PHOTOS: Why South Africans Built An Illegal Settlement Called Covid

[milestogo]

Izwelethu, also known as "Covid," is an illegal settlement outside Cape Town comprising more than 800 tin shacks and 3,000-plus residents. It was started in March, when South Africa's national lockdown began. Some roofs are secured with bricks. With the winds of summer now blowing, more bricks will likely be needed.
Samantha Reinders for NPR

If you ask Alfred Sonandi where he lives, he'll tell you Izwelethu. "It sounds nice," he says. "It means 'Our Land' in Xhosa [one of South Africa's 11 languages]. But to be honest, almost everyone here calls it 'Covid.' And 'nice' is not really the word I'd use ..."

Izwelethu, also known as "Covid," is a densely populated settlement in South Africa comprising more than 800 tin shacks and 3,000-plus residents. It was founded in March, when South Africa's national lockdown began, and has been weathering a number of storms ever since — the meteorological ones that the "Cape of Storms" is infamous for, and the grim epidemiological storm of a global pandemic.

The shacks bump up against the township of Mfuleni on one side and the Kuils River on the other. Standing on Covid's sandy hilltop, you can see Table Mountain in the distance. In the first weeks of June all you could hear in Covid was hammering — the ear-piercing repetition of hammers on sheet metal and nails being driven into wood. You had to raise your voice to be heard.

A month later that sound had faded into the background as the sounds of everyday life took over: kids laughing, a soccer ball being kicked, music pumping from a tavern. It's a rough metaphor for the COVID-19 pandemic: The panic that gripped South Africa in those early days has fast become the new normal here.







More photos and text at link: https://www.npr.org/sections/goatsandsoda/2020/11/15/934003088/photos-why-south-africans-built-an-illegal-settlement-called-covid