Capetown 1998

Part 4

Submitted by Margaret Holub

Next AM Mickey and I make our way to Ikamva Labantu, the development organization that Gill works for. The unstoppable Gill has arranged for us to have a tour of the townships with Angela O'Brien, Ikamva's social worker. IL (means "hope for the people" in Xhosa) does development work in partnership with indigenous efforts in the townships. They don't start projects themselves, says Angela, but assist with fundraising, bookkeeping, advising, social work and whatever else in a myriad of local efforts. It was all started by Helen Lieberman, a Jewish woman who was moved to start this project nearly eighteen years ago. I was astonished to learn that at that time it was illegal to provide social assistance to the townships, so she did so at some risk. Since "the change" they have been able to get bigger and be in cahoots with, rather than in opposition to, the government. I've been trying to organize a way to see the townships the whole time we've been in SA and hear repeatedly that one must only go in organized tours with experienced guides etc. So it's a little amazing to just get in Angela's car and drive to Langa, especially since Angela is white.

I'm still not sure I entirely understand the townships' history, but roughly I guess there have always been poor areas outside all cities. With the advent of apartheid in the sixties these areas were cleared and blacks weren't allowed to come there except male workers to dorms. Of course they brought wives and children anyhow, all under threat of being removed to "homelands" in remote and even more impoverished areas. With the end of apartheid (or perhaps somewhat before under Botha's reforms?) families were officially allowed to come, but no services were allowed etc. Since the change, the townships have become a major focus of the new government, as well they should be. So in the oldest townships, like Langa and Guguletu, which we visited, one sees pre-apartheid houses, the barracks of the apartheid era and then the post-apartheid houses and shacks. I can't say I could entirely tell the difference.

South Africa is 12% white, 80% black. (The "colored" remainder are descendents of indigenous San/"Hottentot" people who mingled with the first white colonists. They are in fact lighter of skin tone than most blacks we see, but also have different facial structures and hair than the Xhosa and Zulu majority we see around us. Because the colored were considered indigenous to the Cape, the racists ascribed to them somewhat more rights than blacks, but less than whites. As I understand it, "colored" also came to mean Indians, Asians and other brown-toned émigrés.) One surprise to me in seeing Langa is that there were some handsome brick-faced houses with paved driveways and such -- sort of like the houses you see here and there in Watts that make you say, "I didn't know there were houses like this in Watts..." Some slightly more affluent blacks do stay in the townships and consider them home. Then there were very meager public housing projects, like little block toy houses, and then miles of squatters shacks.

Few of the squatters shacks have water, toilets or electricity, though a recent initiative is placing "S&S" (site and services) here and there, meaning a toilet and running water -- maybe one such for fifty shacks, where there are any at all. I was interested to learn that even in these shacks families usually pay rent to someone else, often to a gang. I could see in some doorways -- some of the shacks had elaborate wallpaper of can labels, or were painted inside. Others didn't even have this. We could see some recent infrastructure improvements, especially to roads, and some new block houses. But not very much!

One memorable sight was an old woman with a little bonfire on a vacant lot who was roasting sheep's heads. We got out and talked to her (she didn't have much English) -- she buys the heads from the abattoir for 7R ( about $1.50) each and roasts them to sell for food.

In Langa we went to a recreation center which had been closed recently due to vandalism. (We ask Angela whether she finds this discouraging. She responds that she's been doing this work for eight years, and she's used to the highs and lows.) But still operating in the center was a little room in which about eight older people sat and visited. There was an electric teapot, and several of the elder women were cutting up carrots and onions. It was the senior center. We were invited in and spent a half hour or so visiting with them. They had beautiful faces, and Mickey and I both fell in love with that little scene. One woman told me that going to that little room 3x a week was the only relief from the emotional pressure of her household, in which, it seemed, she supported many children and grandchildren.

In the same building was a crèche, a daycare center, for about fifty tots -- they came running out when they saw us. Such beautiful children! Almost all had runny noses, but almost all had shoes too (there are more of my obnoxious, inquisitive class observations -- throughout the trip I was noticing things like this, trying to suss out who fit where, and feeling sad and ashamed at the same time to have such concerns.) We went up to the room where they basically sit all day with no toys or anything. Mickey later said that he'd like to bring them buckets of used tennis balls -- usable only for fun, not weapons, and not really fungible... When we left, they pushed their faces into the chain-link fence and said "Bye bye!" over and over, as we waved our ay to Angela's car.

We went on to Guguletu, another of the older townships, stopped at a rather nicely-appointed workshop for people with disabilities funded by a British charity. Angela told us that people with disabilities often fare "worse than dogs" in the townships, also that a lot of the disabilities stemmed from gang violence. We drove through the famous Crossroads, where big uprisings happened in the eighties. We could see some evidence of government works there. There was a big, empty field, which Angela said had been cleared some time earlier for new house-building. The fact that new shacks hadn't sprung up overnight said that local folks trusted the government to actually build the houses. We asked how it worked that the government could now come in and clear a field of all its squatter shacks, when the same action during the apartheid years provoked the Crossroads riots. Angela explained that, alongside the gang domination in the townships, there was also a fairly sophisticated brand of legitimate governance, a block council made up of all the heads of household in each row of houses and a town council made up of a subset of these very local leaders. All government activity, and, for that matter, any undertaking by Ikamva Labantu or other private non-profits, is done with extensive consultation with the local leadership. Government workers would come to Crossroads, to the block and town councils, say, "We want to build X number of houses here." The council would say, "We'd rather have it here..." and so on. Quite a different picture of government/township relationships than before the change. Nevertheless, when Mandela was elected president, the ANC had promised to build a million new homes, and they are far behind. Different politicized folks in the townships are getting disgruntled to different degrees as action lags behind promises.

