They keep their heads low, always looking forward. Shying away from the sun, they pull a load larger than the cars that aggressively race past them. Sweat pours over their worn out shoulders as they struggle for breath. It’s tough work, but they need to eat, they need to live.
This is the daily struggle of informal waste collectors in Johannesburg. They are part of the city; but the city doesn’t appreciate them. They’re called walkers of the street, or the cockroaches of the suburbs.
The waste collectors, however, don’t have any other option. They do this work to survive.
“I had no choice. After [the Marikana massacre] I was retrenched. My mother died and I had no food. I heard here in Joburg that people were making money, maybe R100 to R150 per day. So I thought this is what I need to do to make sure my family and I have something to eat,” says Lebogang Rapoo.
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He smiles when he talks about his five children, but his work means he hasn’t seen them in years.
“I haven’t seen my family in two years, but what can I do?”
Rapoo had no money to go home for Christmas last year.
“I would rather be dead at Christmas time than to suffer the way I did. There was no food, nothing at all. The dustbins were empty and there was nothing I could gather to exchange for food. I was so hungry I did not know what to do. I walked from door to door, the people chased me away thinking I am a criminal.”
Rapoo lives on less than R300 ($22) a week. The bulk of that money is sent home, the rest he uses for food. It is a daily challenge to find recyclable goods they can trade. Finding white paper is considered a treasure for them as one kilogram can pay about R5 (around $0.40). To make an amount worth their while, they need to find at least 10 cardboard boxes a day to earn about R1.20, depending on the sizes of the boxes. Twenty plastic bottles will get them about R5 ($0.40) and cans trade for up to R1 ($0.10) per kilogram.
They are slaves to their own survival.
“Welcome to my home,” says Rapoo, pointing towards a space next to a wall of an abandoned building where Corlett drive meets Oxford street, near the plush suburbs of Melrose and Illovo. He dusts off an empty bucket and spreads a dry washcloth over it, making a seat for me. Rapoo and his eight street-dwelling friends are all sitting on buckets around a small fire made of twigs and dried grass. He stirs a pot of rice and empties a packet of soup powder into a burned coffee tin. His bed is a couple of cardboard boxes stacked on a torn piece of industrial plastic. At night, he covers himself in the plastic to keep dry and warm.
The waste collectors are breaking by-laws by trading on the streets and by using the roads to transport their goods.
“Last week the police came; they chased us away. They burned our beds and all our blankets, telling us to go find another place to sleep. They say the residents don’t want us here. But what must we do? We have nowhere to go,” says Rapoo.
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The unregulated informal industry works on a first come, first served basis. The collectors get up at 3AM every morning. They have to get to the dustbins before the municipalities take away their treasures. They walk without counting the steps; on Mondays they walk to Linden; Tuesdays to Rosebank, Melrose, Parkhurst and Killarney; Thursdays to Northcliff and Fridays to Blairgowrie. The routes they take to collect trash range between five  and 20 kilometers. On Thursdays, Rapoo sometimes sleeps on sidewalks between Northcliff and Rosebank because his ‘house’ is too far for a day’s walk. For this, he earns less than R300 a week.
