Houses of Hope.(urban renewal in Soweto)(Brief Article)

The troops are ready. Before dawn one morning this week, the Red Ants will descend on Devlins, a 7,000-shack squatter camp near Soweto. These 300 black men in bright red overalls are prepared for trouble: the job is to take down people's homes. And the process recalls the worst days of white rule in South Africa, when authorities struggled to stem the illegal migration of blacks to the country's economic center, Johannesburg. But now there is a critical difference. These squatters will get the break of their lives: new plots on the same land, and the chance eventually to own title to the property. They'll have basic roads, water, sewer pipes and, possibly, help building their own houses. "You won't believe the change, once a guy is the owner of his own property," says the Ants' boss Johan Bosch, chairman of Wozani Security, which took on the latest slum "normalization" operation for the Johannesburg City Council.

Africa is waking up to the nightmare of helter-skelter urbanization, and some possible antidotes to it. With South Africa in the lead, a new generation of technocrats is looking for better ways to wage a war of attrition between local authorities and peasants seeking jobs in the city. One spur is the recent finding that the continent is leading the world in urbanization; some 56 percent of Africans live in slums. Another is the cautionary example of Zimbabwe, where wholesale land invasions were the first symptom of the once bountiful country's collapse into lawlessness and insolvency. Elsewhere in Africa, the spread of multiparty democracy has given leaders new cause to listen to the poor. Elites have tuned in Hernando de Soto, the Peruvian economist whose landmark 2000 book, "The Mystery of Capital," argues that giving squatters title to their land is the key to unlocking huge "dead" assets worldwide--strategies that have already helped clean up slums, notably in Latin America.

A fresh look is long overdue. Africa slept while the rest of the world unsuccessfully tried to forcibly relocate slums, or build expensive welfare housing. Africa's poverty ruled out the latter solution; most of the continent simply has tried to bulldoze shantytowns. A generation of presidents who grew up in the hinterlands never accepted that slum dwellers belong in Lagos or Nairobi, not in a village. "Many politicians are still rather romantic about our rural past," says Anna Kajumulo Tibaijuka, executive director of UN-Habitat, the agency responsible for issues of urbanization.

There's nothing romantic about the way Africa's Big Men routinely treat squatters. As delegates gathered in Nairobi this month for a UN- Habitat's talkfest on slum issues, Kenyan police demolished part of a squatter camp called Mathare on the outskirts of the capital. After the raid, a woman named Magaret Wakonyo, 59, said three men with iron bars and machetes had taken her money and clothes before demolishing her house. She and her 80-year-old husband spent the next week sleeping rough during a period of torrential ...