Word on the streets
The Sunday Times walked down three streets in iconic neighbourhoods this week, asking residents how they were living the lockdown. Their responses were laden with anxiety, resignation, but also unexpected joy
I am not sure if the drug dens have been closed as part of the lockdown. Whatever it is, it works
NoFirst Ntozakhe asked her stokvel to give her an advance on her savings so she could buy a new fridge after her old one packed up last month.
But the 80-year-old’s new fridge stood empty this week. She sells fruit outside a nearby school to supplement her pension and now wonders how she will feed herself and her unemployed grandson, Phaphamani Nkwamza, 25, during the lockdown.
Ntozakhe lives on Gwetha Street, Nyanga, Cape Town, the crime capital of the country which recorded 289 murders in the past financial year.
Most of Gwetha Street’s folk know each other from their ancestral home, Centane in the Eastern Cape, but because of family politics, some are no longer on speaking terms.
The street is lined with small apartheid government-built homes with asbestos roofs, surrounded by scores of backyard shacks.
“I am hungry,” Ntozakhe says, arching dispiritedly on a rickety chair in her living room, glancing at the image of police minister Bheki Cele on a small TV in the corner. Mealie-meal porridge simmers nearby in a silver pot on a stained two-plate stove.
“The state pension is not enough for all my responsibilities. The last time I got paid was on April 1 but all the money went to stokvels and my funeral policies,” she says.
“I did not stock up on food because I did not know how this lockdown would be. My cupboards are empty.”
Nkwamza says the lockdown has “crippled” them, and “the little food we have will be finished in the next few days”.
“Before the lockdown I was supposed to start an [internship] and thought I would get some income. I had just finished my [national diploma] in business management and now I am stuck here,” he says.
Next door, fellow fruit vendor Bukelwa Mlonyeni, 50, says she was forced to ask her relatives for food for herself and her children aged 22, 16 and nine.
“I used to run a spaza shop a few years ago until
Somali businesses took over. I could not keep up with the competition, so I rented the place out. The last time I had money that I worked for was last month. I get a state grant for my children, but it is insufficient.”
Mlonyeni says she would be doomed if the lockdown is extended. (On Thursday, President Cyril Ramaphosa extended it for another two weeks, until the end of April.)
“The kids are home; they eat a lot. It’s like they are at war with the groceries. You must see my kitchen, it is a real battle,” she says. “I bought 10kg of rice, mealie-meal, flour, samp and fish oil. We have been baking our own bread because we cannot afford to buy bread every day.”
Mlonyeni pays R100 for DStv to keep her kids indoors, but the package she bought “does not have all the channels and they still get bored and frustrated”.
Her nine-year-old son, Sive, chimes in. “I don’t like staying at home but I understand why we have to do it. I don’t miss my friends. I don’t even want to see them; they will infect me with Covid-19.”
Mlonyeni converted her garage into a spaza shop, which she rents out for R1,500, but this won’t be paid this month because customers have no money to buy.
Her tenant, Osman Mofo, says business is very slow. “Most people rely on casual jobs. When they don’t get work, they won’t have money for food,” he says.
Next door to Mlonyeni, Monwabisi Sololo’s makeshift welding workshop stands empty.
“The shops where we buy the material are closed. The last time I got money was before the lockdown. I do have orders but I can’t do anything. I don’t have any savings in the bank. The little I have won’t last me at all,” he says.
The 60-year-old has six children; the eldest two are looking for jobs. His bare kitchen cupboards are visible from his spotless lounge. “We buy whatever we can afford from Shoprite, and other local supermarkets, but it’s not easy. I do have basic things like rice and samp but we have run short of things like meat, sugar and vegetables a couple of times.”
Sololo’s wife is a home-based carer for a local clinic but her salary cannot sustain the family. His 16-year-old son is battling with his schoolwork.
“He reads his school books but he cannot access his assignments at the moment because he doesn’t have a smartphone or computer,” Sololo says.
Not everyone in the street is poor.
Across the street from Sololo, Lorraine Mlonyeni’s yard is neatly paved. The 46-year-old is an administrator for the navy and is in the final year of her law degree at Unisa. Her husband is a policeman.
