There’s no glitter, no hoopla, no fan jols — the large screen public viewing areas where South Africans without tickets watch matches together and celebrate the joyous phenomenon of hosting a glamorous global sports spectacle.
That would require both electricity and televisions. The former is sporadic and obtained only by theft, tapping the illegal power lines that criss-cross dangerously overhead. The latter can be found in some households, but are invariably squint-teensy in size, with blurry images in black and white.
“I have been trying to follow the games because I know this is an important occasion for my country,” says Gerra Swartz, who is 63 and almost completely immobile from arthritis, needing help to get out of the single chair that comprises all of her furniture.
“But you can see how hard it is.”
Her grown daughter is rinsing dishes in a basin, the water hauled from a communal stand-pipe. Two young grandchildren live here as well, in a corrugated tin shack lit by paraffin lamps and candles, reached down a long muck-oozing alley that meanders through hundreds of similarly bleak sheds.
The shacks — and there are at least 27,000 of them slapped together in this settlement — are called “wendy houses,” built illegally behind other, slightly more solid houses of wood and brick. Those lucky enough to own an RDP house, government-subsidized dwellings with free-title deeds, typically charge $27 (Cdn.) to the shack tenants. The waiting list for an RDP house in Du Noon Township has more than 100,000 names on it and hopefuls at the top of the list have been waiting for 15 years.
That’s just about as long as Du Noon has been in existence. It is the newest of the “formal” settlements that encircle Cape Town.
Du Noon is also the fastest growing settlement in the Western Cape region, leaping from 100,000 to 300,000 in less than a decade. It has one high school, three elementary schools, a clinic, a clutter of raggedy little stores and other businesses, and dozens of shebeens — tawdry bars largely owned by local gangsters, the reviled “foreigners,” meaning Zimbabweans and Angolans, Somalis and, most detested of all, the Nigerians.
“They’ve brought all the drugs into Du Noon,” complains Nombuyiselo Ngali, a 47-year-old volunteer community worker who has lived here for eight years with her four children, eking out a meager income by raising chickens. She also works, without pay, as a reserve police constable, which mostly involves keeping a beady eye on the traffic in stolen merchandise.
“Foreigners will rob you blind in this place. When I get information about stolen goods in somebody’s house, I gather a group together and we march over there to demand it back.”
“There are women in Du Noon who work as domestics in the city,” continues Ngali. “When they come back in the evening, the foreigners are waiting to steal their money.”
Du Noon seethes with grinding poverty and bitter xenophobia.
That’s the underbelly of post-apartheid South Africa that hasn’t been put on display during the World Cup, the shame of a wealthy nation where much of the population still lives in townships as wretched as this one.
On the other side of the highway, behind high walls, there’s a vast horse-breeding enterprise whose sweeping green pastures occupy more space than all of Du Noon. But in the township settlement, each stinking outdoor toilet is shared by an average of 10 families. For most residents, there’s no running water, no sewage facilities, no power, no heat beyond wood fires.
White South Africa turned the lights out on apartheid two decades ago, yet nobody ever turned the lights on in hellholes like Du Noon.
The word travesty comes to mind.
Cape Town is a tourist mecca, with fine hotels and sleek boats in the pretty harbour, expensive shops in the Victoria & Albert Waterfront mall, so much of the recent development glistening bright. Green Point Stadium is a jewel — $610 million to construct — just one of half a dozen football venues built from scratch for the World Cup at a total cost of nearly $2 billion, a further $2 billion poured in improving infrastructure and security.
Not an iota of benefit will accrue to Du Noon.
“They can build a giant stadium in months and we’ve been waiting 15 years for housing,” huffs Ngali.
“All South Africa is sad now because our team didn’t win. Oh, they’re crying, waah-waah. I have to worry about how to feed my children tonight.”
The worst off in Du Noon are the squatters, shunted off to a hardscrabble tract of land alongside the railway tracks. As utter outcasts, they don’t even exist officially.
