Black South Africans still caged in squalor

By Pelekelo Liswaniso

My heart bleeds when I see the poverty ravaging the black people of South Africa’s Grahamstown. They sleep amongst goats, cows, donkeys and chickens. These are the poor Xhosa speaking communities in the black townships of Grahamstown, one of the poorest towns of South Africa’s Eastern Cape Province.
Thousands of people live in impoverished shanty homes, made out of weak patched-up housing structures that are easily destroyed by storms and rain. Some of these shacks recently crumbled during a downpour. Many others are surrounded by sewage filled standing water.
Eleven years after the break of the obnoxious apartheid rule in South Africa, it is appalling to see such huge disparities between the rich white suburbs and the poor “locations “of the black people in the town.

Poor hygiene
They have no toilets. They still use buckets to help themselves and clear human excreta, amidst buzzing flies. This is obviously a recipe for disease but also a job for a proud provider of an extended household!
Black students at the nearby Rhodes University, once a privy of the white community, wonder at the squalor, dirt, poor housing, high unemployment, and sheer poverty of today’s black townships of Grahamstown.The overcrowded shanty settlements are the remnants of South African apartheid planners who moved black and mixed-race people to the poor areas in the 1960s as part of a whites-only policy for urban areas.
“The disparities are unbelievable,” says Jacqueline Kabeta, a student from Zambia studying for a Masters Degree in Journalism and Media Studies at Rhodes. “It is hard to believe the remnants of the past regime still have so much effect on people’s well-being. Something has to be done,” she said.
The so-called streets have never seen any resemblance of tarmac. They are covered with mud during the unpredictable rain pattern in the town while dust is the order of the day when it’s dry.

HIV/AIDS/TB

In the night, the entertainment dens come alive and are congested with drinkers of all sorts of alcoholic beverages and smokers. Illicit activities including commercial sex as a trade mark amongst most unemployed youths and adults, attest to statistics that rate South Africa as one of the leading countries in HIV and AIDS in sub-Saharan Africa.
Such conditions are also a recipe for Tuberculosis, another killer disease in South Africa. Tuberculosis is in fact said to be the number one killer among South Africans suffering from HIV and AIDS. Signs of disease amongst the people’s faces are widespread and a chilling reality. I hope the powers that be can surely look into the plight of the black communities of Grahamstown and work towards bringing about some desirable positive changes. It’s an awful feeling really.