The work of whoonga, an epidemic on the move

The stereotype of whoonga users remains that of city criminals. Yet to fully grasp whoonga’s political dimensions, scholars and activists need to better connect the heroin crisis to the decline of formal employment and the epidemic of casual work.

South Africa’s heroin epidemic is usually talked about as a crime issue. It is a story of drug cartels and crime-ridden places like “Whoonga park” — the name given to Durban’s Albert Park.

Yet addiction to low-grade heroin—whoonga/nyaope/sugars on the streets—needs to be seen as part of a long history of how drugs connect people to the world of work.

A typical morning in a settlement south of Durban reveals just how hard whoonga users work to sustain their addiction.

As a winter chill lingers in the air, a steady flow of young men in their 20s and early 30s pass on the street. Mandla pushes a wheelbarrow full of empty plastic containers that he will use to collect water for a neighbour. Sifiso walks with a rake over his shoulder on his way to clean a yard. Wandile and Siyanda carry a crate of beer to a shebeen. (Pseudonyms used.)

Other addicts wash residents’ cars, assist backyard mechanics, collect scrap metal, plaster houses, and so on.

Whoonga users restlessly phanta (hustle for work). Frequently on the move, they work hard just to look for work.

Most heroin users in fact don’t live in central parts of cities, and committing crimes is not the main way they make money. Piece-work jobs underlie a stop-start rhythm that feeds the craving for heroin.

Withdrawal symptoms include joint aches, headaches, and a stomach that feels like it is tied in knots. “I don’t even know how to explain the (withdrawal) pain you feel inside,” says Jabulani, who smoked Mandrax before getting hooked on whoonga, and was off to wash taxis when we spoke.

Whoonga addicts form part of the country’s modern army of casual workers. But they are not the underpaid factory workers employed through labour brokers and championed by trade unions.

Piece work close to home can provide a string of R25 whoonga fixes. These might be as little as two whoonga capsules a day or more than 10. Ukuphanta is not new, but it becomes a way of life when drugs mix with inequalities and joblessness.

The connection between heroin and casual work today is therefore just another chapter in the long association between work and drugs. Recall the dop/tot system whereby Cape vineyards paid workers partly in wine: profit and alcoholism became two sides of the same coin.

Or consider the “Durban system” developed in the early 20th Century. Municipal beer halls instituted a monopoly on “native beer” to ensure that workers’ money was ploughed back into funding hostels, police, and other institutions that controlled urban black Africans.