Squatter camps seek taste of freedom

IF YOU ask the average white South African what associations the words 'township' or 'squatter camp' conjure in his mind he will say a burning barricade, or a spear-wielding warrior, or a mob hacking a solitary black man to death.

That is because 90 per cent of white South Africans have never been inside a black area in their entire lives. They are as susceptible as Britons or Australians to the images created by those of us who cover news. If you live, say, in the affluent Johannesburg suburb of Sandton, Soweto _ half and hour's drive away - is an image shimmering in the distance, no more or less real than Mogadishu.

The truth is that a boy drinking water from a tap conveys a far more eloquent picture of the black South African predicament than the harrowing visions satellites transmit daily around the world. For the solitary tap, standing on a street corner, is the very heart of life for the majority of black South Africans. It is not unusual for that tap to be the one source of water for a community of 10,000 people. From dawn till dusk the queues form, women mainly with plastic buckets. And the tap becomes as much the social meeting point, the place to catch up with the gossip, as the shopping mall for the ladies of Sandton.

Even if the circumstances differ. I remember meeting a lady called Martha who lived in a tin shack in Khayelitsha, a squatter metropolis built on sand just 10 minutes' inland from the stunningly beautiful city of Cape Town. Martha was determined to have a garden. Somehow, out of a piece of sand the size of a bath, she had willed half a dozen stalks to grow. She was proud of her garden, prouder than anything else, but she was sad because the flowers were wilting, yellow had turned to brown. 'It's my back, it's breaking,' she said. 'It's a long walk to the tap and the bucket is so heavy when I come home.'

I remember also a talk I had with Mkhuzeli Jack, a brilliant ANC leader in Port Elizabeth. He was complaining about the quality of the political leadership in Cape Town. 'If you want to build up a constituency, if you want to get the people on your side, don't talk to them only about freedom and the oppressor and a constituent assembly and all that. That means nothing to them. But tell them you will fight to get them water, and then get it - get them another tap installed - and they will follow you to the ends of the earth.'

And that, in the end, is what South African politics will be about in the coming years. The ladies of Sandton, the white population generally, have one great fear about the future, oft-expressed. 'What on earth is going to happen when the blacks realise that democracy won't fulfil their expectations?'

Again the question betrays ignorance. Most black people are not so simple-minded as to believe that once Nelson Mandela is president they will acquire houses with pools, large cars, rose gardens. No. All that first government has to do is provide tangible signs that life is getting better. Improve the roads, put windows in the schools, provide cheap housing to those who live in shacks and convert water from a luxury to a commonplace commodity and, as sure as day follows night, peace will come.

(Photograph omitted)