21 July 2008
Johannesburg — The promise is almost 20 years old, but most residents of South Africa's apartheid-era hostels are still waiting for the renovations that will lift them and their families out of their squalor and neglect.
A start has been made in Gauteng, South Africa's richest province, where new family-friendly housing has recently gone up beside hostels in Soweto, Johannesburg's largest township, and Mamelodi, outside the capital, Pretoria.
By year-end, 13 of the province's 54 hostels will have been demolished at a cost of about R1.4 million (US$187,000), according to Aviva Manqa, spokesperson for the provincial minister of housing.
According to Manqa, the department is eager to erase the hostels - and what they represent - from the urban landscape. "We want to do away with all the hostels as conceptualised under apartheid, where people being used as cheap labour were dumped in the areas and left to die with families so far away."
The Inkatha Freedom Party (IFP), which enjoys strong support among hostel residents, is among many who say the government has not moved fast enough in dealing with the dilapidated and overcrowded hostels.
"We monitor the implementation [of the hostel eradication programme] in the townships and we're not happy with the progress, as it has been very slow, and funds don't seem to be utilised effectively. In the IFP we say that development moves, and when it gets to the hostel it kind of jumps the whole area," said Sibongile Nkomo, Gauteng's IFP spokesperson and member of the provincial legislature.
"The government of the day must ask itself: 'if we need to make a change, where do we start?' And the place to start is where it will matter the most, in the informal settlement in the hostel, where people will be able to literally touch development with their own hands," she said.
Progress in sight but not in reach
Soweto's Dube Hostel has seen more progress than most, and the construction of new double-story flats started in January. According to Manqa, plans have been made to accommodate the hostel's 3,000 residents in these flats or in subsidised housing in the surrounding area. Currently, three to four families share a room in the series of two-roomed houses that make up the hostel.
Dube resident Dorcus Dlamini is one of the luckier ones, as her family does not share their room with anyone else. She admits she has seen change outside her windows but inside the house where she has raised seven children, things are getting worse, despite violent protests by hostel dwellers over service delivery in 2007.
Dlamini was born in nearby Meadowlands, another Soweto suburb, and met her husband there more than 30 years ago. The house they still share with their younger children and some neighbours is one of the oldest in the hostel - the old fashioned wood-burning stove that the family uses for heating is a tell-tale sign.
"This house is useless, everything is broken now," said Dlamini, pointing to the crumbling bricks in the corner of the house that is the children's "room". The house, partitioned with sheets, is dimly lit by an illegal connection that runs via Dlamini's neighbours, who could be stingy with the electricity, she said.
A few houses away, Winter Rose Hadebe has bigger problems than a lack of light. Raw sewage has been flowing down her street for weeks and she suspects it has put one neighbour in hospital.
"There are many diseases at Dube because the sewage [system] is broken and it [sewage] is everywhere," said Hadebe, who works as a cleaner. "There are a lot of families who stay in the hostel but it's not safe for kids ... if the government would change this place into family housing it would be better."
Hadebe came from KwaZulu-Natal Province to Johannesburg when she was 18 years old. Her sister followed her three years later, but was shot dead near the hostel entrance in an instance of the crime Hadebe says plagues the hostel. Her family begged her to come home to KwaZulu-Natal, but with children to feed and limited employment opportunities available there, she felt she had to stay in Johannesburg.
Still in the dark
During apartheid, Petros Mtshali's father spent years at the Wolhuter Hostel in Jeppe, an inner-city suburb in Johannesburg, while he worked to feed his family. Now Petros, a welder at a local bus company, has inherited his father's bed as well as the responsibility of caring for ten dependents in KwaZulu-Natal; 11 if you count his new baby.
"We've got a problem there by KwaZulu-Natal because the factories are not as many as there are here in Jo'burg," he said. "We are many there, and we are looking for [jobs at] the same companies, so it is better to move and find a better life outside the province [KwaZulu-Natal]."
Hostels developed as a response to the 1923 Native Urban Act, which tightened regulations controlling the flow of black South Africans into major cities. This single-sex accomadation - an enduring symbol of apartheid social engineering - began to change as controls loosened in the 1980s, and increasingly people found they provided cheap accommodation near the cities.
The Wolhuter Hostel, unlike many others, remains single sex - girlfriends, wives and children are forbidden - but Petros said he would not bring his family there even if he could, because the basement hallways are pitch black and raw sewage trickles into the showers and kitchens.
It is also not one of the 13 hostels listed for renovation this year, but the housing department maintains that this is not about conditions but about logistics.
"It was a combination of many things going on in the province that made us to prioritise some areas such as Dube and Orlando [a Soweto suburb]," Manqa said. "Our work, in terms of our research, was in advanced stages and ... there has always been very good interactions between those communities, government and the department."
Housing legislation mandates that before hostels can be renovated, government has to enter into a consultative process with residents about relocation, either into new units or to other areas, existing infrastructure must be assessed, resident registrars compiled and the construction tenders issued.
Sibongiseni Kubheka pays R27 (US$4) per month for his room in Jeppe and says he cannot help but notice that hostels like Dube have seen much more improvement than his own.
Being closer to Johannesburg and within walking distance of one of the 2010 World Cup stadiums, he thought inner-city hostels like Jeppe would have been a priority as the city moves to improve its image, he said. Government must not know how bad it is at Wolhuter, he said, otherwise why would they ignore it?
Petros Mtshali said he was still waiting for the government to make good on its promises. "It's still like before - we stay in water, there is no service delivery," he said. "We are still struggling for better and new houses they promised us a long time ago."
[ This report does not necessarily reflect the views of the United Nations ]
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There is no such thing as a userfriendly family hostel,knock them all down and replace with family type dwellings,forget about renovations.