Background of Area | Project Overview | Community Meeting | The Way Forward | ALL MULTIMEDIA

When we arrived in Kings Flats, we noticed that the landscape was quite dry and that the soil was eroded. Open areas were covered by litter but peoples’ gardens were well looked after.  The most obvious thing about Kings Flats is that, unlike most of Grahamstown, the area is flat. The surrounding countryside consists of low scrubland that has almost no trees or large bushes. Goats and cattle walk around and can even be found grazing in school fields.  

A house owner in Kings Flats uses thorn bushes as make-shift barbed wire.

Peoples’ attempts to secure their property were evident by fencing and chains tied together by locks. Some people had thorn bushes over their walls which served as makeshift barbed wire. There are many dogs in the township and they are used to protect properties. Kings Flats mainly consists of shacks and mud houses which show the severe poverty in the area and it is in contrast to other extensions which had more face-brick houses, some even with satellite dishes. There are indications that people are trying to make a life for themselves despite the poverty as many people take pride in their homes by having well tended gardens with multicoloured flowers and their homes are neat and clean.   

There are several important places of congregation and hubs of social interaction in Kings Flats which include churches and spaza shops. These are ‘third spaces’ in which people go to socialise or exchange gossip. Other important places in the area are a clinic, which offers basic medical services like vaccinations and family planning and a small satellite police station. (The larger station is in Joza township). 

Spaza shops serve as a space where residents come to catch up on the daily news.

There are informal leaders in the community. The first, Mrs George, offered to set up a focus group for us consisting of community members that were actively making a difference. Community members respect her and responded to her request to attend the focus group. The second informal leader, Elvis Jelo, is a well known figure head in the community and also offered to hold a focus group in his home which proved to be very successful.

Elvis Jelo is one of the informal community leaders in Kings Flats.

Foreigners seem to be a target of crime as a shop owned by Bangladeshi immigrants is constantly being robbed.  Everyone had a story about crime or knew someone who had been affected by crime. One of the concerns expressed by residents was that they wanted police to be more efficient as most people complained about a delay in police reaction time when crimes were reported.

A shop owner in Kings Flats experiences crime on a daily basis.

This approach of scouting the area is called civic mapping, and it’s a useful Journalism tool as it helped our group to get citizens’ opinions on important issues which affected them instead of the traditional journalistic model of reporting where journalists set the agenda for what they think is important to the community.  

One of our group members speaks to a Kings Flats resident about her concerns about crime in the area.

One of our group members chats to a Kings Flats resident.

Through civic mapping, we were able to identify the community members’ concerns about crime, one of them being the large number of youth who were committing crime. We were also able to identify the community’s needs, which ranged from needing more recreational facilities, both for school pupils and adults, to needing better sanitation and waste disposal systems. Although there is a community centre in Kings Flats where women of the community do beadwork and weaving, it lacks resources such as machinery and financial support.

Although civic mapping can be time consuming, it is inexpensive and it is a powerful tool as instead of concentrating on the official voices of the elite, we were able to tap into ordinary and often, marginalised voices. Civic mapping is useful as it allowed us to produce content for the community which was relevant and useful to them. Civic mapping also allowed our group to get a real sense of the community which we were reporting on and so it contributed to gaining a deeper understanding of the issues which are important to the Kings Flats community.