Lets get rid of this tainted part of our past

The statement by Gauteng Premier Panyaza Lesufi during his recent State of the Province Address, regarding the provincial government’s commitment to eradicate the eyesore of informal housing settlement and to turn the single-sex male hostels in the informal settlements into habitable housing projects for families, is most encouraging.

Hostels were designed and built in the informal settlements by the apartheid government to accommodate single migrant males. These hovels were, in fact, nothing more than glorified labour camps for single men of all ages.

These men were crucial in apartheid South Africa’s pipeline of migrant labourers for the industrialised mining industries in towns and cities along the PWV (Pretoria, Witwatersrand and Vaal) areas in the old Transvaal.

Several state-owned entities, including Iscor and Eskom, along with coal and gold mining houses and local municipalities were given exclusive rights by the apartheid government to run their own hostels and house their own migrant workforce in them.

Workers who were too old to work, or who had reached pensionable age, or who had lost limbs or died on duty, or who were dismissed by their employers, were summarily removed from the list of registered hostel dwellers and sent back to their homelands and replaced by new recruits.

Many single men at these hostels came from different parts of the country. Many more were recruited from their own countries by TEBA, a mining labour agency that set up offices in the Southern African Development Community in southern African countries, including Swaziland, Lesotho, Botswana, Malawi, Mozambique, the former Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe) and Zambia.

Married South African men recruited from the various self-governing homelands were also forced to leave their families and live in single-sex hostels in the cities to qualify for employment in the mines and in other industries.

Inside these hostels, often serviced by the local municipalities, the inhabitants lived in deplorable conditions. Beds were single steel bunk beds, and some were solid cement blocks most people would consider unfit for human habitation. The appalling living conditions stripped young and older single males of their dignity and privacy.

Many men started relationships with single and widowed women in the nearby informal settlements. This led to broken homes because some men abandoned their families to cohabit with their new lovers in the cities.

They were desperate to qualify for the hundreds of new, rented municipal informal settlement houses sprouting up close to the major towns and cities within the PWV corridor, including Soweto, Pretoria, the Vaal and on the East and West Rand, to escape the indignity of hostel life.

It resulted in thousands of men being forced into marriages at the Bantu Affairs offices with single and widowed women from the nearby informal settlements.

The hostels are a stark reminder of the horrors apartheid caused for the migrant workers who helped build South Africa with their blood and sweat while being paid a pittance.

Turning the hostels into decent homes for families will help undo some of these injustices.

We encourage the premier to move swiftly on this project, which will excise the apartheid-era ghosts that still haunt South Africa.

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Viva Madiba

Gibson Kente was a doyen of theatre in South Africa.

Naming the Jabulani Theatre in Soweto after the late showbiz impresario Gibson ‘Madiba‘ Kente was said by theatre actors, fans and followers to be a fitting tribute to one of SA’s foremost theatre producers.

Not only were Kente’s productions enjoyed by theatre lovers in Soweto, but his legendary plays such as Sikhalo, Lifa and many others were also enjoyed by thousands throughout the PWV areas, stretching from the East Rand to the West Rand, Pretoria, Soweto and the Vaal.