Qobo Ningiza with sign language interpreter Tshepiso Mokoena

Some of the most courageous stories we encounter are from those who navigate worlds that are structured to exclude them. The marginal identity of people with disabilities is one that we often recognise but we seldom understand what it takes to brave the relentless obstacles that such individuals face everyday.

Among them is Qobo Ningiza who will soon be the first deaf law graduate in South Africa. Not only did he have to overcome the challenges of a school experience with poor education resources and limited opportunities for tertiary study, it was also a matter of navigating a study path that relies heavily on verbal presentations and interactions. Motivated by a desire to seek equality, Ningiza resolutely chose to face the odds. His example is in itself a victory for social justice as he is now about to qualify with a Bachelor of Laws (LLB) degree and hopes to pursue a career in Human Rights Law.

Born and raised in Ntseshe location, Ngqamakhwe District in the Eastern Cape, Ningiza is the fifth born out of six children and the only deaf person in his family. He describes his schooling experience as one with severe disadvantage since the limited resources at schools for the deaf meant that learners had to share textbooks and cope with poor infrastructure. Due to a shortage of teachers they could also not choose subjects but had to comply with a prescribed list. As compared to the school experiences of his siblings, Ningiza grew in consciousness of these shortcomings in the implementation of human rights and became determined to change this.

His attempts to pursue tertiary studies in law were so challenging that he spent an entire year trying to gain entrance at a university that would accommodate deaf law students. He recalls travelling with public transport over a long distance to an institution for registration.  He found another aspiring student making the same journey, at that time a stranger but now a close friend. Since they arrived after the offices had closed, they spent the night sleeping next to a lamp post in the parking lot. When Ningiza finally got an interview he was told, within the first five minutes, that the institution would not be able to provide sign language interpreters and he was denied access again.

Ningiza’s experience at the University of Cape Town was such that the Disability Service facilitated his registration for tuition and residence. The Service also assisted him in accessing comprehensive bursaries such that any financial challenges were overcome. Ningiza received dedicated support with sign language interpretation and also had assistance from fellow students with taking notes in class since it is impossible to take notes for oneself and focus on an interpreter simultaneously. Much of the funding for UCT’s Disability Service and student bursaries is thanks to the support received from donors.

Ningiza is currently working on applications to law firms in order to serve his articles next year but this is another challenge since firms have thus far been hesitant to accept him given that they do not have facilities for deaf candidates. Ningiza is however hopeful that an opportunity will soon emerge and that his career may reach fruition: “there is nothing I want more than to make a difference in other people’s lives. I believe that we are a country with a lot of potential and that many of our problems would disappear if we focused our energy on assisting those in need.”

Written by Merlin Ince

Zimingonaphakade, Tefelo, and Cohen embody stories of resilience from the edge

Being at the edge often means that there are one of two options: falling off or rising to new heights. For most youth who live in marginalised neighbourhoods, however, there is not much of an option. They fall deep into the adversities of poverty, incomplete schooling, and unemployment. Without strong socialising agencies such as closely consistent parenting or development programmes, there is little chance that their personal agency can be enabled to rise above the limited resources at their disposal to achieve greatness.

Nurturing resilience is hard and gritty when you are at the edge. But it can be achieved.

As a teenager, Zimingonaphakade Sigenu never considered herself an exceptional student but always adopted an attitude of working hard and working consistently. As a learner at Luhlaza High School in the township of Khayelitsha, she was selected to be part of the University of Cape Town’s 100-Up Programme. It supports Grade 10-12 school learners from neighbourhoods that struggle with socio-economic adversity, coaching and mentoring candidates in order that they can compete on an even plane with youth from more affluent neighbourhoods for places at university.

With such support, Zimingonaphakade soared in her final high school examinations and university studies where she was selected for the Mellon Mays Undergraduate Fellowship Programme at the University of Cape Town (UCT). Since 2002, the programme at UCT has identified and supported exceptional students towards becoming scholars of the highest distinction.

Each year a new cohort of five students are selected at the cusp of postgraduate study to begin sharpening their research talents towards a possible career in academia. Generously funded by the Andrew W Mellon Foundation, the initiative provides regular and structured programming. Fellows receive stipends for term time research activities and further support for summer vacation research projects, faculty mentoring, and partial repayment of undergraduate student loans.

As she reflects on her experience thus far, Zimingonaphakade speaks of discovering new heights: “I am excited about the possibility of being an academic. I never thought about this before, but then Mellon Mays arrived and now I am able to compete with students whom I previously thought were in a different and better league.” Zimingonaphakade admits that transitioning to university life was a huge challenge, especially in her first year, because no-one in her family had attended university before. Initiatives such as the 100-Up programme helped to put her in touch with the resources necessary to strengthen her academic pursuits.

