SUNS  4311 Wednesday 28 October 1998



South Africa: Apartheid cast in stone?



Johannesburg, Oct 26 (IPS/Gumisai Mutume) -- In scores of settlements dotted in the middle of nowhere across the breadth of South Africa, apartheid still lives.

According to a new report, 'South Africa's Discarded People', by the Centre for Development Enterprise (CDE), thousands of people throughout this country are living the same way as they did when the political system of racial segregation and uneven economic development was legal.

"Displaced urban settlements are not towns in the conventional sense," says Ann Bernstein of CDE. "They lack commercial, industrial and other economic activities associated with urban development."

While in other countries people earning low incomes tend to live near their areas of work, the reverse is often true in South Africa. "The whole intention of the apartheid system was to keep Black people out of the cities," says Bernstein.

The result is a scattering of more than 60 such settlements housing at least 10 percent of South Africa's 40.6 million people mainly in or near what were the former Black homelands.

Winterveld, about 40 kilometres north of Pretoria is one such classic case of apartheid planning. Here, the majority of the 220,000 people live in free standing shacks in a poorly serviced sprawling wasteland that was designed during the 1960s to direct Black settlement away from Pretoria.

People in Winterveld who do work, must travel daily to Pretoria. Because there are no nearby industries, unemployment runs at more than 43 percent, and local government does not function properly in Winterveld.

"There is nothing here for us and when my son finishes school next year, we are moving to Pretoria," says Winterveld resident 48-year-old Ben Mmatli who wakes up at 4 a.m. each morning to go to work in a suburb in Pretoria. "I have been doing this for most of my life. I am tired now."

Mmatli moved to Winterveld at the height of apartheid as a young boy with his parents who were forcibly removed from Pretoria to allow for the development of White suburbia. He, like more than 40% of the inhabitants of Winterveld featured in the CDE report, want out.

The African National Congress-led government has decided to upgrade the settlement. But Bernstein says this "is good money being thrown after bad decisions taken during apartheid."

What to do with such settlements is only one of several policy challenges facing the new government as it tries to redistribute scarce national funding. By 1990, for instance, the then government was spending 175 million dollars annually to subsidise buses.

Many of these subsidised buses still run between such areas and more established urban centres, but the CDE report which surveyed 11 displaced urban areas, found that the majority of commuters do not use the buses.

Industries that were heavily subsidised by the apartheid government to locate near Black settlements have since pulled out as subsidies dried up, because it was unprofitable to operate in the middle of nowhere.

"People living here are living below the average socio- economic levels in national terms," says Jeff McCarthy one of the researchers who compiled the CDE report. "This is because 100 percent of these people are Black. Race is still the primary determinant of the quality of life in South Africa."

The exact number of such settlements is unknown. So is the exact number of people living in them.

"We have to unbundle the legacies of apartheid," agrees Transport Minister Mac Maharaj. He, however, cautions against wholesale acceptance of the research findings, saying more public debate should be generated.

In the former homeland of KwaNdebele, Natal Province, for instance, the majority of the people living there do not want to move, Maharaj says. Hence, the government has to plan to improve settlements around there.

"If we fail to change people's lives, then our policies are not worth the paper they are written on," says Maharaj.
The report underlines one of the basic problems facing development workers in South Africa -- a dearth of accurate statistics and knowledge on what has been happening in communities below the surface of race politics.

"The report serves as a reminder of the point that human settlement normally does and should follow economic forces and not vice versa," says Bernstein.