Two tourists order a round of chilled white wine in the glistening sunshine and turn to their guide. ‘So why are they still living in townships?’ one asks.
‘Some of these guys know nothing different. They like their little huts,’ came their Afrikaner guide’s breezy explanation as to why the majority of black South Africans are living in slums almost 10 years after the end of apartheid.
South Africa may have political freedom, but economic apartheid is very much in force and ignorant attitudes remain close to the surface. This was just the first of a few asides from seemingly concerned, thinking South Africans on their fellow countrymen and women.
When asked why Camps Bay, Cape Town’s beach babe area, is still predominantly white, another Afrikaner guide said: ‘Black people don’t want to live next to some white guy with loads of money,’ and when asked about the squatter camps (your first view of Cape Town as you drive along the highway from the airport to downtown) he excused them as ‘having a great community feel’.
My first two days in Cape Town were magical: taking the cable car to the top of Table Mountain; sweeping across beaches and vineyards in a helicopter Imax cinema-style; swigging Hamilton Russell chilled white wine with fresh grilled lobster on a restaurant terrace overlooking the beautiful people on Camps Bay beach.
But the magic seemed to hover one side of Table Mountain on a very white face — strange, seeing as we were in Africa.
Ok, the hotel doorman at the shopping mall-style Table Bay Hotel was black, as were the chambermaid and the waitress at breakfast. But there didn’t seem to be a lot of black faces running the hotels and restaurants or conducting the tours.
Spend a few days on the beaches and in central Cape Town and it’s hard to believe you’re in Africa. The tanned, toned surfers, open-top cars and palm trees spell California rather than the Cape.
Eager to understand more about Cape Town, I book a township tour and a night’s stay at a township B&B through Rainbow Tours.
White South Africans look either worried or guilty if they hear you’re planning to stay in a township. ‘I hope you’re not going to do one of those ‘slums versus luxury’ numbers on us,’ says one, rolling his eyes.
After the April 1994 first free elections when Mandela came to power, there was a clamour to go on township tours. Some visitors were curious, others were former anti-apartheid campaigners visiting South Africa for the first time and wanting to show solidarity after the end of sanctions. But interest soon died down.
Now the government wants to lure tourists back into the forgotten townships. After the 2002 World Summit on Sustainable Development in Cape Town, the touchy-feely-named Cape Care Route was developed, showcasing dozens of projects in the townships, from potteries to recycling centres to community centres and B&Bs.
Faizal Gangat — the first non-white guide I’ve come across so far — arrives in my hotel lobby with his clipboard. He offers Cape Care Route tours — a pick’n’mix selection of four or five projects in a day, ending with a stay in a B&B if you wish. We swing off a motorway and drive through thick smoke from a bush fire which suddenly clears, revealing a sign: ‘Coca-Cola welcomes you to Langa.’
Langa is a model apartheid township: wire fences all the way around, one entrance in, and one exit with police stations (no longer manned) at the beginning, middle and end to control the masses. The three-square-kilometre township housing 250 000 blacks — as many as whites living in the whole of downtown Cape Town — is hemmed in by motorways on all sides.
During apartheid, millions of blacks, Indians and coloureds
(these were the classifications) were evicted from their homes — often in desirable areas which were handed over to whites — and banished to controlled townships such as this. White areas had the best schools, housing and facilities, followed by Indian, coloured and finally black.
However appalling apartheid sounded in the Eighties, when we boycotted Barclays and sneered at Cape grapes, actually seeing engineered repression and poverty in the form of gleaming corrugated-iron roof shacks a decade after everything is supposed to be better is no less shocking. Despite warnings from white South Africans — ‘you’ll be lucky to get out of there alive’ — the sight of an Indian tour guide with a white journalist raises little interest.
Once past the prison-style gates (now unpoliced) Faizal, who’s on first-name terms with everyone we meet, takes me into a community centre where a group of women are sewing rag dolls decorated with bright orange headscarves and intricate bead necklaces. Next stop is a centre where men and women are painting pottery, all of which is for sale. Then we reach a recycling centre. That there are a lot of people hanging around is testament to South Africa’s 40% unemployment rate — something that doesn’t strike you until you reach the townships.
