Youths Erase ‘Eyesores’ : Black Parks Blossom in South Africa

For the residents of Soweto, Madison Square Garden is not at Eighth Avenue and 33rd Street in Manhattan, but at the corner of Tema and Nicholas streets in the Orlando East subdivision of this sprawling black city near Johannesburg.

Nor is their Madison Square Garden a huge convention center and sports arena. Instead, it is a small triangle of grass, flowers and saplings, all newly planted, a collection of “people’s art” including a multicolored derelict car, and a couple of benches in the shade of a tall, old tree. Madison Square Garden is one of dozens of small parks being created by residents of Soweto and the other segregated black townships around Johannesburg.

“This used to be just a garbage dump, a real eyesore and a terrible health hazard,” said Winston Ngqabayi, one of the organizers of the Madison Square Garden Club. “People would pass by and think they were living in a rubbish heap, that this was all their lives meant.”

Planted Grass, Trees

Together with about 30 other youths from the neighborhood, Ngqabayi cleared the trash from the corner, planted some grass, trees and flowers, obtained benches from the bus company that serves Soweto, and installed electric lights, tapping the power from a nearby junction box. The edge of the park is marked by old tires planted in the ground and painted white, by auto wheels combined in different designs and some tinselly decorations left from Christmas.

In just over a month, the little park--”it’s so small, it’s really just a garden,” Ngqabayi said--has become the gathering spot for neighborhood residents, particularly at dusk when the heat of the day has passed. It was formally inaugurated with a Sunday afternoon barbecue that drew nearly 300 people.

“The black man in South Africa feels so trapped by his environment, by this apartheid system we live in, by a government that makes laws in which we have no say, that he welcomes every opportunity to express himself and to change what little he can,” Ngqabayi said.

Shaping Their Future

“There are so many, many things we can’t change, at least not yet, but this is something we could do ourselves. In a small way, this little garden says we can take our future in our own hands and shape it ourselves.”

Similar sentiments, an outpouring of civic pride mixed with political frustration, are heard at the other little parks that have sprung up along virtually every thoroughfare in Soweto and most of the other black townships around Johannesburg and Pretoria. All are places where a family’s front and back yards are usually bare earth or perhaps raked gravel, lacking even crab grass.

The “people’s parks,” as they are called, are similar to Soweto’s Madison Square Garden--old dumping grounds for trash cleared in long days of work, planted with whatever trees, bushes and flowers could be bought with money collected from passing motorists, outfitted with a few benches and some makeshift playground equipment and then imaginatively decorated with whatever the youths who built it could scavenge.

Their names conjure up dozens of images, some of which seem to have little to do with the actual park--Marlboro Country, borrowed from a cigarette advertisement; Carling’s Black Label, named for that brand of beer; Midnight Madness, OK Corral, Hollywood, Beverly Hills, Devil Street, Mexico, China and Lady Macbeth.

Competition is intense among the various neighborhoods over whose park is best, and the mayor of Soweto, Ephraim Tshabalala, a rich businessman, has promised $45, a week’s wages for most men in Soweto, in a contest for the best park and smaller prizes for second and third places.

Giving Orlando East’s Madison Square Garden an eye-catching character all its own is an old two-door Ford Capri, painted pink, turquoise, silver, blue and white, and set in the middle of the triangle with the words skorokoro pusha, taken from a popular song about an old jalopy that always needs a push, written across the side.

“One of the brothers had this old car, a real skorokoro pusha, and wanted to put it in our garden,” Ngqabayi explained. “We all talked it over, and we liked the idea. . . . That’s how we developed this whole garden--everyone putting in his own ideas, the rest of us discussing them and then going ahead, working together. It is a little bit of democracy, and that’s what the people’s park movement is all about.”

Youths Show They Care

“As youths, we wanted to do something worthwhile for the community, and we wanted to draw the community closer together with a project that everyone could support without any political bickering,” Winston Maema, 19, said at Power Park, which he and other students built under the shady trees on the outskirts of the Orlando Power Station. “Many people think that the youth only cause trouble. Some think we spend all our time throwing stones at the police and army, that we are irresponsible and that we care little about the whole community. We think that the people’s parks will show them we do care. . . .

“Parks are desperately needed in Soweto--shady places where people can gather to relax, where kids can play, where the old folks can have a quiet snooze--and this government, quite typically, provides none. Under apartheid, the black is supposed to work and work until he drops. Under apartheid, parks are for white people who have the privilege of relaxation. We didn’t intend our park to be a political statement, but I suppose it is.”