“I made my trolley into a double decker, so I can carry more waste to recycle. Sometimes I pull 180kg, and then I get more money. Sometimes I only collect 90kg. Every three days, when my trolley is full, I walk to the recycling depot in Alexandra. Then I get money; I can eat again,” he says.
According to Plastic SA, the umbrella organization for the local plastics industry, the informal waste collectors’ treasures make up more than 80% of all recycled material in the province of Gauteng. Without the informal waste collectors, companies like Plastic SA would be out of business.
John Xakaxa, a 50-year-old man from Soweto, has been relying on his eight friends for three months after his recycling trolley was stolen during the night. He says members of a rival group, who wear balaclavas, steal from them. When the men from the other group get to a dustbin and find Rapoo and his friends there, they fight them and take all the ‘goods’.
Supermarkets sell trolleys to the collectors at R150 ($11) each, but Xakaxa has not yet raised enough to buy one. His friend, Gerard Moloi, from Daggakraal in Mpumalanga, has been sharing his food with Xakaxa every night since his trolley was stolen. The eight men living at this very busy intersection also look after their friend Petrus Mpbunda who is wheelchair bound after he lost his leg in a shootout between drug lords in Diepsloot, one of Johannesburg’s largest townships. Mpbunda accompanies his friends on their daily walks from dustbin to dustbin in the leafy northern suburbs of the city.
Despite attracting the ire of many in Johannesburg, some residents and NGOs are reaching out to the waste collectors. WastePreneurs, an NGO in Parkhurst, a trendy suburb in the north, was set up less than a year ago to assist the waste collectors. The NGO provides custom-made trolleys to collectors and pays them R250 ($18.80) if they fill a trolley bin. The collectors deposit the waste at the plant next to the office that was established next to Pikitup, the governmental waste collection company. Godfrey Phakedi, manager of the WastePreneur plant, says the collectors bring the waste to the plant where it is sorted and packed by various employees, creating more jobs for street dwellers. The waste sorters are mostly female. From the 81 collectors, only two are female. The waste is then transported and sold to various recycling companies.
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Sfiso Ngobese, a young entrepreneur from Germiston, has also started an initiative to help the collectors. Ngobese noticed a lady walking past his house every day to search for recyclable goods and decided to build her a reliable and safe trolley. The trolley is bigger and more stable than those from supermarkets and it even has brakes. Ngobese became so inspired that he started a business, called Abomakgereza, to specialize in building these trolleys. His trolleys can be used by waste collectors and be used by companies as mobile billboards. He also buys and sells the waste collected by the trolleys he hands out, thereby managing his own team of collectors. This might be a form of regulation that is much needed for the wellbeing and safety of the waste collectors.
For Rapoo, the journey to a stable life is long and arduous, but it is a walk that he has become accustomed to.