“The lockdown has not been that bad and people are complying. You can see the streets are quiet but there are a lot of poor people in this area. Most are unemployed and they survive on state grants,” she says.
Mlonyeni spends three hours a day helping her children with their schoolwork. After that, they watch DStv cartoons on the family’s flatscreen television.
“My major stress are the queues at the shops. I am avoiding a lot of people. There are things that I would like to buy but I would rather stay indoors than go to public spaces at this time. It’s difficult to practise social distancing at our malls,” she says.
Despite his misery, Nkwamza says he hasn’t “heard a gunshot in days; the last time was before the lockdown”.
“The police and the army are here 24 hours. Even the notorious drug users have gone underground. It is like a suburb. All taverns are closed,” he says.
Mlonyeni says she and her neighbours can sleep without fear of their homes being broken into.
Muggings, she says, have abated since the taverns closed. “We had drug users who steal from people to feed their habits but it is all quiet at the moment. I am not sure if the drug dens have been closed as part of the lockdown. Whatever it is, it works.”
Johanna Nkosi sits in her kitchen. The voice of a preacher crackles over the radio, his pleas for intercession drifting through her twobedroom home in Mabizela Street.
The cul-de-sac in Orlando East, Soweto — less than 1km from Orlando High School, where Hector Pieterson was shot dead by police in 1976 — is alive with shrieking children engaged in a street soccer showdown. They are flanked by rows of houses and a plethora of zinc and timber backyard rooms.
Nkosi’s house at No 3346 is tucked behind a greyed wall of peeling plaster, beside a 1985 British Leyland Rover SD1 that has not been driven in years.
The 72-year-old woman seated on a rickety maroon office chair was born in the house where she now takes refuge.
As a young woman, Nkosi worked as a cleaner for a family in Orange Grove. She has twice seen soldiers and police on her streets, sjamboks in hand. The first time, the jackbooted men were propping up a repressive regime. Now they’re enforcing a lockdown to stay a death toll that is bound to climb.
“I never go onto the road. All I do is walk from the door to my gate, but I won’t leave,” she says.
“God will protect us. I have been praying for that every day, once in the morning and also when I close my eyes at night.”
But the faith of her son, Zachariah, 40, a petrol attendant in nearby Meadowlands and the only person in the household with a job, has been shaken. He shares the property with his mother, two brothers, a sister-in-law and a seven-year-old nephew.
“I am scared to go to work now because we are touching money and the speedpoints every day. What if I bring this corona thing home?” he asks. “But we need the money. I take what I earn, and we use Gogo’s pension grant and we can survive. But if I don’t have a job we will be in trouble.”
On the other side of the soccer game and several houses down, domestic worker Priscilla Golele sits on the single bed in a backyard shack she shares with her husband and three-year-old twins. Her two unemployed adult children live in other structures on the property.
“The people I work for said they will pay me even though I am not working this month, but after that I don’t know,” she says. Her R3,000 monthly salary is the lifeblood of their home.
“I spent most of my salary on groceries but because all the children are home, they just eat so much. Now I only have some porridge left. There is no meat and only three onions. I don’t know what we will do,” she says, tears in her eyes.
The soccer match outside abruptly ends when a police car swings into the cul-de-sac, sending the players scattering for cover.
An officer launches from the passenger seat threatening to arrest all within earshot.
“They don’t understand, we are trying to save them,” she says, sjambok swinging at her side.
In Mabizela Street, boredom pushes many children onto the road. But Sisile Ndlovu from No 3443 is confining her three grandchildren to her tiny back garden.
“People are being ignorant, and this thing is going to be a disaster. I stand behind my fence and shout at the children to go back inside. I tell them not to get close to one another,” she says.
Ndlovu, 65, says the lockdown has afforded her precious time with her grandchildren.
“I can’t have them go outside because it is too dangerous. But it gives me time to tell them all of my stories, the ones that my mother told to me, and the stories about me when I was young,” she says.
“I even get to play soccer with my grandson. He asked me and I said that I would be the goalie; he was so shocked that his granny knew what that was.”
As the police leave to disperse another game a block away, the children of Mabizela Street trickle back out of their homes, hauling chunks of concrete onto the blacktop to mark the respective goal lines.
