aware of my privilege as a visitor to South Africa — that I was doing something I refrained from doing at home.
And it wasn’t hard to accomplish this. In Cape Town, many poor townships, some of them nearly identical, make up the itinerary of the well-advertised sightseeing tours of the city.
“This is Imizamo Yethu,” the guide says over the loudspeaker as the City Tours bus approaches a hillside of ramshackle houses and dirt roads. “This means ‘Our Struggle.’ It began as a squatter camp. It is now a township. It began in the 1980s when the pass laws ended. It grew in the nineties. You may get off here if you wish to be taken on a tour by a person who lives in the community. Another bus will follow in thirty minutes …”
My driver’s name was Thandwe. Xhosa by tribe, he had come here as a small boy, twenty-seven years before, from Port Elizabeth in the Eastern Cape, to live with his uncle.
“I go home now and then,” Thandwe said, “but this is where I intend to stay.”
We were headed down the highway, the road most foreign visitors see, since it is the main road to Cape Town International Airport. I wanted — hoped — to find good news, to see something different.
“New Rest — it is there,” Thandwe said, and indicated a settlement of tidy, russet-roofed houses that lay behind a high fence beside the road. They were not reconditioned huts or renovated hovels; they were new and solid-looking, and they stood very close together in what were obviously the footprints of the shacks and sheds that I had seen a decade before. This was the “in situ upgrade” that the urban planners had hoped for.
We turned off the highway onto the side road that led to NewRest and cruised through this now much-improved township. Forty years ago this was a rural area with a spiritual aura and a ritual significance to the local Xhosa people. Initiates (
mkweta
) in circumcision ceremonies (
ukoluka
) were concealed in the bush here. When their penises were foreshortened with the blade of a spear (
mkonto
), the youths stayed as a group until their wounds healed. Ten years before, I had been told that in June and December, the newly circumcised boys were seen, “sometimes many of them, hiding in the bush on the far side.”
That was no longer the case. Every bush had been cut down, houses stood where there had been scrubland, and there was not a tree standing. But I had seen a change, and I understood how it had evolved. First the new people from provincial villages created a squatter camp out of plastic sheeting, rags, and cut-down tree limbs; then the shelters were improved to hovels with old planks and scrap tin, to become the shantytown; in time came the addition of communal toilets and a standpipe for water; and at last, because of the tenacity of the people — the ones who on my previous visit had told me, “We are staying here. This is our home” — and the volunteer urban planners and well-wishers, it had been upgraded again. There was a government department, the Reconstruction and Development Program, dedicated to improving and rebuilding the squatter camps.
“It has shops now. The school is near,” Thandwe said. “One of the reasons for these improvements was the World Cup.”
After South Africa was named the host country for the 2010 FIFA World Cup, three enormous football stadiums were built in its major cities, and the seven existing stadiums were extensively renovated. New hotels were built, and public transport was improved, and with all this investment came a self-awareness that meant money would be spent on housing for the people who would be employed at the new facilities. The low-paid workers who maintainSouth Africa as an agreeable place that has solved the servant problem — the domestics, the gardeners, the mechanics, the scrubbers, the floor moppers, the bus drivers, the cabbies, the waiters, the nannies, the nurses, and the teachers — live largely in these townships. So