More than ten years after the end of the legal paraphernalia of apartheid, Terry Conway considers how far the African National Congress (ANC) governments and their supporters at provincial and city level have overcome its legacy in the field of housing. Housing, like health care and education is one of the clearest ways to assess how a particular society is functioning. Most major cities in Africa, huge shantytowns and big populations of people, including children, living on the streets. The United States, the richest country in the world, has large numbers of people, predominantly black, living on une streets ano many owners living unsafe and unhealthy substandard accommodation.
In South Africa, the question of housing has played out
particular Lune.
Apartheid laws forbade racially mixed communities and led to the forcible break up of those that did exist. District Six was never redeveloped to stay until alternative accommodation
Ihev were moved on about two weeks later.
The Council's response was not about their concern for homeless people. It suits them to play divide and rule over
of the dispossed. Fighting amongst themselves means people are less likely to unite and demand their rights to decent housing in a place of their choosing. * The apartheid state categorised racial groups as black (or sometimes Bantu), coloured (by which they meant mixed race), Indian and white. The term coloured is still used by the South African government today. from their homes, separated from friends and family and London. dumped in far-flung places sive.
And in fact segregation in housing - as in other things -predated the apartheid state of out to property developers. 1948.
The first "locations" were established at the turn of the twentieth centurv and the first clearances of multi-ethic areas took place in the 1920's.
On a recent visit to South Africa, my first, it was the question of housing that provided the most graphic illustration of the neo-liberal path being followed by Thabo Mbeki's ANC government -and its but tragic failure provide homes of a decent standard for the majority black populaSince 1995 the state has assisted the building of 1.614 mil lion housing units; providing housing to roughly million people from a nousing budget that has on average been less than 2%. This involved a subsidy scheme where the amount was only recenuv uncreasea to aborox Between 1913 and 1983, it luxury flats are being thrown s estimated that 3.9 million up and their and in many of people were forcibly removed the extremely white costal
resorts prices rival those in Housing in the city itself from which travel to school or remains very segregated with work was lengthy and expen- for example the clearly delinHeated Muslim quarter of Bo Kaap - though a few older families are beginning to sell In the meantime thousands of people continue to live in unconverted hostels or in informal settlements without legal electricity supplies or clean water supplies. Illegal supplies of electricity are extremely dangerous and in a situation were shacks alC constructed almost entirely of highly flammable material such as wood, the danger of fire is extremely high. But it is not just a question of people not being able to get out of these dangerous and denigrating conditions. In 1996, the percentage of people living in informal settlements in the Cape Metropolitan Area was 16%. Statistics South Africa puts the current growth rate of informal settlements at 14%; this, it is expected, will continue until 2010 and thereafter decline to an annual growth rate of 3%. I witnessed settlements which were being thrown up before my eyes And it is not just a question of the state a1 national, provincial or city level not putting in sufficient resources because they are providing