In limbo and dying a slow death –
Dozens of people evicted from hijacked and gutted buildings languish in tents to the south of the city – cold, hungry and far from work opportunities
Young men push themselves up against the wall of sunlight, the galley fire fanning the warmth deeper into their chilled early-morning bones. It’s not only the cold but the distance from the heart of Egoli, where opportunity lingers around every corner, that bothers them.
For the motley crowd of 200 people banded together in a clutch of tents on the periphery of the Jo’burg central business district, the ties that bind them together are misfortune, wrong turns, ill health and, ultimately, poverty. There are no customers and no money for the sweets, airtime, loose cigarettes and drugs the young men sell. This is an encampment of the unwanted.
Last week, putting mayor Herman Mashaba’s vow to do away with hijacked buildings in Johannesburg into action, authorities went about clearing out Fattis Mansions in Jeppe Street. Two weeks before that, the Cape York building, also on Jeppe Street, caught fire — claiming seven lives.
Residents of hijacked buildings speak of a life of constant fear, where brute, brash violence holds sway and where self-declared landlords could decide the fate of their residents on a drunken whim.
Before she shared a City of Johannesburg relief tent at Wembley Stadium (in the south of the city) with six other women and a toddler, 20-year-old Nondumiso Sithole lived in a hijacked building near the Faraday taxi rank in the city centre.
For just over a year Sithole shared a double room that was bigger than the relief tents with her two-year-old son and the boy’s father.
She never discovered who the building’s legitimate owner was but felt content that her family’s tenure and safety was secured by the building’s hijacker, a South African man they only knew as S’bu.
“Every weekend he’ll come to the door being drunk. He fights a lot, ’cos if he’s drunk he doesn’t want to listen. First he knocks, then he bangs the door and kicks it down. The place is his so we don’t talk [back],” Sithole told the Mail & Guardian this week.
Sithole moved into a room on the second floor of the two-storey building in the middle of winter in 2015, and soon discovered why S’bu was feared by the other tenants.
“It’s not a big guy. It’s a small, small boy. But nobody said anything to that guy — everyone was afraid of him because he had backup or he had people to call. Others said he had a gun. People talk; that’s why they were afraid,” she said.
On Saturday mornings S’bu would drunkenly stumble from one door to the next to collect the weekly rent — R50 a person. His henchmen, usually four or five young men, would wait on the building’s roof or break down the doors of people who refused to pay up.
“If they know you are a foreigner, they take out your things; they throw them out. Others were beaten. One day there were Zulus fighting with foreigners, Tanzanians and Mozambicans … His [S’bu’s] friends were on the roof, throwing down stones, and they were fighting outside the building. Then there were gunshots that made the foreigners run away,” Sithole, a South African citizen, said.
In the Faraday building, Sithole said, S’bu was the final arbitrator of any disputes between his tenants and took unilateral decisions about who could occupy the building. In December 2015, only a few months after moving in, Sithole we used to throw our rubbish. He told them to throw her stuff down that hole,” Sithole added.
The weekly rent payment was eventually changed to R500 a month in January of 2016, after several other people were violently evicted over the December festive season, Sithole said.
In the winter of 2016, and despite being able to make a living from selling sweets and airtime at the Faraday taxi rank, the couple decided to move their family into a room with Sithole’s brother at the Cape York building on Jeppe Street.
But their time at Cape York was also short-lived. Earlier this month, a fire broke out that completely destroyed their room, their identity documents and other possessions.
Now Sithole and her boyfriend are among the group living in tents at Wembley Stadium near Rosettenville. Her child was sent to live with relatives in Alexandra.
In the tent, there are seven women, six sponge mattresses and no pillows. Each of the women has a blanket but the nights and early mornings are brutal, Sithole said.
“So we put the sponge together and sleep next to each other at night because it’s so cold.”
Despite being from South Africa, Sithole said she feels like a refugee who has been dumped in a camp, with no signs that anything will change.
“The government said they will find us a place to stay, so we are still waiting. We have no place to go, nothing to do. At least at Cape York we were getting money; even [with] R90 or R100 a day you can buy food. Now, there’s nothing; there’s no people,” she said.
Her sentiments echo those of the young men pressed up against the wall, who hail from as far away as Tanzania. Following the destruction of Cape York, where they had been living, the city brought them to