At house 3341, Sipho Mnguni, 77, leans over the stable door of his kitchen, captured by thoughts of his late wife.
“Her name was Emily and she died in February last year. She had cancer. I am alone here and especially now I wish she was still here,” he says, pointing to her picture on the mantelpiece. The couple did not have children.
Mnguni does what he can to busy himself, doing his exercises, tidying the house and listening to the “wireless”.
“I have my pension and I have some small savings, but I am trying not to think about that now,” he says.
Next door to him, Bungwe Chauke, 6, is cooped up with her brother Tye, 5, and is tired of it. Their mother, Hlulane, has been carefully corralling them near their backyard room.
“It has been fun being at home … we have been playing school and drums but I want to go back to my friends now,” she says.
Luther Vandross echoes faintly from an old BMW as S’the Mthethwa and his friends connect over mqombothi.
The short cul-de-sac, home to backyard flats, shacks and formal houses painted in faded pastels, backs onto Hero’s Acre cemetery, where famed writer Nat Nakasa and murdered Bafana Bafana captain Senzo Meyiwa are buried.
The cemetery is a permanent reminder of death in the neighbourhood, especially now as the incidence of coronavirus grows in KwaZulu-Natal. But despite this, Mthethwa, 45, is philosophical.
“This lockdown has given us an opportunity to discover ourselves and sit together as men in the neighbourhood even though it’s not allowed, we know that. But we are practising social distancing where we are seated. Occasionally we meet and we drink traditional beer and then we go our separate ways so we can be alone to find ourselves,” he said.
The men have brewed their own beer because the popular tavern next door now operates solely as a tuckshop. Mthethwa and neighbours Mxolisi Hlongwane, Thamsanqa Mkhize, and Sandile Hadebe sit about a metre apart. Their conversation is animated.
“There is no need for the soldiers and police to get violent with people! They need to talk to us properly,” says Hlongwane, 40.
“Sometimes there’s nothing you can do if you need bread and it’s night-time and the children want bread. You need to go get bread! There’s no need for them to be violent,” agrees Mkhize.
“But come on, guys, this is serious! People need to just listen and stay at home,” says Mthethwa.
While his friends agreed they should be allowed to buy alcohol “in moderation”, Mthethwa sees the booze ban as a “lifetime experience” and an “important time to find ourselves and just be sober … and detox”.
He takes a sip.
“This also teaches you discipline … We are going to look back and say during the lockdown you were able to stay for three weekends without touching alcohol.”
The front-yard philosophers all agree that they worry about how much longer they will have food in their fridges.
David Chirwa, who lies on his bed scrolling through his Facebook feed in his backyard shack across the road, concurs. The 24-year-old, a general worker at an event co-ordination company who lives on his own, was last paid at the end of March. He doesn’t know if he’ll be paid in April and hopes the rice, eggs and potatoes he has left will sustain him until lockdown’s end.
“I had no money saved up. This thing caught me off guard and we were not given any notice. I did not have a plan; I wish I had the time to prepare so that when it hit, I at least had bought more food,” he says.
Five doors down live Nombuso Mzobe, 43, and her mother Zandile, 63, in a grey house that stands out in a street of peach and yellow-hued homes.
“We sit the whole day and watch television until we get tired of it and we switch to the radio and cook. I am not that bored. I keep myself busy in the kitchen,” says Nombuso, a cook in Investec’s staff canteen in Umhlanga.
Zandile has revived her sewing hobby in a back room on the property to keep busy.
A former TB patient, Nombuso, who lives with her mother, brother and two adult children, stocked up on hand sanitiser and hand wash.
“I am clued up about Covid-19 and I’m afraid of this virus. I only have one healthy lung and that keeps me away from people. I’m afraid of sitting in large groups,” she says.
For friends Ayanda Mchunu, 16, and Ayanda Mbatha, 18, who live nearby, the lockdown has been anything but fun.
“As friends we sit and talk and just catch up, we don’t roam the streets. We stay indoors,” says
Mchunu, sitting outside on her front step.
“We watch TV and we eat food. This has affected me as a matric student because I don’t know if or how we will be able to catch up,” says Mbatha before being summoned to her house across the street to do chores.