By Siphiwe Sithole:
Photo by David Van Wyk
I have often wondered when I was younger why during the week I would sleep in a nice house where my grandmother worked as a domestic worker in the suburbs but on the weekends get into a taxi and sleep in a small hose in Meadowlands. It was with time that I realised I had apartheid to thank for this. I realized that because my grandparents were black someone decided they were not good enough to live a place of their choosing. So he designed a ghetto a place where he would place this trouble that was a black man.
I find it rather strange that black people who fought indefatigably to attain freedom would not insist on destroying this construct designed to disempower them. The same place created to segregate you because you were once thought not to be good enough to live in Sandton. Soweto, Alex, amongst others, are today hip and happening places with skyscrapers which compare to those in white suburbs. In Soweto we build malls that white people have, nice pubs and restaurants that rival the ones in the North. However our schools are still not private or have the same standards of white schools in white suburbs. How many private schools do we have in townships of South Africa? Those with the means to send their children to schools in white suburbs– however they live in a R1.8 million rand house in Diepkloof extension. This does not make sense.
We seem to be strengthening this atrocious system meant to keep us locked up in the townships. We disown and cast out those who defy the system and buy houses in white suburbs and send their children to private schools in white suburbs. We call them all sorts of names: sell outs, coconuts, model c’s etc. and yet we continue to sleep in dining room floors of houses sometimes without a bath or toilet indoors and sometimes no toilet at all! Today generations upon generations of black children still live in their grandmother’s apartheid match box house many without the hope of ever leaving. We are famous in townships for backrooms known as a ‘’two rooms and garage’’ cottage like structures. Some are bigger and fancier than the main apartheid match box house. If you asked me this the best form of gloried oppression … just with a DSTV subscription and sometimes a fancy BWW parked outside.
We seem to forget that none of our grandparents chose to live in a township and that if they had the power to, all of them would have chosen to occupy any part of South Africa they liked. Perhaps then many of us would live in places today we call Sandton, Ballito, the Waterfront and other affluent suburbs.
The white man still has us locked up in a camp far away from him and all his splendour, with big nice houses, cars, swimming pools, tennis courts, state of the art hospitals and schools. Not enough black people live in white affluent suburbs and this is largely because of our own doing. This way the white man still has us oppressed and we do not even see it! The white privileged, racist South African disguises himself as a liberal and comes to party with us in the township, feeds us the same alcohol he sells to further oppress us, laughs at us then gets into his car, hits the highway and sleeps in a triple story house far away from us and our burden to him. We in fact support his evil ways and continue to lock up generations upon generations of black children in different townships in South Africa.
Black people with the means must leave the ghetto and set up roots in places where it was once not possible for him to live he was not free, unless if indeed the black man even the ones with the means to are not free in a democratic South Africa.
The ghetto was designed purely to oppress us and an unoppressed black man must make it his sole mission to leave it.
You might better ask yourself why your black government keeps so many of its own people in poverty while spending 200 million on the president’s private house? Corruption in the black government cannot be blamed on the white man, whatever evils that may have been instituted in the past. It is back politicians that keep this problem going while they enrich themselves. Time to get honest black politicians into the government and to throw the corrupt rascals out.
Despite the short falls of living in the township, there’s much of our identity and heritage attached to it. It’s a place most of us grew up in and call home. This is a place that taught us to be who we are. The apartheid system wanted us to rot and die in it. Instead we prevailed, we lived on and fought the regime.
There is a fundamental legacy of fear and hate towards to white man that has passed through generations. That legacy is hard to change as in the media, the white man is still being portrayed as superior and the black man as inferior. Most black people don’t feel at home in these suburbs that won’t let us slaughter a sheep for umsebenzi- because they call it animal cruelty. These suburbs that don’t let us gather our families together as they complain about the noise. There’s high walls and no interaction with ones neighbor. You could live next door to a person for 10 years and still not have some type of relationship with. That’s against our every fibre. Can you name 3 white people that you know by name that you met and continue to have a relationship with in the suburbs- and not someone you met via work?
Instead in the suburbs the focus is on materials rather than relationships. The culture is to hang out in malls and spend money you don’t have.
There will always be a significant gap in levels of education (which shouldn’t be the case), service delivery, housing etc. That falls down to the competence of our government. We have a tacky and complicated past. RDP houses were meant to be a dignified way to assist the poor but they too are a form of oppression as how can one family live in a box. But that’s still a better way to live than to live in a shack. Back rooms are an alternative to people who can’t afford to live in a flat in the North suburbs or any suburb due to another apartheid scar, which is the remuneration gap- but that’s another topic all together. City living is an expensive exercise, and anyone living in the city will tell you that much.
There’s no wrong or right here. People will always live where they most feel comfortable.
Be it in the hood or the burbs. The gap will always exist.
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