Everyone is in celebration mode. Yellow, green, and black signs have been appropriated from lampposts and strung up along fence posts. Mandela for President. The People’s Choice! Vote ANC! People spill out of shacks and into the lanes. Some are draped in ANC flags, and some are clutching beer bottles while others hold gourds of sorghum beer, umqombothi, or cartons of fermented mahewu.

“Here, sister,” a neighbor says, passing Zodwa a bottle of Black Label. “Drink this. Beer is good for the baby. It will make him big and strong.”

Zodwa smiles and thanks him for the offering. She wishes instead that he would give her some of the sheep’s head that he’s roasting on a grill over a drum. The smell of the meat makes her stomach rumble.

“Viva, Mandela! Viva, freedom!” The cries ring out from all sides.

She keeps walking, skirting the shack that stands all by itself on a corner. It’s the only one in the squatter camp that doesn’t have three or more other shacks pressed up against it. The woman who lives inside it, Gertie, is rumored to have the killing sickness, ingculaza, or AIDS as the whites call it. As bad as Zodwa’s luck has been of late, at least she’s not an untouchable like Gertie, who’s wasted away, gone from being over a hundred kilos to looking like a skeleton the last time Zodwa saw her.

The sun is setting as Zodwa steps from the muddy, littered lane into the main road, and it lights up the clouds in the pinks of cosmos flowers, and the greens and purples of cabbage leaves. It sometimes amazes Zodwa that beauty can exist in a place like the township. With all its shacks thrown together from things the white man has found no use for, or hasn’t been vigilant enough to guard, it’s a festering pile of scrap metal. And yet as unsightly as it is, as fragmented and desperate and temporary, all it takes is seeing it in the reflection of dusk’s forgiving gaze to realize that the discarded can be beautiful.