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THURSDAY,
July 20th: Black township tour
The first half
of today, the last full day of my African trip, was spent in a
tour van with a group of six other Americans from California and
Arizona being guided around the black ghetto "townships" on the
outskirts of town where the vast majority of the city's
populations where herded like animals during the apartheid years
and forced to live in dilapidated tin shacks often in the absence
of even the most basic services such as water or electricity. Our
tour guide was a local black South African who had grown up in the
townships himself and who had managed to start up his own tour
company as well as learn accounting since the overthrow of racist
white domination in the mid 1990s.
The tour took us
through the three main types of townships:
1. Illegal
informal townships: totally unplanned offshoots of other
townships housing large numbers of black migrants from within and
without South Africa, most of which have no roads, no government
services, and often no water or electricity.
2. Informal
settlements: officially sanctioned black communities of tin
shacks or tiny, rickety cinder block homes that actually have
roads, basic services, and community water and electrical service
(though not necessarily in one's home)
3. Formal
settlements: those neighborhoods that were established as
permanent residential zones during the apartheid years that had
most of the government services found in virtually any other
modern city/neighborhood, though of a greatly reduced quality.
It was very
fascinating driving through these three different types of
neighborhoods, and most impressive - though not in a particularly
good way - was they seemed to expand over the horizon forever,
housing MILLIONS of Africans both in Cape Town and throughout the
rest of the country. It almost bordered on the unbelievable. So
much wealth within the proper confines of Cape Town 's white and
nouveau riche black and Asian populations, yet such utter abject
poverty just several miles away. The scale of it, and the sheer
existence of it, was mind boggling.
MILLIONS OF
PEOPLE LIVING IN SHACKS.
It's an absolute
scandal.
Fortunately
though, the newly elected majority black government has undertaken
a process in the last ten years to address the social inequality
rampant throughout the society and it can be said that South
Africa is now on the long LONG road to improvement which will take
generations to achieve, if ever. This is being done through a
process of wealth redistribution, improved spending on social
programs, health care and education, and the construction of
low-cost housing for the working poor and affordable mortgages for
the growing middle class.
Keep in mind,
however, that I use the term "middle class" VERY loosely. The
standard of living experienced by a middle class South African in
one of the up and coming sections of a black South African
township would rank in quality with the worst and most
impoverished areas of North America or Europe . That is to say,
that the quality of life for the West's poorest citizens mirrors
that in many regard's of Africa's middle class in terms of access
to wealth, services and accommodations. I.e. poor people in the
West have it pretty good and/or "middle class" people in South
Africa have it pretty bad.
Despite that, I
have been very impressed with the spirit of the Africans
throughout the region that I have come across in these terrible
economic situations since they seem to not approach their lives
with a mindset of despair and resentment, but rather that they
recognize things as simply being what they are, that great strides
must be undertaken to overcome their plight, yet that they have
pride in what little they do have and what few achievements they
have been able to attain in the last 10 years after their
liberation.
The sheer scale
of what must done to bring the millions and millions of
impoverished black Africans out of abject poverty seems terribly
daunting though, and it really made me wonderful if it will ever
be possible. 300 years of being screwed by white invaders and
displaced by millions of South and South-East Asian laborers will
not be overcome anytime soon. Yet the local Africans seem to have
a more or less positive outlook toward it, and even on life in
general, so I am sure they will endure, as they always have.
While on the
tour, we took a couple side stops to visit various community
projects aimed at the improvement of the black communities in
these shantytowns. We went to an Anglican church which has built a
primary school and social services center. We visited a small
corner store in a destitute part of town which provides needed
goods as well as employment to locals - and even a place for
people to hang out and socialize. We stopped by a nice *little*
two bedroom bed and breakfast run by a very feisty and astute
black business woman who has risen out of poverty and charges $28
a night for a room for visitors who want to experience township
living for themselves.
We then swung by
a local witch doctor who apparently heals people with a wide
assortment of potions and ointments ground out of animal bones and
reptile skins (i.e. those who lack health care coverage will take
issues into their own hands), and finally we visited a dark little
"shabeen" beer pub on a muddy back street in one of the shanty
towns and drank some home brewed liquid refreshment. Alcoholism,
or at least alcohol abuse, is a significant aspect of life in
these communities where unemployment can be as high as 50% to 60%,
and our tour guide wanted us to see that side of life in the
townships as well.
It was a great
tour and I was able to see the side of South Africa that many
visitors would rather just assume didn't exist. The final stop to
round out our trip was to the District 6 museum in the city of
Cape Town which chronicles the systematic destruction of an entire
section of the city razed to the ground from the 1960s to 1980s
during the process of driving non-whites out of town and into the
suburbs. The area was never rebuilt after its destruction and
largely sits empty today awaiting a general consensus as to
whether the area should be resettled or left as a memorial of
sorts. Moreover, the resettlement process would and will require
that all former tenants and land owners or their families be
identified and located, and then a long series of processes
undertaken to prove that these alleged former residents were in
fact former residents in the first place.
What a disaster!
There were
lessons to be learned everywhere I looked today.
So that is how
my last day in Africa was spent: seeing the human element of this
continent which is not nearly has pleasant as trekking around on
safari spotting lions and giraffes frolicking in the bush or
staying in phenomenal desert lodges and gorging myself on endless
amounts of food. Today's experience was the ultimate reason I came
to Africa and I am glad that it will be the most recent and most
prominent memory that I leave the region with.
With that said,
I should wrap up this email, mosey on up to my room and get some
shut-eye. There's a lovely winter storm over Cape Town right now
and I look forward to the sound of the falling rain outside my
window accompanying me off to sleep and greeting me in several
hours on my final morning in Africa .
I will upload
all the pictures from this trip to my website once back in the
United States and will write again soon.
Until then!
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