The Guardian, Thembokwezi, Graaff-Reinet and Franschhoek, South Africa
One evening a week, Natasha Msweswe and Zanele Madasi leave their children at home and set out to patrol the streets of Thembokwezi. They return at midnight. This is potentially very dangerous, but they feel they have little choice.
“It can be scary, but we want to protect our community,” 31-year-old Madasi said. “We want to make a difference.”
Thembokwezi is a neighborhood of Khayelitsha, a sprawling, overcrowded township overlooked by Table Mountain that has long been infamous for high levels of gang violence, drug abuse and unemployment. South African police are stretched thin, so a network of neighborhood watch organizations play a key role in fighting crime. Thembokwezi is more prosperous and safer than much of the rest of the township, and those who live here want to keep it that way.
“We work with the police of course ... but if we fold our arms as a community, the criminals will run amok,” said Phindile George, the leader of the Thembokwezi neighborhood watch, which counts 50 volunteers including Msweswe and Madasi among its members.
Across South Africa, tens of thousands of people are making similar resolutions. Some teach, secure reliable electricity supplies, organize vaccination drives, repair roads, deliver protective gear to hospitals or distribute water.
Many work almost alone, others in non-governmental organizations (NGOs) or for wealthy businesses that are now setting aside large sums for philanthropic work.
What all share is an almost complete lack of faith in South Africa’s government to provide any kind of a solution for their problems.
“People have given up on the state as a protector... There is a massive loss of faith. It’s a tragedy,” said William Gumede, a respected analyst and academic in Johannesburg.
The retreat of the state from everyday life in the continent’s most developed country has widespread consequences, changing the way people think, behave and interact, especially in a time of crisis. The death of Archbishop Desmond Tutu, who was almost universally revered, provided a moment of paradoxical hope as well as grief, reminding many South Africans of what they have in common after many months in which circumstances have conspired to drive them apart.
DISCONTENT SPREADING
Most South Africans were suffering even before COVID-19 struck, and discontent with the ruling African National Congress (ANC) — in power since the end of the racist, repressive apartheid regime in 1994 — has been growing for years. Economic growth was already slowing even before the nine-year rule of Jacob Zuma, the populist president ousted in 2018 amid widespread corruption allegations.
Despite the good intentions of South African President Cyril Ramaphosa, a former labor advocate turned tycoon, there has been little to celebrate since. The pandemic has delivered a series of crushing blows to the economy. Rolling power cuts shut down businesses and factories for weeks on end, while the public healthcare system has been lethally undermined by mismanagement and corruption.
The government claims that 90,000 South Africans have died from COVID-19, but reliable excess mortality figures suggest the real death toll is between two and three times higher. Depending on the definition, unemployment could be as high as 46.6 percent.
In July, in the worst breakdown in public order for decades, hundreds of shopping malls were looted, warehouses torched and key infrastructure targeted across a swath of South Africa. Much of the violence appears to have been instigated by renegade factions within the ruling party, angered by the jailing of Zuma on contempt of court charges. This shook faith in the state, too, and a few people turned to vigilante violence.
The neighborhood watch in Thembokwezi aims to reinforce official efforts, but in a rougher part of Khayelitsha, a community has come together to confront local authorities. When a strict lockdown at the beginning of the pandemic in 2020 led to widespread illegal evictions, hundreds of homeless people occupied a patch of wasteland to build homes of tin and wood.
“For years, the politicians said they would use this land for homes for us. They failed to fulfill their promises... So we decided to take it over and do it ourselves,” 40-year-old community leader Mabhelandile Twani said.
Despite efforts to evict them anew, this neighborhood has thrived. Now more than 15,000 people live in rows of shacks on the sandy soil. Electricity is diverted from better-supplied streets nearby. Twani calls it “people’s power.” The neighborhood is known as Lockdown Village.
There are many other such settlements born of the misery inflicted by COVID-19 in a country unable to afford the expensive support offered to individuals and businesses in Europe, the UK or the US. In Khayelitsha, there are now settlements called Sanitiser, Quarantine and Social Distance.
“Now things are so difficult. We don’t get help from the government. We try to help ourselves,” said Nondwebi Kasba, 73, who helps to run a communal vegetable garden set up by neighbors in Khayelithsa’s Illitha Park to help the poorest among them.