Tefelo Mathibane was also on the 100-Up programme in high school and qualified to study for a degree in Medicine at the University of Cape Town. He attributes much of his foundational success to the programme since it gave him a more competitive edge in mathematics and science, especially given the poor resources he had to contend with at school.

Tefelo maintains these heights of excellence at university. In 2016 he was awarded the Santilal Parbhoo Prize for best study project in molecular medicine.  It was always Tefelo’s ambition to pursue a career in medicine, since he identified a passion for wanting to help people and he is driven by a need to make a difference in combatting diseases such as Tuberculosis in Africa. This was the focus of his laboratory-based project, monitoring the distribution of mycobacterium tuberculosis (MTB) on the human lung system. His curiosity for asking questions and approaching solutions from diverse perspectives kept him up for many a late night on his experiments and write-up, earning him top honours.

Besides Tefelo himself, no-one else seems more excited about his achievements than his father whom he visits during vacation in the Eastern Cape: “He always tells me how proud he is, and fact that I am the first child of his to make it to varsity excites him even more. Whenever I speak with him about my studies, he reminds me that I should continue to work hard and he prays to the Lord that he doesn’t die before I graduate. He wants to see me succeeding.”

Close and consistent parental mentoring is also a critical element in the academic success of Cohen Charles who grew up in the poverty-stricken neighbourhood of Manenberg on the Cape Flats.

Not only is Cohen, and his twin brother Cameron, the first in their family to complete high school but Cohen is also the first person in his immediate part of the neighbourhood to attend university. He has just completed a four-year BA degree programme in Linguistics at the University of the Western Cape. His outstanding academic record has won him several accolades, including membership in the Golden Key Society and Deans Commendations.

Cohen’s story is all the more awe-inspiring in that he was raised by a single parent. His mother Elaine made a concerted effort to mentor her children and make certain that they were not exposed to negative influences in the neighbourhood. When they were still in primary school she would make charts of their maths and put them on the wall so that they could practice. She would make flash cards of their vocabulary and test them everyday after she got home from work. Cohen’s grandmother, who is now deceased, took care of him and his brother while Elaine was at work. They both monitored their homework and Elaine even helped them write essays, making sure that they kept pushing themselves towards higher grades at school and aiming for better results each year.

The highlight of Cohen’s academic journey thus far is that he has been selected to study at the University of Oslo in Norway as a bilateral exchange student. Cohen’s achievement is a powerful story of overcoming adversity and achieving success against all odds; a young man from challenging socio-economic circumstances now taking on the world!

Stories of achieving success against adversity, as seen through the eyes of Zimingonaphakade, Tefelo, and Cohen, are possible but often elusive. Without strong social support, their path towards success is compromised and many youth fall off the edge in marginalised neighbourhoods. For those who are enabled to soar towards new heights, their extraordinary examples of resilience emerge as catalysts for change and transformation; signs and symbols of the agency we ought to become for those straddle a marginal identity.

Written by Merlin Ince

Photograph Credits: Merlin Ince (Zimingonaphakade); Lu Nteya (Tefelo); The Daily Voice (Cohen)

Young men in Manenberg, Cape Town, doing informal vehicle repair work to earn a living

No one ever chooses to live in a ghetto, and the chances of overcoming the structures that keep people there are few. Like many poor neighbourhoods on the Cape Flats in South Africa, ghettos were designed as spaces to contain and segregate people of colour. Uprooted from prime property identified for lucrative development opportunities of the apartheid government, black and coloured people were structurally excluded through the euphamised concept of ‘separate development’. Today, more than two decades since this legislation was dismantled, promises of an open and free society still elude ghetto neighbourhoods. These marginal spaces continue to be ignored like the surrounding highways that direct traffic to distant economic hubs.

Looking for work under such confined circumstances is a shadowed and grim reality that is often lost on the mainstream. Youth like Natheem, who grew up in the historically segregated neighbourhood of Manenberg on the Cape Flats, relate poignant stories of the daily hustle to find work. Along with a group of his friends, who live in the same block, they wash windows and carpets. They perform shopping errands for house-bound residents, and use their combined skills to do household repairs or to fix appliances.

For Natheem, it conveys an almost desperate sense of needing to provide for each day, of having to think about how he will get his next meal, how units can be purchased to feed the electricity meter, how fundamental needs such as cooking and cleaning can be managed: “The most I get is maybe ZAR50 for washing all the windows, kitchen, room, sitting room and maybe make two carpets clean or I also do upholstery like chairs are broken, then I get new material and then I fill that pieces [using] my own imagination. I do that because I won’t give up…if I’m gonna give up then there is nothing.”

