About 40 minutes from Cape Town, close to Kuils River, a Coca-Cola sign cheerfully announces: “Welcome to Happy Valley.” The notice is a tad misleading, judging from the daily queue outside the Afrika Breadline soup kitchen, the blocked toilets and the streets of wood and plastic shacks.
Happy Valley is one of two “temporary relocation areas” housing some of Cape Town’s half a million homeless people.
“They mean welcome to Cape Town’s dump. All the spare and homeless kaffirs and hotnots are dumped here with a starter pack and promises of a house,” says Kleintjie Mayosi, a shack dweller who has been on a housing list for more than 10 years.
The “starter pack” is a council-issued kit for half a shack comprising 10 untreated wooden poles, five corrugated iron sheets, 15m of black plastic sheeting and 1,5kg of nails, all valued at R800.
Council officials say they cannot give people a full kit because, at R3200, it’s too expensive. “Then everybody in the world will flock here. Nobody will want to build their own house; they’ll just wait for government handouts,” says mayoral committee member for housing, Dan Plato.
Happy Valley is home to about 2400 families and 80% of the adults are unemployed. Although it is supposedly a short-term reception area, families hailing from all Cape Town’s townships have been living on these Port Jackson willow-infested dunes for 12 years or more.
After building 730 one- and two-bedroom houses, the former ANC council decided to use it for the “reception” of destitute people evicted by a court or living in illegal shacks in the city. The idea was also to house immigrants from the Eastern Cape and elsewhere until they found permanent shelter.
Plato admits the promise of housing is used to induce people to move. “Housing is the carrot we use, and we make sure they get on a housing list once they relocate to Happy Valley. We give them a serviced site until council can provide them with a formal house,” he says. “A lot of happy people live in beautiful shacks in Happy Valley. The unhappy ones just want council handouts.”
A serviced site consists of a couple of mobile toilets every few hundred metres, some communal taps, a grid of eight dirt roads and sandy plots on which to build… M&G
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