Diepsloot by Anton Harber
My rating: 5 of 5 stars
Diepsloot is an informal settlement (shanty town) on the northern outskirts of Johannesburg and the southern outskirts of Tshwane. It began post-apartheid in the late 1990s and this study of it was made by journalist Anton Harber about 2010, so it is probably out of date now. At the time the author estimated that there were about 1700 similar settlements throughout South Africa, and there are now probably many more. This detailed examination of Diepsloot at a particular point in its history gives a pretty good picture of how a lot of South Africans live today, and the number of people who live in this way continues to increase.
Anton Harber analyses Diepsloot from many different points of view -- its history, how people came to live there, the difficulties of life, accommodation, transport, housing, schooling, municipal and government services and the lack of them, and protests against lack of "service delivery".
Diepsloot and its problems are rarely known to anyone outside, and the place is rarely mentioned in the news media other than from an outside point of view, the only exception to this being the Daily Sun, which, however, concentrates almost exclusively on crime stories.
Diepsloot consists mainly of shacks erected in unplanned fashion by those who live in them, and the shacks were erected before there was any infrastructure like roads, sewerage or electricity, so providing such services is difficult without disturbing or demolishing existing shacks, which of course evokes protests from the residents.
Crime is rife, and the police were absent for a long time -- the nearest police station was in Erasmia, 16 kilometres away in the City of Tshwane, though Diepsloot itself is in the City of Johannesburg. so by the time a crime was reported to the police, and the police had arrived on the scene, the perpetrators had long gone, if they had not been caught be people in the vicinity and often dealt with by vigilante justice, so by the time the police arrived the only people they could arrest were those who had punished the original criminals by beating them up or even killing them. Later a police station was built, but because of the difficulty of reaching places within Diepsloot by vehicle, the police could still not reach crime scenes quickly.
Places like Diepsloot illustrate the problem of housing in South Africa. The figures for the provision of housing are impressive, but the need for housing is growing faster. Harber analyses this, and shows, pretty convincingly I thought, that the need is not so much for housing as for accommodation, and the distinction is significant and important.
The provincial and local government have tried to provide "RDP" houses, which are single-family houses in the middle of their own plot of land, very much on the same pattern as the previous apartheid government sought to provide. There is a shortage of land for such houses, and that makes it difficult for Diepsloot to expand for its increasing population, which is also complicated by some nearby land being the breeding ground of an endangered species of frog.
Outside politicians and bureaucrats have tried to impose a "one family, one house, one plot" model, but the people of Diepsloot gravitate naturally to a pattern in which
...shacks are in small family clusters, bunches of them sharing small courtyards and fenced off as units... People have structured the space to serve their needs, and it means that child-headed households, for example, get the support and assistance of their neighbours.
Finding solutions is made more difficult because of bureaucracy. Money is budgeted by one agency and allocated for something like road improvements, for example, but that requires drainage and various other planning permissions from different departments, which takes longer, and so the allocated money is not spent and has to be returned to the Treasury. The City of Johannesburg decided some years ago to separate the provision of electricity, water, and rubbish removal into several autonomous "silos", each with its own bureaucratic structure, so coordinated planning is almost impossible.
...the electricity, water, refuse removal and transport departments... (were) carved off into independent companies, known collectively as City-Owned Enterprises.... Coordination, though, is a nightmare. Now they have more silos than a Free State farming cooperative and getting them all to operate and implement, in harmony, is extremely difficult.
One harassed bureaucrat from the Development Bank of Southern Africa showed Harber a shelf full of files of completed development plans, waiting to be implemented.
Because of this, the people of Dielsloot have de3veloped their own structures and systems of authority, and these are often rivals, and there are rivalries within rivalries. The ANC, the dominant political party in Diepsloot, sees power struggles between the ANC itself and its alliance partners. There are also tensions between businesses -- small businesses and bigger businesses, and between local business people and foreign traders.
Harber tried to interview representatives of each, bureaucrats, business people, teachers, NGOs, politicians (local, municipal and provincial), teachers, health workers and others, to build a picture of the settlement. People like to speak of the "community", but in fact there are so many overlapping and often rival "communities" within a place like Diepsloot that it is a misnomer.
I found it particularly interesting because some members of our church in Atteridgeville live in such an informal settlement, Phomolong in Atteridgeville West, and they sometimes mention similar problems. And sometimes our diocese has tried to negotiate for places for building temples in such places, without understanding the complexity of political structures and power relations. Some of that is unique to Diepsloot, of course, but the complexity is universal. We have been trying for 20 years to get a church site in Soshanguve, but the land, earmarked by the City of Tshwane as a church site, is registered in the deeds office as owned by the Gauteng Province, and before the site can be allocated and developed, someone must pay the conveyancing fees, and is it the municipality or the province? So people tell us to make like an informal settlement, and just build something on it before someone else does.
This book is important reading for South Africans, both those who live in places like Diepsloot, and perhaps even more, those who don't.
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