Many of the little parks, however, do make clear, even strong, political statements.

Some Soweto parks have political slogans--”One South Africa, One Nation,” or “We Shall Overcome,” or “Freedom In Our Lifetime” or “The People Shall Govern”--incorporated into their designs, and others have boldly included the green, black and gold colors of the outlawed African National Congress.

Named for Mandela

In Mamelodi, a black township outside Pretoria, South Africa’s capital, parks have been named for Nelson Mandela, the imprisoned black nationalist leader, for Oliver Tambo, president of the African National Congress and for Benjamin Moloisi, the amateur black poet and congress sympathizer who was hanged two months ago for the murder of a policeman.

Another Mamelodi park honors a 2-month-old girl, Trocia Ndlovhu, who reportedly died from the fumes of a tear-gas canister fired into her house by police in November.

At Mohlakeng, a black township near Randfontein west of Johannesburg, a local sculptor has made a life-size statue of the late Steve Biko, founder of the black consciousness movement of the 1970s, for one park. Developers of another little park put in a cornerstone dedicating it to Mandela.

Such overt political statements can bring retaliation. At Mohlakeng this week, soldiers smashed the Mandela cornerstone, according to residents of the black township, and an explosive charge was reportedly placed on the Biko statue but failed to detonate. In Soweto, some parks have been bulldozed by the city or torn up by the military’s armored personnel carriers; others were reportedly dug up by local vigilantes or perhaps rivals of the developers.

Blacks Find Unity

“It is hard to see how a little park could threaten this system,” said one Sowetan who had watched the police destroy, presumably because it was dedicated to Nelson Mandela, a small spot of greenery his sons and their friends had built on what used to be a glass-littered, garbage-strewn plot in the Diepkloof section of Soweto.

“I suppose they had to destroy anything with Mandela’s name on it, but the real threat is that we blacks are finding things that we can unite around and put aside all our political bickering.”

Although Soweto does have its own plan for parks development, parks do not have a high priority in the city’s budget. Similarly, a Soweto beautification campaign by a former schoolteacher with backing from some white businessmen failed to make much progress over the past decade because companies were reluctant to finance projects they felt would certainly run down through lack of maintenance and probably vandalism.

The “people’s parks” movement, in contrast, apparently began when Grace Sesali, a nurse and mother of four, organized neighborhood youths who were boycotting classes to clean up the street and plant a few flowering shrubs. “We were living in a stinking hellhole of a place,” she said, “and disease from all the rubbish and the vermin it bred was becoming a real problem.

Put Youths to Work

“I thought it was time to do something for ourselves--clean up the area, plant some trees and bushes and flowers--and then there were all these young children, out of school, frustrated because they had nothing to do, getting into trouble. I thought we could use their energy for something constructive and occupy them in fruitful labor.”

On her days off, Sesali gathered the neighborhood youths to collect the garbage, including the rotting carcasses of dead dogs. They burned what they could and buried the residue. She collected plants and a bit of money from other residents to beautify the now clean street. And she gave the children little pep talks on beautifying the neighborhood as much as they could.

“It was amazing what we achieved in just the first day, and the interest shown by the kids, not just in my street but in the rest of the neighborhood, was quite startling,” Sesali said. “They turned up every afternoon to water the plants, and when they began to grow they took turns doing the weeding.”

Some Officials Object

The parks are not without controversy. In some townships, local officials have opposed them, arguing that they interfere with planned park development or that they are unsightly with their fences of painted tires and makeshift equipment. Some motorists have objected to the incessant collecting at street corners by children soliciting money to finance purchase of plants and other supplies. A few parents have objected to their children’s participation--and found a load of trash dumped in their yards in reprisal.

And some militant black youths oppose the parks on grounds that they divert attention from “the struggle” against apartheid, South Africa’s system of racial separation and minority white rule, and delude blacks into thinking that their lives can be improved by measures short of a full revolution.

“Not everything is political, and parks are one of those things that aren’t,” said Benjamin Masinga, an unemployed laborer, whose gardening efforts at a still-unnamed park near the Orlando railway station promise to make it one of the best landscaped plots in Soweto. “If we are trying to say anything, it is that our lives are our own and our communities are our own and that we should try to improve them in every way we can. That’s why these parks have caught people’s imaginations--something in their lives has gotten better.”