In Pearston, a small town between Graaff Reinet and Somerset East where residents live off groundwater, the river is dry but pouring with rubbish. For decades, Pearston’s riverbed has separated its black township, Khanyisa, from its town centre. “When I grew up here it was the peak of apartheid,” the local ambulance driver explained. “The centre was only for white people, then by the river [now dry] was the so-called black area.”
“At 9pm, all the black and coloured people had to be out of town. And you had to carry a ‘pass’ (official identity document). Service delivery was a problem. Rubbish would be removed from town every day. But in the townships, it was not like that.”
Garbage has political meaning in the life and history of Khanyisa and many places like it, as does the idea of ‘removal’. In the history of Khanyisa, removal had been for people, not rubbish. For the region’s poor and working class, this is, in some ways, still true – piles of plastic lapped the edges of Khanyisa’s dry riverbed, while stories of farm evictions continue to appear in the press.
When we fail to deliver proper waste removal services to the country’s most underserved communities, when we locate landfills next to people’s homes, the message we are sending is that some people and neighbourhoods are disposable – like waste.