Slaves To Survival

It’s a rainy afternoon when we arrive at Nkomo Primary School, in Mnqobokazi, a small village within Hluhluwe town in northern KwaZulu-Natal, a province in South Africa.
The school’s 51-year-old principal, Nomusa Zikhali, approaches us with a smile and a gentle handshake as she welcomes us to her office in a school she first started for a handful of students under four hulking trees.
Zikhali was born and bred in this dry corner of Mnqobokazi. Teaching was always her passion.
“When I was young, I used to play school with my friends and I was always the headmaster. I used to love being a teacher or I’d be a social worker because I loved working with people,” she says.
Zikhali had it tough growing up. She ran away from home, as her father wanted to marry her off at the age of 16.
“I left school in standard eight because my father believed I was old enough to get married. He wanted 11 cows, so I was supposed to get married to a man with five wives,” she says.
Her older brother suggested she relocate to big city: Johannesburg.
“He also didn’t like the idea of me being married at a young age, so he wanted me to go and stay with him and his girlfriend, who worked as a domestic worker in Johannesburg,” says Zikhali.
“I was scared and confused; I didn’t think I would survive. I didn’t even have an ID or passport, so I had to hide at the house where my brother’s girlfriend worked. I sometimes felt lonely and intimidated by the huge buildings, big city lights and busy lifestyle.”
Even here, life was not easy but she managed to survive for two years.
Zikhali and her brother’s girlfriend sold street food – fat cakes and polony – in Ellis Park, commuting by train every morning. Her R500 ($37) profit bought her a ticket to return home. It also brought her face-to-face with her future husband. He benevolently offered to pay for the 11 cows her father wanted.
“On my way home I met my future husband on the bus; when I told him about my story, he offered to pay for the cows.”
At 18, she got married but personal tragedy was in store. Tears well up in her eyes as she relates the story of her two-year-old son’s death in 1994.
“He was burning, I went to the clinic and the nurses told me that they only treated emergencies on weekends. I was turned away and at night he got worse, he had a fit and died on a Monday morning before I could return to the clinic. I couldn’t accept his death, I almost went crazy,” she says.
She channelled the pain into completing matric. She couldn’t go to university because she had to take care of her mother-in-law who had had a stroke.
Because of her love for mathematics, she volunteered at a school as a teacher for seven years without pay.
“I decided to register part-time at the Rand Afrikaans University for a teaching course through correspondence,” she says.
She noticed that the nearest school was 20 kilometers by foot, so she wanted to build a school nearer, and approached the education department, which approved her proposal, but didn’t have enough money to fund it.
“I started the school alone in a hard-to-reach area where I was supposed to walk and cross a flooded river with a handmade boat with 35 children every day.”
She had to move to a rondavel [an African-style hut] on the other side of the bank for two months.
This made teaching difficult as nature continued to conspire against her.
The floods worsened, and the number of students in her school shrank from 60 to 25.
Zikhali was forced to look for a better, safer location. The site she finally settled on only had trees but no brick-and-mortar infrastructure, whatsoever. But under those four majestic trees, she set tables, wooden mats and a stove where she cooked meals for the children.
“I decided to make one of the trees my office; whenever you came to the school you would wait for me in my office; and I used the others for grade 1, 2 and 3. I was the only teacher and had to teach the different grades at the same time,” she says.
Zikhali asked the Africa Foundation, an independent non-profit organization, for classrooms; they built two.
Sixteen years later, the school has 20 classrooms, 860 children and 26 teachers. Zikhali also opened a center for orphaned and vulnerable children.
“I decided to do some home visits after school and saw that the situations at their homes were not alright. There are some children who have bad mannerisms; I don’t push them away, because it’s their way of crying out for help, there’s usually a story behind a child’s behavior.”
Khumbulani Ngwane, a 30-year-old plumber and electrician who was taught by Zikhali, recalls how learning under the trees taught him perseverance.
“The situation was difficult, especially on rainy days; sometimes we’d bring planks and used them as chairs and others would sit on dirt. But that whole experience taught us to never give up in life. As much as we were learning from text books, we were also trained on how to handle life problems.”
Ngwane’s parents died when he was young; his mother was shot by robbers and his father passed away following an illness. Zikhali took him as her own.
“She’s an amazing person,” says Ngwane. “She basically raised me and opened so many doors for me and others in the community without expecting anything in return.”
Zikhali plans to retire in 2020 and continue with her community projects.
Hopefully by then, her rain cloud will have a silver lining and her children a roof over their heads.

