Township areas suffer urban woes, without the advantages of an urban area because they are in a rural setting: typically, they are high unemployment, unserviced, no-hope situations with a fractured civil society that has virtually no organization, according to Kotze. "I would venture to say that these urban areas are worse-off than the squatter areas of the big cities," she said. Apathy has prevailed in these communities as they have a long history of poverty and disenfranchisement.
In 1994, the region including Wakkerstroom had an illiteracy rate of more than 50 percent, and 40 percent of residents had had less than six years of schooling. Among blacks, the percentage of single language speakers (Zulu) may be as high as 90 percent, of whom are 70 percent functionally illiterate.
In 1995, less than 1 percent of the Wakkerstroom area population had a college education, and more than 85 percent had less than an 8th grade education. But the recent revival in Wakkerstroom's economy is cause for hope. Seventy-five percent of new immigrants to the area, most of whom are in early or partial retirement, have a college education, and they have brought back the skills base that Wakkerstroom had lost. They have helped make Wakkerstroom a lively, vibrant, thriving town, as evidenced by active participation in the Wetland Natural Heritage Association, the Grass and Wetland Tourism Association, a Business Forum, and a Cultural Association that is concerned with the build environment and the cultural history of present and former inhabitants of the Wakkerstroom area.
"I think the most powerful change has been that when I arrived here in 1989, people were essentially shamefaced that they were living here and not in some prosperous place – you would have been hard pressed to find some one proud of this place," Kotze said. "Today, you would be equally hard pressed to find someone who is not extremely proud of this town and the surrounding area. The influx of new residents has also increased the skills base tremendously, as the depopulation of the rural areas meant a loss of skills – hence the turn around of the downward spiral into an upward spiral that has resulted in the skills base returning. And that is what a community needs – human capital. It is far more important than money, as the money will follow if the human capital is high, but the converse is not necessarily true."
"We have a poor, but peaceful community, and I ascribe this to the fact that there is hope in this community, and the hope stems from the renewal that they have witnessed," Kotze said. "Our former white school, which became empty in 1993 because there just were not anymore white kids in town, was handed over to the black school for use without any incident or any opposition."
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