It is a Monday morning in July and you wake up in the wood and iron shack you live in in Blikkiesdorp in Cape Town.
The freezing cold and wetness have not given you any deep sleep for months. The icy rising cold through the damp wood and cardboard flooring, sniping winds blowing through every crack of your shack, and the constant coughing of your three hungry children are the only things you emotionally connect with every morning.
You came here with your parents 16 years ago as a young 10-year-old. Today you are a parent with your own children. You are still here. Nothing has changed. Your poverty is constant. It’s been constant for decades. You live in a city recently voted Best City in the World. But that’s not your reality.
Your home in Blikkiesdorp is just 29km from Bishops Court, but is worlds apart in every other way.
The four horsemen of the biblical apocalypse visited your shack a long time ago and many times over. Hunger, war, conquest and death live in your street. You know no other Cape Town and fear your children won’t either.
The four horsemen of the Cape Town apocalypse that have trapped you in poverty are political promises, slick marketing of a better life, being told to wait your turn, and denying the faeces-invested reality of your poverty.
Your parents bought into these lies and it destroyed them. Both died of common preventable illnesses in their late 40s. You are next. You are asked to embrace the same four horsemen of the apocalypse of poverty which they embraced: political promises, generational waiting, election-inspired slick marketing and denying your reality till you, too face death in your 40s.
If you live in a shack in 2023, you are probably part of a family generation who owned land and average wealth and lost it through colonialism, apartheid and the brutality of capitalism. You probably had a decent life with other decent people who, through the slow brutality of capitalism’s demands for more and more profits, have suffered at least four generations of constant poverty since the early 1900s.
You are now part of the poor majority who constitute the population of Cape Town and South Africa.
Most media – television, talk radio, print, and online media – will ignore you and your reality. Reading, watching and listening to them, you may wonder when they will stop writing and talking about the wealthy and affluent five percent of the population and talk about the apocalyptic poverty of the 95% of the population.
You may also wonder how it is possible that the dampness in your shack, and the pneumonia coughs of your children, and the broken and unfulfilled political promises and slick marketing of a better life, and being told to wait your turn, and the constant faeces-invested reality of your poverty are not worthy stories on any media platform.
Placating poor people with promises is a political strategy as old as the earth itself. Politicians telling “poster stories of a poor person ‘who made it out of poverty’ or got a house” are as nauseating as it has always been. When poor people, who have suffered decades of poverty in South Africa, are still told by politicians to be patient and wait, and are ignored by media platforms, then the collusion is complete.
The end of your icy cold mornings, the rising dampness you feel through wood and cardboard flooring, the sniping winds blowing through every crack, and the constant coughing of your three hungry children are not public interest stories.
The apocalyptic hunger, urban warfare, violent conquests, and death of the majority of the people who live with you in your city are, infuriating and, sadly, not part of the stories to be told of the greatest city on earth.
* Lorenzo A. Davids.
** The views expressed here are not necessarily those of Independent Media.
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