MALAIKA MAHLATSI: Hammanskraal a case study in being failed by government

This past weekend, as part of data collection for my Masters research, I visited the township of Hammanskraal.

The region is currently experiencing an active cholera outbreak that has thus far claimed the lives of 23 people, and has seen hundreds hospitalised.

The former zonal coordinator of the African National Congress (ANC) in Hammanskraal and current chairperson of Ward 75 in Temba (located in the Greater Hammanskraal area), Micheal “Kotiti” Aphane, was waiting for me when I arrived at our agreed meeting spot.

As soon as we exchanged pleasantries and sat down to continue our ongoing discussion about the water crisis in the township, he informed me that his aunt-in-law was buried the previous day after she succumbed to cholera. Having spent the past two weeks visiting families of deceased and sickly people, he went on to detail what the last days of cholera victims are like.

He said constant diarrhoea and vomiting forces many to effectively stay in the toilet, while the dehydration is so severe that it renders them unable to walk or talk. They atrophy right in front of their loved ones.

I began my Master of Science (Water Resource Science) at the Institute for Water Research (IWR) at Rhodes University in 2022, and chose Hammanskraal as my study area.

For many years, the township situated in the north of Pretoria has been a site of water insecurity challenges that have worsened over the last decade. In seeking to understand how and why urban water insecurity in South Africa persists, Hammanskraal was the perfect area to study.

Previously part of the Bophuthatswana homeland under the apartheid regime, and only incorporated into the City of Tshwane metropolitan municipality in 2000, Hammanskraal has a rich history that illustrates the complexities of our country’s amoral past and its structural challenges in the post-apartheid dispensation.

When I submitted and defended my proposal at the IWR, I believed then as I do now it was important to tell the story of Hammanskraal and its people, as a way of highlighting how historical constructs compounded with contemporary governance problems perpetuate the disenfranchisement of black people.

I wanted to demonstrate how the lack of access to the most basic human right, water, is rooted in the layered injustices that define black life in democratic South Africa.

Throughout my academic career, including in my two previous Masters degrees, one in Public Affairs and another in Urban and Regional Planning, I have sought to make this dehumanisation and de-civilisation visible. But in Hammanskraal, doing so felt like a pursuit of justice itself, for the people of that township are largely forgotten.

As we travelled across Hammanskraal, we came across clusters of people carrying empty containers in search of clean drinking water. While many were young, some were elderly people – frail men and women who could barely put one foot in front of another, forced to search for water to stay alive, in a democracy that promised a better life for all.

I thought of my own grandmother in Soweto, and wondered if she, too, would someday endure the indignity of travelling with 5L containers in search of water to make her motogo wa mabele (soft porridge) and Five Roses tea.

While some households have erected JoJo tanks near the perimeter of their outside walls, many must contend with the municipal tankers that bring water a few times a week, as well as the donations being made by non-governmental organisations such as Gift of the Givers, whose interventions in the cholera outbreak hit township has been nothing short of life-saving.

Having already conducted some interviews prior to the outbreak, on this trip, I sought only to make some observations and document them. The epistemological assumption when conducting qualitative research is that conducting studies in the field provides an important context and understanding to the participants being studied.

As such, as researchers, we get close enough to those whom we are studying, while also maintaining a degree of objective separateness. I have always understood this, and never seen it as an impediment to my work. On the contrary, I rationalised that the credibility of my research lies in my ability to be close enough to understand, but distant enough to not centre myself.

But as I journeyed through Hammanskraal this past weekend, I found myself wondering if there was any value in my work; if a well-written dissertation about a deadly cholera outbreak matters when I could not save any of the dead, or make life bearable for the living.

I couldn’t even offer lifts to the many elderly women and men whom I saw walking to water points, because I had work to do and a vast township to cover. I questioned the work of researchers – work that I once saw great value in.

This past weekend, I wondered if we too are complicit in the pervasive injustice that defines black life - if townships like Hammanskraal are nothing more than extraction sites for us, where we gather as much information as we need from the people, then leave them behind.

I wondered if we used the lived realities of those on the margins as a tool to advance our own scholarly interests and by extension, our upward mobility in society. For the first time in my life, I wondered if the ideational space was not a people’s pain-for-profit for researchers like me – and all this because Hammanskraal was a debilitating experience.

My trip ended on Sunday evening at the Hammanskraal Community Centre, where residents gathered at Mandela Hall for a meeting with the Minister of Water and Sanitation, Senzo Mchunu. Under the cover of night, he waltzed in with his security detail and some officials from his office.

In that hall were men and women who have listened to far too many empty promises from politicians – promises whose failure to materialise is now claiming lives.

I looked into the tired and sombre faces of the Hammanskraal community, and I saw what it meant when a government failed.

It means dreams deferred, potential hindered, and a future betrayed. In Hammanskraal, it also means losing your loved ones.