Good morning from Hout Bay Yacht club Marina, 20 km south of Cape Town. We have been here for over ten days, and I have been busy sightseeing every day so far. Cape Town is gorgeous. There is so much to see, so much to do, and so much just to experience. I have said in a previous post that all this beauty has a deep undercurrent of politically incorrectness and corruption, but I don’t know enough about that, and I cannot not enjoy a specific sight because of some racial issue in the past or present that stood at the origin of that sight. South Africa is drenched in it.
When I take public transit into Cape Town, which takes about an hour, we drive the coastal road and make our way through some of the most expensive neighbourhoods in South Africa. Camps Bay, Clifton, Bantry Bay and Sea Point are along this road lined with million-dollar houses and apartments facing the Ocean. Incredible beaches, beautiful white sand, and very well-kept green areas. However, the water is stone cold and, oddly enough, colder in summer than in winter as the summer winds push the top layer of warmer water away from the coast, and the colder underlay comes up to the surface. If these neighbourhoods were individual towns or cities, what they probably were in the past, they are whiter than most north American cities I have had the pleasure of going to.
Most of Hout Bay and Cape Town is safe to move around in, at least during the day. But, of course, you always have to be aware of your surroundings, pick pockets are present in every metropolitan in this world. But there are armed police officers pretty well on every street corner keeping the peace, so I could walk to City hall and see Nelson Mandela’s life-size statue in the very place where he stood when he was released from prison and where he stood when he gave his inaugural speech in 1994. I have been there three times now, making it a pilgrimage whenever I’m downtown. I don’t think a more extraordinary statesman ever lived in the past or present, and perhaps foolishly, I feel his presence more so here than anywhere else.
But this post is about Imizamo Yethu.
Imizamo Yethu is a township in the Hout Bay area, less than ten kilometres from where I am in the marina. It was established in the early 1990s when people squatting in shacks around Hout Bay were moved to this area. Imizamo Yethu, meaning ‘through collective struggle,’ sits on 18 hectares and is now home to over 33,000 people.
In a nutshell, a township is an undeveloped segregated urban area for non-whites, blacks, coloureds and Indians. During apartheid, “white only” living areas were established, and non-whites that happened to live in these areas were forcefully evicted and moved into these segregated townships. Townships for blacks, townships for coloureds and townships for Indians. However, the whites still needed their workers, and the blacks, coloureds and Indians still needed their jobs. Many of these townships were too far from their places of employment, and people started squatting close to the “white only” living areas. That’s what happened here in Hout bay.
My third attempt to take a tour of Imizamo Yethu was successful. Twice, the bus drivers wouldn’t let me off as no tour guide was at the bus stop and letting me off in a free for all landscape might have weighed too much on their consciences. But on the third attempt, Belinda was there to take me and an Indian couple from Johannesburg up the hill to see an area where apartment buildings would rise in the next few years to provide homes for some legal township inhabitants. Along the paved road, small proper houses had been built by Irish volunteers with Irish money. At the end of the road, a high school built with money from Germany that also granted ten scholarships a year for higher education. Between those houses, shacks were constructed from either corrugated iron or wooden boards, a combination of the two, or temporarily from plastic and cloth.
Belinda as a young girl, with her parents and grandparents, had been a squatter in the nearby area and was one of the first families to move into this township. A beautiful lady with a wide, two-inch high, uncombed mo-hawk and inlays in her canines was one of a group of people taking the initiative in providing safe interpretive tours of the township. This township is home to primarily Xhosa-speaking people, as she is, but also legal and illegal immigrants from Zimbabwe, Malawi, the Congo and a slew of other African countries. It’s a small township relative to a Soweto with over a million inhabitants.
Walking up the road, we pass a one-chair barbershop built by putting up some corrugated iron between two houses. We pass a shack with a sewing machine, and we pass a shack from which the owners, or renters, sell essentials such as soap, utensils and canned food. All places have electricity paid for in advance, which is not uncommon in South Africa. Actually, I remember my friend Jane living in a bedsit in London, England, in the 1980s, depositing coins in a padlocked box to keep the lights on. Her boyfriend Marco managed to open the padlock, resulting in depositing the same coin over and over again.
Children attend school and receive two meals a day as long as the parents pay for a school uniform, no uniform, no access, and 400 ZAR a month, just under US $25 for schooling. Unfortunately, I couldn’t get any information on what percentage of kids do not attend school. Unemployment runs at over 40% in the township, but again, finding stats on the employment of legal and illegal immigrants seems impossible. There is quite a bit of fish processing where I am near the Hout bay marina, and Belinda acknowledged that a lot of the workers in the plants come from Imizamo Yethu.
Imizamo Yethu has its own health center and church. No matter how poor and desolate a place can be in this world, there is always a church. This one doubled as the township’s cultural center and, when we visited it, a place where local craftspeople hawked their wares.
Belinda knows everyone we pass on the street, and everybody is very friendly toward us. She says there is a huge sense of community and people help each other as much as possible. I have seen that in many places, the poorer the people, the more they are willing to share what they have.
After forty minutes, Belinda drops us at the bus stop, waiting with us for the bus to arrive. I have so many more questions about literacy, illegal immigrants, food supplies, sanitation, and whatever else comes to mind. Truly a privilege to be able to visit the township. One of these events where you leave with far more questions in mind than when you arrived.