Posted on December 13, 2011
Members of the community of Lwandle join to celebrate the opening of the newly restored "Hostel 33" exhibit funded by the U.S. Ambassadors Fund for Cultural Preservation. Photo credit: United States Diplomatic Mission to South Africa website.
What was it like being a migrant worker living away from your family? Jo-Anne Duggan and I revisited the Lwandle Migrant Labour Museum following the recent opening of the renovated Hostel 33, the housing unit that keeps alive the memory of what people who lived in male-only migrant labour hostels had to endure. We spoke to Lundi Mama, the museum's education officer, about the research the museum has conducted on those who lived in Hostel 33. Some of what we learnt was quite surprising.
The Lwandle hostel was established in 1958. Construction was completed in 1960. 500 men who worked for different fruit and food canning companies were moved from nearby Waterkloof to the hostel. The men, almost all of them from the Eastern Cape, had to have labour permits to live in the hostel. You were only permitted to live in the hostel if you were over the age of 18 and were legally employed. Raids by security guards to look for illegal occupants were frequent. An illegal occupant had to pay a fine or face imprisonment and a criminal record. Family members were allowed to visit on special permits during the holidays. Otherwise, the men were expected to see their families for the three-week breaks they got at the end of the year.
The space was small - four to six men shared a tiny space, but the rules and controls were circumvented. So, up to 16 people lived in a space meant for two. They slept on beds stacked on top of one another. Family members and friends came to visit or look for work. Women came to visit boyfriends and husbands. They would sleep practically piled on top of one another. They added to the scores sharing ablution facilities at the end of the block and a communal kitchen in the middle of the hostel complex.
So far, the museum's research has located four families whose men lived in the Hostel 33. The story of Mr Makhosonke and Mrs Lenie Peter illustrates some of the hardships and triumphs of people whom apartheid forced to live disconnected from one another. Makhosonke was born in Mount Fletcher in the Eastern Cape in 1944. He came to work for the municipality manning the gate to a building complex. He and his future wife, Lenie, who was born in Somerset West in 1952 met when he was living in Lwandle. She worked as a domestic worker. As his wife, she was allowed to visit him on weekends. During the week she lived in her employers' home where he could visit her on weekends as well. Today their children still live in Lwandle, which has by now expanded into a township of approximately 80 000 residents.
Bulelwa Sophia Mtshizana met her husband while she was visiting her sister who worked as domestic help in Cape Town. She continued living in the Eastern Cape even after they were married and would see him during his annual sojourn at home. What is striking about the way they made their life though is that their children were somehow able to grow up in Lwandle. Not legally, of course. Mr Mtshizana had a licence to sell meat in the area. He was able to use his money to pay authorities to turn a blind eye. The children attended the first school to open in Lwandle. The school started operating in 1990 and officially opened in 1994.
In 1994 the hostel was transformed into family units on the initiative of the government of the day. The transformation followed years of campaigning by the Western Cape Men's Hostel Association, which was formed in 1985, for an end to the separation of families through apartheid laws. The transformation of the hostel was the first step towards the formation of the bustling community found in Lwandle today. Many of the families that once lived in the hostel now have houses in Nomzamo township, which adjoins Lwandle.
In a nutshell, life in the hostel was miserable. Single men were crammed into small spaces. They were away from home for almost a year at a stretch. Their loved ones were often far away. When they came to visit they were constantly harassed by security guards. Often a person would have to queue to use the toilet or the shower as the facilities were inadequate. More difficult to imagine is how a person used the toilet in the rain. At one end of the rectangular block of dwellings there is a little gap and then cubicles built on a way that faces the outside wall of the block. The open cubicles are separated by shallow walls. There is a gap between the roof of the block and the roof of the toilet. The toilet is a wooden seat with a bucket underneath. When the facilities were still in use, it seems that when sitting on the toilet seat, the person's feet would be exposed to the sky above.
It must have been unimaginably dehumanising to live in such a place, sharing a communal kitchen where someone had to stand guard over the pots at all times or the food would be stolen. But, Mama reminded us, many who lived in these hostels do not remember only the bleakness and depravation. There were parties, dances and card games. Many fondly recalled going home bearing gifts for their families and the admiration with which they were regarded back home coming from the city.
Mbongiseni Buthelezi is the Archival Platform's Ancestral Stories Coordinator