VANESSA VICK PHOTOGRAPHY

Durban

Violent confrontations between police and residents at an informal settlement in Durban South Africa called Foreman Road led to 45 people being arrested and several people being injured. This incident is part of an emerging trend spreading in South Africa where underprivileged communities are demanding better services from their local governments.

CebisaNkenkwenkona, 20, stands in front of her shack located on the edge of the settlement.
  
Residents from the Foremen Road settlement live in squalor next to up market residential areas. Authorities have been promising for years to improve services to the community.
   
Sending what some call an ominous signal to this nation's leaders, South Africa's sprawling shantytowns have begun to erupt, sometimes violently, in protest over the government's inability to deliver the better life that the end of apartheid seemed to herald a dozen years ago.
     
  
Maureen Zondi, 36, walks through the crowded shacks.
   
Residents say the clash was the culmination of weeks of tension between the Foreman road informal settlement residents and the Ethekwini municipality.
  
Since the end of apartheid the number of shanty dwellers has grown by as much as 50 percent, to 12.5 million people -- more than one in four South Africans, many living in a level of squalor that would render most observers from the developed world speechless.
     
  
From its first days, South Africa's black government pledged to address the misery of shanty life. That the problem has instead worsened, social scientists, urban planners and many politicians say, is partly the result of fiscal policies that have focused on nurturing the first-world economy which, under apartheid, made this Africa's wealthiest and most advanced nation.