Protests over lack of housing and other basic services broke out in several cities across South Africa on Wednesday, underlining the slow pace of change for millions of poor blacks a decade after apartheid's end.
Police fired tear gas and rubber bullets against hundreds of protesters who erected barricades of burning tires in Happy Valley, an inaptly named slum settlement outside Cape Town.
Some 2,000 residents of the poor township of Segunda in the northern Cape marched to the town hall demanding the mayor's resignation for his failure to improve abysmal living conditions.
Elsewhere in the northern Cape province, demonstrators blocked a key highway near the diamond center of Kimberly for several hours. In the southern coastal city of Port Elizabeth, tensions were still high following days of protests there.
And in the capital, Pretoria, hundreds of destitute and disabled protesters with banners bearing slogans like "welfare is bleeding, the nation is dying" took to the streets to call for higher benefits.
In a speech to parliament on Wednesday, President Thabo Mbeki said the demonstrations were driven by "feelings among some of the poor that, so far, the democratic order has failed them."
Bantu Holomisa, leader of the small opposition United Democratic Movement, warned of the "danger that these protests could easily spiral out of control."
"A ripple here and a ripple there could easily become a wave of national uprising if valid frustrations are not addressed," Holomisa said.
Eleven years after South Africa's multiracial elections, the government is struggling to overturn the legacy of years of racial segregation and systematic neglect of social and economic rights of the black majority.
The scale of the challenge is overwhelming on the Cape Flats -- a grim, wind-swept collection of crime-infested townships used in the apartheid era to house blacks and mixed-race communities straddling the N2 highway between the graceful center of Cape Town and the airport.
Housing Minister Lindiwe Sisulu has launched the N2 Gateway Project to try to replace the tin and cardboard shacks along the highway by 2010 in a bid to improve the quality of life for hundreds of thousands of locals -- and get rid of an embarrassing eyesore before the anticipated influx of millions of tourists into the "Mother City" for the World Cup soccer finals.
The aim is to build modest family homes and subsidized apartment blocks, and build roads and sewage systems as well as more facilities like schools and clinics. Authorities also want to build housing near the city center, thus reversing apartheid-era policies which forced people to live in the townships far away from their places of work. With only 27 percent of residents having access to electricity and only 3 percent access to flush or chemical toilets in the worst-hit suburbs, tempers have reached breaking point.
"We are not going anywhere until officials tell us what they are going to do," said Nkosinathi Mzayiya, a spokesman for Happy Valley's Backyard Dwellers, so named because they have flimsy shacks in the back yard of someone else's shack.
"There are no services and no schools for the children. Our children have to get up as early as 5 o'clock in the morning to wait for buses to take them to school," he told South African television.
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