I asked why. His adamant certainty captured my attention. He was not making a racial generalization. He would not sell me what he regarded as a ticket to violence. He explained that the train to Khayelitsha was routinely stoned, the windows broken, the passengers assaulted, by unemployed youths in the township and the nearby squatter camp.
The next day, provoked by his warning, I went to the New Rest squatter camp, 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 streets of 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 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 New Rest 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 maintain South 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 improvements to their living conditions were essential to the running of the city.