The woman raising 98 children with disabilities
This week, we start in Nigeria, where hundreds have been killed in attacks on Benue’s border communities. Next, we travel to Kenya, a woman is caring for children with disabilities abandoned by their families. Finally, we stop in the US, where same-sex marriage rights face new threats, a decade after they were legalised.
But first, in South Africa, Liziwe Damba shares the story of her father, a street vendor in Khayelitsha, Cape Town. Despite the end of apartheid, he faced many struggles including limited market access, no formal documentation, and forced evictions that kept him, like many others, on the margins.
Today, vendors still deal with the same challenges, from poor infrastructure to minimal government support. Her father retired in 2019, but the fight for dignity and stability continues.
Read an excerpt here👇🏽:
My father was a street vendor in post apartheid South Africa. Decades later, not much has changed.
At the edge of a township called Khayelitsha, just outside Cape Town, my father built a business with his bare hands. He sold building materials: zinc sheets, timber, ceiling boards, nails—items used to erect the very homes our neighbours lived in. It wasn’t glamorous. But it was honest work, and it kept food on our table.
His name is Lindile Lennox Damba, and in 2005, more than a decade after the official end of apartheid, he became a street vendor. This was not the kind of entrepreneurial dream often romanticised in boardrooms or business schools. My father sold goods beneath a makeshift structure in Site B, a part of Khayelitsha characterised by informal housing. The stalls were basic. The work, gruelling. The profits, modest and unpredictable. But for my father—and many like him—it was all they had in a country still wrestling with the legacy of systemic exclusion.
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On a muddy, uneven and unnamed road on the outskirts of the eastern city of Jinja, children laugh and play in a compound surrounded by green hills and sugarcane plantations.
A child hurtles his wheelchair down the driveway at breakneck speed towards a heavy gate manned by a friendly security guard. On the worn concrete veranda, a young boy with hydrocephalus – a condition in which fluid enlarges the skull – laughs loudly as he plays checkers with two friends.
The cheerful atmosphere belies the difficult backgrounds of the 98 children – aged six months to 18 years – who live on the compound. All were abandoned. Most were babies when their parents left them. Some were left at the compound gate, others at hospital after they were born while one three-year-old boy was rescued from his home days after his parents disappeared.