When [ANC] party bigwigs had an apparent change of heart in March and went to campaign in Bekkersdal in March this year, they were greeted with brickbats and burning tyres, prompting their bodyguards to open fire with live ammunition. Boitumelo Nkuna, 22, a local community leader, said it was their own “Marikana” although, miraculously, no one was killed.

“The ANC says on its election posters it has ‘a good story to tell’ but what about us? Are we part of that good story? We have been abandoned,” said the articulate young man who trained to be an accountant but has no prospect of work.

For young children in Bekkersdal, the best form of entertainment is seeing how big a splash they can make by throwing rocks into the open sewers that stagnate next to their corrugated iron shacks. Terrifyingly large rats scamper through piles of rubbish banked up at the end of every red-dust lane and communal toilets overflow with maggots after months of going unemptied.

Rates of tuberculosis and other diseases are high because of the filthy conditions, and with nothing for older children to do, drug use is also prevalent.

“Even when you hang your clothes out to dry, you have to watch them or they will steal them to sell and buy nyaope (a cocktail of marijuana, low-grade heroin and ground-up HIV pills),” said Mr Nkunda.

One hosepipe is shared by 20 streets – long queues form in the early morning as people try to wash their clothes, children and selves before, if they are lucky, going to work.

It was there that the Telegraph met Mrs Makereke and was welcomed into her two-roomed shack. She cooks on a primus stove by the chinks of bright South African sunlight that pierce through the gloom and bedsheets hung up to keep out the cold as winter approaches. On the wall was a 2014 calendar featuring a South African flag and a picture of Nelson Mandela. Next to it is pasted a tattered photograph of Mrs Makereke in her auxiliary nursing graduation gown. She has several diplomas in nursing but with no hospital nearby, scrapes a living as a volunteer community care worker paid expenses only.