Crammed into two sloping hillsides, it is home to some 40,000 people, all black. They live in homemade shacks sided with corrugated iron roofing, abandoned doors, and plywood scraps. They have neither sewers nor running water. Streets and dooryards are bare, packed dirt. Even though you can see the city skyline 27 miles away, there's little public transportation.
Most people here are unemployed.
Because at last the shacks are beginning to come down. They're being replaced by spare but solid one-room houses with bathrooms, running water, sewers, and electricity. Judging by the swarms of workers lugging bricks and mixing mortar, dozens more will be completed in the next few weeks, thanks in large part to Planact, a nonprofit organization that established the CDF here. You can also find optimism at the other end of the scale in the Johannesburg suburb of Parktown. In a seminar we conducted at the Graduate School of Business Administration of the University of the Witwatersrand, eight senior executives, black and white, talked for two days about business ethics.