Like many other youth growing up in ghetto neighbourhoods, the prospects of Natheem finding a permanent job are slim. He dropped out of school at the end of Grade 9 despite being an exemplary learner who was even selected as Head Prefect at his primary school in Grade 7.

His family was largely supported by his parents who also made a living from irregular domestic work and gardening, but his family suffered great tragedy. Natheem’s mother died of a heart-attack and within two years of her death, his father was caught in the crossfire shootout between police and gangs in the neighbourhood. He died from his injuries. With only Natheem’s older brother providing a meagre income through contract construction work, Natheem felt obliged to leave school and look for work.

Inasmuch as poverty and personal tragedy are common life experiences in neglected neighbourhoods, structural impediments impose further challenges that youth encounter on their education and employment pathways.

According to Statistics South Africa 2011, high school completion rates are as low as 12% among the adult population in ghetto neighbourhoods such as Manenberg, giving way to little motivation and cultural capital to finish school   Unemployment rates are as high as 47% of the total workforce, meaning that youth are in contact with a limited number of people who can provide job referrals and information about job opportunities. These limited social networks confine youth to work role models who cannot inspire them to persevere at school, study further, and pursue professional careers.

At a community meeting in Hanover Park, another historically segregated neighbourhood on the Cape Flats, a high school teacher shared his thoughts on the schooling experiences of learners. The curriculum prescribed by the National Department of Education favours teaching models of small classroom numbers where teachers pay close attention to individual learner needs. There is also a large part of the syllabus that requires homework to be closely supervised by adults. But with classroom numbers averaging between 40 to 50, teachers struggle to keep every learner up to speed. At home where most households are run by single parents, adults have barely enough time to take care of chores and are burdened by the adversities of trying to make a living with little resources available.

Many youth fall through the cracks, with weak foundations in their early education that cannot cope with the incremental pace of studies in higher grades. In many ghetto neighbourhood schools, poor resources result in teachers spending more time on administrative tasks and less time teaching, sometimes as little as 46% of a 35-hour week (Sayed & Motala, 2012:112), leading to learner outcomes that are far below the national standard. Most drop out in Grade 9, at a rate of about 78% (Statistics South Africa, 2011). Their employment expectations are minimal, explains the teacher whom I interviewed: “They don’t think further than what they see. They don’t think doctor, professor, scientist, astronaut. They are happy with getting a job at the local supermarket or hustling on the streets because that is the only thing they know.”

Without a high school certificate, the opportunities for full-time work are very scarce. The demand for labour, through deindustrialisation, has shifted economic focus away from the manufacturing industry towards employment in industries such as tourism, information technology, film, and finance. Jobs that do not require a high school certificate, namely semi-skilled manual jobs, even unskilled manual jobs, have grown slower than jobs that require a high school certificate or even a tertiary education qualification.

Economic sociologists such as Borel-Saladin and Crankshaw (2009: 653) highlight job trends in Cape Town that show a decline in manual work employment for the manufacturing industry, while increases are noted for managerial, technical, and professional jobs as well as middle-skilled clerical, retail and sales jobs.

Excluded from mainstream economic trends, youth in ghetto neighbourhoods become disillusioned and vulnerable. Rose, a 22-year-old single mother in Manenberg, dropped out of school after she failed her Grade 9 examinations. She shared with me her experience of being recruited by an insurance company to conduct door-to-door policy sales. For each policy of ZAR300 that she sold, she received ZAR30 commission. The recruitment process did not require an interview or presentation of a CV. It offered little training and only supported workers with transport to and from areas in which they were required to conduct sales. Rose was often hungry and tired. She was not well versed in the terms of the policy and struggled to explain it to me when I probed the subject during our interview. She sold two policies in the space of ten days and then quit out of sheer exhaustion and frustration.

Her experience of exploitation is also evidenced in her hairdressing services to women in her neighbourhood following a training course that Rose completed at the local community development centre. She would accept to do a job for ZAR10 that would ordinarily cost ZAR100 at a hair salon and often not get paid, with women promising to pay her at the end of the month and then not honouring their commitments.

Without close, consistent, and concentrated intervention, youth in ghetto neighbourhoods face bleak futures in terms of their employability. This intervention needs to begin at the level of basic education, building learner confidence through after-school mentoring programmes. The isolation that youth experience must be counteracted through exposure to career guidance and the cultural capital that empowers them to navigate opportunities such as student financial aid schemes. If they are left to the demise of social structures that prevent them from competing for jobs in high demand, they will always struggle to transform their circumstances.

