I am Thulani Lamla. We are poor, living on the capitalist fringes. Mama decided that we should leave the poverty stricken, death filled village of Ngcobo, eternal home to Tata. This was some time after the 1994 elections – freed from homelands we spilled outwards towards new horizons.

Some people said Tata died of ugawulayo. Some call it that, ‘the one that chops down’. Some call it AIDS and others amagam’ amathathu, ‘three letters’. The death certificate read ‘Tuberculosis’. I couldn't really read English, and that was a big word, simply meaning ‘i-TB’.

‘Akukho nto siyihlaleleyo apha, my son,’ Mama explained to me as we boarded the crammed Blue Line Bus for Cape Town. She was right – there was nothing holding us to that forsaken place. The city with its abundance was our future. Mama would look for a job and I would attend school, where teachers could teach me English with an accent! It would be a new beginning for us, a fresh start, with freedom on our side.

At first we stayed with Uncle, at the crowded Marconi Beam squatter camp just outside the city: person upon person, shack upon shack, racked and stacked. Uncle lived with Aunty and my precocious cousin, Noluthando, protected by Church and the Holy Trinity.

Mama tried hard to find a job, walking through the streets of the Southern Suburbs, diminutive in the shade of mansions, in search of domestic work. She did not find work, not even with freedom. We ate what was left from the emptied plates of others, once in a while affording dog-bones to make soup. Suburban dogs were fat, sleeping warmly inside large houses on specially made soft beds – those in squatter camps starved until their bones stuck out awkwardly, that's what I saw. All we could afford were those dog bones.

Eventually, Mama stopped looking and started to work the dump, digging, digging deep. There was no other way. I helped her as much as I could. Every day we waited for the swollen garbage trucks to bring the reeking rubbish, bagged in black, then spilling it out. Like carrion eaters, we swooped on it, tearing it apart with our bare hands. Fights broke out when someone took something that you had already claimed, fights of freedom, poverty and redistribution.