Then, in 2005, 400 proper houses were built. ‘Witsand was very disadvantaged with no roads, lights, houses, toilets were bucket system, and only three taps for the whole community,’ water activist Bulelani Kave told a group at the Cape Town Climate Change hearings in October 2009, organised by the Environmental Monitoring Group. It was in the kind of condition that the United Nations uses to describe most slum settlements: communities which typically have ‘inadequate access to safe water little or no sanitation poor structural quality of housing overcrowding or insecure tenure’. Before the City of Cape Town started running electricity, water pipes and asphalt-topped roads into the community in 2005, the place was like so many of the slums that typify our urban edges. The residents of Witsand are in a running battle with the City of Cape Town over water delivery, and Linah is one of those at the front of the troops. The township is a cluster of relatively new RDP houses in amongst the older shacklands that sprang up here on the ancient dune fields on the outskirts of Atlantis after mostly Xhosa-speaking people from the Eastern Cape started moving to the factories in this once burgeoning industrial zone. Linah spends most of her day working with the HIV positive people in the community, but tackling the stigma about HIV is not Linah’s only battle here in Witsand. There is a Pick n Pay nearby, too, but although the food is fresher at Pick n Pay, Usave is cheaper. The vegetables she bought for today’s dinner come from the local Usave, part of the Shoprite stable. She has her diabetes under control, taking tablets daily – she is not on insulin shots yet – but admits she sometimes does not take the medication in the morning because she does not get around to eating breakfast. Keeping an eye on her blood sugar, she says. Later, she squeezes a droplet of blood from an invisible puncture on her middle finger, splashing it onto a strip of plastic sticking out like a tongue from a glucose meter. After he dashes out to play in the street, Linah sits down to an ample helping of the savoury pap. Her son, Sibabalo wolfs down the leftovers from a soup kitchen handout, his spoon working through the Tupperware dish of chicken, rice and vegetables. Linah stirs up the stiff porridge while the stars in some or other soapie spar from a corner in her lounge. It bloats up slowly over the two-plate tabletop stove next to the sink in the kitchen corner, with its single tap jutting out from a brass pipe which angles out of the raw plastered wall. ©Eric MillerLinah chops cabbage for the imfino.
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