tell the world

touring poverty is not something one is comfortable doing. in cape town there are numerous organized tours of the townships. the guide books and activists encourage visiting the townships for a complete picture of south african culture. township residents, at least those we met, encourage it because if not for the tours the government wouldn’t feel any pressure to improve conditions. by opening their homes and communities to strangers, and agreeing to be photographed (I couldn't take pictures) it’s there way of saying tell the world (ironically, later that night we saw the last king of scotland, another tell the world story). our tour guide said the people’s homes we entered do get paid, but i think he was just telling us what we wanted to hear.

i went on a half day tour which included, in route to the township, highlights of local landmarks (including the field where our guide, and other boys coming of age, were ceremonially circumcised at age eighteen with a spear; way more than I needed to know for sure), some history of the forced removals, racial classifications, and how they determined your classification when it wasn’t easily apparent based on their criteria. i'm not going to go into the asinine details, but we can have great fun later thinking of all the subversive ways those tested could have made life difficult for the white supremacists.

we visited langa township (established 1927 and south africa’s oldest planned township). the population of langa is 250,000, the same as the city centre area, which is 48 times larger. the first stop on the tour was the guga s’thebe arts & cultural centre, where residents can come to learn craft related skills (pottery, metalworking, beadworking, etc.), and how to run a small business. the rest of the afternoon was a walking tour that began at a recycling center, the tsoga environmental resource centre. from their we walked the neighborhood for an hour visiting a preschool and the various types of housing in the community. the worst are shacks smaller than walk-in closets, about a notch above a refrigerator box on 5th avenue or la’s skid row, to single family detached cement homes with a yard, and in some cases a fence. like in the days following desegregation in the u.s. all classes of blacks lived within the same neighborhood or in close proximity. more housing is being built in langa and judyie tells me that there is actually a waiting list to rent or own property there. there’s plenty more the government needs to do to lift people out of poverty. some residents aren’t waiting for the government and are starting and getting involved in grassroots programs promoting self-reliance. one incentive the government has to improve conditions, as opposed to just covering them up, as they have been accused of doing, is "2010", when the world comes to south africa for the world cup.