Side by side, a slum and gated community show South Africa's widening gulf

Times

2 days ago

Upturned beer crates serve as stepping stones through a maze of muddy walkways in the foul-smelling slum where Irene Jubeju stands at the door of a tin shack. Inside, her three-year-old grandson, Lucobo, lies on a bed. A single lightbulb hangs from the ceiling.
'It's not nice to live here. I would go to America very happily if President Trump would take us,' Jubeju said, nodding sadly at her possessions: the bed, a single white plastic chair and a cupboard containing a bag of rice and two tins of pilchards.
Further along the alley, Patricia, a mother of six, waits to fill three large plastic bottles at a standpipe. 'At night there's shooting and screaming. You can't go out. We're not safe.' She added: 'You must call Mr Donald Trump and tell him to invite me and my family to America.'
Millions of South Africans watched on their phones last month as Trump harangued Cyril Ramaphosa, his South African counterpart, over claims that the white Afrikaner minority were facing 'genocide'.
The American president has granted refugee status to several dozen Afrikaners. To the slum-dwellers of Masiphumelele, they seem like the lucky ones.
'My daughter said to me the other day, 'Mum, maybe God has his favourites',' Patricia recalled. 'Those white farmers are probably right to be afraid of criminal attacks on their farms, but I think our case is just as deserving.'
Three decades after Nelson Mandela became South Africa's first black president, the country once reviled for its former apartheid system remains one of the most unequal in the world. Nothing better exemplifies the gulf than Masiphumelele.
The warren of ramshackle dwellings, where 65,000 people are crammed into an area of less than a quarter of a square mile, is bordered by a wall beyond which lies another world, a lakeside idyll of swimming pools and manicured lawns.
'People were separate before,' said Jeremy Mathers, a retired naval submarine engineer who has lived for years with his wife in this exclusive gated community guarded by security professionals. 'Thirty years later they still are,' he added, as a black maid swept his sitting room floor.
He has watched from this comfortable abode with a lakeside pontoon and a swimming pool as the township next door has expanded over the years, along with his own gated community. He does not need burglar alarms or bars on his windows: the estate is wired with cameras monitored by a team that conducts regular patrols.
'That fact that it's necessary is one of the tragedies of South Africa. There's massive unemployment, and people have to live,' Mathers said.
'The residents here know they live in a bubble isolated form the real world out there and probably feel a little guilty about this. But security of family and property trumps all other considerations.'
Down the road, slum-dwellers vie with baboons to rummage through rubbish from another well-off white enclave. Others hand out slips of paper asking for jobs as nannies or nursemaids. 'I am good with children and animal friendly,' said one note thrust through my car window at a traffic light. In a state hollowed out by flagrant corruption, the deepening crisis of crime and unemployment has made age-old warnings of national breakdown feel disturbingly plausible.
Wealthy white South Africans began leaving the country decades ago. 'There are 35 dollar billionaires born here who no longer live here, and I can name hundreds of South Africans worth $100 million to $900 million who are living overseas and not coming back to invest,' said Rob Hersov, 65, a billionaire who left in the 1980s but has returned.
He accuses Mandela's heirs in government of 'stealing the country to death' and promoting violence against whites. Claims of 'genocide' have been circulating for more than a decade, with vocal support from Trump's erstwhile ally, the South African-born billionaire Elon Musk.
• Fact check: Are white farmers being killed in South Africa?
Trump took up the matter last month when he hosted Ramaphosa and several officials in a live-streamed Oval Office meeting, playing a video that showed Julius Malema, leader of the far-left Economic Freedom Fighters party, and former president Jacob Zuma singing an apartheid-era struggle song called Kill the Boer. Trump claimed it was inciting 'white genocide'.
One of those in the meeting was John Steenhuisen, 49, South Africa's white agriculture minister and leader of the governing coalition Democratic Alliance party.
He said he had consulted Lord Mandelson, the British ambassador to Washington, the evening before the encounter with Trump. 'He gave me sound advice: 'Don't answer back, don't contradict him.' But nothing could have prepared us for the dimming of the lights and the TV screen coming on. My heart jumped into my throat. I thought, 'What's happening now?' '
Steenhuisen sprang to the defence of the coalition government, which had been formed specifically to keep the hate-filled militants depicted in the film out of power. The majority of white commercial farmers wanted to stay in South Africa and 'make it work', he said.
Speaking in his Cape Town office last week, he said claims of 'genocide' against whites were 'completely false'. South Africa suffers from appalling crime and murder rates: an average of 60 people are killed daily in this country of 63 million, about 7 per cent of whose inhabitants are white.
Down the road, Louis Botha, the Afrikaner war hero and South Africa's first prime minister, sits on horseback, cast in bronze outside parliament. 'We have a statue of Queen Victoria too,' Steenhuisen noted.
In the first quarter of this year, there were six murders on farms. One victim was a white farmer and the rest were black, according to police. Since 1990, 1,363 white farmers have been murdered — an average of 40 a year.
Grant Butler, a primary school headmaster in Port Elizabeth, recalled a tragic 2018 case when the home of a farming family with two boys in his school was targeted for robbery. 'The mother was raped, the father wasn't home at the time,' he said. 'I remember her telling me she couldn't sleep any more. The family needed a new start. They moved to Australia.'
The countryside the family once inhabited outside the city is cradled by gentle hills and distant ridgelines that shelter rows of trees from which oranges hang like golden lamps in a green night.
One of the region's biggest producers, Hannes de Waal, 58, who runs Sundays River Citrus Company, dismissed the 'white genocide' claim as 'the biggest nonsense under the sun', arguing that farm attacks are the result of common criminality, not an organised campaign. Sitting at the end of a long table in his headquarters, he called 'proper' Afrikaners 'tough and resilient', adding: 'Going to another country as a refugee is crazy.'
That did not mean farmers felt no anxiety, he added. The earth is moist and red in the orange groves, the air rich with the scent of sun-warmed rind. Yet beneath the postcard tranquillity, tension hums like an underground current.
'The only question — and it's always in the back of your mind — is when is it going to happen to you?' said Hennie Ehlers, 65, head of 2Rivers Citrus Company, further up the valley. 'You lock all the doors once you're inside at night. You don't leave anything open. You don't know what's going to happen. It's become a way of life.'
Rising unemployment and desperation have raised fears that crime will increase. 'People see the gold on the trees and want a share of that gold without realising how much effort, capital and sweat went into producing it,' Ehlers said.
The affable silver-haired figure is quick to acknowledge that farm murder victims are not only white. Sitting next to him was his black business partner, Khaya Katoo, and his wife, Crewelyn, who run a farm in the valley. 'These farm murders cut across race,' said Katoo, 50. 'We've got the same security cameras, alarms and smart tech systems at my house as they do here. Everyone is affected. Everyone is a potential victim.'
He blamed unemployment for the attacks. 'The government has failed to deal with it. There's a huge gap between the black elite and the poor. The rich got richer without pulling the poor up with them. There's not much of a black middle class.'
For the township dwellers of Masiphumelele, though, the daily struggle is not to thrive but to survive.
'Mandela wanted us to love each other,' said Patricia, the mother of six, of the freedom fighter turned president. 'He would be rotating in his grave. He'd cry if he could see what's happening to us.'