Fra Business Day (South Africa), by Jonny Steinberg
October 9, 2006

Some months ago, a fieldworker from an orphan support organisation in an old Transkei village agreed to let me shadow her for a day.

I shall call her Siphokazi. She was in her late 20s, and her job was both grinding and modest: it was to find all the orphans living in her jurisdiction, to ensure that their guardians received child support grants, that they were going to school, and that they were not being physically abused.

One after another, the places we visited were dismal beyond description. Our first port of call was a one-room mud hut, the thatched roof torn and patched, the door frame rusted and without a door. Two large, emaciated dogs were tethered to a post, and the yard in front of the hut was strewn with dog turd.

An elderly man and woman sat on chairs out in the open. Three children, the oldest about 14, the youngest four or five, came out of the hut to greet us.“This is a miserable place,” Siphokazi said as we made our way from the car, and her comment took in not just the physical state of the hut but also its isolation. For even by the old Transkei’s backwater standards, it was in the middle of nowhere: nothing around it but veld and scrub, the nearest tarred roads, running water and electricity some 15km away, the nearest clinic and school even further.

The two older kids gathered their schoolbooks and brought them to Siphokazi, a timeworn ritual, it seemed. As she paged through them the old man and woman watched her with interest. He was the kids’ grandfather; she was his sister. All five of them were living off his pension. The old woman had come to stay here when her husband kicked her out of his home. In her haste to leave, she had left her ID behind, and had thus lost access to her pension.

“Why are they not getting child support grants for the kids?” I asked.“When you live out here,” Siphokazi replied, “you cannot just get a grant. The social worker will visit at some point, perhaps later this year.”

“But surely your organisation can pay the taxi fare to take them to the welfare office in town,” I asked.“We have tried that. They were sent home and told to wait for the social worker.”

At a loss for what else to say, I asked how the kids were doing in school. “They are clever,” she replied. “I have noticed that all orphans are clever.”

“Why do you think that is?”“I have thought a lot about that. I think God intervenes to make up for their misfortune.”

I stared at her, first in disbelief, then in despair. If these three kids had come off a shelf of human souls, to be distributed at random into the world, they had found themselves on the proverbial rubbish heap: in the furthest corner of the remotest dumping ground of the most unequal society on the planet. No God could possibly have put them here.

And if a potential Einstein or Tolstoy does indeed reside in their native intelligence, nobody will ever know about it.

I wondered how Siphokazi’s conception of things worked. Perhaps evil, or just cold indifference, distributes souls into the world. Perhaps God gets a look-in at the last second, giving the truly downtrodden that little bit extra.

On the drive home, I asked Siphokazi about herself. She said that she had matriculated a decade ago and had not found formal employment since. “I have had two job offers in my life and it was clear that both involved sleeping with the boss. I said no. With this orphan work, I am a volunteer, I get paid a small stipend, but the work is meaningful, and the boss is an honest man.”

As she spoke, it became clear that her comment about the orphans’ brains was as much about her life as theirs, and when, on the outskirts of town, she asked if we could stop to buy her weekly Lotto ticket, I was not at all surprised. For God and the Lotto ticket share the same function: they contort the world into a shape that appears to give the wretched a future.

I guess this is better, I thought to myself, than a poisonous envy of those who do have real futures. And it is better, too, than utter despair.In any event, from the vantage point of my day with Siphokazi, it seemed that those who need democracy most are least equipped to use it; the poorest of the poor are too busy remoulding the world into tolerable shapes to demand much from those who govern them.