Eggs, Pap and Bread: Diepsloot Dinners
Matshidiso Madia
31 January 2013
Setting foot in the unkempt area of the Diepsloot Informal Settlement, just north of Johannesburg, is a shock to the senses. It’s incredibly congested and is cloaked in an unsavoury smell of sewage from the endless streams of waste running past the matchbox houses. Children can be seen playing around those streams of effluent.
A staple diet of eggs, pap and bread is what many of the people here have in common.
Surprisingly enough people are home; it’s the middle of the week and many have no jobs. Some of the children are either not enrolled in school or their parents can’t afford to take them to crèche.
Diepsloot is home to some of the city’s poorest people. You can tell poverty resides there, by just driving past it. You know there are children who go to bed with no food in their stomachs. Those children are among the 12 million South Africans said to be food insecure.
According to the Department of Agriculture, Forestry and Fisheries millions of people in the country do not have access to adequate nutrition.
This includes people in rural, informal and urban areas.
According to a study by the University of Cape Town’s African Food Security Unit Network, areas in ‘the Mother City’ and KwaZulu Natal are the worst affected.
It’s also found that close to 50% of people living in Johannesburg grapple with starvation and malnutrition on a regular basis.
In Diepsloot, the Tefo household is one of the hundreds of corrugated iron houses along the dirt paths. Many people here haven’t woken up at the crack of dawn to go to work. There is no work.
“This is life,” 44-year-old Reuben Tefo says as he takes a deep sigh. Tefo moved to Johannesburg from Limpopo in the late 90’s looking for better opportunities. For him it’s been anything but wonderful.
He works at a gas company and makes about R600 a week. That money is used to take care of him and his wife, as well as their mentally disabled four-year-old son who is also a burn survivor and unable to eat regular food.
When asked what food they eat on a regular basis and how much they spend on meals he says, “What monthly? I don’t even think that far. Here we operate on a week-to-week basis. I was told I need to always buy Weet-bix for my son so I always make sure we have that.”
Tefo also explains that they mostly rely on tinned food, eggs and maize meal to keep them going. He adds that life could probably be better for them if he earned an extra R200, but for now, “Ag, it’s life you know?”
A few houses along that path there are women sitting in groups, feeding their infants and lost in their own conversations. Elizabeth Kganyago and Dimakatso Masinya face different problems in their respective households. Ultimately none of them can afford to stock up on fresh produce or food filled with good nutrients in their households.
For Kganyago the lack of electricity is the greatest challenge. “We can never buy meat, it goes off way too quickly, so we buy things to eat on a daily basis. It changes depending on how much we can afford that day.” The mother-of-three, who’s also unemployed, says the social grant she receives for her two youngest children helps them get by, although it’s not enough. Kganyango mostly worries about her 19-year-old Grade 11 daughter, who gets R5 pocket money every day and carries no lunch.
“I know she’s not eating enough. R5 does very little here in the township and that’s all she takes. No breakfast and she’ll have pap when she comes back later in the afternoon.”
Masinya pipes and says, “I’ve never eaten in a restaurant and I doubt I ever will. I buy Kota’s mo Loxion. Even then, I haven’t had one in the past year or so because I just don’t have that kind of money anymore.” The locally made bunny chows used to form part of her staple diet, but she’s since had to give them up because the meal costs about R10 and is way too expensive for her.
She doesn’t seem too bothered by the fact that life for her and her child won’t get much better than this. In fact she’s less concerned about the groceries that she can’t afford. Her focus is on the government which she says promised the people of Diepsloot decent housing in 2001. She and many other residents are tired of waiting.
For these residents, a lack of food has become a way of life. But it seems the lack of money and ever increasing food prices will see even more South Africans going to bed without food let alone healthy, nutrient filled rations in the upcoming months.