The Last Train to Zona Verde Read Online Free Page A

and I wrote at the time of the 1,200 shacks that had been accumulating for a decade on the sandy infertile soil of Cape Flats, beside the busy road that led to the airport. Most of the 8,500 inhabitants lived in squalor. It was dire but not unspeakable. There was no running water; there were no lights or any trees. It was windy and bleak. Because it had been plopped down by squatters on forty acres of sand, there were no utilities, and as a consequence it stank and looked hideous. The houses were sheds made of ill-fitting boards, scrap lumber, bits of tin, and plastic sheeting. The gaps between the boards were blasted by the gritty wind. One man told me that he constantly had sand and dust in his bed.
    Life could get no grimmer than this, I had thought then — the urban shantytown, without foliage, too sandy to grow anything but scrawny geraniums and stubbly cactuses; people having to draw water into plastic buckets from standpipes and burn candles in their huts; the huts cold in winter, sweltering in summer, very dirty, lying athwart a main highway and its noise. What could be worse? Call them “informal settlements,” as some people did, and they would smell just as foul.
    Yet for all this squalor the people at New Rest were upbeat and had a sense of purpose. One of the residents, the man who complained of sand in his bed, took me to the New Rest committee that met regularly in one of the shacks. The committee members told me that these squatters had come from the Eastern Cape, the old government-designated homelands of Transkei and Ciskei, as well as from the slums of East London, Port Elizabeth, and Grahamstown, industrial cities that were not faring well in South Africa’s post-independence economy. The New Rest committee explained their aims: roads, piped water, electricity, and — in a process known as“in situ upgrade” — a permanent house to be built where each shack stood.
    A master plan had been outlined and blueprinted by volunteer urban planners from the University of Cape Town. Every miserable shack, no matter how small, had been numbered and its plot recorded. A census had been taken. The idea of transforming a squatter camp into a viable township by upgrading existing dwellings — turning a slum into a subdivision — had been accomplished in Brazil and India, but not as yet in South Africa. The driving force behind this was the pride the people took in having found a safe place to live. The goodwill of foreigners had also helped: well-meaning visitors had contributed money to support the day care center, to purchase three brick-making machines, and to establish a trust fund to benefit the place. The fund was administered on a pro bono basis by a safari company and the New Rest/Kanana Community Development Trust, which promoted township tourism. Some children were sponsored by Americans and Europeans who sent money regularly to buy them clothes and for school fees. It was an improvisational, hand-to-mouth arrangement, but the element of self-help in it made me a well-wisher.
    So what had happened since then?
    On my second day in Cape Town, after another gourmet breakfast at my hotel, I took the thirty-minute drive down and around the mountain to the squatter camp. I had found a taxi driver who lived near New Rest, in an older settlement called Guguletu, where I also wanted to go, having visited it ten years before.
    No visitor to Boston, where I was born, rises in a luxury hotel and, after a great breakfast, catches a taxi to tour, out of purely voyeuristic curiosity, the poorer parts of the city — the black section in Roxbury, where Malcolm X Boulevard enters Dudley Square; the poor districts of Charlestown and Chelsea; or the mean streetsof Everett, with its corner shops, pool parlors, and three-decker wooden houses. Gawkers are not welcome in these places, but even if they were, no one would casually visit, because the poor sections of American cities are perceived as dangerous. So I was keenly