Beware of practising your righteousness before other people in order to be seen by them, for then you will have no reward from your Father who is in heaven. Thus, when you give to the needy, sound no trumpet before you, as the hypocrites do in the synagogues and in the streets, that they may be praised by others. Truly, I say to you, they have received their reward. But when you give to the needy, do not let your left hand know what your right hand is doing, so that your giving may be in secret. And your Father who sees in secret will reward you.
Matthew 6:1-4
Man, those were the days.
I’m referring, of course, to the time before Charity Inc., back when humans were encouraged to give away a portion of their bounty quietly, in order to preserve not only their own modesty, but the self-worth of those they were ostensibly helping. In ancient Abrahamic cultures, the paying of tithes—tzadek in Hebrew, and much later zakat in Arabic—was a simple obligation. As societies evolved, tithing became distinct from paying taxes—“Render to Caesar the things that are Caesar’s, and to God the things that are God’s,” said Christ, controversially. It was all a way for cultures to maintain a semblance of equanimity, a form of heavenly-ordained socialism that was destined not to last, and has now been reduced to just another reality TV logline.
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I’m the last person to advocate a regression to the Days of Yore, when Yahweh was Yahweh, men were men, and toothaches were terminal. But it’s interesting how Judeo-Christian notions of charity have been discarded in the service of Celebrity Giving—the whizz-bang, paparazzi-accompanied poverty-porn that is the hallmark of cultures that venerate CEOs as high priests. I offer as Exhibit A the recent 702 Sun International CEO SleepOut, a “global challenge” newly imported to South Africa in order to raise money for, and awareness of, the plight of homeless children.
Indeed, 250 captains of South African industry—such as there is any—were last week determined to raise the profile of this “invisible” scourge. But what scourge were they referring to, exactly? The most recent study of South African homelessness was undertaken in Cape Town by the Western Cape’s Department of Social Development and Early Childhood Development, and published in March of this year. The researchers interviewed 2,508 respondents about life on the streets of the Mother City, and found that “many cited problems with adequate housing as their reason for being homeless. Just over 13 percent of the people living in shelters said they had left home because of family problems. Substance abuse also featured. Other reasons cited include gangsterism, being a foreigner and struggling to find work, having no family, unemployment and even ill health.”
Speaking of ill health, a 2010 study published in the journal Development Southern Africa found that about half of all homeless people suffered from mental illnesses. What’s more, the majority of homeless, at least according to the Department of Social Development and Early Childhood Development study, didn’t actually live on the streets, but instead slept in shelters, and were therefore literally invisible—at least to those of us who don’t frequent these filthy, underfunded nightmare-scapes.
None of which explains what “homelessness” is in a South African context. For that, we need to consider how those same studies cited above have found a significant percentage of the city’s homeless aren’t homeless at all, but live in faraway townships, and are therefore considered “temporary overnight sleepers”. This immense cohort is on the street because the mechanisms of Apartheid have not been dismantled, and they cannot afford to travel from home to work. “Chances are that this is a typically South African phenomenon,” the academic Jacques du Toit has written, “and there are similar groups of homeless people across all six South Africa’s metropolitan municipalities, since the peripheral location of townships and informal settlements is characteristic of South African cities.”
The definitions get trickier: the South African Homeless Peoples’ Federation regards informal settlement dwellers as homeless, but acknowledging that outlook would nudge our CEOs into dangerous political waters. After all, a context-free homeless person, like a rain-soaked YouTube kitten, can melt even the toughest venture capitalist’s heart. A person who has illegally occupied a plot of land is an irksome glitch in capital’s matrix, and must immediately be bulldozed into oblivion.
By now you likely know where I’m going with this. Our CEOs and their numerous corporate sponsors picked an issue that no one with a soul could object to, and stripped it of context in order to “solve” it. In a self-aggrandising display of philanthropic pantomime, they took to the streets of the City of Sand in their be-logoed boxes, armed with about a billion rand’s worth of outdoor clobber and a bottomless supply of cup-a-soup—and instead of raising awareness, they rebranded it.