“Three times in the last five years, the authorities have pulled down my shack,” says Dinilysizwe Libala, a 32-year-old husband and father who earns about $2 an hour as a forklift operator. “Each time, I’ve rebuilt. Where else am I to go?”
Libala’s family pays to siphon off some electricity from a nearby house owner. Yet they don’t have access even to one of the outdoor shared toilets. They use buckets or relieve themselves in the scrubland along the tracks.
“The world has come to my country to watch football. And I’m a fan, too! But I’m not getting anything out of it. We were fools to believe anything would change. Even the construction jobs from building the stadiums and the new roads — they’ve gone now, finished. The only ones I see from around here who have profited are the foreigners.”
There it is again, that loathing for the outsider, this belief that others, undeserving as non-South Africans, are gaining while those who were always here fall ever further behind.
There exists a strange double-edged hatred of these fellow continental Africans. Many critics allege the foreigners don’t work, are parasitic layabouts. Yet at the same time, they are resented for taking menial jobs for wages as low as 67 cents an hour.
“We can’t survive on those wages,” says Libala. “But they’ll take them, so why should an employer hire us?”
The mass influx of migrants who have poured over South Africa’s borders have turned townships like Du Noon into emotional tinderboxes. Everyone fears an outbreak like the violence that tore Du Noon in May 2008, when Somali and Nigerian businesses, in particular, were torched and nearly 19,000 foreigners displaced as they fled the mobs.
“I’ve been warned that’s going to happen again,” says Sumaila Mahmah, 43, as he lies across a stack of mattresses. This is his business. He sells used mattresses in Du Noon and has been doing so for seven years, since arriving from Ghana.
“The foreigners are the ones who are actually trying to make something out of South Africa. But they don’t like us. We’ve replaced whites as the people they blame for all their problems.”
What’s weird, sad and funny at the same time, is that for himself and other Ghanaians, the World Cup has produced a kind of moratorium.
“Once South Africa is out of the competition, my neighbours say they’ll all be cheering for Ghana because that’s an African team. They hate Nigerians and Angolans even more.
“But they say, after the World Cup is over and everybody goes home, I better go, too. They promise they’ll come after me then.”
That would require both electricity and televisions. The former is sporadic and obtained only by theft, tapping the illegal power lines that criss-cross dangerously overhead. The latter can be found in some households, but are invariably squint-teensy in size, with blurry images in black and white.
“I have been trying to follow the games because I know this is an important occasion for my country,” says Gerra Swartz, who is 63 and almost completely immobile from arthritis, needing help to get out of the single chair that comprises all of her furniture.
“But you can see how hard it is.”
Her grown daughter is rinsing dishes in a basin, the water hauled from a communal stand-pipe. Two young grandchildren live here as well, in a corrugated tin shack lit by paraffin lamps and candles, reached down a long muck-oozing alley that meanders through hundreds of similarly bleak sheds.
The shacks — and there are at least 27,000 of them slapped together in this settlement — are called “wendy houses,” built illegally behind other, slightly more solid houses of wood and brick. Those lucky enough to own an RDP house, government-subsidized dwellings with free-title deeds, typically charge $27 (Cdn.) to the shack tenants. The waiting list for an RDP house in Du Noon Township has more than 100,000 names on it and hopefuls at the top of the list have been waiting for 15 years.
That’s just about as long as Du Noon has been in existence. It is the newest of the “formal” settlements that encircle Cape Town.
Du Noon is also the fastest growing settlement in the Western Cape region, leaping from 100,000 to 300,000 in less than a decade. It has one high school, three elementary schools, a clinic, a clutter of raggedy little stores and other businesses, and dozens of shebeens — tawdry bars largely owned by local gangsters, the reviled “foreigners,” meaning Zimbabweans and Angolans, Somalis and, most detested of all, the Nigerians.
“They’ve brought all the drugs into Du Noon,” complains Nombuyiselo Ngali, a 47-year-old volunteer community worker who has lived here for eight years with her four children, eking out a meager income by raising chickens. She also works, without pay, as a reserve police constable, which mostly involves keeping a beady eye on the traffic in stolen merchandise.
