The Empower Shack in Khayelitsha’s BT Section, 2016. Increasing the number of toilets does not address gendered violence, however, or eliminate the potential risk associated with any toilet that is outdoors and some distance from one’s home. Initially, the Cape Town government’s solution was to supply more toilets. Women and girls are more vulnerable to these attacks than men, partly because they use the bathroom more often the lack of sanitation puts their lives at special risk. In fact, Mafevuka is one of many women and girls in informal settlements in South Africa who have been raped and murdered on their way to the bathroom. 2 Tracy Jooste and Nonhlanhla Mathibela, Asivikelane Brief 5, “Improving the Lives of Women in Informal Settlements Starts with Fixing Basic Services” (Capetown: Asivikelane, October 2020), 5. The result is overcrowding, and an inadequate distribution of basic services, including toilets. The population of Khayelitsha, for instance, a township established in 1982 on Cape Town’s periphery, remains 90.5 percent Black its density has mushroomed in the last decades. In cities like Cape Town, the growth of these townships is still constrained by apartheid-era buffer strips. Black laborers and their families were specifically placed in townships furthest from the city center, exacerbating economic disparities. These townships were separated from White areas and from each other with buffer strips such as highways, tree avenues, and green patches. Planners created neighborhoods, called “townships,” on the urban periphery for each of the three officially recognized non-White racial groups: Blacks, Coloureds, and Indians. The Group Areas Act of 1950 was used to justify the ethnic cleansing that followed. Architects bolstered and perpetuated apartheid, by designing buildings that upheld these divisions.Īll went to plan until the postwar economic boom of the 1950s, when large concentrations of squatter camps began to populate cities, due to increased urban labor demand and the resultant rural-urban migration. Urban planners selected the most attractive urban areas for the development of an exclusively White property market, and reserved infertile rural areas, far from city centers, for Black communities. 1 Patricia Johnson-Castle et al., “ The Group Areas of Act of 1950,” South African History Online (2014). The government elected in 1948 adopted the policy of apartheid so as to establish and maintain separate spaces for different racial groups. To understand Mafevuka’s story, it’s necessary to trace South Africa’s complex history all the way back to the introduction of Architecture with a capital “A.” In South Africa, architectural practice has its roots in slavery (1652-1834) and apartheid (1948-1994), which institutionalized and spatially formalized racism through land acts and building regulations. To understand the threats to women and girls in informal settlements, it’s necessary to trace South Africa’s history back to the introduction of Architecture with a capital ‘A.’ Days later, the 20-year-old’s body was found in a filthy toilet cubicle. ![]() Her home was in SST, one of Khayelitsha’s informal settlements, and like most homes in SST, it was not equipped with plumbing or running water. ![]() Mafevuka lived in Khayelitsha, near Cape Town. On Maat 8 pm, Sinoxolo Mafevuka left her corrugated sheet-iron home, toilet paper in hand, to relieve herself at the nearest public toilet. Patricia Mhoja Bandora December 2021 A young girl uses a public toilet in the Khayelitsha informal settlement, 2014.
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