You can see the shacks from the road as you drive from the airport into Cape Town. Mile after mile of miniscule, tumbled-down huts made up of scavenged wood, cardboard, plastic and corrugated iron. It’s hard to believe that any person, let alone whole families, can call these places home.
Closer to the city, the new housing built to replace the shacks begins to appear. The Number 2 Gateway homes on the Joe Slovo settlement are two-storey apartment buildings. “Are these new homes being built by the government?” I ask my taxi driver. “Yes,” he says. “They are going to build them all the way out to Khayelitsha. The government is building on this side and the Irish are building over there.” He waves his hand towards some distant place.
The “Irish” he refers to are the Niall Mellon Township Trust volunteers and employees. At the beginning of this month, around 1,400 Irish people travelled to South Africa to join the locally employed team. At present, the trust is building houses in the Freedom Park settlement out in Mitchell’s Plain, a vast area of impoverished townships on the Cape Flats east of the city.
Mellon, a Dublin-based property developer turned philanthropist, established the trust in 2003 when he became aware of the appalling conditions many black South Africans were living in. In that year, 125 Irish volunteers travelled to Cape Town to build 25 houses.
Nowadays, some 1,700 mostly black and coloured South Africans are employed to continue the building year-round. For the last five years, bricklayers, plumbers, carpenters, scaffolders, roofers, tilers and their labourers – lawyers, doctors, academics, civil servants, secretaries, nurses and the like, from Ireland and a sprinkling of other countries – have participated in the trust’s annual ‘Building Blitz’.
So far, the trust has completed 3,500 houses in townships in the Western Cape and Gauteng – the province that surrounds Johannesburg and Pretoria. By February 2008, a total of 5,000 houses will have been built, according to Deirdre Grant, the locally based director of the Niall Mellon Townships Initiative.
The crisis in South Africa’s housing is illustrated by the fact that in Cape Town alone there are 460,000 families on the waiting list. And a further 1,600 families arrive in the area each year, so that the list continues to grow. Families average about seven people and more than half of them are female-headed households, Grant says.
Freedom Park is drab, dilapidated and dusty. The shacks have no running water. If you need the toilet, you go out to the street where your single Portaloo is shared with five other families. Inside, the shack I visited was clean and neat. A curtain divided the kitchen and living room from the bedroom. I recognised the smell, though. It was the smell of poverty – the sort of smell you got years ago on Dublin buses, or when it rained. Outside, most houses sported washing lines full of spotless clothes and despite their surroundings, everyone I saw looked scrupulously clean and well turned out.
The trust’s newly built houses, on a corner of the Freedom Park site, offer a welcome touch of colour – mostly terracotta and a vivid blue, the odd mint green and a dash of white. One of them bears the crest of Drogheda Grammar School, whose pupils raised the money for the house.
The new dwellings are small – around 42 square metres, with two or three bedrooms. Unusually for the townships, the houses on this site are semi-detached and some are two-storied – the norm here is for single-storey detached houses – and each has its own small garden. The houses are fully plumbed with shower and toilet and a kitchen, but the walls remain unplastered when they are handed over.
The trust gets a South African government subsidy of R38,000 (around 3,800 euro) for every house it builds. However, the houses currently being built cost between R62,000 and R70,000, and the trust fundraises to make up the difference. In the early years, the new occupants purchased the houses, but this has proved problematic – people are simply too poor to afford the mortgage repayments. Nowadays the houses are allocated to families on local housing lists and in return they provide ‘sweat equity’ on the building site.
Despite the fact that the Niall Mellon Township Trust is now building 20 per cent of social housing in both Cape Town and Gauteng, the trust believes the pace of building using traditional methods is too slow, and it is establishing a ‘Super Housing Factory’ to produce flat-packed timber houses ready for speedy on-site assembly.
The ‘Building Blitz’ participants I spoke to were all euphoric about their experiences. The white South Africans I met spoke warmly about the project. “We feel guilty,” a number of them said. “If you Irish can do it, why can’t we?”
Yvonne Healy is a former Irish Times journalist who has recently returned to Ireland from the United States. Her column appears monthly in Metro Eireann
