We need to talk about the deplorable state of townships in our country.
As an urban planner and geographer, I have great appreciation for how townships were never designed with the comfort of Black people in mind. They were and continue to be labour reserves.
Concentrating hundreds of thousand of people (or in the case of Soweto, 1.3 million people) within a small area comes with inherent challenges.
These are compounded by insufficient infrastructure, particularly as the population rises exponentially.
The mushrooming of informal settlements on the outskirts of townships — a result of several factors including landlessness, undocumented immigrants, rising costs of rent in formal townships — also compound the already difficult spatial challenges in townships. But, none of this explains the shocking extent of dirt in townships.
I was born and grew up in a shack in Sekhwiri Street, Zone 8 Meadowlands in Soweto. Almost every household on that street had backyard dwellers (people living in shacks within the yard).
My family occupied one of three shacks in the yard where we were living. In 1999 when we were evicted from a brick house that we were renting in Tlhomedi Street, we moved to another shack in the same neighbourhood. In that particular place, we occupied one of the two shacks erected in that yard. It was common in the township then as it is now.
Despite the challenges faced in townships then, people took pride in their environment. People of Soweto, living in those cramped shacks, were very clean. On weekends, townships were filled with women sweeping the pavements and streets outside their houses.
Streets — not just their yards, actual streets. Every two weeks, as students at Tshimologo Junior Primary School in Zone 9 Meadowlands, we were expected to clean our classrooms. Some learners would mop and polish floors while others washed windows.
We took care of our schools even when they had nothing. I only started attending multiracial schools in grade 5. So, for 5 years, from Grade 0-4, as a little girl, I knew that cleaning my classroom was expected and required.
The result of that was that we took care of our classrooms and school. We didn't like cleaning but we knew that leaving classrooms dirty gave us more work. And so we looked after our space.
Our family shack might have been small and cramped but one thing it was not, was dirty. Our pots were shinny, our small and broken cabinets spotless. And this was the case in other shacks I have been to.
We cannot reasonably argue that townships are dirty because people are poor.
Dirt is not synonymous with poverty. The poor are not inherently dirty. They were not when I was growing up in Soweto. And the fact that we now associate poverty with being dirty is shameful. It's not a failure of government.
It's not only a legacy of apartheid. It's disregard for our own humanity. People in this country haven't only given up on their government, we have given up on ourselves.
We don't think that we deserve to live in clean neighbourhoods. We think it is OK to sit at a street corner next to a pile of soiled nappies and rubbish, and eat right there within that stench — then throw our bunny chow paper wrap there when we stand up to go home where there are bins. We don't believe that we deserve anything good. And that’s something that will be changed not by a law or policy, but by collective accountability and a sense of civic duty.