Builder women outside Johannesburg
One recent morning in the township approximately 125 kilometers southwest of Johannesburg , strong hand and strong back women were stretching and arching their backs. More than a dozen women busy building a nation; one sidewalk block at a time. No one was complaining, even as they shoveled heavy mounds of wet cement or pushed a heavy brick laden wheelbarrow. Emerging from their labor were walls, floors and simple roof lines.
At the edge of Kgotsong , as vast empty wilderness, an ever-growing township of well over 72,000 people, these women are solving one of South Africa’s biggest issues: a housing shortage of tremendous proportion, leaving 7 million of the country homeless. We were fortunate enough to be staying at one of the many Hotels Johannesburg has to offer, but these women were staying in crumbling corrugated metal shanty’s while building with their own hands, 28 houses with materials they themselves salvaged or purchased by pooling scant resources.
Working with a technical adviser, five women can build a three bedroom house in five days. For generations, millions of the poor, black South Africans had no choice but to squeeze entire families into the crude corrugated shanti’s, which did not provide much shelter from the rains and winds that will suddenly whip by and tear apart or blow off roofs. Some shack dwellers will visibly shake if you mention the word fire.
So, twice a week, these builder women gather on a dusty plot and do a Kgotsongs version of a barn-raising. They pool their resources, each woman contributing a rand per day. The money is usually earned by fund-raising parties, working as a domestic many many miles away or sell fruit to passers-by. The Government has long understood that for the poor in South Africa, mostly the black, buying a decent home has been a great and difficult dream. But a dream these builder women are bringing into fruition.