City of Cape Town’s Social Development event: International Day for the Eradication of Poverty

17 October 2013

Presentation by Evan Blake

Junior researcher, Cape Town Partnership

Last Thursday, the 10th of October, was World Homeless Day. At an event to commemorate this day

approximately 140 people gathered at St George’s Cathedral to communally break bread. The people who

gathered on this day were those who experience some of the most extreme forms of poverty in the central

city. These people, the poorest of the poor on our city’s streets, experience structural violence and

marginalisation as a part of daily life.

Those gathered at St George’s are diverse in their backgrounds, interests, hopes, dreams, fears and needs;

but are often labelled and clumped together with the identity label of ‘homeless’ or ‘bergie’. Those

gathered are often seen by us as being willingly on the street; their lives judged as being ‘nice’ and ‘easy’,

that they just don’t want to go home or be helped, that they are lazy and just need to pull it together and

help themselves.

If only it was this easy.

The reality, a reality we have to start acknowledging regardless of our position and prejudices, is that the

lives of those gathered at St George’s Cathedral last week are far more diverse and complex than what

most people would think. Some of these difficult and varied complexities people experience include:

People who have not seen their families in decades, who have no families, who have abusive families, who

have traumatic pasts, who have no family, who have no sense of what a home is.

People who have been in and out of shelter and rigid support systems, have tried desperately countless

times to meet half way with social workers and field workers but even those small expectations are too

daunting to tackle.

People who face seemingly insurmountable social, cultural and economic challenges that are so daunting

and complex they are near impossible to vocalise to another person: to the person you sleep next to, to

other people in similar circumstance and to a person trying to help you. The result is crippling anxiety,

depression and self-defeatism borne from holding onto this pressure. These difficult and complex realities

are diverse and are not uniform. They are people’s experiences and knowledges of poverty.

To take the challenge of alleviating poverty seriously is to acknowledge the need to confront and engage

with these very real experiences; as uncomfortable and difficult as they may be. To not engage is to ignore

and make invisible the very real experiences of citizens of this city. To ignore the need to engage with

peoples’ experiences, and to dictate what they need instead, is to entrench and perpetuate historical

legacies of misrepresentation, displacement and marginalisation.

By taking on the challenge to combat poverty we acknowledge that poverty cannot be alleviated by

sweeping people off the street, making their lives ‘uncomfortable’, or what amounts to ‘dumping’ them in

places outside of the city that may actually deepen their poverty.

To take on the challenge we reject quick fixes that ignore the multiple and varied deeper issues of poverty.

We reject making people invisible as an option. We reject simplifying peoples’ lives.

So what acknowledgements should we be making?

As citizens of this city, as mutual users of city space and those of us with the political and economic power,

let us give people their power back. Let us help everyone find their agency, their resiliency and their voice.

Let us foster and develop existing and potential skills of everyone in an engaged way. Let us be consistent

in our approach to all users of the city. Let us acknowledge street people as users of this city; that they are

not a temporary issue to ‘solved’.

Through these acknowledgments, let us work together to locate the glimmers of hope and resilience that

we all hold; from the person who has been living on the street for the longest period of time all the way up

to the CEO of the most powerful business. Through these acknowledgements let us speak to this hope, this

potential, in a way that creates dialogue and an exchange. An exchange that embraces creative, innovative

ways of knowing that build deeper relationships between us all.

Let us also think of outreach for people in precarious positions that takes engagement and capacity for

hope seriously. Outreach that is collaborative rather than top-down and paternalistic. Outreach that

enhances, fosters an enables self-determination; one of the building blocks of our constitution. Self-

determination that is often lost through having been embedded in poverty. Outreach that focuses on

positives of peoples’ lives and allows people to find their feet in a way that is meaningful and insightful for

them.

What I am speaking about today are not solutions to eradicate poverty. My aim has been to be rather

present the philosophy and the ethical commitment I have had to make through working face-to-face, one-

on-one with people on their own terms. My aim here today has been to raise basic acknowledgements we

need to make about peoples’ lives before we can even begin to seriously consider tackling poverty in the

central city. My aim has been to demonstrate the inarguable reality of life for citizens of this city, and that

in this reality we can all locate hope and inspiration.