Like many others, Wendy is an immigrant in Katlehong. She has mixed feelings about living conditions in South Africa. “When you see a hungry two-year-old licking the kota-wrapper someone has just thrown away, you know something is wrong with our society,” she says.
WENDY GREW UP IN ZIMBABWE
We meet in a café in Alberton for coffee. Wendy is an educated, goodlooking woman of fifty, neatly and modernly dressed. She has been a resident of Palm Ridge, Katlehong, for eight years. Wendy grew up in a rural environment where there were strict rules and traditions, enabling them to finish school and develop a sense of self-discipline. Principles she applies up to this day. She has agreed to paint me a picture of what it means to live in Katlehong in 2024, as an ordinary citizen.
Each morning at five o’clock, she leaves the township with thousands of others to work in the greater Ekurhuleni area. She is a domestic worker, or, as her employer likes to call her, her house manager. The taxis navigate potholes and the sewerage running unhindered through the streets.
WE ARE A MIXED BUNCH
“We are a mixed bunch,” she says. “Shangaan, Xhosa, Zulus, Tsongas, Indian and Coloured people all live together. The hostels are still Zulu dominated and areas like Phola Park is Xhosa.”
What stuns her is that lot of parents in the township do not see the need to work, as they rely on the R350 grant from the government as well as the child support grants: “We cannot wake up early in the morning to go and look for work, because the government promised us everything we want,” they say. “We will vote, because everything is for free – houses, water and electricity.”
Electricity “specialists” climb onto the pylons to connect electricity to the houses. “Six years ago, people still paid for electricity. But there is a new pattern – people tell you; you are ‘behind’ because it is no longer necessary to buy electricity,” explains Wendy. “The ‘specialists’ call it bridging.”
ACCESS TO WATER IS A BASIC HUMAN RIGHT
“But we can easily go two to three days without any running water available,” she says. “Mostly, between three and five o’clock in the morning we wake each other up. There are specialists who open the fire hydrant at that time, and it links into the system so for those few hours you have water in the taps.”
“And the sewerage in the streets?” I want to know. “What does your councillor say about that?”
“Oh no, he doesn’t care,” says Wendy. “He doesn’t live here, he and his family live in Sky City, far away from this mess. He is never here, precisely because he doesn’t have to care about the raw sewerage running everywhere, turning the roads into a stinking mess.”
Children jump up and down and play in the dirty streets, they go to the small shops where the stinking water runs.
KATLEHONG IN THE EAST RAND
During the mid-forties Witwatersrand East Rand became the economic seat of power in South Africa (Bonner, 2000). The gold mining and industries provided unprecedented new opportunities for thousands of job seekers. Urbanisation quickly became a reality and housing and transport posed major challenges. “But very few of these hopeful migrants became rich, and many lived in dire poverty and squalor. There were massive systems of conflict. During the 1950s, the area became a focus of apartheid social engineering with the industrial townships of the East Rand seeing forced removals and relocations. Essentially thousands of people were relocated from the old location of Dukathole to the new ‘apartheid township of Katlehong’ without consultation or appeal…. In other words, this area was a seething cauldron of activism, discontent, and stress.
“Dukatole was a mixed-race township, which very quickly became overcrowded and unsanitary,” says Gary Kynoch. Black persons from Dukatole, Elsburg, and many from nearby Edenvale and Alexandra, were relocated to a new township called Natalspruit, from 1949. Somewhere in the 1970s, Natalspruit was renamed Katlehong (‘Place of Success’). Two other townships, Vosloorus and Thokoza, were fused with Katlehong in the 1970s.
“The original population at Katlehong was complex, being mixed Zulu, Xhosa, Swazi, Venda, North Sotho, South Sotho, Tswana, Tsonga and even Chinese, with Zulu and South Sotho being the largest ethnic groups” (Kynoch).
THINGS ARE CHANGING AND SLIPPING
The older inhabitants of Palm Ridge are worried. “They say things are changing and slipping,” says Wendy. “One of these days we will be just like Phola Park and Spruit [Natalspruit].”
The different political parties in the area are so intent on fighting each other for dominance, that service delivery has flown out of the window.
“Before Corona they built a park for the children. With clear-vu fences, paving and swings. But during the Corona people started vandalising it. Children go there to smoke pipes, from morning to sunset. There are no safe spaces for the children to play. Instead, they are building more taverns. Black Label, Castle, Savannah – you can find it all there, and even ten-year-olds can buy what they like.”
She pauses. “Being an immigrant in Katlehong is not always easy. I don’t know what else to say.”
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