Township tour

We’ve spent the last couple of very rainy days at the hostel. We’ve got caught up with all our washing and repacked our camping bag with our mattresses and bedding ready for our next trip. Mark got his hair cut. We both edited photos, and I completed my trip notes so far and made a good attempt at catching up with social media posts. I also needed to make a call to the UK to renew our house insurance. We organised to stay here in Green Point until the start of our next overlanding leg on 25th June and booked activities for the rest of our stay in Cape Town. Mark cooked a very, very spicy chilli for dinner one night, which sent me running next door to Spar to buy a yoghurt! Last night, we had decidedly non-spicy pork fillet, salad, and new potatoes! We watched All Quiet on the Western Front which we missed when it came out last year, and started watching After Life by Ricky Gervais, which we’ve never seen because we don’t have Netflix at home! All in all, it was a very productive couple of days!😊

Today, we were going on a pre-booked townships tour, so were up promptly. After breakfast, we walked down to the City Sightseeing office at the waterfront for our 10am pick-up. Our driver was 20 minutes late, so there was no need for us to have rushed! We had one other person on our tour, a university student from Wolverhampton studying international relations at St Andrews. He had just arrived in the city after spending a week in Johannesburg. His trip was funded by his university as he was researching post-apartheid South Africa. He was an interesting guy to chat to.

Our tour would take us to three townships. On the way, our driver (who is from the second township we were to visit) thanked us for visiting his community and told us to forget any misgivings we may have been having about taking part in ‘poverty tourism’. I must admit that I had been feeling a little uneasy, but, as he explained, the money we had paid for the tour would help everyone in the townships. Tourism in general is the lifeblood for him, his family, his friends, and his neighbours, who are employed at the airport, in hotels and restaurants, as tour guides, as security guards, as cleaners and gardeners, etc. He told us that whilst there is gang violence in the townships, tourists will always be safe as the general population will make sure they are. He stressed the importance of tourist visits to his community in terms of them getting a better understanding of modern South Africa and sharing their knowledge with others. Personally, I was reassured. Everyone we met subsequently in the townships was extremely friendly and welcoming.

Townships, or informal settlements, are racially divided suburbs on the outskirts of South Africa’s big cities. They came about as a result of Pass Laws, a form of internal passport system designed to segregate the population, manage urbanization, and allocate migrant labour. Also known as the natives' law, pass laws severely limited the movements of black African citizens and other ethnic groups by restricting them to designated areas outside of city centres. Men were then forced to leave their families and return to the cities to find work. This led to them living in hostels in townships on the city’s outskirts. They were employed in factories and mines and were housed in large dormitories with shared cooking facilities and rudimentary ablution blocks. When the Pass Laws were repealed, wives and children were allowed to join the men. This resulted in very cramped living conditions with basic shacks being built so that families could escape the crowded dormitories. As more and more people arrived, the townships we see today evolved.

The first township we visited was Langa, the oldest township in the Cape Town area, created in the 1920s as a result of the 1923 Urban Areas Act, the latest incarnation of the Pass Laws, which were first seen in South Africa as long ago as 1760. It is one of many areas in South Africa designated solely for black Africans even before the apartheid era, which we are all so familiar with, began.

Langa means ‘sun’ in Xhosa, but that’s not why the township got its name. It is named after Langalibalele, a chief and renowned rainmaker who was imprisoned on Robben Island in 1873 for rebelling against the Natal government.

Langa was originally designed in a way to allow the authorities to keep tight control on its residents. In the early years, local laws prohibited the brewing of sorghum beer (utywala). This was strongly resented. In the 1930s, the authorities abolished prohibition and built municipal beer halls, realising that alcoholic citizens were easier to control than those who didn’t drink alcohol! We visited one of these beer halls, which has now been divided into 20 individual units, each housing a family. There are shared ablutions outside.

Today, Langa is located just off the N2 highway, a few kilometres south of the centre of Cape Town. It occupies an area of just over three square kilometres and is home to more than 75,000 people. The vast majority of these people are Xhosa.

We stopped to pick up a local resident who was to act as our guide on a walking tour of the township. Our first stop was at the building, which served as the courtroom during the apartheid era. Citizens had to come here to pay for the privilege of renewing their ‘dompass’, a derogatory term meaning ‘stupid pass’.Læs mere