Until We Have Won Our Liberty by Evan Lieberman

Author:Evan Lieberman [Lieberman, Evan]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780691203003
Publisher: Princeton UP
Published: 2022-03-04T00:00:00+00:00

Township Life

Traveling up and down Mogale City’s rolling hills and around its sometimes narrow streets, I spoke with citizens, politicians, journalists, and civil society leaders. I tried to learn the extent to which the statistical portraits described above resonated with the lived realities in various neighborhoods, with a particular focus on the predominantly Black townships of Kagiso and Munsieville and the formal and informal settlements around the more rural Muldersdrift. I concluded in short order that the municipality is not a standout success story by any means, nor is it the opposite. In fact, Mogale’s record of development seems to reflect much of what has transpired in other midsized South African municipalities.

Norman Sedumedi, a former teacher who serves as the councillor for Ward 24 in Munsieville, the township in which he was born and raised, provided some history. As an ANC politician with a record to defend, he wanted to highlight progress when I asked if there was any to report. Still, the facts of what he shared with me when I asked, “What’s changed?” were easily corroborated, including by my own site visits. He spoke of Munsieville’s relatively new sports complex and a regional park, as well as the fact that all the streets were tarred and that all the houses, except some small and newer informal settlements, had electricity. He described the high school and the primary schools built to accommodate additional children and to reduce the length of their walk to school. The government had built health clinics and early childhood development and youth centers. He conceded that many of them don’t work as they had hoped or intended. I passed the relatively new senior center on multiple occasions, and indeed, I could see throngs of older residents coming and going, and at least superficially, it appeared to play a vibrant role in the community. By contrast, the tennis courts without nets that stood barren next to a locked recreational center reminded me how public projects can sometimes become white elephants.

FIGURE 7.1. Corane Street, Munsieville, February 2019. Credit: Evan Lieberman.

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