GROWING STRUGGLES
Seven hundred miles to the east, in Graaff-Reinet, a small and conservative town in the Karoo Desert, there is also a new struggle for the basics that the state once provided. In the townships on Graaff-Reinet’s outskirts, drug dealers steal water tanks from schools, and hawk their contents alongside cannabis and methamphetamines. No one bothers to tell the police, expecting that they would not come.
Jobs are rare. So too are the means by which young people could gain the skills to allow them to escape. Khanya Mbaile, a 31-year-old office administrator, hopes to start a coffee shop and Internet cafe to provide a safe meeting place for young people in the township where she lives. She has already sourced six computers from an NGO.
“We are all exhausted, but there is a glimmer of hope,” Mbaile said.
Louise Masimela, 58, who runs a community school for young children in a township just south of Graaff-Reinet, is another of South Africa’s perpetual problem-solvers. The former journalist has no permanent premises for her students, scarce water and no funds to pay teachers.
“It’s tough, really tough ... but we want to give our kids an education that will allow them to go out into the world, not get stuck here,” Masimela said.
So she has found solutions. A church offers a space during the week, and seven volunteers teach. Water comes from The Gift of the Givers, now one of South Africa’s largest NGOs. Funded entirely by private donors, mainly businesses, it distributes 400 million rand (US$25 million) of aid annually.
In Eastern Cape Province, the NGO works in hospitals, providing much-needed personal protective equipment, medicine, oxygen delivery devices, food for patients and goody bags to motivate healthcare workers. Elsewhere in the province, one of South Africa’s poorest, it has provided seeds, fodder and food for orphanages, trucked water into poor communities and even dug boreholes.
“There are a lot of good people in government who want to do the right thing ... and I can see things changing. It’s not massive change, but people want to fix things,” Gift of the Givers founder Imtiaz Sooliman said. “We have to fill the gap, but by filling the gap, we are putting on pressure. People are asking why we are doing what the government should do.”
Local elections in November last year were seen by many analysts as a cause for optimism. The ANC was punished by voters, losing 8.3 percent of its vote share and just under 1,000 council seats. The party was forced to share power in many small towns — including Graaff-Reinet — and its grasp on cities such as Johannesburg and Pretoria slipped further.
POLITICAL ACTION
In several towns, local communities joined together to create political alternatives that frequently won support.
“A lot of this is hopeful... It shows a desire for a new inclusive project,” Gumede said.
Many see a need for political options that offer an authentic alternative to the ANC, but also escape the toxic legacy of South Africa’s traumatic past. The dominance of the ANC at national level means the most important political battles occur within the organization.
Analyst Judith February wrote for the Daily Maverick Web site in December: “From the insurrection in July to the shambles which is our intelligence services, [from] an increasing ... anti-vax position to a commitment to coal, the tensions within the party are ... at odds with the country’s best interests. Ramaphosa’s grip on power appears reluctant and tenuous.”
Farmers say the relief provided by rain that has broken a five-year drought has helped the agricultural sector offset losses elsewhere, but the key industry of tourism has been badly hit by the pandemic, with huge losses of income and jobs.
“It has been a disaster, a total disaster,” said 59-year-old Kobus Potgeiter, who runs a farm guesthouse outside the town of Oudsthoorn, on the spectacular R62 road that was once busy with tourists. After 16 years, he is thinking of closing for good, or at least downscaling.
In Franschhoek, a center of fine dining and wine making amid mountains and vineyards an hour’s drive from Cape Town, the absence of overseas visitors has forced top restaurants to close and hotels to shut for months, and has led to the loss of thousands of jobs. As elsewhere, the national vaccination campaign has lacked resources, offering minimal opportunities for local people to get jabbed, and almost no information that might help overcome very widespread hesitancy.
To convince would-be visitors that the town was safe, Franschhoek’s tourist office sought to organize its own vaccination drive, supported by crowdfunding, big businesses and the local administration. By November, 85 percent of those working in the hospitality industry had been vaccinated.
However, just as the tourists began returning, the identification of the Omicron variant of SARS-CoV-2 in South Africa brought new travel bans.
“It was devastating,” marketing manager Ruth McCourt said.
In a country with some of the highest levels of inequality in the world, some have been able to weather South Africa’s economic and political storm better than others. Even its residents admit Franschhoek is a “bit of a bubble.”
Khayelitsha is not, and its 500 thousand inhabitants have little protection from the forces buffeting the country.
“It will be a bitter, black Christmas,” Twani said in the middle of last month. “My fear is that here in South Africa, we are living in a time bomb. People are angry... Eventually, anything can happen.”
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