Nomusa-Zikhali-130

Classes  Under Rain  Clouds And Trees

Four years of drought and South Africa is counting the costs on the farms. It is tougher than most for hundreds of struggling sugarcane farmers in KwaZulu-Natal who lost everything last year and fear the same this year.
Fifty-year-old Thembelihle Mzila grew up near Wartburg, 40 kilometers from Pietermaritzburg in KwaZulu-Natal. All she wanted, like her parents, was to own a sugarcane field. For more than 20 years, she has lived that dream. All these years, Mzila has worked long hours to feed her children and has build her house.
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“I have learned to use my own hands at a young age. I know how to use my hands, it is something I was born into, I never begged,” says Mzila, pointing to her sugarcane field stretching downhill near her homestead. When FORBES AFRICA met Mzila, the sky over the rural town of Wartburg was grey and the clouds were heavy. It rained when we left but not enough to make up for the four years of drought.
Mzila’s childhood dream is slowly running dry. Since drought struck a few years ago, there is little to harvest, forcing Mzila to look for other income while she prays for rain. Last year, KwaZulu-Natal was the first of five provinces declared drought disaster areas by the government. Early this year, the government announced a R15-billion ($955 million) bailout through loans, but Mzila and her 95 associates won’t qualify for it. They don’t have collateral. While she waits for rain, she is selling soft drinks and snacks to keep her children at school.
Mzila is the chairperson of the Inzwakele Co-operative Group, formed in 2011, that meets once a month. There are 95 members, who plough a field the size of a football field. Most are pensioners, unemployed and single parents. Besides solely depending on rain for ploughing, there are many other problems. They use their annual financial support from government to hire agricultural instruments and repair fences broken down by cattle.
It takes up to two years for a sugarcane harvest. Many are despondent as well as dry.
“Because of climate change, and its unpredictable weather, we find it difficult now to know exactly which months are good for ploughing the fields. Habitually we start in August and through to the end of January, but there was no rain last year, as a result the fields dried up and went hungry with no money,” says Mzila.
“Unemployment is very high here. Many people turn to farming for income. Though we have so many members, we still have a challenge to assist each and every one getting started with their own fields. We have many in the waiting list because we hire tractors and tools. We have a roster that we keep,” says Bongani Shangase, a 75-year-old former bus driver who now farms sugarcane.
<div id="attachment_4748" style="width: 310px" class="wp-caption alignleft"><img loading="lazy" decoding="async" aria-describedby="caption-attachment-4748" class="size-medium wp-image-4748" src="/wp-content/uploads/2017/05/P26B8333-300x200.jpg" alt="" width="300" height="200" />Young children collect water from a spring in Kimaswa Western Kenya Wednesday, Sept. 30, 2015. 375 schools in Cheptai and throughout Western Kenya are currently being given Lifestraw Water Filters to ensure that every child at school has clean water to drink. Jaguar Landrover are supporting the project being run in partnership with Vestergaard and Climate Care and employees form Jaguar Landrover are currently visiting the schools to assist with distribution. ( Photo/KATE HOLT)</div>
“As the small cooperation farmers, we get advice or recommendation from the ‘mill’ as to what kind of sugarcane seed we should be planting at the given time. Based on the soil test done by Illovo representatives on our land, we were given sugarcane N12 and N48 seed to plant. Those of us who ploughed in 2012 have started selling sugarcane to Illovo.”
Mfanufikile Mbatha, 52, is another member who has yet to see his first crop. He’s a shopkeeper as well.
“We worked separately on our own gardens, ploughing vegetables for ourselves and selling when the product was good. But when the local officials approached us to organize ourselves, we came up with the cooperation in 2012. The thing that boosted our confidence was the government grant, although at times we received money a little late into the ploughing season, we are grateful for it,” he says.
They’d be even more grateful for a few weeks of torrential rain.

