Housing heroine Mafokeng dies
2003-09-08 07:53
Johannesburg - Anna Mafokeng, a South African woman from an impoverished township who received international attention for founding an innovative women's housing cooperative that built hundreds of brick homes where once only tin shacks stood, has died, colleagues said on Sunday. She was 47.
Mafokeng died after a long illness, said Thembi Nkambule. Nkambule is project administrator of the Masisizane Woman's Housing Cooperative that Mafokeng helped create four years ago.
Mafokeng began the project after attending the funeral of a young boy who drowned when the ramshackle hut he lived in was swept away in the rain.
Built a brick house
She and several other women, frustrated the long wait for promised government housing, pooled their money, bought bricks and cement and built the boy's mother a house.
Four years later the housing cooperative has helped provide houses for over 1 500 people, built day-care centres and provided steady jobs to dozens of unemployed women in Ivory Park, east of Johannesburg.
The cooperative - called Masisizane, or "To Help one Another" in Zulu -now has 18 000 members. In small groups of 70 each, the women pool in about R20 a week. When they have enough money, all the women in the pool take about two weeks to finish a one-room house.
They make their own bricks and have learned how to build and wire the houses.
The cooperative has also gained attention for being run by women, for women and their families.
About 11 million South Africans live without proper shelter, and as more people migrate to the cities, the number of homeless is on the rise, despite the R3-billion a year the government is spending on housing.
Housing ministry officials have praised Mafokeng's efforts, saying the cooperative is a model for the nation.
Mafokeng's death is "a great loss," said Nkambule. "We will remember her for her efforts for the community. She also encouraged us to work as women, not to rely on men."
She is survived by two sons, aged 17 and 21.
- AP