‘We Want Decent Houses’

Housing is an essential requirement for enhancing human dignity and pursuit of higher socio-economic and political struggles.

Maslow categorised housing as a basic need.

Like food, water and other physiological needs human beings require decent houses before any other needs. Therefore societies invested their abilities and talents to design and construct houses for accommodation, cultural expression, dignity, etc.

History tells us about African architecture: round houses – I emphasise houses, not huts, that are in sync with Nature herself. The thatched roofs that provide warmth during the mercilessly cold winter days and become a cooling agent on hot days of the summer months. Needless to say, men and women built their own houses using resources that Mother Nature provided.

All that changed as a result of the land dispossessions of the 17th, 18th and 19th centuries brought by successive colonial governments.

Black communities that emerged in towns and cities lived in what were described as slums and later townships.

Describing communities of the colonised people revolutionary philosopher Frantz Fanon observed that the native town is “a world without spaciousness; men live there on top of each other, their huts are built one on top of the other. The native town is a hungry town, starved of bread, of meat, of shoes, of coal, of light”.

Like many other towns throughout the colonised Afri- Lindinxiwa Mahlasela ca, Rhini - I will no longer call her Grahamstown – had her own slums that emerged especially during the second half of the 19th century.

A 1902 health report concurred with Fanon’s prognosis. It described Black communities as of “most primitive order… covered over with parrafin, pieces of boarding, cloth, cardboard, in fact anything that the builder could lay the hand upon to close his house”. The respected Black politician Dr Rubusana visited Rhini in 1915 and bemoaned the lack of improvement in Black communities since his last visit 15 years previously.

He particularly criticised the “great deal of filth” that besieged the community and fingered the Council for refusal to spend financial resources for its improvement.

Needless to say the Council refuted his criticism and painted a glowing picture of the townships. Nevertheless and despite the fact that colonial governments were under no obligation to provide housing for the Black population, protest marches for decent houses were organised by especially women during the early years of the 1900s. These protests continued during the apartheid era leading to the realisation of freedom in 1994.

The democratic government rightly included housing as right in Section 2 of the 1996 Constitution.

Since then, a great deal of work has been done towards the realisation of this right. However there are many challenges that housing projects faced. They include:

* The size of the houses which gave birth to the word “ovez’ inyawo” commonly used in Western Cape.

* Some beneficiaries either sell or rent out their houses instead of occupying them. The latter may be attributed to a lack of pride, the fulfilment and the dignity that comes with owning a home.

It is this aspect among other things that prompted Makana Municipality to mobilise communities to build their own homes. A housing project in Extension 10 is the pride of the municipality. The satisfaction that beneficiaries of the project experience after having contributed to the building of their homes is similar to that of Dalibhunga when he bought a house for his family in Orlando East, Soweto in the late 40s.

As we commemorate the Sharpeville and Langa massacres and celebrate human rights month, authorities might need to consider a model that is underpinned by the principle that people are the solution to the housing problem.

Such a model will be likely to resuscitate their energies to pursue other struggles that lie ahead.

• Lindinxiwa Mahlasela is a researcher at Albany Museum.