Hit by Unequal Extreme Heat in Cities– Black South Africans Retreat to Cooler Rural Homes

Tello Moloi, 40, has spent half his life in Alexandria, a tough area of Johannesburg city, South Africa, and weather temperatures were always ‘fairly normal,’ he says.

Something has changed dramatically in recent times. 

In the last decade, summers in Alexandria – where green urban forests are rare, and populations are squeezed in close quarters - have gotten torturously warmer, with temperatures consistently reaching the 40s. This gives little respite to some of South Africa’s poorest, who must also contend with flash floods drenching their makeshift plastic homes.

Unequal Cities

Yet across the city in upper-class Sandton, Johannesburg’s wealthiest suburb and Africa’s ‘richest neighborhood’, it’s much cooler thanks to well-maintained urban forests that are manicured by hired gardeners (most who hail from poverty-stricken slums like Moloi’s) and corporate landscape companies. 

 “We, the poor, can’t survive healthily in hot slums anymore,” he says.

Moving across the city to tree-lined and cooler neighborhoods like Sandton is unthinkable, as a one-bedroom apartment in Sandton’s gated estates, rentals start at R20,000 ($1,100). This differs radically from the slums of Alexandria, where the poor don’t need any permit to erect a plastic and wood shackhouse for R00 ($50). 

Moloi’s urban heat struggles mirror those of  2 million, mainly Black households, living in slums across South Africa’s cities. A local study, published in Bloomberg last month, released damning findings that Johannesburg city’s slums (where folks of color live) are 6 degrees Celsius hotter than wealthier suburbs. 

Whilst Johannesburg has 2 million trees, 80% of them are in posh neighborhoods (mostly White areas), ‘a brutally enduring environmental legacy of apartheid colonialism that heaps all elements of extreme weather on the back of the poor, be it extreme heat, flash floods, mudslides,’ says environmental consultant, Shamiso Mupara. 

Yet, South Africa is one of the countries warming faster than the global average – and its urban poor endure a different heat than the wealthy, she explains. “If you are in Alexandria, a slum suburb in Johannesburg, your tin and plastic one-room is extremely cold in winter, wet under your bed in the rainy season, and the walls are too hot to touch in October,” she says. 

“Across the pond in Sandton suburb, your apartment is insulated by green tree shrubs, supercooled by thermostats, and buffeted from hot air swirls by green soaking ponds in private parks”.

Back to Nature

As a solution, thousands of people from poor South African households like Moloi’s family are retracing their footsteps to rural ancestral homes – where land is free and dense forests are still intact. 

One such rural province is Limpopo, where the urban poor, unwilling to retire in hot urban slums, are building sustainable rural homes from cheap materials in districts where virgin forests and unpolluted rivers can provide cooler climates. 

“It’s a menacing choice for us, the urban poor – retire and get sick in hot urban shanty towns or build homes in our rural districts where the climate is cooler and land is free,” says Moloi.

In his village in Vhenda, 600km from Johannesburg, Moloi is part of a group of five friends, all of whom have returned from city slums to decamp in their rural homelands. In the rural districts, land is usually free, a tradition of family matriarchs passing it down to children.

“We are perplexed by the recent profile of our children leaving city slums to come back home and resettle in rural districts,” says Toni Mphephu Ramabulana, King of the Vhavhenda, one of the largest tribal authorities in South Africa’s northern Limpopo province, a largely rural state. In the past, returnees would cite hunger and joblessness as the reasons for abandoning cities like Johannesburg to re-establish themselves in rural homelands. 

Now, they are furious that “the weather elements in city slums are punishing, extreme. The poor live at the mouth of heatwaves, floods, and hunger at the same time,” he says, revealing that in his rural kingdom, 120 families have arrived in the last three months alone, citing unlivable city slums.

Growing Phenomenon

Unequal heat experienced by different demographics within one country or city is an emerging phenomenon in South Africa. 

This is sparking a climate-induced re-emigration of the urban poor from ‘unliveable city slums’ to once-shunned but now enviably cooler rural districts, says Tapuwa Nhachi, a climate activist and former analyst at the regional Center for Natural Resources Governance.

City planning in South Africa, established 100 years ago, was shaped by colonial architecture arising from excessive coal mining and didn’t anticipate that cities would get extremely hot at varying intensities depending on where one lives. 

Rapidly warming cities in South Africa take the biggest hit from burning fossil fuels in faraway factories in China and North America, Nhachi explains.

“But our cities are hot from misdeeds closer to home - the giant coal power plants and mines we have run in South Africa for the last 100 years, right on the edges of Johannesburg city”, he adds. 

For new migrants retracing their footsteps back to cooler rural lands like Moloi, the changes have been soothing. 

“My children were having nasty rashes from heatwaves in Johannesburg’s slums. Since resettling back to our rural homestead and small farm, they have thrived, drinking fresh groundwater and feeling cooled at night from the orange trees that surround our home,” he says.