‘Nowhere to Go’ : S. Africa Black Squatters See Hopes Fading

When a white farmer invited Anna Phire to move with her husband and children to unused pastureland on his small farm here, she could hardly believe her luck: Here was a chance for her family to move out of one of the crowded black ghettos outside Johannesburg into a home of their own.

“This was going to be great,” she said, standing outside the little shop from which she sells cigarettes, soft drinks and household items. “We were promised that this would become a new township, that we would be able to buy four- or five-room houses here and that there would be schools and churches and all other facilities.”

Many other black families--some of them former farmhands moving to better-paying town jobs, others pensioners who had lost their housing when they retired, a few of them refugees moving from strife-torn areas of the country--also settled on the farm. Quickly they built a shantytown that they believed was the start of a new community that some wanted to name New Hope.

But none of those promises will now be kept: The establishment of the small but fast-growing settlement--a “black spot” in South African terminology--runs counter to decades of racial zoning here, and local courts have ordered its demolition.

The farmer, Giel Nieuwoudt, who charges each family the equivalent of $15 or $20 a month for ground rental and water, has been convicted of illegally housing black squatters in an area reserved for whites. He has been ordered to remove them from the Varkfontein farm. His neighbors watch the farm closely and call the police at any sign that another black family may be moving in.

The 700 squatter families--more than 4,000 people--say they have no other place to go and wait in fear of a police raid to move them and demolish their shacks of wood and tin.

And government officials, caught between new reforms that now allow blacks to move to urban areas without first getting permits and laws that still reserve most land for whites and prohibit squatting, are perplexed about where the little community can be resettled.

“We don’t mind moving,” Phire said, “but we need a place to move to. We have nowhere to go. Most of us cannot return to where we came from, and nobody can tell us where else we can live. . . . And we all had so much hope that we could settle here and build this into a pleasant place for our families.”

Squatter settlements are rapidly proliferating across South Africa as many blacks, their movements no longer restricted by law, leave rural areas for the cities in search of work or move out of overcrowded black townships. Many prefer to build their own houses in new areas rather than continue to live six and eight to a room with relatives and friends.

According to new government figures, there are now more than 1.3 million known black squatters outside of the country’s tribal homelands, and the black housing shortage has grown to nearly 600,000 units.

The total number of squatters, however, might be close to 4 million when the residents of “informal settlements,” such as those around Durban where there is a policy of “controlled squatting,” are included, according to independent researchers. The total housing shortage in black communities is probably closer to 1 million units.

The shantytowns, similar to those elsewhere in the Third World, are springing up around black townships and industrial areas alike, on golf courses and in cemeteries, on farms like that of Nieuwoudt’s and on vacant land wherever blacks can find it.

“The squatters’ camps are a heritage of the hopeless policy of the government, which refused for four decades to accept the permanency of urban blacks and the inevitable and irresistible drift to the city,” Helen Suzman, the veteran member of Parliament from the Progressive Federal Party, said last month in calling for greater efforts to house black urban residents.

“That policy has resulted in the desperate shortage of land and housing for blacks that we face today in every urban . . . area in the republic and in the mushrooming of squatter camps everywhere. Thousands upon thousands (of black families) live under the most miserable conditions and under constant harassment by the police and army for illegal squatting and trespassing.”

Reducing the housing backlog is a government priority, but senior officials estimate that even with expenditures of $600 million annually, it will take 20 to 30 years to eliminate the backlog entirely.

“Blacks have the freedom to move now, but they still don’t have the freedom to settle,” said Josie Adler, who has worked with squatters in the Shack Dwellers Project of the Black Sash and the Agency for Industrial Mission, two welfare groups.

Although the government last year ended its “influx control” policies that restricted blacks from moving into urban areas, Adler said that half a dozen laws still prevent free settlement.

One law, for example, provides for the eviction of squatters, the demolition of their homes and their forced removal. Other statutes provide for the arrest of trespassers, the demolition of slums and the removal of black settlements judged unsafe or unhealthful.

The government’s official policy now is for “orderly urbanization,” allowing any blacks who so desire to live in urban areas provided they are properly housed. But anti-apartheid and welfare groups charge that little land has been allocated for black housing, that planning and development of new black townships has been slow and that most of the new houses that have been built are too expensive for most black families.

Thomas Moloi, for example, earns the equivalent of $15 a week working as a guard and still has three of his eight children in school. The cheapest township housing, when available, costs a minimum of $1,800--and most of the new houses sell for upwards of $10,000.

“Here, I can build my own house, working myself, and little by little I can make it bigger and better with the help of my sons,” Moloi said, standing outside his shack of rusty metal and weathered wood in the Bapsfontein settlement. “The important thing is to have one’s own home.”

With many of the shacks jammed together amid pit toilets and an open garbage dump, the shantytown here is squalid, and when it rains the mud is ankle-deep. Water tanks are spotted about the settlement, but the water must be boiled before use. No electricity is available. A small primary school is now staffed but cannot cope with the hundreds of children living here.

“Yes, we can put up with this because it is no worse than what we had,” said Abel Mzimuko, 21, who moved with his wife and two children from a nearby farm to work as an electrician in town. “But the main thing is we hoped that this would become a new (black) township and we could build proper homes here. . . . If this place is finished now, where do we go?”

Residents had already begun to spruce up the small settlement before its demolition was ordered. The first, flimsy shacks, built from discarded packing crates, corrugated iron, tin sheeting and old doors and windows, had been giving way to more substantial structures, some of them brick and others brightly painted. The community had started planning little parks, children’s playgrounds and even a town hall. And Nieuwoudt had promised that construction would start at the end of the year on houses for those who could afford them.

“Our leaders say stay, but they can’t say what will happen,” said Lucas Mbonani, a construction worker. “We don’t know whether to plant gardens--or dig trenches to stop the police from coming in to throw us out. We expect the worst, I’m afraid, and if we are evicted, the confrontation could result in a loss of life.”

Government spokesmen say, however, that the community will not be moved until a place is found for the residents, perhaps adjacent to the black townships of Mamelodi, outside Pretoria, or Daveytown, east of Johannesburg.

“We are looking to help these people, not confront them,” said a spokesman for the South African Department of Cooperation and Development. “They are victims, not culprits of some sort. . . . But we want orderly development and cannot allow people just to settle wherever they want.”

The situation here points up how vulnerable blacks are to exploitation by some landowners, who ignore the law, allow blacks to erect their shacks and charge them rent that, measured against the blacks’ incomes, is high.

Nieuwoudt, who himself rents the Varkfontein farm, has been collecting at least $10,500 a month in rent--and perhaps as much as $135,000 so far this year--and profiting further from the sale of food, coal, household supplies and other goods to the settlement. Aside from erecting about 30 toilets, he supplies only water to his sub-tenants.

Nieuwoudt declined to comment. His attorney, Pierre Erasmus, said in Johannesburg that Nieuwoudt had allowed the homeless blacks to settle on the farm out of compassion because they had nowhere else to live and that, as a result, he had been threatened repeatedly by white right-wing extremists in the area as well as prosecuted by the government.

“Nieuwoudt has created a sort of ‘squatting business’ by bringing homeless people to settle here and then charging them whatever the market will bear,” a Pretoria social worker, Phil Mtshweni, said during a recent visit. “He almost has a captive market, and the profits are huge. His risk, except for prosecution and a fine, is minimal because as a tenant himself, he just walks away when the government says, ‘Out!’ ”

Times researcher Michael Cadman also contributed to this story.