Tunatazama - Community Monitors

The tailings farms become an exile to illegal immigrants!!

Community Alerts/Thokozile Mntambo/Soweto/02/02/18

Today I spoke to a woman from Maputo, she lives in the tailings. She had been hired to work there with her husband by South African farmers. She says she wakes up every morning to go and work on the field planting mealies every day and her husband takes the cattle out to graze every day. Since they arrived in South Africa they don’t have passports, so these farmers hide them and pay them for working even though the money is not enough to have a decent living, at least they don’t sleep on an empty stomach.

They say they suffer a lot from headaches and eye problems, they are even afraid to go to clinics because they don’t have ID document. This is not the only family working for the farmers, there are more women from Maputo who work for the farmers and they pay them cents because they are illegal immigrants. They did not want me to take their picture cause they are afraid they might get in trouble. By Thokozile Mntambo