Johannesburg - It's another Tuesday morning in Ennerdale. A bunch of boys lie sprawled on the uncut grass outside a purple house.
They are the drug boys, as a shopkeeper calls them. Not old enough to vote or legally buy alcohol, but certainly old enough for the drug dealers inside the house.
Further down the road, a group of aimless men gather. They have nowhere to go. They have walked their working wives to the taxi rank and now they wait – the visible part of the 60% unemployed here.
Ennerdale, a sprawling township situated on the south-western backside of Joburg, is an easily forgotten part of the “world class African city”.
The people here know it all too well.
Last week, residents blocked off the two entry roads into Ennerdale and television reporters interviewed furious subjects who shouted that they were “tired tired tired” and that they wanted what the surrounding Finetown, Lawley and Orange Farm, with its African residents, have been getting from the ANC-run Gauteng government. They wanted houses and development.
Drive through this 1970s National Party monument to apartheid race planning and there appears sufficient reason for the anger that has regularly spilt over into protests.
Tiny yards are crammed with zinc shacks because the last houses had been built back in 1992. There is land but, according to community activists, the politicians claim they don’t know who it belongs to.
With such high unemployment, no-one can afford to purchase the houses on the market with an average asking price of R550 000.
Those who work earn too much for an RDP house and too little to qualify for a home loan.
It's not as if the politicians haven't come to listen when the tyres had been dragged into the roads.
Promises have been plenty, but delivery has been slow. Last week, DA mayor Herman Mashaba said the residents had been lied to by his ANC predecessors.
Housing MEC Paul Mashatile has vowed to deliver, and Housing Minister Lindiwe Sisulu has given her personal assurance that she will do right by Ennerdale.
Community activist James Golden isn't convinced. He will believe when foundations are dug in Extension 6 and the walls of 740 houses are rising. If not, they will go back to the streets. They are tired of the lies.
But the story of Ennerdale goes far beyond a housing crisis. It is steeped in stereotypes of the old and new South Africa and the awkward space that coloured people occupy.
Here all the crass characterisations abound: aimless, nowhere people; women with entjies hanging from their lips; a preference for gold to fill the gaps between their teeth; fair and dark skin politics; kroes hare versus style hair; an easy victimhood; drug addicts; and a lasting inability to slide their tongues smoothly over “th”.
The positives are here too – hard-working families who want to catapult their children out of poverty, a strong sense of community when times are hard, as well as an abiding belief that prayer and faith will overcome all.
There is a sense of bewilderment, though. Are they being punished for being neither white nor black. How else can they explain being ignored when they see Orange Farm – established long after Ennerdale – being transformed from a squatter camp into a proper township?
Why not us, they ask.
Residents cannot recall when they had proper investment. Besides a Shoprite and a Spar, a Kentucky outlet and a Cashbuild, there hasn’t been much. There is an ATM that disburses money but doesn’t accept cash deposits. There isn't a single bank branch.
Back in the 1970s, when the National Party sold the area to coloureds displaced by the Group Areas Act, they promised an autonomous town with a vibrant economy, a university, an old-age home and a hospital.
Everything, says Pastor Aubrey September, is outside Ennerdale – banking in Lenasia, car licences in Westonaria, tax in Roodepoort, the hospital is in Soweto and the courts in Vereeniging.
There is no work here and no investment, says businessman and resident Ambrose de Lange. A few years ago, he was invited to a site inspection for a proposed mall. He opened a small office in the township in preparation. He is still waiting.
“Quite honestly, my hopes are huge, but I don’t have much faith,” he offers with a shrug.
“The only businesses that are flourishing are the drug houses and bottlestores.”
Children walk in the middle of the street. There are no pavements, no stormwater drains. The street names have faded and there are no signposts to the multitude of extensions.
Father George Palmer, a straight-talking Anglican priest, says coloured people have nothing. Affirmative action is not meant for them. When stores like Shoprite and Spar opened, the jobs went to Africans.
“When the elections are here, the politicians go door-to-door and promise people heaven. People have lost complete faith in the ANC.”
And so he and other church leaders must fill the gap left by the state. They are asked to intervene in teen pregnancies, abused old people, hungry families and addicted children.
Ennerdale suffers no shortages of churches. It is estimated there are about 300 dotted across the extensions and, along with drug dens, they seem to be the most profitable businesses around.
September says his youngest drug addict is nine. Their need is so desperate that the children are now crushing ceramic tiles to smoke.
The only formal rehabilitation centre started last year. But it isn't government funded because it doesn't meet the required standards to be accredited. Vision for You’s Marvin Rusty, a former drug addicted who started using at 13, walks through a hall outfitted with cast-off furniture from the community. They have an abundance of dreams of what they want to achieve, but, like most of Ennerdale, it is already stunted at birth.
Pastor George Watson, who has lived in Ennerdale for all of his 68 years, when the area was still called Grasmere, has seen the politicians leave in their sedans having delivered clutches of promises.
“Coloured people and Indians feel as if they are nothing. They are part of the useless group.”
He delves into his folder and removes a map of the area where his Temple of Agape church stands. Next door is a drawing of an extensive old-age home.
This is his dream. He has written to mayors and officials. Former Joburg mayor Amos Masondo wrote back in 2005. Others never bothered.
Marike de Klerk, the former wife of ex-state president FW de Klerk, once referred to coloured people as leftovers, implying that they were the scraps that no one wanted.
Here in Ennerdale, there is a powerful, near-tragic sense that coloured people have remained the discarded and the desperate. The depth of neglect shows in every centimetre of street that winds its way through the township, the drugged child that sways as he walks into oblivion and the old woman whose child holds her hostage for a social grant.
Democracy seems to have forgotten to take the off-ramp to Ennerdale at the Grasmere plaza on the N1.
The Star