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speakeasy. The shebeens were where men would go to drink after work and during prayer
meetings and most any other time of day as well.
People built homes the way they bought eggs: a little at a time. Every family in the
township was allocated a piece of land by the government. You’d first build a shanty on your
plot, a makeshift structure of plywood and corrugated iron. Over time, you’d save up money
and build a brick wall. One wall. Then you’d save up and build another wall. Then, years later,
a third wall and eventually a fourth. Now you had a room, one room for everyone in your
family to sleep, eat, do everything. Then you’d save up for a roof. Then windows. Then you’d
plaster the thing. Then your daughter would start a family. There was nowhere for them to
go, so they’d move in with you. You’d add another corrugated-iron structure onto your brick
room and slowly, over years, turn that into a proper room for them as well. Now your house
had two rooms. Then three. Maybe four. Slowly, over generations, you’d keep trying to get to
the point where you had a home.
My grandmother lived in Orlando East. She had a two-room house. Not a two-bedroom
house. A two-room house. There was a bedroom, and then there was basically a living
room/kitchen/everything-else room. Some might say we lived like poor people. I prefer “open
plan.” My mom and I would stay there during school holidays. My aunt and cousins would be
there whenever she was on the outs with Dinky. We all slept on the floor in one room, my
mom and me, my aunt and my cousins, my uncle and my grandmother and my greatgrandmother.
The adults each had their own foam mattresses, and there was one big one that
we’d roll out into the middle, and the kids slept on that.
We had two shanties in the backyard that my grandmother would rent out to migrants
and seasonal workers. We had a small peach tree in a tiny patch on one side of the house and
on the other side my grandmother had a driveway. I never understood why my grandmother
had a driveway. She didn’t have a car. She didn’t know how to drive. Yet she had a driveway.
All of our neighbors had driveways, some with fancy, cast-iron gates. None of them had cars,
either. There was no future in which most of these families would ever have cars. There was
maybe one car for every thousand people, yet almost everyone had a driveway. It was almost
like building the driveway was a way of willing the car to happen. The story of Soweto is the
story of the driveways. It’s a hopeful place.
—
Sadly, no matter how fancy you made your house, there was one thing you could never aspire
to improve: your toilet. There was no indoor running water, just one communal outdoor tap
and one outdoor toilet shared by six or seven houses. Our toilet was in a corrugated-iron
outhouse shared among the adjoining houses. Inside, there was a concrete slab with a hole in
it and a plastic toilet seat on top; there had been a lid at some point, but it had broken and
disappeared long ago. We couldn’t afford toilet paper, so on the wall next to the seat was a
wire hanger with old newspaper on it for you to wipe. The newspaper was uncomfortable, but
at least I stayed informed while I handled my business.
The thing that I couldn’t handle about the outhouse was the flies. It was a long drop to
the bottom, and they were always down there, eating on the pile, and I had an irrational, allconsuming
fear that they were going to fly up and into my bum.