Musa Nkabinde knew no one in Johannesburg when he came looking for work five years ago, but the 22-year-old knew exactly where to stay – the same place as his grandfather and thousands of other migrant workers before him: the hostel.
Grim, mainly single-sex dormitory blocks dotted round South Africa’s main cities, the hostels are one of the lesser-known legacies of apartheid and the migrant labour system enforced on blacks by the white minority rule that ended two decades ago.
They are associated with Dickensian poverty, crime and, in many cases, Zulu tribalism.
“I know where he slept. So when I came here I slept where he used to sleep,” Nkabinde said, gesturing to a bed in the small room he shares with 14 other men where he says his grandfather laid down his head almost 20 years ago.
Housing Minister Lindiwe Sisulu recently told Parliament she wanted to do away with hostels, calling them “a very painful relic of our past”.
But with no better alternative for the millions coming to the cities in search of work in a country saddled with 25 percent unemployment, closing them risks prompting unrest.
Hostels grew up alongside South Africa’s mining industry throughout the 20th century as workers flooded in, extracting the gold and diamonds that built Africa’s economy – but leaving the social structures in their villages in tatters.
The system had the blessing of apartheid’s white rulers as it provided the mines and industry with cheap itinerant labour, and left the workers’ families in remote rural areas.
Twenty years after the end of apartheid, the government has not resolved the problem of rural decline and the hostels remain a source of despair.
“Because of the poor living conditions, you have this sense of desperation – unemployed, mainly young men who for various reasons feel excluded from the system,” said Noor Nieftagodien, a historian at the University of Witwatersrand.
Nkabinde’s hostel is typical – a three-storey brick building in the south of Johannesburg that serves as a home to more than 3 000 men.
Only five of the 14 men in his room have jobs. Some sleep on the metal frames of beds with no mattresses. Others sleep with only blankets protecting them from the cold floor.
The walls of the washroom are stained with grime, few of the toilets work and none of the showers. To wash, the men heat water in metal buckets.
Nkabinde gets occasional work as a labourer, moving scrap metal on to trucks. But some weeks the trucks don’t come, leaving him with nothing. Many never find work.
“They are disappointed,” said hostel resident Sifiso Mlambo, a 41-year-old chemical worker. “They don’t get what they came for. Your dream doesn’t come true because you don’t have money.”
The hostels also have a history of violence. In the early 1990s, brigades of Zulu men armed with spears and traditional shields were mobilised in them and unleashed on townships, the footsoldiers of a power struggle between the IFP and the ANC.
Thousands of people were killed and the violence almost derailed South Africa’s transition to democracy.
Now the anger in the hostels is directed at the hundreds of thousands of African migrants coming to South Africa, either fleeing persecution elsewhere on the continent or seeking work. They do not have the contacts to enter the hostels, but find meagre accommodation in the townships.
“In my grandfather’s days there were a few foreigners but now foreigners are more than us,” said Nkabinde, who pays just R27 a month for his tiny share of floor space.
The government is considering asking hostel dwellers to leave for temporary shelters while unspecified “permanent units” are built, a prospect that does not appeal.
“This place is not good for us,” Nkabinde said. “But we don’t have anywhere else to go.”
Reuters