JOHANNESBURG Sending what some call an ominous signal to this nation's leaders, South Africa's sprawling shantytowns have begun to erupt, sometimes violently, in protest over the government's inability to deliver the better life that the end of apartheid seemed to herald a dozen years ago.
At a hillside shantytown in Durban called Foreman Road, riot police officers fired rubber bullets in mid-November to disperse 2,000 residents marching to the municipal mayor's office downtown. Two protesters were hurt; 45 were arrested. The rest burned an effigy of the city's mayor, Obed Mlaba.
Their grievance was unadorned: Since Foreman Road's 1,000 shacks sprang up nearly two decades ago, the only measurable improvements to the residents' lives amounted to a single water standpipe and four scrap-wood privies. Electricity and real toilets were a pipe dream.
"This is the worst area in the country," said one resident, a middle-aged man who identified himself only as Senior. "We don't so much need water or electricity. We need land and housing."
In Pretoria that week, 500 shantytown residents looted and burned a city council member's home and car to protest limited access to government housing. In late September outside Delmas, Botleng Township residents rioted after a sewage-fouled water supply caused 600 cases of typhoid and perhaps 20 deaths.
Last Thursday, Cape Town officials warned residents of a vast shantytown near the city airport that they faced arrest if they tried to squat in an unfinished housing project nearby.
From its first days, South Africa's black government pledged to address the misery of shanty life. That the problem has instead worsened, social scientists, urban planners and many politicians say, is partly the result of fiscal policies that have focused on nurturing the first-world economy which, under apartheid, made this Africa's wealthiest and most advanced nation.
The government's low-deficit, low-inflation strategy was built on the premise that a stable economy would attract investment, and that the wealth would spread to the poor. While the first-world economy has boomed, it has failed to lift the vast underclass out of its misery.
Unemployment, estimated at 26 percent in 1994, has soared to roughly 40 percent, many analysts say; the government, which does not count those who have stopped looking for work, says joblessness is lower. Big industries like mining and textiles have laid off manual laborers, and expanding businesses like banking and retailing have failed to pick up the slack. Many of the jobless have moved to the slums.
In Durban, the city is erecting about 16,000 starter houses a year, but the shanty population, now roughly 750,000, grows by more than 10 percent annually. The city's 180,000 shanties, crammed into every conceivable open space, are a remarkable sight. Both free-standing and sharing common walls, they spill down hillsides between middle-class subdivisions and perch beside freeway exits. They are built of scrap wood and metal and corrugated panels.
The 1,000 or so hillside shanties at Foreman Road are typical. A standpipe at the top provides water. At the bottom, perhaps 120 meters, or 400 feet, down a ravine, are four hand-dug, scrap-wood privies. Residents say they seldom trek to the privies, relieving themselves instead in plastic bags and buckets that can be emptied or thrown away.
The one-room shacks provide the rudest sort of shelter. A bed typically takes up half the space; a table holds cookware; clothes go in a small chest. There is no electricity, and so no television; entertainment comes from battery-powered radios. Residents use kerosene stoves and candles, with predictable results. A year ago, a wind-whipped fire destroyed 288 shacks here.
The residents say Mlaba, the mayor, promised during his last election campaign to erect new homes on the slum site and on vacant land opposite their hillside. Instead, however, the city proposed to move the slum residents to rural land far off Durban's outskirts - and far from the gardening, housecleaning and other menial jobs they have found during Foreman Road's 16-odd years of existence.
Lacking cars, taxi fare or even bicycles to commute to work, the residents marched in protest on Nov. 14, defying the city's refusal to issue a permit. The demonstration quickly turned violent.
Afterward, Mlaba argued that the protest was the work of agitators bent on embarrassing him before local elections next year.
"Of course it's political," he said. "All of a sudden, they've got leaders. There weren't any leaders yesterday. Are they going to be there in 2006 or 2007, after the elections?"
