Falling through the cracks
Invisible souls during lockdown
When Edmo Wilson was 23, he worked by day mixing cement, sand and water to make “daga” for permanent, protected structures on construction sites in Pretoria East. By night, the undocumented worker from Masvingo, Zimbabwe, was vulnerable and itinerant, sleeping under plastic shelters built to be inconspicuous to the mounted police and spotter planes that were used to raid squatters.
In the 14 years since then, Wilson has watched nature, golf, lifestyle, security and other estate variants transform the landscape of the southeastern flank of Pretoria.
The lives and livelihoods of many undocumented construction and domestic workers living and working there, however, remain as precarious as ever — perhaps now even more so.
“I was staying very close to this camp,” Wilson says, pointing southwest, “but it was just outside the fence, by the hills there. It was just a bush. If they caught you, they take you to Lindela Repatriation Centre. We were not staying in a camp like this.”
The 7mx7m stand where he and his wife, Nomsa Tsitsi Mbanje, share a shack is in a fenced 5ha settlement, Plastic View, that is home to an estimated 15,000 people with no access to running water or electricity. Covid-19 social distancing and lockdown regulations are near impossible to adhere to here.
Since 2017, Mbanje has been a community healthcare worker at a clinic created and funded by the Moreletapark Gemeente church, Plastic View’s neighbour. The lack of Covid-19 test kits means that neither positive nor negative cases can be confirmed.
“We haven’t done tests at our clinic,” she says.
“Only screening. We haven’t found a case so far.”
Restrictions on movement have played a part in further loosening the tenuous access the invisible in Plastic View have to the South African health-care system.
“For the first two weeks of lockdown, many children were born in the shacks here. I have received three children here in my shack. Ambulances would take four to five hours to arrive. Often the child would have already been born by the time the ambulance arrives,” says Mbanje.
“Before we had the clinic, people went to Pretorius Park Clinic where, if you didn’t have papers, either asylum or passport, they don’t help you. If a child didn’t have a health road map document, they are not helped. Many people stopped going to Kanana Clinic. It helped and was better because they accepted everyone, but it is far and people would take the bus there in the morning and come back late.”
During lockdown the Moreletapark Gemeente has also distributed food packages of maize meal, soy mince and fresh produce to people who have not enjoyed the same from the South African government.
A study recently published by Wits University’s African Centre for Migration & Society (ACMS) found that 5.3% of South African residents — about 2-million people — of working age (15-64) were born outside of the country.
The study, based on Stats SA data collected between 2012 and 2017, found that “a foreign-born migrant with the same age, gender, and level of education, belonging to the same ‘population group’ and living in the same place as a South African, has a higher probability of being employed than a South African. But foreign-born migrants are also more likely to be employed in precarious work — or in the informal sector — than South Africans.”
The binary documented/undocumented status for categorising foreign labour in SA has little meaning in Plastic View, where people say they exist on a spectrum, from having a passport with a valid work permit at one end to having neither at the other.
These invisible people speak of having different levels of access to and exclusion from the state’s resources, depending on their legal status in the country.
ACMS researcher Dr Zaheera Jinnah wrote, in a research paper that uses migration and domestic work in SA as a case study, that “a form of negotiated precarity, defined as transactions which provide opportunities for survival but also render people vulnerable, can be a useful way to make sense of questions around (il)legality and (in)formality in the context of poorly protected work, insecure citizenship and social exclusion”.
Husband and wife Dzingai “Tsvangirai” Dinako and Madeline Manyatsa — both of them with passports but no permits to work in SA — share a bedroom and kitchen. Dinako is tiling a third room, and the fourth is a chicken coop.
Manyatsa and her husband have been out of work since the lockdown began more than three months ago. He had worked on various construction sites and she at a Hillside Estate home 20 minutes’ walk from her doorstep.
What before lockdown was a dual-income household that supported a 22-year-old first-year university student and two teenagers in Zimbabwe, is now a family dependent on their chicken business for survival.
In 2016, while working for a construction company, Dinako saw one of the managers selling chickens to his staff at month-end. “I asked him where he got his chicks. He laughed at me. I said that I wanted to start a business because I don’t drink beer or anything. I just like soccer on Sundays. He told me, I bought them and used that room.
“I cleaned the coop and gave the chicks food in the mornings and when I came back from work. From 2016-2018 I used that room for layer chickens for eggs. I had 100 layer chickens. Everyone here at Plastic View used to buy eggs from me.”
One day when he came back from work, Dinako noticed that the chickens were not eating the food he had given them. They soon became ill, and most died. He suspects someone jealous slipped poison into the coop. “Someone came at night and sprayed something that killed my chickens. On the first day I found 28 dead, on the second day 36. In three days 76 were dead. I took the dead chickens, put them in bags and went to go and burn them in the bush. My heart had to be like a man’s.”
He showed spirit and thought on his feet — like one of his favourite soccer players, jersey no 5, Mark Fish. “My wife and I decided to sell the layers and buy broiler chicks to sell for meat. These ones are quick to make money, they mature after six weeks.
Little is hopeful about the lives of people who share small spaces living precarious lives, eking out an existence during a global pandemic that has threatened their livelihoods and compounded their inability to access basic services and goods.
A fresh batch of fluffy yellow week-old broiler chicks might not be hope, but their high-pitched chirps certainly sound something akin to it. The indomitable Dinako and Manyatsa have invested in their fledgling business once more, hoping that in six weeks’ time Plastic View residents will again have the means to buy live chickens from them.
Most Plastic View residents cite proximity to their places of work as a reason for wanting to stay there. Before the settlement was demarcated and granted the minimum basic services of water tanks, latrine toilets and refuse collection, men stayed in the area because they could not pay rent in townships and steep transport costs to get them to work and back.
The city on whose outskirts they cling is itself at its most precarious at the moment, on the cusp of a rapid rise in the Covid-19 infection rate.
More vulnerable than most, the people of Plastic View watch the gathering storm, aware that an accident of birth and the extent to which they have managed to navigate the bureaucracy for its precious documents, will determine their chances of access to basic, possibly life-saving, services.