SA moves to make Soweto liveable

Press, 27 July 1981, Page 8

SA moves to make Soweto liveable

NZPA-Reuter Johannesburg

A $254 million scheme to provide every house in Soweto with electricity is one of a number of projects under way to improve the quality of life in Johannesburg's black satellite city.

Other essential services, such as a central shopping district, sewerage, and the provision of piped water to every home, are also planned for Soweto’s 1.25 million residents. Such amenities are sorely needed in Johannesburg's shadow city, where in 1976 some 600 people died in riots sparked by student protest. Soweto, according to its mayor, David Thebehali. is “just a dormitory where people sleep.”

Soweto — the name is an acronym for south-western townships — comprises 26 separate townships which house Johannesburg's black population. Each consists of row after row of soulless single-storey dwellings, known to their inhabitants as “matchboxes.” Each “matchbox" has four rooms and an asbestos roof. Most lack bathrooms and inside toilets. Only one house in four has electricity and most are still without running water. Soweto does have its luxury suburbs, where an emergent black middle class lives. In Orlando West Hills, known to Sowetans as "Beverly Hills residents have transformed their “matchboxes" beyond recognition, improving them and building extensions.

There are. however, districts like Kliptown where there is severe overcrowding and hardship. Here as many as 10 families live in one

makeshift house. In some areas extra accommodation for family members is provided by corrugated iron shacks in the back yards. Officials of the West Rand Administration Board, the Government-appointed body which runs the black townships surrounding Johannesburg. estimate Soweto has a housing backlog of more than 30.000 homes. They admit the figure could be even higher.

One W.R.A.B. official reckons 45 houses need to be built every day for the next 20 years if Soweto's target population of two million is to be adequately housed by the year 2000. Home ownership is now being promoted by the W.R.A.B. as one solution to Soweto’s housing problems. But although private estates

are being built in the townships, the response has not so far been encouraging.

So far, only 1000 Sowetans have bought their own homes under a 99-year leasehold system for blacks in urban areas, while another 4000 applications are under consideration.

Blacks are unaccustomed to the leasehold system and feel that the property they have purchased should be theirs indefinitely.

But the white Government strongly ' resists granting freehold rights to blacks in the townships, where under apartheid policies they are regarded as temporary sojourners who will one day return to their rural homelands.

Housing is not the only serious problem facing Sowetans.

The crime rate is one of the highest in the world. The murder rate alone is 336 per cent higher than that of New York, according to one South African newspaper. A murder is committed every nine hours in Soweto and every eight hours a woman is raped. At weekends the crime rate doubles.

In one typically violent July week-end. 17 people were killed and 13 females raped, the youngest a girl of nine.

Entertainment facilities are scarce in Soweio. There are only two cinemas and one hotel, leaving the shebeens — illicit drinking dens in private houses — as the sole places of entertainment for most residents. The shebeens offer an alternative to the W.R.A.8.-run beer halls and stores which provide the board with nearly half its revenues.