Hard life, even in lucky Mvezo
A BITING wind whipped dust across the gravel roads and brightly coloured rondavels on Friday afternoon, keeping residents of Mvezo holed up indoors.
Only those who needed to venture outside did so, but even then they tended to stay close to their homes in the Eastern Cape village — popping out to take down clothing and blankets hung on barbed-wire fences, tending to cooking fires or throwing out basins of water.
But some, including Nosamele Fokwane, have to go further than they would like just to collect a daily essential: water. She carts plastic drums and fills them from a communal standpipe near her home, then loads them onto a rusty wheelbarrow and rolls it down a steep hill.
This is not an unusual sight in the village famous for being Nelson Mandela’s birthplace.
Six of the seven smaller villages that make up Mvezo have electricity, but few, if any, have piped water. JoJo water tanks have been installed at almost all homesteads to collect rainwater, but they seldom collect enough to supply a household.
Resident William Mdyogolo says he loves living in Mvezo — “but water is the big problem”.
“We sometimes have to walk very far to collect it,” said Mdyogolo.
The 63-year-old pensioner, who has a handful of cattle, sheep and goats on his plot, says his livestock often struggle to survive — a problem that struck Mandela’s own herd at his Qunu farm last year.
Then the provincial agriculture department stepped in and helped his beloved, but ailing, livestock.
There is also frustration that Mvezo does not have a clinic despite work having started on one in 2012. This week, it was clear that the building had been completed, but the clinic was not yet up and running, meaning villagers had to trek 20km to the nearest facility.
The clinic would open soon, the authorities promised.
But despite these problems, Mvezo is still a village better off than most, having enjoyed remarkable development over the past decade. According to Mandela’s grandson and local chief, Mandla Mandela, the area is no longer the tiny village his grandfather used to describe.
Three schools, from pre-school to high school, have been built — state-of-the-art facilities made possible with R120-million in donations and corporate investment.
And a new road has been built from the N2 freeway and across the Mbashe River — although it stops only metres after the entrance to Mandla’s homestead. A well-tended dirt road serves the rest of the village.