New Life in the Winterveld - Home to 1 Million People

Anyone who lives in Winterveldt could not have taken home South Africa's gold! But here, in this settlement just behind Pretoria, is one of hundreds of Black workers ghettos that sprang up all over the gold-rich Witwatersrand economic powerhouse. More than one million people came from all parts of South Africa and the neighbouring countries to live here. All came in search of jobs. Under the Apartheid regime the Winterveldt was a contradiction. It was in demand as a squatter settlement for people hounded out by the apartheid laws. But, as part of the Bophutatswana bantusatan, people could live here with their families with less fear of police harassment even though they were without official residence papers. It was a kind of dumping ground.

Even today Winterveldt is a sort of No Man's Land. Communities were destroyed when their farming land was taken from them. It was such dry and barren land that not even the Boers who always thought of themselves as great pioneers would occupy it. Only Black farmers dared to work the land. Then they were forced off the land into the Winterveld. Black landlords also have no interest in farming the land in the Winterveld. Still, they do carry on their business there. This huge area, devoid of vegetation, has been parcelled out into small plots. The plots are rented out to Black labourers who work in the neighbouring industrial areas, if they can find jobs. That is how this giant shanty town of a million people grew in the industrial belt surrounding Johannesburg and Pretoria., where most of the jobs are to be found and where the pay, low as it is, is still better than rural landlessness! Desperate people stream into this industrial area from the whole Southern African Region.

Winterveld has no natural surface water resources. There is however plenty of ground water available to those who can pump it out of deep boreholes. Because small-holders do not have the resources, the boreholes, and therefore the water, remain in the hands of the landlords. They make a business out of selling water from their privately owned water tanks at 40 Cents for a 4 gallon can. Most Wintervelders could not afford electricity because they could not pay the high cost of connection to the main supply because of the overland cables that were needed. Neither waterborne sewerage nor refuse removal are available.

Mostly one finds women, children, the old and the sick, and of course the unemployed in Winterveld. Fathers, sons, uncles and brothers, but also some women who have found jobs as housemaids, or other menial work, get up very early in the morning. Before dawn they board the buses that pass through the settlement to the highways that will take them to their jobs. They return home late at night Family life is badly disrupted. It is left to late evenings and weekends only. Large families have to be fed from the pitifully low wages. And always the money for the land rent must be found if they are not to lose the house in which they have invested their own materials and their own sweat. Because of the poverty of the inhabitants, Winterveld is a very complex community living in clay huts, corrugated iron barracks and shanties made of industrial waste, and some live in brick houses,. The inhabitants, even though they come from nearly all African ethnic groups and from neighbouring countries, survive together here.

Now a new time has dawned in the Winterveld. The first democratically elected local council, led by the ANC, has come into existence. With money provided by the Government's Reconstruction and Development Program (RDP) the land will be bought from the landlords so that an infrastructure of public roads and streets can be built. Then the people who have so far been tennants will be able to buy the land on which they have built their houses or shacks through a small scale credit scheme that is already being prepared.

When the local authority legal structures have been set up communal water supply and sewerage can be constructed, connection of each home to the electricity supply will be possible at reasonable installation prices, and refuse removal can be introduced to the Winterveld. Finally, Wintervelders will have to take some development initiatives themselves to make their place attractive.

The inhabitants of the Winterveld had already had experience of community development work during the apartheid era. The ANC is the strongest political force in this area and works with a dozen community organisations, various religious congregations, womens, youth and and environment groups which have existed since the nineteen eighties. Some social improvements can already be seen since the time of the transition. For example the St Peters Clinic has been established to provide medical care to outpatients. Thanks to the support of the nearby Medical University for Southern Africa (MEDUNSA) good health care and treatment possibilities exist, albeit in a rather small and poor building.

MEDUNSA came into being in 1976 under the apartheid regime as a teaching institution for exclusively black medical personnel. Its graduates would work only in the black settlements and homelands. Even though it was conceived in terms of a racist concept, MEDUNSA is a blessing for its surrounding area and is constructively and deeply engaged with many programs and projects for the reconstruction of the New South Africa.

Polio and other serious infectious disease such as the feared Measles, will be eliminated for the children of the Winterveld because all children will be innoculated in accordance with the World Health Organisation (WHO) immunisation program. The main hall of the St Peters Clinic which is used for on Sundays for church services, is used on weekdays as waiting rooms and or treatment room for patients. When I visited the Clinic it was innoculation day. The room was packed to overflowing with mothers and their babies. Sister Thuli Mzamane, the Clinic Director, apologised for the cramped conditions and the lack of privacy for the patients. "Expansion has to wait until the money is available. But it is so important that all women and their children come to the Clinic." In fact the women make good use of their new rights to free health care for themselves and their children up to their sixth year of life.

The students of MEDUNSA who do their practical training at St Peters Clinic are always available to help. That makes it possible to open everyday including Saturdays. A mobile clinic of the University travels around in other parts of Winterveld providing health care where there is no building to serve as a healthcare centre.

"For me Winterveld was a lucky strike," Doris who is crippled told me. She invited me in to the well kept little clay house where she lives with her sister-in-law. "We came to Winterveld many years ago when we fled from the poverty of KwaZulu. But then I became ill with polio. I could no longer walk and I believed my life was over. Yet now it is okay again."

When the young social worker Jane Motau came to Winterveld she started to work together with Christa Meyer of the Department of Occupational Therapy to work with people with physical disabilities. Doris was one of them. She obtained calipers for her legs and was rehabilitated to the point where she could again move about unaided in her home and do the housekeeping without outside help. So that she could leave the house to take part in an activity program for people with disabilities she was given a wheel chair. She has finished her training. She proudly put on my head a cloth hat she had made. She makes them for sale and earns a tidy little income from them.

Since then Jane Motau has lifted 400 physically and mentally handicapped people of Winterveld out of their lethargy. That might not seem very much, but it is really hard work. "In our society where only the healthiest and strongest find work and receive acknowledgement, a poverty stricken family with a handicapped member to sustain waits only for that person to die," she told me. "The handicapped person finds that he or she is a burden and hides away. That person is concealed even from members of the family because disability is seen as an evil omen. One can suspect a misshapen neighbour of being the manifestation of evil spirits. In the end that means that such people are rejected and the people suffer from great anxiety." Jane has to speak seriously with the people about the issue of handicap or disability, and seek to explain it. It is a slow process to change traditional ideas.

Funding from Community H.E.A.R.T. also finds its way into health and social reconstruction projects of Winterveld.

(This is a translation of a report of a visit to the Project in April 1998 by Edelgard Nkobi, Member of our twin organisation Community H.E.A.R.T. e.V., Essen.)