Lenox Lizwi Mhlanga

I was recently privy to a debate on StarFM relating to the perennial tug-of-war between landlords and their lodgers, sorry, tenants. The ever bubbly KVG was playing the protagonist against a combative Phathisani.

There is no guessing on whose side “MaSugar” was rooting. And he seemed to have a host of supporters who we can only assume were once, or still are lodgers, eh, tenants.

Not once did a landlord chip in to support KVG which in itself is very telling. The conversation was about landlords who ill-treat their tenants. Perhaps they don’t tune in to the radio station.

In the topsy-turvy world of lodgers, tenants, and their tormentors, the horror stories could fill a compendium. It reminded me of these two ladies who worked at a clothing shop. They were sharing ‘Lodger War Stories.’ One described how they took duties to clean the only toilet in the house.

This included sweeping the yard. Surprisingly, none of this was rent-deductible. It was slave labour, premised the friend.

The other related how every morning the landlord checked for tyre tracks in the driveway. This was to find out whether there were any unwanted visitors at night.

Whether one wants to call him or herself a lodger or prefers the more sophisticated tenant, it’s all the same. There I have said it. It will save me the drudgery of diluting the inevitable.

A lodger by definition is someone who pays rent to live on someone else’s property. It’s not out of choice that one finds him or herself in this untenable position, to excuse the pun.

What’s wrong in being a lodger, eh . . . tenant? On the surface, nothing, but to the landlord you are the person who is there to devalue his or her property. If we borrow Marxist class-struggle lexicography, you are part of the ‘lumpenproletariat’ or just plain ‘lumpen’ to cut it short.

Whether one is educated, well-cultured or has a nice job, one remains the underclass and them the overlords. A “we” and “them” scenario.

Through dissecting the term “lord” we learn that it refers to someone “who rules or lords over people.” From what we hear (and have experienced) some poor souls go through hell and high-water at the mercy of property owners who believe they are gods. One wonders whether it’s really worth going through such an ordeal.

It also explains the month-end migration of one ton trucks piled high with furniture. One would have had it up to here, to mimick the expression.

To conform to his newfound status as a bank employee, a friend of mine moved out of the ghetto (meaning townships) to a more spacious abode in one of the leafy eastern suburbs.

The landlady (my friend was violently opposed to calling her that because she was no lady) owned two houses adjacent to each other, one which she decided to rent out. The first problem which at first glance did not seem very obvious was that our “relative” had just bought a car. The landlady, for some inexplicable reason, did not own one.

One day he was told that he revved his car too loudly in the morning and was upsetting her dogs! Well, the complaint sounded reasonable enough at first glance and was attended to. Then next thing he was being reprimanded that his Toyota Vitz was “too heavy” for her driveway. She animatedly described how the paving was ‘sinking’ as a result. He is no engineer but this began to sound ridiculous.

Then came the bombshell. My friend was told, correction, instructed to leave his car at work! That was just the beginning. He later had to endure surprise house inspections even in the dead of the night.  At one time he mistook his nosey landlady for a witch when he found her crouched outside the bedroom window in her nightie eavesdropping. She then made it a point to regularly harangue his wife or maid — depending on who was at home at the time — about how his family was “depreciating” the value of her property.

The besieged family’s sins seemed to multiply. They included hanging too much laundry outside, “crowding” the house with “unnecessary” furniture and entertaining “too many” visitors. This was in her own words.

The crunch came when my unsuspecting friend fitted a DStv satellite dish. The very day technicians mounted the dish on the chimney, a terse and strongly worded letter was slipped under the door with the following:

“Who do you think you are, creating such a hideous defect (the dish) without consulting me as the owner of the house?”
Initially he thought it was a joke until he came home one evening to find the offending gadget removed and grounded in the garage. No one was laughing after that!

What, if you might ask a patently silly question, was all the fuss about? Simply put, how could a mere tenant enjoy the sophistication of watching several television channels when the duchess of the manor endured watching DeadBC? His own words!

My friend’s tenancy lasted two thrill-a-minute, action-packed months that gave him high blood pressure, diabetes and a near-stroke. In that order.

“She really tested my limits of tolerance,” he told me. “If it wasn’t for my fortitude and patience, I’d have strangled her the very week we moved in!”

That landlady wasn’t the worst. How could she match the landlord whose attempts at creative population control saw him instructing his tenants to keep the size of the family “within reasonable limits?” Perhaps this is where China got their one child policy from.

Tenants have to endure the misdemeanors of their landlords, particularly in the high density suburbs. Which desperate tenant would fend off the amorous advances of a sex-crazed landlord or lady if there was the threat of finding your expensive property dumped outside?

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