Another day, another departure from my lovely hotel in the center of the city, another driver. This man was Phaks — pronounced “Pax.” He had been recommended to me as an authority on township life and was himself a resident of the great sprawl of Khayelitsha, with its population of half a million and its more than 80 percent unemployment, the place with the worst reputation for crime, idleness, gambling, fighting, and binge drinking.
“But it’s not all bad,” Phaks said as he drove down the highway. He was fairly jolly but seemed to have unresolved matters weighing on his mind, and at times his expression darkened and he became aggrieved.
We swung past District Six, a lively area of Cape Town in the apartheid era that had defied the racism and thrived as a safe, multiracial inner-city neighborhood well known for its music, its food, its color and zest. In the late 1960s, wishing to reclaim the land and create a white area, the city government had forced its population of sixty thousand to leave and divided them by race, resettling them in specific townships — the whites to white areas, the blacks to Khayelitsha, the mixed-raced people (“coloreds”) to Mitchells Plain and Bonteheuwel.
The idea was to create a whites-only neighborhood of new houses, to be called Zonnenbloom (“Sunflower”), but it hadn’t worked. No one wanted to live there, and ten years ago it had sat empty, a barren field bordered by two old churches — all that remained of District Six were its churches.
But some houses had been built since I’d last seen it. In 2005 the Reconstruction and Development Program had put up a number of new houses, and many of them — but not all — were occupied.
“They are for those who want to come back,” Phaks said. “But some people are resisting.”
“It’s central, it’s safe, the houses are new,” I said. “Why would they not want to move back in?”
“They say it’s not the same, so they stay away.”
“What does ‘not the same’ mean?”
“It’s not multiracial anymore. Just black.”
Next he took me to Langa township, which was a bit nearer to Cape Town proper and, like many of the other townships, just off the main airport highway. Langa’s distinction was that it was one of the first black townships. Phaks said that it had begun to be settled in 1900, but the local historian contradicted him and said it was 1927. Then Phaks said that the name Langa meant “Sun,” and the local historian said that it was designated Langa after a famous nineteenth-century chief and anti-government activist, Langalibalele, who was exiled as an undesirable to a site near here.
The local historian, subcontracted by Phaks to join us, was a Xhosa man named Archie, who explained that this township was the consequence of the South African apartheid system, in particular the Group Areas Act, which compelled nonwhites to live in designated places. This hemming-in of nonwhites was enforced by the Pass Laws Act of 1952, which required all of them to carry an identity document known formally in Afrikaans as a Bewysboek, in English as “the Reference Book,” and universally among the carriers as the dompas, or “stupid pass.”
The dompas was, in effect, a passport, with as many pages as a normal passport. “The most despised symbol of apartheid,” according to the South African parliamentarian and anti-apartheid campaigner Helen Suzman. “Within the pages of an individual’s dompas were their fingerprints, photograph, personal details of employment, permission from the government to be in a particular part of the country, qualifications to work or seek work in the area, and an employer’s reports on worker performance and behavior.”
Protests against the pass laws — first by brave women in the early 1950s, then in the 1960s by men inspired by the women — led to suppression, outright massacre in Sharpeville, and more protests, which brought the apartheid struggle to the world’s attention. South Africa now celebrates these protests with two national days, Women’s Day and Human Rights Day. After thirty-four years of internal passports ruling the lives of South Africans of color, the pass laws were repealed in 1986.
With indignation bordering on rage, Archie was telling me about the hated pass laws and the Group Areas Act as we walked through the Langa streets, which were littered with garbage, old tires, and broken bottles. Even the recently planted flowers and patches of fenced-off grass had been trashed.
“Your Bill Gates helped us with the cultural center,” Archie said, showing me around the Guga S’thebe Arts and Cultural Center, where in a back room three women were painting designs on ceramic pots and mugs, in an effort to teach skills and create employment. South African women seemed to have a spark, but more than 60 percent of the adult males in Langa were unemployed. The cultural center, brightly painted and with ceramic artwork on its façade, built for workshops and performances, was an imaginatively designed post-apartheid building, perhaps the only new one in the township. It had been deliberately constructed near the spot where in 1954 a demonstration by thousands of Langa residents had been held to protest the pass laws — a mass burning of the dompas — and a march to the center of Cape Town. Only ten years old, the center was already in a state of disrepair — unswept and seemingly neglected. On the township tour itinerary, it had more tourists visiting than local residents.
“How did Bill Gates help?”
“He gave us these computers.”
Four unused computers, with grubby keyboards and blind screens, sat on desks.
“Unfortunately they have been out of service for a year.”
What Archie did not say, and perhaps did not know, was that the Gates Foundation had given money to support an effort to increase awareness of HIV/AIDS. Langa had one of the highest rates of infection in South Africa. Saturday is “burial day” in Langa, and there were usually around forty burials each Saturday. In spite of efforts to educate Langa’s people, the death rate from HIV/AIDS was rising.
“Come this way,” Archie said.
When he kicked a beer can with the side of his foot, I used that as an opportunity to ask him why the carefully planted flower gardens in front of the cultural center were blighted, and the whole of this street and its sidewalk littered with beer cans and waste paper and blowing plastic.
“We don’t know what to do with it. People throw it and it blows.”
“Why not pick it up?”
“It is a problem.”
“Archie, all it takes is a broom and a barrel.”
“The municipality cares for it.”
“If that’s so, why is this crap still here?”
I deliberately put him on the spot because he was, so he said, the spokesman, and the cultural center was the primary destination of the township tour — as it happened, a busload of white visitors had arrived and were looking with that “where are we?” squint of tourists just off a bus. In a place where tens of thousands of people had no job and nothing at all to do — a number of people were conspicuously sitting around and talking, or gaping at the tourists — not one was picking up the masses of litter.
It is possible that Archie, still denouncing the injustice of the pass laws, did not see the disorder, and he seemed annoyed with me for mentioning it. As if to dazzle me — or perhaps to explain the dereliction — he began to declaim.