Burgersdorp

Burgersdorp lies north of Queenstown. The road sweeps through grass plains and distant blue hills towards Aliwal North and the Free State. This is the heart of merino sheep-farming country. Burgersdorp – which means Town of Citizens – was established by Voortrekkers in 1846. Deeply conservative, it was never an easy place in which to live. The town is still rigidly segregated, a legacy of both the apartheid-era town planning that is stamped on even the smallest of South African towns and the widening income gap between South Africans. The national road bisects the bedraggled and increasingly crowded townships: coloured to the west, black to the east. The old council houses are now fringed by 1000 newly built low-cost houses. These, in turn, are ringed by informal settlements. Nestled under the Stormberg Mountains is the formerly white town where only a handful of black professionals have bought homes.

What challenges face the Advice Office:

Burgersdorp is dominated by an imposing church in the central square. Crowded around it and the other gently decaying Victorian buildings is a bustle of street vendors, small shops, briskly trading bottle stores, hooting taxis, residents haggling over the food and cheap Chinese goods on sale. Despite this vibrant informal sector, unemployment is very high and increasing numbers of unemployed farm workers are moving to town. Most families depend on government grants – a pension, a disability or child-care grant – for the cash needed for survival.

The Burgersdorp Advice Office, although busy, is beset by the internecine politics that brews malignantly in some small towns. Lack of resources, municipal nepotism, official inertia and slow delivery frustrate the development initiatives needed to make social justice a reality for the 200 000 people who live in Burgersdorp and its satellite villages and farms. Investment capital has been slow to materialise, thus delaying local economic development initiatives. Although there are both primary and secondary schools in Burgersdorp, the lack of tertiary opportunities means that much-needed skills cannot be developed locally. Because the income of most families is so appalling low, very few matriculants can afford to study further as they cannot move away. The advice office – kept grimly busy dealing with gross human rights violations during the apartheid era – remains as busy as ever. Their work ensures that people have access to the social grants to which they are entitled, while protecting the rights of vulnerable individuals as they are enshrined in South Africa’s fabled constitution.The advice office has facilitated many community workshops on grants, social justice as well as healthcare. As a result of these training workshops increasingly more community members are accessing these government facilities.

Objectives and Programmes:

To provide participants with an understanding of the basic conditions of the employment act by holding workshops that focus on the following key areas: basic employment conditions, contracts, farm worker rights, maternity leave and sick leave.

To provide participants with an understanding of their role in supporting and assisting domestic violence victims and planning for their safety by holding workshops which focus on: major causes and contributing factors towards domestic violence; training in support & safety; interviewing/counselling skills training.

To empower the community on human rights issues in order to identify shortfalls in their daily lives through a series of workshops which will cover the following areas: the constitution, human rights, the bill of rights, equality in the work place – no discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation, marital status, gender, children’s rights.

Burgersdorp Advice Office
1 and 3 Colin Street
P.O. Box 478 BURGERSDORP, 9774
Tel/Fax: 051 653 0735
Contact: Mzwanele Kelengeshe