Back at Ikamva Labantu we bought some stuffed toys made in their workshops (just like US non- profits, they are turning increasingly in the direction of entrepreneurship to fund their endeavors) including a Mandela doll, then headed for the train station to make our way home. Taking the train was itself a bit of a study, even though we were only going to go three stops. Nothing was marked in any discernible way, so we were running from platform to platform. Finally someone pointed us to the ticket window, where there was a line of at least 300 people and one window open. We watched the line for a minute, and it didn't move at all. We left in frustration and went to call Eddie, which involved a payphone that didn't work, another that didn't take coins and the usual travelling-someplace-where-you-don't-know-anything headaches. We got the call made, and someone pointed us to another line where there were only maybe 150 people. All were black, all looked poor and tired, and all made their way to the window and asked for "Khayelitsha," "Guguletu," "Manenberg," "Mitchell's Flats" and other townships. We stood apprehensively in line, with that unpleasant sudden awareness of being the only whites in sight. We got tix and got on the train, where we were suddenly in a compartment with only white riders, except for one passenger. Sitting on the train before it took off, I noticed the muzak playing in the station. Christmas carols! I decided to notice and remember this little detail -- somehow it spoke to me of how in Capetown everything seemed very first-world, except that little details were slightly off. They had muzak, but it was Christmas muzak in late February. Oh well.

Once the train got going and the conductor came for our tickets, there was an angry confrontation with the one black rider, who had apparently gotten on without a ticket. We later heard that all the folks we had been in line with were in the third class car at the end of the train, which would have been packed to the rafters. Our tickets cost 60 cents -- third class only 30. We were never told that there were two fare options. But then, when we mentioned this detail to someone, they said that you have to specifically request a third-class ticket. Who knows???

That night I did services at Green Point, the slightly more luxurious, older Reform synagogue. I actually found it a little more relaxed than Wynberg, probably because of a slightly more casual president. Afterwards we went to dinner at the Shermans', the retired rabbi and his wife, along with another couple and Professor Gittai, an Israeli bible professor at UCT, who also teaches at the temple. The Shermans live in a highrise that could be in Miami or Tel Aviv, among a million other highrises a block from the beach. It was the first apartment I'd been in -- very nice, beautifully furnished. We were escorted in to a fancy Shabbat table, with heavy silver silverware and such. By Mrs. Sherman's place there was a little bell, and when she rang it, the black maid in a uniform came out with each course. I was fascinated with the maid, who never said a word or met anyone's eyes. We had six desserts!

Conversation after dinner turned to politics, of course. The Shermans have two daughters in Johannesberg, two in Jerusalem. The Capetown Reform Jews are all extremely zionist, probably especially because they keep feeling the need to leave South Africa. A couple of days before there had been a "zionist fair" at the Herzliya School, the Jewish day school attended by 90% (!) of Capetown's Jewish students. Mickey had gone with Rabbi Hoffman, and had come home shaking his head with amazement at the hard-sells from real estate saleswomen hawking condos in Netanya and such. Very practical zionism!

So at the Shermans that night there was a long talk about the situation in Israel, security, would the impending war with Iraq cause war in Israel etc. Talk turned seamlessly to South Africa (I've been aware all through our trip, as I hear all this zionist talk from the Jews, of the parallel between the treatment of blacks under apartheid and Palestinians under Israeli occupation. This didn't seem like the time to bring it up.) I was heartened to hear some good words for Thabo Mbeke, the heir to the Mandela presidency. People there said that it was he, not Mandela, who really runs the country now (this I heard from many people) --- and that Mbeke had already done a great deal to bring international investment to South Africa, something obviously needed in order to make all those improvements that so need making. Nevertheless, Mbeke was more unapologeticaly African-oriented than Mandela with all his rainbow language, so the real changes won't happen until after Mandela is out of office.

Someone said, "Of course, Mandela is a saint," meaning that he was above the daily running of things. But nobody in the whole time I was in South Africa seemed to disagree with that assessment. Mandela is a saint. Around the living room there were those who said that they were waiting to see how things went post-Mandela, meaning how "African" things will become, how inhospitable to whites. One dinner guest suddenly spoke up very ardently and said he was tired of all those people who had wanted apartheid to end so much and now were abandoning ship. He felt committed to staying in South Africa and making a life here. In fact, he said, he was one of the blessed ones, because all four of his adult children were still in Capetown.

{End of Part 4}

(Capetown 1998 - Part 5)

Copyright Margaret Holub 1998

Last updated 03/12/98 (RGE)