The Hewitt family in front of their shack in the Mamelodi township, where they lived for the month of August.
Published: September 15, 2013
MAMELODI, South Africa — Regina Matshega was gossiping with a neighbor
over a fence between their shacks in the Phomolong squatter camp last
month when a very unexpected sight suddenly popped into view: two
ruddy-cheeked white South Africans, a man and a woman, with two
towheaded toddlers running at their heels.
“I couldn’t believe my eyes,” Ms. Matshega said. “What are white people
doing here? They live in the rich places. They never come this side.”
The white couple wandered over, past the gutter overflowing with raw
sewage, to say hello. They introduced themselves as Julian and Ena
Hewitt, a middle-class family that lives in a gated estate in Pretoria,
just six miles away. They had moved into a 100-square-foot shack with no
electricity or running water next to their part-time housekeeper, Leah
Nkambule, to experience what life was like in an informal settlement.
“They said they wanted to see how we are living,” Ms. Matshega said. “Can you imagine?”
The Hewitts moved into the shack for the month of August as an
experiment in radical empathy. Could a white middle-class South African
family make it on $10 a day in the kind of living conditions that
millions of black South Africans endure every day? “It is one thing to
know from an academic perspective what divides us,” said Mr. Hewitt, who
also blogged about the experience. “But what is it like to actually live it?”
In most countries, a family slumming it for a month would hardly be
news, but in South Africa, where deep racial divides strike at the core
of the nation’s identity, the Hewitts’ experiment made headlines and
spurred heated debate.
They left behind in their comfortable suburban home everything but the
barest necessities that people in squatter camps could afford. A few
changes of clothes, a couple of pots, some blankets and thin mattresses
were allowed. With no running water, tepid bucket baths replaced hot
showers. Instead of flushing toilets, they shared a pit latrine with
their neighbors. They also left behind their cars, taking local minibus
taxis instead. Their children, Julia, 4, and Jessica, 2, even had to
leave their toys behind. They were allowed one book to share.
“Like so many people in South Africa, we live in a bubble,” said Ena
Hewitt, a real estate agent. “We wanted to get outside that bubble.”
But stepping outside the sharp lines that define South Africa, a nation
that endured decades of repressive white minority rule that brutally
enforced racial division, can be a tricky business on many levels, the
Hewitts soon learned.
By Lydia Polgreen
Ena Hewitt on how the experience of living in the settlement affected her children.
Some people, especially residents of Mamelodi, the township that
includes the squatter camp, have applauded the Hewitts for putting aside
the comforts of their own life to see how the other half — or in this
case, much more than half — live.
“I think it’s a wonderful thing,” said Vusi Mahlasela, a prominent South African musician who also lives in Mamelodi. “We all need to understand each other better.”
But their experiment also poked at some of South Africa’s sorest spots.
Were they white slum tourists who had come to gawk at black poverty? Was
this simply a publicity stunt, aimed at getting a book or movie deal —
or worse still, a reality television show?
And even if their motives were noble, did they inadvertently confirm
what many here suspect: black poverty gets little notice until a white
person experiences and highlights it?
Some critics took to Twitter with outright nasty, even violent
responses."You know what? Hope the paraffin stove falls over and you
people burn in that shack. Bye!” tweeted someone going by the handle
@Keratilwe.
Others were more measured in their critique.
“One would think that after 20 years of a democracy underpinned on the
idea of diversity and inclusion, white South Africans would know what
would be meaningful ways to engage black South Africans,” said Sibusiso
Tshabalala, a young black businessman who wrote an opinion article about
the Hewitts in which he referred to their experiment in township living
as “Survivor Mamelodi.”
Busi Dlamini, executive director of Dignity International, a rights
group, said that the Hewitts’ motives were clearly noble, but that their
experiment in township living was bound to be fraught given the history
of South Africa.
“It is what I call poverty pornography,” Ms. Dlamini said. “They put
themselves at the center of the narrative that reinforces the centrality
of whiteness in South Africa.”
Osiame Molefe, a writer who is working on a book about race relations in
South Africa, wrote in an e-mail that “the Hewitts’ empathy project is a
performance of the privilege of being relatively wealthy and white.” He
added: “They have sought out, won and accepted sympathy and praise for
living the hardships others experience daily without receiving the
commensurate plaudits.”
Indeed, few have wrestled with these questions as painfully as the Hewitts themselves.
“Ena and I laugh about this,” Mr. Hewitt said. “We just landed upon this massive social schism in South Africa.”
Asked why his family decided to move to a shack rather than following
the more traditional route of building a school or a playground in a
township, Mr. Hewitt replied: “It’s very simple. We’re doing it for
ourselves. We’re doing it to change ourselves.”
His parents had been horrified that he decided to bring their young
granddaughters to live in a township. After all, the Hewitts lived in a
gated community, the kind of place where the wealthy shield themselves
from South Africa’s violent crime epidemic.
But the couple insisted that their children should learn to cross South
Africa’s ever-present boundaries of race and class.
“People might say it is irresponsible to bring children,” Mr. Hewitt
said. “But I would rather say it is irresponsible to raise children in
this country who can’t cross boundaries.”
By Lydia Polgreen http://bcove.me/lwhu7shr
Julian Hewitt on the social differences between living in the settlement and in the suburbs of Pretoria.
Among the most immovable legacies of apartheid are the rigid geographic
boundaries that separate the races. Far-flung, overcrowded townships
like Mamelodi were the only urban places black people were permitted to
live. Colored, or mixed race people, were restricted to their own areas,
also on the periphery of cities.
People of Asian descent were required
to live in monoethnic suburbs as well. The nicest suburbs were for
whites.
While well-to-do black people have moved into formerly white suburbs
since apartheid ended in 1994, whites have generally not reciprocated.
Indeed, even poor whites have their own slums, far from black people.
For all their irrepressible cheer, life in a shack was not easy for the
Hewitts. August is the bitterest month of South Africa’s winter, and
keeping warm in an uninsulated, thin-walled structure was impossible.
They all slept on a pile of mattresses on the floor, fully clothed in
multiple layers. Even so, in the first week the entire family had the
flu.
Keeping everyone clean without running water was a daily challenge. Ms.
Hewitt, who has a washing machine at home, tried scrubbing the
children’s clothes by hand, but she struggled with the task.
“I put the girls’ clothes up on the line to dry, but my neighbors all
laughed at me,” Ms. Hewitt said. “They said, ‘Those are still dirty!’ ”
At home, the Hewitts use a gas stove that heats quickly at the flick of a
wrist. In Mamelodi, the family relied on the same kind of smelly, balky
paraffin cookstove their neighbors used.
“A simple pasta that would take me 20 minutes at home took an hour and a half,” Ms. Hewitt said.
But the biggest surprise was how expensive it was to move around.
Commuting using the local transportation that most poor people rely on
ate up almost half of the family’s $300 budget for the month.
“It was really an eye-opener,” Mr. Hewitt said. “People need to realize
that if they are paying minimum wage, a huge portion of that is going to
transport.”
But the Hewitts said they would miss many aspects of their time in the township, which ended on Aug. 30.
By Lydia Polgreen - http://bcove.me/ypa9hyrj
Mr. Hewitt says goodbye to a neighbor in the settlement.
“There is a real sense of community, where people rely on each other and
take care of each other,” Ms. Hewitt said. “That is something that we
don’t have enough of back home.”
The couple said they planned to keep up with the new friends they made.
On a recent evening, Mr. Hewitt made the six-mile drive from his hilltop
house back to the squatter camp to go to a lively new church the family
discovered while living there.
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