Saulsville is a township on the western extremes of the Tshwane metropolitan municipality. It was established under the apartheid government’s Group Areas Act to house Tsonga and Venda-speaking migrants with permits to work in the city of Pretoria. Saulsville’s black residents were only permitted to white urban areas as short-term labour migrants. Their presence was understood as temporary. Despite the building of schools, low-cost housing and clinics, Saulsville is still neglected by government planners and service providers. Many sites in the township have been turned into illegal dumping sites.
The Soulbent Project arranges clean-up activities around Saulsville with the help of volunteers. They were given orange overalls by the municipality.
Why is there so much rubbish in Saulsville?
- =Many landfills have closed. This means that residents and builders in west Tshwane must travel many kilometres to dump their waste legally and are often charged a fee by the dumpsite.
- =There are not enough garbage trucks servicing Saulsville. Trucks get full fast and take a long time to get to faraway landfills. This often means they do not get to all the houses on time. In 2018, the City of Tshwane had 136 garbage trucks, when it needed 464 trucks.
- =Informal areas are growing fast, but do not get waste services. These areas don’t have dustbins or formal dumpsites and the municipality usually doesn’t collect from them.
- =Outside dumping. Those living in better-off urban areas closer to Pretoria take bakkies and drive to Saulsville to dump.
- =Informal businesses are adding to the dumping problem, because there are no proper waste management systems in place for them.
- =Even in Saulsville’s formal areas, waste removal is not designed for how people live. In areas like Saulsville, it's common for people to rent out the unused space in their backyards to earn rental income. This trend is known as 'backyarding'.
Many formal properties have three or more backyard shacks built on the property. There are many residents on one plot, but they only get one wheelie bin. Because of this, there is a big market for bins. Bins get stolen and sold.
“Back-yarding is a big thing here, even in formal areas. So, one house may have 30 people living there with only one wheelie bin. The official dustbin gets full very quickly, yet you can only put it out once a week for collection.” – Saulsville resident.
Mashudu Makhado, a resident of Saulsville, was moved to start the Soulbent Project when he saw the extent of dumping close to his home. “When I started to see what was happening in our community, I changed. When I was seeing that illegal dumping sites were now a problem – motorists, people throwing things out of cars – you will start to realise ‘wow, this is not right’. You’ll see people will stop their cars there and throw whatever that they want to throw. So that’s when I realised that I can’t be doing those things. I need to make sure that I’m not the problem, I must be a solution. I must bring solutions to my community.”
With his sister, Mashudu initiated the Soulbent Project in 2019 to clean up the community. Within one week they had 30 volunteers. Soon after, there were 300 volunteers helping them to remove the illegal dumping sites. At one large dumping site near his house, Mashudu and his team cleaned up and planted a vegetable garden, where today they also recycle and have a donated container storing their equipment.
Mashudu is a prolific user of Facebook, where he posts numerous pictures and videos of the group’s daily cleaning activities. He believes that in addition to online awareness-raising, T-shirts and jackets showing how long it takes for plastic or nappies to decompose would also be effective strategies to educate people. He publicises his project widely and works well with the Tshwane City cleaning teams, and other departments and NGOs. Yet his project is still under-funded and remains largely a volunteer organisation.
One of the volunteers is Given Manganye, age 28. He became involved with the Soulbent Project due to his struggle to make ends meet: “I became involved this year. I got involved because I was struggling. Things at home are difficult. So, by joining I was having hope that one day something will come of it. Sometimes they also give us groceries or food.”
Given says that he always used to have good knowledge of the ills of littering, he values a clean environment and does not like to see litter on the streets. When people ask him why he got involved in the clean-up, he replies:
“We want to see our place clean. I tell them we have small kids who want to eat things they see on the ground, so we must protect the kids. It is good to be clean because you get healthy. If there is litter on the ground, you get sick.”
