Unequal Scenes - South Africa

Primrose and Makause, in Johannesburg.

Lake Michelle and Masiphumelele, Cape Town.

Dunoon, Cape Town.

Papwa Sewgolum Golf Course, Durban.

South Africa has been famously called "The World's Most Unequal Country", and it certainly looks that way from the air.

Ask anyone where the nearest "township" is and they will give you an answer; talk of slums, race, and poverty and no one will blink. Inequality is a part of the society here, as second nature to South Africans as any other topic. Inequality in South Africa is economic, cultural, but maybe more here than anywhere else, also overtly racial. Black and other non-white South Africans continue to suffer from much higher rates of every societal ill, have less social mobility, and have dramatically less income and wealth as their white counterparts.

I know this because I have made South Africa my home since 2012. This project started in Cape Town in 2016 with my image of Lake Michelle and Masiphumele, and it continues with the support of friends and organizations, government and business. I'd like to specifically thank Code For Africa for their unwavering support in the continuation of the project, as well as the philosophy behind it. I hope you find the project as interesting, impactful, and painful as I have.

Hout Bay, Cape Town.

Kya Sands and Bloubosrand, Johannesburg.

Pietermaritzburg, Tembisa, Durban, and Johannesburg.

Wolwerivier, Cape Town.

Alexandra, Johannesburg & Strand, Cape Town.

There are many types of "inequalities". Most people tend to focus on economic inequality; specifically income and wealth inequality. Income, of course, is what you take home as payment for work (i.e., your labor). Wealth is what you own which makes you money even if you don't work (housing, investments, savings, machines, etc.) In some rich countries, both income and wealth inequality are rapidly increasing. The top percentage of people now own a vastly disproportional amount of wealth, and this figure continues to grow. In South Africa, where wealth inequality has always been radically skewed because of race-based political and economic policies, levels of inequality still remain the highest in the world.

This matters for several reasons: When societies become highly unequal, they become less efficient. Health outcomes, consumption, and investment all tend to suffer in highly unequal societies. Broadly speaking, this means that a society cannot thrive when it is unequal in comparison to a more equal version of itself. South Africa may be reducing absolute poverty, but without changing the relative dynamics of inequality within the economy, it will never be as prosperous, healthy, or safe as it could be.

There are also non-economic inequalities. These are inequalities of opportunity, inequalities of justice, and inequalities of health (and many others). Race, sex, ability, and nationality factor into our unequal world in ways that disproportionately enact negative agency. Vulnerable, disenfranchised populations are not destined to be marginalized - they exist within the structures of power which imprison them there.

Inequality is not inevitable, and what we have created, we can reverse. As academic AB Atkinson writes, “If we want to reduce inequality, and that is a big “if”, then there are steps that we can take. They are not necessarily easy and they have costs. But there are concrete measures that can be tried if we are serious.”

(from top left) Pietermaritzburg, Wolwerivier, Tembisa, Hout Bay, Kya Sands, and Masiphumelele.

(above) Kenny Tokwe and Shane Holland.

(below) Monwabisi Park and Masiphumelele (right), Cape Town.

Far from watchful eyes, the informal areas of Cape Town have grown by thousands of new shacks, housing tens of thousands of new migrants, many of them from the Eastern Cape, every year.

The discussion around what to do with informal settlements is complicated. While they represent in a clear way the divisions that exist in the country, their proximity to wealthy neighborhoods in some ways is an actual break from spatial apartheid. Many "townships" were far from white areas; separated by large expanses of open field, buffer strips, and other obstacles so that European eyes did not have to observe the conditions of the "black spots".

Today, residents, landowners, activists, academics, and governments are navigating an extremely tricky path to working out the "best" solution. Marie Huchzermeyer, Professor at the School for Architecture and Planning at Wits University, writes, "the settlement will remain looking as it does for quite some time, but some very important aspects will change. These will not be visible to the drone, or even the photographer on the ground...and that is the careful planning to secure this foothold on a permanent basis. Infrastructure will follow, and only as a very last stage will support be provided for households to improve their housing structures."

Shane Holland (pictured above) has been living on property which has been in his family for over 70 years. He remembers when the area was all farmland, and cows, pigs, and ducks use to roam freely, in an area called Browns Farms, about a 20 minute drive from Cape Town. As time went on, the city grew, the Cape Flats became peri-urban instead of rural, and railroads and highways soon appeared next to his property. As apartheid crumbled, around 1992 he remembers, people built homes on the farmland next to his in a haphazard fashion, which soon became known as Sweet Home. Today, Sweet Home is an interesting mix of social grant housing, home lending programs, and a large informal settlement of shacks.
“…I’m a bit more privileged…because I found myself in a situation where I can make a living for myself. I found that because of this piece of land that I’ve got I can give my family a settlement and they don’t have to really struggle to get a house. …But then again you get guys that come out of shacks like this…and this is to me very important…what you make out of yourself. You can also go stay in Constantia (a rich area), wherever you want to go and stay but it determines whether you want to lift yourself up, you want to educate yourself, and you want to make something out of yourself.
I can’t be frustrated, really, honestly, I can’t be frustrated for people staying in nice houses, having nice flashy calls and stuff like that. And I don’t see really, honestly, I don’t see the reason why I should be frustrated.”

Asiphe Ntshongontshi, resident of Masiphumelele, lives in a simple shack made out of tin and wood, along with thousands of other people. When it rains, the area turns to mud, and although the city has dug drainage canals into the bush, rubbish and foul water still occasionally seeps into people's homes. The worst homes are the ones closest to the reeds, as those are the wettest, and the furthest from the road. Nearby, only a few hundred meters away, an electric fence surrounds modern family homes in the gated community of The Lakes.

"Living in the wetlands to me is a drive. You know that every day I must wake up, go to work, go to college, go to the university in order my kids from the future not to live in the same environment that I lived."

Danie Kagan lives in a house near the electrified fence which separates her community, called "The Lakes", from the surrounding informal community of Masiphumelele. Danie welcomed me into her home and allowed me a window into her life, living side by side with such great poverty. "I don't think I'll ever get my head around the disparity".

Kenny Tokwe, a community leader, leans against the concrete wall which separates the community of Imizamo Yethu from Hout Bay. Nowhere else in Cape Town are the haves and the have nots so closely positioned to one another as they are here, and the relationship between them, especially along this wall, seems to range from acrimonious to barely tolerable. It seems that few people, on either side, would say they choose to live here; the shack dwellers don't have jobs, money, or indoor toilets. The house owners have built gigantic fences around their properties which look like palisades, and live in a siege-like state of constant vigilance. It's a stalemate which leaves both sides fuming, and the government seems ill-equipped to provide alternatives.

Kenny's position as community leader is tenuous - his home was burned down, and his life threatened, for negotiating "too leniently" with the city after a large fire - but he remains ever cheerful, breaking into a large smile at the slightest provocation. On the subject of the fence, he pauses for a moment, as if it's a subject which doesn't come up too often. Perhaps it's just too obvious of a subject. " Yeah, this fence is kind of irritating to people. We need more land. We are like rats in a small cage. For the rats to have a space they normally kill each other to create a space."