If you drive along the municipal dump site in Grahamstown’s industrial area in the afternoon, it is likely
that you will see a number of people walking along the road towards Grahamstown.
One immediately presumes that these people are walking home from work. However if you take a closer look at them, you will see that they are carrying big plastic bags.
If you drive along the municipal dump site in Grahamstown’s industrial area in the afternoon, it is likely
that you will see a number of people walking along the road towards Grahamstown.
One immediately presumes that these people are walking home from work. However if you take a closer look at them, you will see that they are carrying big plastic bags.
Inside are scraps of food, tin cans, old clothes, torn books, defunct electronic appliances,vegetable peelings and stale bread.
Where are these people taking all these items from? The dumping site? Yes! The dumping site is now a scavenging ground for the poor.
The locals scavenge the dumping site for food along with poor and homeless people from the surrounding areas.
According to Phindile Makhasi (50) of Sun City informal settlement in the coloured area, they have to risk
their lives to get food. “When a waste truck offloads, we all run there in an effort to sort out bits of scrap food. It’s tough, but we’ve got no choice, there are no jobs.
I live with my son and four grandchildren, and my health is not good. “We are feeding and dressing our children from the dump.
Some of the things we get them here are healthy for consumption and we therefore see no problem of eating them. We sometimes sell the things we find here to the residents in the township.”
He says that this has become a daily routine. “We collect tins and sell them to a nearby ‘cheeks’ [a scrap yard], and we sometimes get R5 to R10 in exchange for the tins. My husband is also not working, we both collect the tins.
Two fingers on my right hand side are not functioning, and I applied for the disability grant two times, but the computer rejects me.
Our remedy is the dump,” said one of the women found at the dump. Nyanisile Bonani of Transit Camp, who is also 50 years old, calls himself a spiritual being. He goes to the site to get food for his dogs, because he is also a hunter, and says “this is a socialisation that was created by God”.
“People say we are going to die because we eat condemmed stuff, but we are still alive, and we are not sick because God is within us. He is protecting us. People even laugh at us, they look down upon us,” he says.
He even lambasted the educated elite for neglecting their countrymen. “The educated people don’t have a heart, they don’t feel for their brothers and sisters.
They sometimes come here and collect people to do occasional jobs at their homes and pay them R5 for a four hour job. What is that?”
Makana Municipality Environmental Health and Cleansing assistant director Johann Esterhuizen said people are not allowed to enter the site. “They are trespassing.
We put a fence around the site, and people cut it to get to the site. In the near future we will put security guards to keep people away from the site,” said Esterhuizen.
He added that “people throw the food in the garbage because it’s not good, therefore the food found in the site is not conducive for human consumption.”
Thembeni Plaatjie is an independent citizenjournalist for Grocott’s Mail
