South African Diary 10

July 15, 2005 by tompoyser

The bin-men are out, which means there are loads and loads of tramps. Not quite like a morning bin-round in Britain. They flock around the trucks like flies, all carrying all their possessions in shopping trolleys. Now I am all for recycling, and it is pretty cool that these guys manage to find a use for all this stuff that has been thrown away, but the way they get their stuff is unbelievable.

They wait until the bin-men have finished loading up the truck and all the rubbish is the back. Then they hop on, scavenge what they can, throwing it out of the back of the truck, then before the compressor comes down and the truck drives off they leap down. So it is a pretty dangerous occupation for two reasons. One, they could get squashed to death or run over by the truck. Two, they then have to fight with the rest of the homeless guys for what they have chucked out.

Hardly an ideal existence. The stupidest thing is that the homeless guys live in and around the townships. So the things they get is stuff that the township people don’t want. Security guys chase them out of the nice areas, so all the ‘good rubbish’ is thrown away and the stuff they get is third or fourth hand. I can’t blame the people in the nicer areas for not wanting this spectacle every bin collection day, but it is a ludicrous situation. People who are destitute using the left-overs of people who are close to destitute.

There does exist in a lot of the townships a middle-class of people who have a really good standard of living, but there are those who have very little. I have not yet decided which are the worse, the urban townships in and around Cape Town, which contain millions of people, some of whom have no water or electricity, a state of affairs they are not happy with. Or the rural townships that exist close to fruit-farms and canning factories. They have fewer people, but less chance of getting things like water or electricity.

Both sets of people protest regularly and manage pretty effectively to shut down main roads and town-centres, but they achieve very little. There is a mixed reaction to this action. Most people are sympathetic, but see it as useless, or energy ill-spent, but some people get really annoyed with it. And as it happens all the time, the protesters do little except antagonise others.

The thing that really surprises me is the lack of co-ordination. When apartheid was in place there was a cause that unified many of these people into a single body. Now there are so many problems, many with poverty as a root cause, that this single-mindedness has disappeared, with lots of fractions each clamouring for it’s voice to be heard.

I honestly don’t have a suggestion, and I don’t think that is possible to ‘triage’ these problems into an order. All that I know is there is a huge problem when homeless people have to risk their lives simply to find rags to sleep in. What South Africa does about this is unclear, but maybe a little co-operation would speed up this difficult transition?