SOUTH AFRICA-HABITAT: Hostels Here To Stay

By IPS Correspondents Reprint | | Print |

Gumisai Mutume

JOHANNESBURG, Nov 15 1996 (IPS) - South Africa’s migrant hostels, which have been linked to periodic eruptions of violence in the country, are one legacy of apartheid which continue to live on.

Abolishing the hostel system is not easy. Hostel residents have no other place to call home while they work in the cities, even if it means eight men cramped into a two-roomed dwelling.

“It is bad, but it could be worse,” said Msimanga (49), (not his real name). “Government says it will improve them (hostels) and until they do, we have to continue living this way.”

Msimanga is a father of seven. He works at a nearby factory but has to commute back to his home in KwaZulu Natal, some 600 kilometres away to be with his wife and children.

“Even if my family could come here, they would have nowhere to stay,” Msimanga said. He shares a males-only hostel in Alexandra, one of Johannesburg’s most densely settled townships.

There are 240 government-built hostels around the country with 600,000 beds. Sometimes, the hostels are occupied by more than three people per bed-space. Such institutions are a creation of the apartheid circulatory migration system.

One of the major tenets of apartheid was the resettlment of the country’s Black majority to the then 10 ‘homelands’, some of which were given “nominal” independence. Between 1960 and 1970, for example, some 1.5 million Blacks were forcibly resettled in these designated areas.

Blacks were only permitted in the urban areas for work and the hostels (mainly for men) were built in black urban settlements to accommodate the men temporarily while they worked in the cities.

Over the last five years there have been more and more calls for these institutions to be either demolished or transformed into family accommodation.

The government has started to improve them under a Hostels Redevelopment Policy (HRP), but is faced with more pressing housing demands in a country with a three million housing unit deficit.

“It must be accepted that resources available for hostels redevelopment are extremely limited and should essentially be seen as a kick start intervention rather than the total answer to the multiple housing and other social needs of hostel residents,” notes the National Housing Forum (NHF), which grew out of attempts to develop a response to sound hostel development.

“In the absence of such an approach, the interventions in hostels will continue to heighten the conflict and competition for resources among hostel residents and between them and neighbouring communities,” the NHF said in a discussion paper.

Migrant worker hostels have been linked to on-going community conflict and the periodic eruption of intense violence as they lump together people of conflicting backgrounds and interests.

In February 1995, for example, a gun battle occurred between ANC residents of Glebelands Hostel near Durban, Natal Province and 16 bus-loads of rival Inkatha Freedom Party supporters.

Ongoing violence last July at Scaw Metals Hostel, east of Johannesburg, forced Anglo American Corporation, the hostel’s owners, to close it. It was “difficult to justify the continued existence of the hostel if people’s lives could not be guaranteed,” said Jabu Maphalala, an Anglo spokesperson.

Hostel residents want their accommodation improved, but have no hopes of transforming the single quarters into homes.

The housing minister in the capital Gauteng Province, Dan Mofokeng, has estimated that upgrading the 51 state-owned hostels in Gauteng alone will cost in excess of 140 million dollars.

“A lot of us are merely in Johannesburg to work, our homes are elsewhere and we do not seek permanent residence here,” said Mike Ngwako.

Research amongst migrant worker hostel residents shows that the majority have a deep connection to their rural homes and perceive their urban working lives as temporary, given the scarcity of economic opportunity in the rural areas, said the NHF.