Unshakable Strength: Holding Together in the Townships of South Africa
December 16, 2003
Hard on the lee of a steep hill, its two thin windows covered with blankets to keep the wind out, the living room of Zanele Bolata’s two-room house is nearly pitch black. But even here, in the darkness, her presence is almost tangible – a filter for the stream of young women and children who move constantly beneath her gaze, and bask in the silent strength she offers. Here, Zanele Bolata is all things to all people, but most of all to those who live here she is simply Makazi – mother.
I met Makazi at her small home in Lamontville, a tin-roofed township on the sloping hills just south of Durban, South Africa. The house itself is like all others here – tiny, unpainted, and worn with the same poverty that marks townships across South Africa. Perhaps more significantly, Makazi’s family is in many ways typical of those across South Africa’s townships as well – a family touched by AIDS and burdened with poverty. But, here at least, it is a family held together by the compassion, and strength, of one quiet figure.
Round faced and soft spoken, Makazi, 59, shares her life, and her home, with a brood of children and grandchildren. Her three grown daughters share her tiny living space, along with their eight young children, sleeping in three small wooden shacks built behind the house. It is a house only of women and children, as the townships of South Africa, like many American cities, have experienced a marked change in social behavior, and fathers, when seen at all, are often viewed more as a threat than as a source of support or protection.
“It didn’t used to be like this,” Makazi says. “When we were children we knew our fathers. But now, it is different.”
A domestic servant, Makazi works three days a week in the nearby city of Durban. For each 12-hour shift she earns 79 Rand – about $13. With none of her daughters able to find work, Makazi clothes and feeds the entire family on her salary, and pays as well the household bills and school fees for the children.
But Makazi’s generosity extends beyond the reaches of her own family. In 1990, a young woman named Gezephi showed up at her door, pregnant and scared. She had just been kicked out of her own house, she explained, and had nowhere to go. Though Makazi knew of the young woman only casually from the neighborhood, she took Gezephi in, raising her and the baby girl she eventually gave birth to as her own children. Today, Gezephi’s child, Sizakele, is 13 years old and lives happily among the other children of Makasi’s home. But the story has yet another layer.
In 1998 Gezephi, then 25 years old, fell sick. “She was losing weight, she was losing energy, and I had to struggle to get her to eat,” Makazi remembers of that time. These, they were to learn, were the first symptoms of AIDS. The year that followed was one of late night cab rides to the emergency room and all night bouts of coughing and cramps as Gezephi grew weaker. Despite the burden on her already meager resources, Makazi never abandoned the young woman, a choice many poor families have to make when faced with the extended care of relatives stricken with HIV and AIDS. “We decided to keep her here when she was sick,” Makazi says of her decision. “It was not right to throw her out.” She continued to care for Gezephi until she died in August 1999.
“She was a nice girl,” Makazi says simply, remembering the time that she shared with Gesephi.
Something of that understated sensitivity runs through everything about Makazi. But beneath her gentle exterior is an unshakable strength – a strength that enables her to provide for 12 young women and children at a time in her life when others might well be caring for her. In Africa, a continent burdened with the highest HIV infection rates in the world and saddled with widespread poverty, such figures are the lynch pin upon which entire generations now depend.