“Foreigners will rob you blind in this place. When I get information about stolen goods in somebody’s house, I gather a group together and we march over there to demand it back.”
“There are women in Du Noon who work as domestics in the city,” continues Ngali. “When they come back in the evening, the foreigners are waiting to steal their money.”
Du Noon seethes with grinding poverty and bitter xenophobia.
That’s the underbelly of post-apartheid South Africa that hasn’t been put on display during the World Cup, the shame of a wealthy nation where much of the population still lives in townships as wretched as this one.
On the other side of the highway, behind high walls, there’s a vast horse-breeding enterprise whose sweeping green pastures occupy more space than all of Du Noon. But in the township settlement, each stinking outdoor toilet is shared by an average of 10 families. For most residents, there’s no running water, no sewage facilities, no power, no heat beyond wood fires.
White South Africa turned the lights out on apartheid two decades ago, yet nobody ever turned the lights on in hellholes like Du Noon.
The word travesty comes to mind.
Cape Town is a tourist mecca, with fine hotels and sleek boats in the pretty harbour, expensive shops in the Victoria & Albert Waterfront mall, so much of the recent development glistening bright. Green Point Stadium is a jewel — $610 million to construct — just one of half a dozen football venues built from scratch for the World Cup at a total cost of nearly $2 billion, a further $2 billion poured in improving infrastructure and security.
Not an iota of benefit will accrue to Du Noon.
“They can build a giant stadium in months and we’ve been waiting 15 years for housing,” huffs Ngali.
“All South Africa is sad now because our team didn’t win. Oh, they’re crying, waah-waah. I have to worry about how to feed my children tonight.”
The worst off in Du Noon are the squatters, shunted off to a hardscrabble tract of land alongside the railway tracks. As utter outcasts, they don’t even exist officially.
“Three times in the last five years, the authorities have pulled down my shack,” says Dinilysizwe Libala, a 32-year-old husband and father who earns about $2 an hour as a forklift operator. “Each time, I’ve rebuilt. Where else am I to go?”
Libala’s family pays to siphon off some electricity from a nearby house owner. Yet they don’t have access even to one of the outdoor shared toilets. They use buckets or relieve themselves in the scrubland along the tracks.
“The world has come to my country to watch football. And I’m a fan, too! But I’m not getting anything out of it. We were fools to believe anything would change. Even the construction jobs from building the stadiums and the new roads — they’ve gone now, finished. The only ones I see from around here who have profited are the foreigners.”
There it is again, that loathing for the outsider, this belief that others, undeserving as non-South Africans, are gaining while those who were always here fall ever further behind.
There exists a strange double-edged hatred of these fellow continental Africans. Many critics allege the foreigners don’t work, are parasitic layabouts. Yet at the same time, they are resented for taking menial jobs for wages as low as 67 cents an hour.
“We can’t survive on those wages,” says Libala. “But they’ll take them, so why should an employer hire us?”
The mass influx of migrants who have poured over South Africa’s borders have turned townships like Du Noon into emotional tinderboxes. Everyone fears an outbreak like the violence that tore Du Noon in May 2008, when Somali and Nigerian businesses, in particular, were torched and nearly 19,000 foreigners displaced as they fled the mobs.
“I’ve been warned that’s going to happen again,” says Sumaila Mahmah, 43, as he lies across a stack of mattresses. This is his business. He sells used mattresses in Du Noon and has been doing so for seven years, since arriving from Ghana.
“The foreigners are the ones who are actually trying to make something out of South Africa. But they don’t like us. We’ve replaced whites as the people they blame for all their problems.”
What’s weird, sad and funny at the same time, is that for himself and other Ghanaians, the World Cup has produced a kind of moratorium.
“Once South Africa is out of the competition, my neighbours say they’ll all be cheering for Ghana because that’s an African team. They hate Nigerians and Angolans even more.
“But they say, after the World Cup is over and everybody goes home, I better go, too. They promise they’ll come after me then.”
- thestar.com
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