Homeless and hopeless ... Joburg has a large and growing population living on the streets, writes Don Makatile.
For the downtrodden, End Street in downtown Joburg leads further down the road to perdition. The haunt of those who have fallen out of society, it is something of a boulevard of broken dreams.
Men and women wake up in a city park further up End - on Anderson Street, just as the rest of the normal world is rising to meet a new day, full of promise and opportunity.
For the homeless community in this neck of the woods, every new day is as gloomy as the last.
On this day too, they wake up with the lethargy of people with nowhere to go and nothing to live for. Sandile Hlophe is 27; he looks 72. The story of his life runs like a common thread among the narratives of virtually each one of his fellow hard-luck buddies.
He hails from KwaMakhutha, just outside Durban, and came to Johannesburg looking for his mother who worked for the Salvation Army. An only child, just as he was beginning to warm under his mother’s care, she died.
That was three years ago. His mother’s employers could find no reason to house him for free, so he found himself on the streets among kindred souls. He walks with a pronounced limp, from being hit by a car as he navigated his supermarket trolley down the streets, in search of recyclable plastic.
“This is the job many of us do here,” he says, with a double decker gap-tooth that ages him considerably.
On a good day, he says, he can make up to R100. “Then I can buy bread, and then chicken innards, with some cold drink.” The modest diet can last him the whole day, he says.
But the bulk of the money he makes, like everyone else here, goes to feeding a drug habit with something he calls “Time”. He has an education, he says, but cannot give the correct spelling of his drug of choice. It is a white powdery stuff that gives a better kick when layered on a bed of dagga.
“Once I have smoked, I can go on for the whole day,” Sandile says.
The merchant of Time is one of their own, who sells the contraband for R20. A tiny pouch of dagga sells for R2.
He lost his trolley when he was hit by the car. A part of him went with the trolley: “I can’t do without it.” Everywhere around him, the energetic among them are up on their vehicles already. Here and there one eats a banana, many suck on a zol or a cigarette, some just chit-chat idly while others are still deep in slumberland.
Sandile’s bed comprises a lone sheet: “My blankets were stolen.”
Theft is a way of life here, a form of survival of the fittest. Anything unattended grows legs - within the wink of an eye.
He will bath when “the clothes feel heavy” or when “I think I am dirty”. This can be after several days.
Life on the streets is better than what awaits him back home in KwaMakhutha: “There’s nothing for me there.” A few times the gods have been good to him. “I found a cellphone in a dustbin.” On another occasion, he peered into a bin while out on his rounds and found three R20 notes folded together. He remembers those two incidents very well. He stayed behind and did not go out scavenging.
That money lasted me a few days, Sandile says. The guys “who eat well” in this community are those who can score about R300 a day, he enthuses.
MMC for Health and Social Development in the City of Joburg Mpho Phalatse says they are aware of the homeless community in their parks. “It is a widespread problem in the city,”she says, adding that it is not peculiar to End Street.
The city runs a homeless shelter in Braamfontein - a 150-bed facility that hardly accommodates the demand, Phalatse says.
In 2013, the MMC says, statistics showed a headcount of 2 700 homeless people: “But Johannesburg being the economic hub that it is, it attracts about 10 000 people a month. Not everybody will find a job. A huge fraction of them will end up in the streets.”
She says they employ an integrated approach in collaboration with other departments and they hope to win the battle within their five-year term.
They have a displacement unit in their assessment centre in Braamfontein that often reunites some of the homeless with their families, Phalatse says.
Sometimes their social workers pinpoint the need each individual presents with, like drug abuse, and they duly assist. But while they are in the city searching for its elusive gold, the homeless remain an eyesore..
Some, like Sandile, see light at the end of the tunnel. “I am still young. Age is on my side.”