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Before flying to Durban we went on a guided tour of the black and coloured townships of Cape Town. It was a very interesting to see the conditions which a large part of the population had to endure, but we also learned that the situation was not hopeless and improvements were certainly happening. After spending the night in Durban we travelled back to Swaziland to stay at an orphanage in Nhlangano which was run by Borgny, a relative of ours.
South African Adventure 1999, Part 8: From Cape Town back to Swaziland via Durban
Jan Arild Teland2006-05-08 20:24:05
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and probably not very safe to eat. We felt kind of embarassed walking around recording video and taking pictures, but Frank said it was OK to do so, and that people here were just happy for "the world" to see the conditions they were living under.
Getting into the car, we drove only for a few streets to arrive in an area which Frank called the "Beverly Hills" of Langa. The housing changed quite abruptly to much larger houses, all looking very nice. Frank explained that this was where the professional people like doctors and lawyers lived. There were hardly any people walking the streets in the "Beverly Hills", while across the road it was really crowded. We now realized that the townships were not at all a homogenous slum, as many people seem to believe.
There must initially have been an open field between "Beverly Hills" and the motorway. However, this was no longer the case as it was now crowded with socalled "informal housing", which is a nice word for "shacks". This was where people put up their houses if they didn't have a garden to put them up in. There were no roads in between the houses, no water, no electricity, and those living there had no address. I had never thought about how important it was to have an address before Frank explained it. Without an address it is very difficult to tell anybody where you live, in case you require assistance from the police, a doctor or somebody else.
On our way into Cape Town a few days ago, these shacks were all we could see from the motorway, so we implicitly assumed that conditions were similar all over the townships. It was nice to discover that this wasn't true at all, and although conditions weren't good, they were in some places much better than we had expected. In fact, Frank was quite optimistic for the future.
Langa had been a black township. We now left Langa behind, crossed the motorway and entered the Cape Flats and the coloured neighbourhoods. My initial
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See photographs from:
South Africa Gallery
,
Swaziland Gallery