Here Faizal hands me over to Tsepo Rametse, who takes tourists on walking tours of Langa. He is one of several guides who take visitors inside the township, rather than cruising around in tour buses which brings few benefits to locals or tourists alike. He leads me to a group of working men’s hostels — imposing brick buildings. Half have been refurbished. ‘This is progress. Only one family to a room in those ones,’ he says proudly, before leading me into an ‘old-style’ hostel where three men, their wives and children live to a room.
One minute you’re standing in the beating hot sunshine, the dust blowing in your face, the next you’re in somebody’s home. Or rather, several dozen people’s home.
Tsepo explains that there are 14 rooms to a hostel. During apartheid black men were ordered from the countryside to work in the factories in towns and housed in hostels. They were forbidden to bring their families or to travel home to see them for up to six months at a time. But since the mid-eighties, the men have brought their families to live with them.
We’re standing in a room no bigger than 3×3 metres. There are three concrete beds. The room is neat. Suitcases are stacked on shelves up to the ceiling. A woman is asleep on one of the flowery covers, a T-shirt draped over her head. She stirs. Tsepo calls another dozen people into the room from a communal cooking area down the corridor, as if to prove that he is not exaggerating.
They stare at me silently, leaning against bedposts. I wonder about their privacy… me being here… and what it’s like sharing with three families in a space this size. ‘Three families live in this room,’ he said. ‘But where does everyone sleep?’ I ask. ‘The six adults sleep on the three single beds and the kids in a heap on the floor.’
We pass back out through the crowded communal area into the street, people ignoring me. Tsepo moves on down the road talking about the introduction of electricity and the hostel refurbishment programme. I can hardly take in his words. My face aches, fighting back tears. I want to offer money, help, anything.
‘Make a donation to the community centre if you want to, we don’t want to cause havoc here,’ he says when I suggest leaving something. Women are washing clothes in buckets at a communal tap. He takes me to the Joe Slovo squatter camp a few metres away — the one we’d passed earlier in the week on arrival at the airport — where arrivals from the countryside over the last 10 years have erected 20 000 dwellings of mainly hardboard houses with corrugated roofs.
Tsepo proudly tells me about the chemical toilets and communal taps. ‘Before, all these people had to go to the hostels across there,’ he said. A lone cockerel struts down the sandy road.
Apart from the children, no one seems to notice me. Tsepo is a regular with visitors. I’ve visited shanty towns in a year spent in South America, but the systematic planning and hemming-in of people based on their race is the bit that really shakes me. Tsepo says it’s important for visitors to see what happened in South Africa. To see what has gone on and what needs to be done and the progress that is being made.
He points at a refurbished hostel: ‘After seeing this place two German women donated beds to everyone in that block. A doctor from Canada noticed a boy suffering from a disease and he sponsored him for treatment,’ said Tsepo.
We lunch at Eziko, though it’s hard to eat after the morning’s tour. This is a catering college with a small restaurant. We order umnqusho (samp). ‘Many of these cooks work at Sun International’s Table Bay Hotel where you were staying before coming here,’ says Faizal. ‘Once in an international chain they can work all over the world.’
The visitors’ book has entries from Nepal, the US, UK, Norway, Denmark, the Netherlands and Canada.
I get back in the car with Faizal, who pops his headphone microphone back on (call centre style). In Khayelitsha township (home to 1,1-million people and another Coca-Cola sign: ‘Coca-Cola welcomes you to Khayelitsha’) we visit the home of ex-gold miner Golden Nongawuza, who runs a thriving business with his six children making exquisite ornamental flowers out of tin cans.
There are big cardboard boxes full of Pledge furniture oil cans, Brut cologne deodorant, Red Bull and Fanta and everywhere you look happy flowers with leaves cut out of Coca-Cola cans and stems made with knotted sheets of metal from more tin cans.
Driving down the motorway we pass hundreds of houses resembling garden sheds known as ‘Mandela houses’. A million have been been built in the last decade — a great achievement. But although they have plumbing and electricity, the houses are tiny and have been heavily criticised.