Without interventions that are designed acknowledge, affirm and develop inherent skill, their experience of work will remain a daily hustle and grind for underpaying and irregular jobs. And for this our society is all the poorer without Nobel laureates, global leaders, and innovators whose talent was ignored and relegated as a marginal identity.

Written by Merlin Ince

References:

1. Borel-Saladin J & Crankshaw O (2009) ‘Social polarization or professionalization? Another look at theory and evidence on deindustrialization and the rise of the service sector.’ Urban Studies 46(3): 645-664.

2. Sayed Y & Motala S (2012) ‘Getting in and staying there: Exclusion and inclusion in South African schools’. Southern African Review of Education 18(2): 105-118.

3. Statistics South Africa (2015) Census 2011: Income dynamics and poverty status of households in South Africa. Pretoria.

Photograph Credit: Lu Nteya

On a quiet and chilly afternoon in July 2015 I headed out to Manenberg for a research interview. I was meeting with youth and their families, listening to their stories about how they deal with social hardships in trying to find work. Manenberg is a poor and marginalised neighbourhood on the outskirts of Cape Town.  As a relic of the apartheid-engineered city, residents still bear the anger and pain of being forcefully removed and resettled on these dusty windswept plains of the Cape Flats.

Manenberg’s bustling streets were virtually abandoned on this afternoon, either an ominous sign of a gang fight or a more tempered measure of taking cover from the cold especially since the first rains had fallen. I decided to follow the cue from the presence of fruit sellers who would not have set up shop in the event of any impending unrest. I take my chances, as people do everyday in Manenberg.

As I walk out from one of the apartment blocks,  I am cautioned by the nervous gesture of a young man approaching me. We are on opposite sides for now, of the fence that cordons the territory of the block. He is outside and I am on the inside. He stops and takes a step back. His gaze is steady on me but I drop mine to counter his engagement. He persists. “Are you an American” he calls out, referring to one of Manenberg’s most notorious gangs called The Americans. I laugh nervously, realising the poignant intent of such a question in territory ruled by the rival Hard Livings gang. “No,” I respond feebly, “No I am not.” He continues towards me and we pass at the gate. He glances over his shoulder, “I thought you were an American coming to kill me.” And then with him now on the inside of the fence and I on the outside, he turns to triumphantly announce words that numb me, “I do the killing around here.”

People who straddle marginal identities, particularly gangsters, often display a certain contempt that disturbs us who are outsiders. We interpret it as a cold disregard for mainstream society values and this is what shocks, abhors and horrifies us. We do not live in their world. We live far removed from the brutal realities that have turned little boys playing soccer on the street into knife-and-gun-wielding criminals. And because we live so far away from this world, we do not understand.

This is not an attempt to condone heinous crimes. It is rather an endeavour to discern what breeds such contempt in the hearts and minds of young men who belong to gangs. Many writers have grappled with this question through their work which has won both critical and popular acclaim. One of them is Brazilian author Jorge Amado. His most famous novel, Captains of the Sands, gives an evocative portrayal of a group of street children who operate as a gang, thieving out a living on the streets of Salvador de Bahia. Amado navigates this gritty story with a delicate hand, as a constant reminder that these are little children who have been orphaned and abandoned by the social structures that favour wealth and prestige. The empty warehouse in which they live is a metaphor of the loss they have suffered, of their families and of the comforts that every child deserves in order to know what it is like to belong. Instead they are savagely beaten and punished by police authorities and so-called reformatories. What they long for is the affirming touch and embrace of a mother’s hand, or the warmth of a nourishing meal and a bed to dream the dreams that keep hope alive: “All of them were looking for affection, anything out of that life.”

I don’t think that anyone ever chooses freely to live a life of killing, thieving, or hurting other people unless you are consumed by emptiness, when comfort and love seem like elusive luxuries that you are never entitled to. It becomes a hard and heartless life, as a young man in Manenberg explains about his marginal identity as a gangster. He speaks plainly, with determination and no need for apology, about what it means to defend one’s pride and dignity when you do not have much to hold on to:  “Don’t come running and try to pull me, no. I will hit you. I will make you very sore, you see. You can make me also sore and I don’t care. There’s only sore from the outside but they don’t have a clue what its like to hurt inside you see, so what is that? You gonna stab me, you gonna shoot me, it gonna heal again but the feeling inside can’t heal, my brother, you see no-one can heal this what you feeling inside…”

Is it really a contempt for other human lives and a disregard for mainstream values that characterise the marginal identity of gangsters, or is it rather a contempt for the sense of loss and emptiness from which they cannot escape?

Written by Merlin Ince

Photo: A Street in the Pelhourinho district of Salvador de Bahia