Romeo Dipura's passion to make the excluded visible

I grew up in Zimbabwe, in a small city on the eastern border of Mozambique, with my mother and sisters. My father was always away looking for work so he wasn’t around and things weren’t easy. I remember in 2003, my family was in a dire economic situation, so my mother negotiated with one of my neighbours to work their field. We cultivated maize and just when the crop was ready for harvest, the council came and slashed everything, saying it was too close to the river. I remember my mother crying, “What am I supposed to do?”

A few years later, in 2005, my mother received a call from one of my aunts, saying her house had been destroyed under Operation Murambatsvina (Move the Rubbish) in Harare – again I saw her tears and it was terrible.

I tried my best in school, and after getting relatively good grades I was accepted into the University of Zimbabwe. Things were still tight. I could not afford residence and had to live some distance away in a high density suburb of Harare, but I managed to graduate at the top of my class that year. I was offered an internship to work for a housing trust. This experience grounded me in the struggles for housing and basic infrastructure in the city. Through that I managed to see what ordinary people had to go through just to belong. That is where I began to develop a zeal to pursue something bigger than myself, to ask, “what is my role as a scholar to make visible the struggles that people endure?”

Living in a township outside of Cape Town, one evening at around 7pm some guys came to our house. They knocked on the door and asked us to come out. “We are going to fight the guys who are making illegal connections,” they said, and asked us to join them. I found myself in a tight spot. It felt difficult for me to challenge the locals because, despite the fact that we had been having successive black outs because of illegal connections, I was an immigrant living in an RDP house[1]. But I had to comply.

There are stories here of families burning in their homes because of malfunctioning electricity connections.

I decided to use infrastructure access as a lens to look at urban citizenship. The topic of my research is “Connections Matter: Grey Space Electricity Access and Citizen Agency in Witsand”. My study is around the everyday struggles of ordinary people in accessing electricity and what they do to access such an elusive basic service. It seeks to look at how they encounter risk, merge their own modes of electricity access with the national service provider, and how that can help us to look at agency and citizenship.

In order to theorise from the perspective of people living in these precarious conditions, I also live in the same space so that I really capture those voices and make them visible. And to avoid imposing any kind of hierarchy of meaning I take a collaborative approach.

I have been struggling with self-doubt for a while – sometimes when things don’t work out, I feel like giving up. What keeps me going is the thought that I am not alone. What I am doing is so much bigger than me – it’s not about me. The substance of my work is about people who want to be heard, who want their struggles to be seen and to exert agency over their lives.

Finding people who feel the same way you do and are pursuing the same cause has helped. You realise you can change the world if you set your mind to it. I want to do my part and lay the path for others to continue.

I feel extremely privileged to be part of this wonderful Canon Collins family. I feel at home – in a place with people who are likeminded and championing the cause of doing things for the good of others.

[1] Reconstruction and Development Programme (RDP) houses were built by the government to meet the housing crisis and redress the apartheid backlog. While it is more nuanced than this, RDP houses typically have electricity access while shacks do not.