Ok, they have light and running water, but a garden shed still needs a bit of catching up to reach many whites’ living standards. Faizal points out new schools on almost every street corner and excitedly explains how thrilled he is to see hundreds of black children in school uniform pouring out of the gates.
Under apartheid, black children received scant funding for education compared to their white peers.
Faizal drops me at Kopanong (‘where the world meets’) B&B back in Khayelitsha. The house is at the end of a long, dusty street scattered with homes with iron bars at the windows and security gates.
After a rollercoaster day visiting corrugated huts, hostels and a self-build project, Kopanong — with its lacy curtains, Coca-Cola tin flowers (made by Golden) and leopard-print hob — seems like the Four Seasons.
Thope Lekau and her daughter Mpho greet me with a glass of home-made ginger beer and show me to my room with en-suite shower and loo. Thope has just got rid of a bunch of Dutch tourists and seems to be recovering from a lunch she hosted in the courtyard of her house for 60 overseas visitors. She is making a mad dash to a seminar in downtown Cape Town for entrepreneurs and invites me along.
In the car she tells me about her former life as a community worker and her current existence as an entrepreneur. She wishes the tourism business would filter down to the masses: ‘Ten years ago tourism was very exclusive, very white’. She wishes more blacks could train as guides (but you need a car or bus), or own their own hotels. Both options need capital, which is hard to obtain if you don’t own anything already. She has managed to secure loans from Switzerland to add three bedrooms to her house and buy the people carrier we are in now so she can pick up guests at the airport without breaking down.
The two British couples I encountered on that hotel terrace in the sunshine later on the trip told me it was patronising to go to a township. ‘We don’t want to be driving around in a tour bus looking out of the window making a spectacle of something you should not be,’ they said. But you walk around, I explained. It made no difference.
Thope sighs. ‘I admire people for coming. Otherwise they will think South Africa is the Table Bay Hotel. It is important to see the real South Africa,’ she says, adding that visiting a township means black South Africans sharing a bit of the tourism action. She buys food for her guests from local concerns and asks unemployed neighbours to clean.
She takes guests to local drinking haunts and restaurants and to craftspeople such as Golden, so they all benefit from tourism spending. But however many overseas visitors come, nothing pleases her more than when white South Africans come to stay — a sentiment shared by Faizal: ‘I bring 150 to 200 people a month to the townships. If two are white South African that is a lot. It is a life-changing experience for them. They go home and clear out their cupboards of clothes, sewing machines and shoes and bring them down here.’
Visiting the townships changed me. I rushed to a bookshop at the airport and bought Nelson Mandela’s Long Walk to Freedom, immersing myself in it on the plane home and staying up in the early hours of the night for a week after, desperate to understand how apartheid happened and how it was killed off.
I suppose it’s what you’d call a political awakening. It showed me that making charity donations on a direct debit isn’t going to feed, house and educate people or give them human rights — it’s down to democratic government. And getting involved as a consumer — sanctions, political activism — achieves much more than dipping your hand in your pocket at the first sign of a beggar.
The people in the squatter camp and the unemployed in the hostel are part of a world in transition, a jigsaw puzzle that made more sense when I went out to the countryside whale watching and back to Cape Town where the only black people seemed to be waiters.
Faizal is hopeful that townships won’t be on the tourist itinerary for too much longer. ‘In 10 years’ time township tours should not exist. Langa and others should be part of a city tour. That’s my vision. I am selling township tours at the moment because it is a reality and part of the legacy of the past.’
The last stop on the Cape Care Route is meeting Rose Maso at Victoria Mxenge, an entire village built by a group of women with their bare hands on a former rubbish dump. We meet in a community centre where women are simultaneously breastfeeding and poring over housing plans. They asked the government for the R180 000 that would normally be spent on a Mandela house and said they would build their own houses. Most of the money normally goes on labour. By building the houses themselves they can make it stretch much further. Rose stands proudly in front of her 80 square-metre house. Add a few street lamps and some trees and her home and those of the rest of the co-operative could be taken from a neat American suburb.
‘India had slums for 100 years. We are not going to let that happen here. Look how far we have come in 10 years.’ she says, with a metaphorical two fingers up to anyone who might suggest it’s fun living in a hut. — Guardian Newspapers 2004