Long Walk to Freedom in South Africa

Beyond the “Safe for Tourists” Zones in Capetown

By Amelia M. Bookstein

As our plane circled widely over the shoreline of Capetown, the suburbs of the city were laid out in the common patterns of monopoly game pieces; then the shacks of the shantytowns appeared, their tin roofs gleaming in the late summer sun. As we came in to land, I saw Robben Island, the isolated prison that housed the nation’s president, Nelson Mandela, for 18 years of his 27 years of incarceration.

At first, Capetown might seem hard to understand. As I found my way along the streets--some five-lane freeways, others winding pedestrian alleys--I felt I was moving through an unreal place filled with contradictions. Migrants from the countryside lay out trinkets on the sidewalks in front of expensive cafes. The botanical gardens in the middle of town are full of uniformed school children eating their lunches and homeless people seeking shade. Most establishments post signs declaring that they still reserve admission. An expressway stops in mid-air where it had been planned to cross over a sacred Muslim site and construction had to be abandoned. Now, refugees from the countryside and other countries camp out in its shadow in houses made up of cardboard and tin.

I felt rather safe in Capetown, as any street-smart traveler can. However, the stories of violence are everywhere and the level of fear, especially among the white citizens I met, was quite high. Tourists are advised where to go and when, and many will never mix with or try to understand the great changes going on in the society around them.

The places labeled as “safe for tourists” are inevitably controlled environments and almost exclusively reflect only the white version of Capetown’s history. Since South Africa’s population is less than 20 percent white, I felt I needed to look elsewhere.

The kiosk for Legend Tours, www.time2travel.com/ct/legend/index.htm,  is sandwiched among the ads for winery tours and bungie jumping in the tourist information office near the Castle of Good Hope. There I met Mohammed, who led four of us on a “Walk to Freedom” tour through the townships in the Cape Flats.

Bo-Kaap. Our first stop was Bo Kaap and the extensive Indian neighborhood called the Malay Quarter. Capetown is the only South African city without a black majority. According to our guide, it is 60 percent colored, 20 percent white, and 20 percent black. As we came to see in very concrete terms, the apartheid regime treated the colored population slightly better than the black population in order to prevent any coalition from forming between them.

Bo Kaap has the beauty of a watercolor painting, the houses lined up next to each other, each painted a different bright color, on streets along a steep green hillside. The Mosques are tightly squeezed into the neighborhoods and hold a place of unquestioned respect.

District Six. The District Six Museum, on Buitenkant street, not far from downtown, holds the records of what was once a vibrant neighborhood of over 60,000 people; District Six’s flaw was that it housed working class people of many races, not evenly divided as the apartheid system would have liked. In 1966, the government declared the neighborhood of District Six to be a “white area” under the Group Area Act of 1950, and decreed that non-whites must resettle far away in the Cape Flats. The residents fought back with protests and riots, holding out for almost two decades. In 1982, the government forced the last families out and bulldozed the area.

The museum is set in a small church, the columns decorated with dozens of signs from streets that no longer exist. Underfoot is an outline of the layout of the neighborhood; former residents have been invited to write their memories on this map and poetry, protest lyrics, and messages as simple as “my home” cover the floor. On the walls, outdated signposts read: “For Use By White Persons.”

District Six is now a wasteland. The government built a few houses, expecting whites to be eager to move into the “new” land. But very few people wanted to come to this ghostland of fires, riots, and protests. The skeleton of one shack remains, standing without a roof in the middle of the barren landscape, graffiti on its side declaring: “The President is leaving where he grew up.”

Langa: As we drove into the Black township of Langa, on the outskirts of Capetown, the windshield wipers pushed away dust instead of rain. We could see blunt cinderblock houses and rows upon rows of shacks. Mohammed explained: Unlike ghettos in America and elsewhere, it was not just poverty that pushed people into substandard housing. Under apartheid, no matter what job you held, if you were black you had to live in a certain area; if you were colored, you had to live in a different area. For nonwhites, it was illegal to travel without a Pass Book--essentially, a passport declaring you as an outsider. In the townships, it was clear that the government had systematically treated the races differently in order to keep the barriers of anger and fear between them.

As our van pulled into the narrower streets of Langa, passing shack after shack after shack, we did not feel like voyeurs, as we had expected; instead, we felt welcomed by the people there. As we smiled, they smiled.

As we stepped out of the van to visit the Chris Hani School, the smell signaled the lack of running water and sanitation facilities. We were welcomed by the school children and pulled inside. Women from the community run the school without any government money, educating the many children who cannot attend government schools because they are too poor to have the proper documents. Here they teach the basics and complete the proper paperwork so that, in two years’ time, most of the students have the skills and documents they need to enter the government schools with their peers.

Inside the sparse schoolroom about 20 children began to sing bright African songs with multi-part harmony. Their voices were bold and loud, and almost unbearably beautiful. The children were all dressed in some semblance of a uniform, but many were without shoes.

As we continued to drive through the townships--passing through Nyanga, Nyanga East, Cross Roads, and Guguletu--we saw similar scenes of poverty in each, but still had some surprises. In Nyanga people are forced to live on heaps of trash, their shacks perched on top of land covering an old landfill; as the soil erodes away, it releases 20-year-old garbage. Other landscapes were equally humbling: lines of streetlights without any electricity, streets without names, shacks collapsing into the other shacks beside them. It is clear that the legacy of apartheid is not easily undone.

Samora Machel. We drove into a new housing project where the government provides land and a small cinderblock house to qualifying families. The one-room houses are a great improvement over the rickety shacks. Each family receives a plot that can hold a building up to four times the size of the initial house, so they can expand their living space as they manage to save money for materials. The project was designed to help get people on their feet. And it seemed to be working--some people had already begun building onto their houses.

Robben Island. The island prison still stands very much as it once was, although now it has been transformed into a state park. As a prison it was nearly impossible to escape from; yet from the island one can see the developments of Capetown quite clearly.

The tour guides are all former prisoners at Robben Island. I stood outside Mandela’s cell--a space of only six feet by six feet--and tried to imagine what it would be like to spend 27 years in prison, some in complete isolation, most in just one bare gray cell.

I saw the quarries where prisoners used to be forced to dig, and I heard stories of torture and maltreatment. As a last thought, my tour guide pointed to a corner of the courtyard. There, he said, Mandela buried copies of the manuscript for his autobiography as he was working, so that his jailers wouldn’t confiscate it. It is now a lengthy book titled Long Walk to Freedom.

AMELIA BOOKSTEIN is a freelance photographer and writer currently living in Washington, DC where she works for an NGO focused on refugee advocacy.