How long must voting be influenced by fear of losing grants?
Driving into Alexandra township from Sandton through Grayston Drive is always a nightmare and yet, late on Friday, I convince myself it would defeat the purpose of my visit if I sought convenient ways into one of the oldest townships in Joburg.
After a gruelling step-by-step negotiation with taxi and truck drivers, I make it past the Pan Africa Shopping Centre in Wynberg, Sandton, then Madala` Hostel and a set of colourful multistorey flats on Seventh Street.
Not far from here, I recalled, residents unleashed horrific xenophobic attacks that made international headlines. I recalled too how Madala was a hotbed of internecine violence between the IFP and the ANC in the period leading to the country’s first democratic elections.
I park on Eighth Street and walk the streets just as the sun sets a day before the country celebrates 30 years since the dawn of democracy.
Do Alex residents remember? Do they care? The squalor, the filth, the cramped shacks tell a sad story of endemic poverty, of a people focused daily on the struggle to make ends meet. The intangibles of SA@30 celebrations seem at once an inconvenience, and mushy feelings about equal rights come second to the urgent need to put bread on the table.
I meet Salome Mashele, a vegetable seller behind a makeshift coal-powered griller topped with a stainlesssteel braai mesh, balanced with what locals call mampara bricks, which she uses to grill corn.
She explains she has been in Alex since 2002 and, despite the violence at night she hears about, she is lucky to have been spared.
To her left and right are lampposts adorned with images of ANC president Cyril Ramaphosa and EFF leader Julius Malema while Rise Mzansi’s Songezo Zibi is a further pole away.
Asked if she will be celebrating the country’s 30 years of democracy, Mashele seems at first surprised I expect her to engage in what must be meaninglessness banter, and then she shrugs off the idea. “I will be here. I do this every day,” she says as she turns the corn.
She explains she is old and grateful for her social grants. I understand, but will she be voting, I insist?
“I don’t know — but if we don’t, the whites will take away our pensions,” she says.
She tells me she’s even more grateful for the child support grants and for the R350 which she says is for the destitute. These grants, she tells me, help many out of very dire situations. These essential incomes, and not mushy celebrations about democracy, are what matters. These show that the ANC cares, she tells me.
I want to say to her these are crumbs, SA is mineral-rich and the ANC could do better, but I don’t. She’s distracted by dark clouds that gather overhead. And, in any case, my expectations of the ANC and government are mine. Her reality and pains are not, for now, about macroeconomics and strategic directions, even if these affect her.
Her struggle is about what happens not just today but right now. Or about how each passing minute will help her to survive.
I recalled how Gloria Jean Watkins, an American author and academic known by her pen name ‘bell hooks’, wrote about how colonial academics inquire into those subalterns (who are socially, politically, and geographically marginalised or oppressed people), then colonise their knowledge — and how their pains must be understood.
Hooks, on marginality as a site of resistance, notes: “There is no need to hear your (native) voice, when I (the investigating academic) can talk about you better than you can speak about yourself. Only tell me about your pain.
And then I will tell it back to you in a new way.”
I didn’t want to be this.
As we talk, EFF activists drive. “These people, our leaders, gave us the grants,” she returns to the topic. I say, “but you know Malema is no longer with the ANC, right?” She says she does, but “he too and the ANC deserve to be given a chance to fix things. I don’t know who I will vote for. But I know it’s not the white parties.” I ask, why? “I can’t trust them.”
I recalled here how I previously criticised Cyril Ramaphosa for talking about social grants as if the system was a success when it represented an admission that high unemployment in the country has made millions dependent on the state, which is still true. But the other truth is that the ANC and Ramaphosa know where their votes come from.
We may have highfalutin’ debates about complex issues facing the country. We may scream at the top of our voices as if we understand Mashele’s pain better than her. Or, worse, assume the solutions we pontificate about align with what those on the ground believe are urgent.
The question is for how long must Mashele wallow in wretchedness, selling corn in streets overflowing with filth? How long must her political choices be influenced by her fear of losing her grants?