Extract from the 2023 book; Born White Zulu Bred, A Memoir of a Third World Child, by GG Alcock

KASI TRANSFORMATION

It’s 1992 and South Africa is emerging from a racially divided past, Mandela has been released, a new constitution is being written, the

rainbow nation is dancing a multiracial dance, we are celebrated in the world as a miracle.

I am in Soweto, working for the amavulandlela, the groundbreakers, a unique marketing agency called Group Africa, the first of its kind, marketing to a space most believe is a ghetto – poor people, cheap goods, unsophisticated consumers. I take a picture in Diepkloof, Soweto, of a four-room house, which is like every other house in townships across the country. It has a tiny kitchen, generally with a Welcome Dover, a coal stove warming the house and cooking warm sishebos, a little lounge, a radio turned on 24/7 and generally tuned to Radio Zulu or one of the other ethnic vernacular radio stations (Sotho, Pedi, Xhosa and so on), two bedrooms with small beds with overstuffed mattresses, and stacked in the corner is a pile of foam mattresses and neatly folded blankets, all spread out at night for the large extended family between the two rooms and the lounge, and sometimes even in the kitchen. Outside in the far corner of the property is a toilet, a pile of newspaper or a telephone book serving as the toilet paper, and attached to the side of the toilet is a concrete washing basin with a cold water tap. Under the basin are stacked the plastic washing bowls used for a full body wash morning and night, and across the backyard a rusty drooping wire serves as a wash line where each family member’s waslap or facecloth hangs, generally alongside panties or underwear, washed and drying for the next day. Rows and rows and rows of identical four-room houses are the norm, occupied by families of six to eight people, with basic furniture and decoration.

I am in Soweto again in 2020 and I take a picture in Diepkloof, Soweto. It’s the same street. I take another in Vosloorus, another in Soshanguve, another in Khayelitsha; but wait, what’s happened in twenty-eight years? Townships have transformed. Where hundreds of thousands of four-room homes stood in sad rows, today practically every four-room home has been extended, improved, renovated. Mansions built over and around the old four-room house, slowly replacing or removing the four-room house, piece by piece as the new house is completed, the occupants moving out of or into new parts as they are completed. Amadouble storey and ama Bighouse are the norm, backrooms are added, additional rooms are added, kitchens refurbished, elaborate ceilings installed in a kasi fashion statement. Outside is another statement, an imposing istopnonsense (perimeter wall), built less for security than for a show of status and upward mobility.

The housing sector is another massive Kasinomic sector that is underestimated in its scale and pace of change. Unlike the suburbs or formal environments, extension and renovation is a practically permanent activity in townships, shack settlements and rural areas. This means that what is an informal housing area, a shack settlement, today constantly morphs and formalises. What is true today is untrue tomorrow, and the trajectory is one of constant improvement and formality.

In KasiNomic Revolution I describe how this housing sector is self-financed through amasociety (savings and lending stokvels), lay-by or, most often, through brick-by-brick home loans. A lack of trust in home loans coupled with the complexities of cultural ownership, lack of title deeds or township certificates among living family means that the vast proportion of funding is by these three methods and not by any formal loans. It is important to distinguish between ownership (an African culture concept) and title (a Western concept) when looking at this space, especially when understanding things like risk. Financial institutions are unable to understand the African concept of ownership, which is in many ways stronger than title, and thus see risk and don’t really finance this sector. My favourite quiz these days is to show a picture of rows of shacks to audiences and ask, ‘What percentage of households in South Africa are informal?’ (Stop reading for a moment and choose a number.) Illustrious CEOs, senior government officials, marketing directors, investment gurus, all get it wrong. I get guesses of informal household percentages of 80%, 60%, with the lowest being around 40%. Of course the media leads us into this with anecdotal stories of people living in shacks, the cold whistling through the cracks, water dripping down from rusty corrugated iron roofs, shack fires raging across settlements – true stories, all of them, but not stories we should extrapolate to say that they represent the majority.

Nor, as we fly into Cape Town International Airport to visit a wine farm or chill on the beach at Clifton, should we look down at the rows of shacks in Khayelitsha and adjoining informal settlements, and think ‘Oh my, that’s how the majority lives’. Because it’s not: it’s a perception influenced by media and historical statistics, a perception which has not kept up with the pace of formalisation. In fact, apart from just driving down a township street anywhere in the country and seeing the obvious, you can look at the 2021 South African General Household Survey which shows that 84% of households are formal and only around 12% are informal; the balance is rural, which is generally a mix.

And that’s not all. My next trick question is, ‘What is the average number of people in a household in South Africa?’ Of course anecdotal and media horror stories talk of large households squashed into tight spaces, child-headed households, multi-generational households.

Apart from the media the most quoted sources I get is ‘my Uber driver told me that …’ or ‘my maid lives in a shack and eight of them squeeze in together, it’s horrible’. It is horrible, and it’s generally true even if sometimes exaggerated. But a true story of informality, poverty, and large multi-generational households cannot be extrapolated to be representative of the total population or even the majority of households. When I ask what is the average household size, I get answers of six, eight, up to ten people per household. Well, actually, for years households have been growing faster than the population according to every annual South African Household Survey. The 2021 survey shows that on average we have 3.34 people per household nationally. But even more amazing is that 23.3% of households are one person households, 18.6% are two person households and 17.3% are three person households. More than 70% of households in South Africa are four or less people households!

So why is this important, apart from the obvious reassuring and heartwarming fact that the majority of people live in formal homes in small households? Well, the transformation of household composition – that is, smaller households – means that those smaller households in townships today invest more in comfort and design in their homes versus maximising space to accommodate a large household and plugging leaks and cracks in corrugated iron shack walls. Walk into these homes and you will see fancy tiled floors, elaborate ceilings, king and queen size beds, flat screen TVs, kitchen appliances, igamazini wall plaster and paint, aluminium framed windows, stainless steel gutters (a fashion statement), elaborate Kingdom Doors. There is a whole kasi decor look and feel with houses transformed and design statements unique to the kasi.

Extract from the 2023 book; Born White Zulu Bred, A Memoir of a Third World Child, by GG Alcock