Jo’burg’s Nightingales


Date: January 1, 1970
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While other families are preparing to settle in for a night of television, Ntombi Nhlapo stands outside her house waiting for the municipality truck to fetch her. Nhlapo is one of the thousands of women who work nightly cleaning the streets of Johannesburg.

After the truck fetches her, it goes on to pick up more women. “We start at eleven o’clock at night and the city is very quiet at that time of night,” she says. “Sometimes we witness horrible things from hijackings to rape. The tsotsis never come to us; they know that we do not have money and that certain parts of the city have cameras.” 
 
These women work until six in the morning. Nhlapo says winter nights are the hardest to bear, as she never gets used to the cold.
 
According to Nhlapo, the city is getting dirtier. “I started cleaning the city five years ago. It was never this dirty,” she says, “But now things have changed it has become more filthy, we sweep until the morning.”
 
She furthermore reveals the challenges of her job. She said, “If you work at night outside you are bound to be affected in terms of health. I have bronchitis and most of the women also have cold related sicknesses. But there is nothing we can do, we are mothers and we have children that look up to us.”
 
A single mom, Nhlapo says that the most difficult part of her job is leaving her three children alone at night. “My daughter became a teenage mother at the age of fifteen,” she explains. “I sometimes blame myself, because maybe if I was not working at night this wouldn’t have happened. I worry more about my last born, she is only nine years old, anything can happen to her whilst I am not there.”
 
Nhlapo ccame from a small area called kwaNtuzuma in the outskirts of Kwazulu Natal to Johannesburg in the late 1970’s. She struggled to get a job, and later lived with the father of her children. After a number of years, things did not go well and her partner chased her out of the house together with her children.
 
After that as means of survival she worked from one part time job to the next until she joined the Municipality of Johannesburg. The monthly pay is not much for the amount of work and the conditions these women work under. Nhlapo dreams that someday she will leave the streets and maybe start her own business.
 
Nowadays Johannesburg, the city of gold, is over populated with people that come from various parts of the country and the world to seek better opportunities. If you have never asked yourself why the dirt in the city never piles up to be as tall as the Carlton Centre building, you should.
 
Before you dirty the city, you must think twice, because there are woman like Ntombi Nhlapo that have to leave their children alone at night and bear all the cold winter nights, just to keep the streets of Johannesburg clean for us.
 
Ntshepang Motema is an intern reporter with SABC. This article, produced during a GL “Business Unusual” training workshop, is part of a South Africa Women’s Day series from the Gender Links Opinion and Commentary Service that provides fresh views on everyday news.
 
 


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