Dry And Desperate

It’s the last place I expected to catch a nap, but I did: lying in the dirt, hugging my body against the cold mountain rain on the edge of a cliff. Just behind my rocky makeshift bed was a sheer drop to the village of Quthing, 183 kilometers south of Maseru, the capital of Lesotho. From below, the squawks of chickens and barks of dogs drifted up as people went about their daily lives. In many ways it was a strange place to be, on a mundane day, on the verge of an ancient art discovery.
Hunkered under a rock five meters in front of me is Justine Wintjes, archaeologist and fine arts lecturer at the University of the Witwatersrand, who is also lying in the dirt. Under her keen eye is a rare rock art panel of stooped over black figures frozen for hundreds of years on the stone. Every now and again, her short cropped hair, black with a stripe of dyed pink fluorescent, bobs up and down as she sketches in the damp.
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“In Africa, you can’t walk two meters without finding an artefact,” she says.
It was because of a journey in the African bush to find lost rock art that Wintjes is on this cliff face in a remote part of southern Lesotho. With her is a pile of black-and-white photographs and dusty diary entries made from a long forgotten expedition 85 years ago. For generations it was buried in the archives in Frankfurt. They called it the Frobenius Expedition, after the German ethnographer Leo Frobenius. For the great grandparents of the people of Quthing the name might mean something, the last time this team climbed these hills on the hunt for rock art was in 1930.
“He only did one exploration in to southern Africa… I was working on a rock art site in northern KwaZulu-Natal [in the] Drakensberg… It was a very broken site and I knew that it had been recorded in the 1940s by people. But there was this earlier copy, which had been recorded by Frobenius. So I looked at that copy and I thought ‘well, if he made one copy, then maybe he made more than one.’”
It was a thought that took Wintjes on a six-year journey, from the hallways of academia in Johannesburg, to the archives of Frankfurt and finally the dirt roads of Lesotho.
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“I went to Frankfurt and I realized that there was this whole archive of photographs, copies and field notes about the site that were really informative. There were two trips made in 1928 and 1930, with quite a large archive and in various southern African countries. It was archaeology and cultures that no one had really looked at in close detail. I realized they had recorded a lot of sites,” she says.
Wintjes brought back piles of the jumbled Frobenius material to Africa where she began to catalogue it. As part of her PhD, she follows in the footsteps of their expedition.
“For its time [Frobenius] was very accurate. Around the same time, you had a lot of people reading into the exotic readings, like the White Lady of the Brandberg. It’s a really popular example of the Europeans looking at the rock art through the European lens, sort of a racist lens, thinking that it can’t be African, that it can’t be San Bushmen, or of African origin. That it had to be Phoenician or exotic to the continent.”
Wintjes and her team may have a host of digital gadgets to help guide them, but they still had to do good old fashioned legwork in Quthing. They needed the help of the people to find the locations.
“Nowadays, because of online digital data, you can do a lot of preparatory fieldwork. Fieldwork on the internet, looking through books, through archival material you have collected digitally. You get a really good sense of where things are. But you are never entirely certain. You get errors in the archival system, or things that are slightly misleading. For example, the two sites that we visited on this trip had the same name in the catalogue, but were in two very different sites. They were not even particularly close,” says Wintjes.
On a mild Saturday morning, the expedition follows up on a lead. They make a breakthrough when 22-year-old Tlhanole Thulo, clad in Basotho blanket and beanie, and his sister Thebane, in jeans and shirt, recognize one of Frobenius’ 85-year-old photographs. It is a chance meeting no internet connection could find. They recognize a river where they played when they grew up – a 20-minute walk from their home in Qomoqomong.
The team’s excitement is palpable as they jump out the vehicle and grab their gear. They follow the siblings along a goat path deeper into the gully. There, hidden behind a giant boulder, is the site. They stand there holding the 1930 photo to see if it fits; a rocky north-east facing overhang hiding a trove of paintings; impossible to see from a distance. Everyone grabs a pile of photographs and starts looking for a match.
“This cave, we call it Halephutha, we know about it from our parents. It shows us how old people were living. Sometimes it can tell us what they ate and how they lived,” says Tlhanole.
Wintjes’ role in African archaeology was as much chance as finding the cave itself. The South African grew up in Canada, studied fine arts and archaeology in Belgium, before coming back to South Africa 10 years ago.
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“To be honest I can’t remember why [I did archaeology]. It was a discipline that I was always interested in, history and pre-history. So it’s about the paintings, but also about the way they have been studied and the way they have been copied; the visual aspect to the rock painting. I just always loved old things. I was fascinated by ruins and abandoned buildings and old stuff.”
“I realized that through rock art I could combine my background in fine arts and archaeology. It was a place where they came together. At that point I felt a little bit schizophrenic. I wasn’t always very sure about what to do with these two very different worlds.”
“It’s a very exciting field particularly in Africa, given the antiquity we have on the continent. But there aren’t enough archaeologists, or art historians. There aren’t enough people interested in these fields. They really are important,” says Wintjes.
So, the team got on with their tasks; taking new photos, drawing sketches of rock art and struggling to geolocate their site under an infrequent GPS signal. So ends the discovery between a rock and a hard to place to find.

Tag: Rain

FORBES AFRICA SOCIAL MEDIA

Slaves To Survival

Classes Under Rain Clouds And Trees

Dry And Desperate

The Goat Path To Glory