INTRODUCTION

‘Virginia’ lives in a one-room corrugated-iron shack in one of the largest informal settlements in South Africa, Orange Farm, a place characterised by large-scale poverty, with an estimated population of 1.5 million people. It began as an informal settlement in 1987 as a result of the growing housing crisis in Gauteng Province, and most of the people live in self-made shacks like Virginia's. Virginia, like the majority of the people of Orange Farm, is unemployed, while others have low-paid and precarious employment in casual or contract jobs. In her daily life, Virginia demonstrates the resourcefulness that desperately poor people need to survive in contemporary South Africa. While she previously engaged in informal economic activity — hawking vegetables and fruit in downtown Johannesburg — she now has to rely on the meagre social pension of ZAR 740 a month.

Service delivery in Orange Farm ranges from poor to non-existent. There is no proper sanitation, with most households relying on the hated bucket latrine system. Virginia has access to electricity via the ‘pre-paid system’. When I spoke to her in 2003, she said she could cope with this, as she said she could use a mix of energy sources, such as candles for lighting and paraffin in a primus stove, or coal or wood for cooking. But she said she could not cope without water, and the prospect of doing so loomed, as pre-paid meters were being installed in the area. This is part of a global trend of privatising a natural resource that is essential to all life forms, water. Once understood as a commonly held resource, to be managed by communities and states for the public good, water is now being redefined as a commodity to be managed by market forces.

PRIVATISATION

Nature is increasingly the ‘public’ domain, or area of life previously held in common, that is being privatised. The terrifying reality is ‘not that humans are changing nature but that nature is ceasing to be common, that it is becoming private property and exclusively controlled by its new owners’ (Hardt and Negri, 2004: 72). Increasingly the ‘new owners’ are powerful multinational corporations concerned largely with profit, not human needs.