South Africa: Cape Town—The Townships
Posted By Sika on March 11, 2009
I
n the evening after Bo-Kaap, we did a tour of Langa and Khayelitsha—two townships just outside Cape Town. Gareth’s sister had wondered why we felt the need to do a township tour, seeing as how we know what poor Africa looks like and all that. But in Malawi things are a bit more balanced—the whole country is poor and those who are wealthy live a different life than those who are poor, but it’s not as different as in South Africa.
Khayelitsha is on the way to the airport and about 20 minutes outside of Cape Town. Much of it isn’t wired for electricity; there may be one tap and one block of toilets for hundreds of houses. Many of the houses are slapped together and made out of whatever. And yet Cape Town is exquisitely cosmopolitan—one of the richest, cleanest, nicest looking cities I’ve ever seen.
At several stops along the way, whoever was talking to us at the time was asked, “How many white South Africans have come to see this?” Each person asked said no more than a handful over the last several years. I think that’s a shame. And indicative of the kind of intentional blindness that is present in race relations in South Africa and in the States.
There are some nicer houses in the townships—areas called Beverly Hills—where the more well-to-do have built houses after trying it out in nicer areas and finding the community is not so communal and their family and friends are too far away.
There are old dorms in the process of being torn down and rebuilt as apartments. There are rooms in the dorms, each with three or four bunks. Each bunk is rented by a family. Let me repeat that: Each family lives in one bunk. If there are kids, they often sleep on mattresses stored under the bunks during the day. Each room is maybe 8 feet by 12 feet. Each common room has 2 or 3 of these bedrooms attached. So the small kitchen and table and tire-storage area we saw was the common room for about 11 families. The apartments built are small and cost a lot more a month than a bunk, but every family renting a bunk is guaranteed to have the opportunity to rent one. Eventually.
The Irish have helped out by sending money and workers to help speed up the apartment buildings. I wonder if this is a better sort of aid: The South African government has shown and is showing their commitment to the project. They’re building the apartments; they have their lists of who goes where, so the Irish aren’t leapfrogging people into places they shouldn’t*; they’re not doing the government’s job for it, they’re just facilitating—with a set allotment of what they’ll do, so the government doesn’t think it can just sit back and stop doing its job. I don’t know. There’s probably some drawback I don’t know about. But the Cape Townians sure do love the Irish right now.
We saw a woman making smilies: Sheep’s heads, boiled and hair removed, sliced in half and sold as a snack. We went to a shebeen where a woman let us taste her version of mowa. Then we went to Vicky’s, a B&B right in the heart of Khayelitsha. Vicky told us to let people know that we made it in and out of a township. At night. Alive. If I were to go back to Cape Town I’d stay at Vicky’s a couple nights. Vicky is fascinating and her B&B is very nice. But not if I come back during the 2010 World Cup. She’s already getting booked up for that.
*In an effort to increase the numbers and enthusiasm of Health Surveillance Assistants here in Malawi, an NGO increased HSA salaries. But instead of increasing the salaries of all HSAs, only the new hires received the increase because there wasn’t enough money to pay everybody the same. Already working HSAs became bitter. Some quit their jobs to take the same job in a different district or to replace themselves in order to get the higher salary. Some of the HSAs just stopped working.
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