Relocation rears its head: Bringing de-densification home in Alexandra - The Mail & Guardian

There has been at least one confirmed Covid-19 infection in Stjwetla. But any further devastation will likely have less to do with the coronavirus and more to do with what it lays bare.

For the past 24 winters, Gladys has been waiting for another home. She first qualified for state-subsidised housing in 1996. “But where is my house? This is it,” she told me, pointing around the salmon-coloured interior of her shack. “It’s better than sleeping on the street.” Zion Christian Church built a small, neat neighbourhood of green shipping container homes nearby and offered one of them to Gladys. She refused it, however, and told New Frame it was because she would not be allowed to hang her ZCC portraits inside.The “de-densification” announced by the department of human settlements, water and sanitation in response to the likely spread of the coronavirus in shack settlements has taken on some puzzling proportions.

But it is in their political outlook that mother and daughter differ most. Gladys, despite being well versed in the grammar of broken promises, holds on to her belief that a government home is coming. Thandi, on the other hand, is not too old to have acquired aversions to the processes meant to deliver that home. A lifetime of losing has seen her hope slowly atrophy. She now nurses an abiding mistrust in promises. “I’m tired of government. They just do shit.

Gladys’s first shack went up just as apartheid’s influx control, which was abolished in 1986, came down. She stood, with countless others, on the verge of South Africa’s great urban migration. Alexandra’s population nearly tripled between 1985, when there was a shack for every brick house, and 1990, by which time the township’s shacks far outstripped its houses.

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