Endlovini

The project engages and highlights the impact of inequality and safety in relation to land occupation in South Africa, focusing on the silenced voices.  If you visit any black area in South Africa – especially in the city – you will find a housing section called ENDLOVINI. The Nguni term has a double meaning. The first literal translation is “at the elephant/place of the elephant”. The second meaning is more nuanced and slightly loaded: “the place at which we charged in and settled”. The term invokes, at least for mother-tongue speakers, a powerful image of resistance.

In collaboration with Onsite Collective, artist Wezile Harmans questions and exercises the notion of collective remembering, and explores how it can patiently help one to have a clear picture of certain events that happened and transpired, looking at Endlovini as a space of urgency and as a form of archive. 

The project was exhibited at WHATIF THE WORLD Gallery, Cape Town, from the 15th June to 27th July 2024.

Website: www.wezileharmans.com

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Ukundlova is an act of identifying a vacant piece of land on which to settle. Thereafter, a list of names is drawn up from backyard dwellers, new arrivals in the city and young adults looking to leave home out of necessity.

Once that is done, residents come together to partition the vacant land, so those in need of space are apportioned plots. Those allocated these plots then buy or source material and start building their shacks.

Necessities such as water, sanitation and electricity are often an afterthought and tend to be superseded by the urgent need to have a roof over one's head.

There are many such Endlovini settlements in the Eastern Cape (where the term originates) - stretching from Port Elizabeth, Port Alfred and Jeffreys Bay and beyond other cities)

This is how most new settlements develop. But the process is often complicated by bureaucracy. Officaldom dictates that such settlements are considered illegal because they come into existence without permission from the relevant authorities.