Langa Walk

A few days ago, we went on a tour of Langa township, the township where we are living. In my last entry, I explained what a township is (basically a “suburb” of the cities where Black people were confined to live during apartheid). We’ve gotten a lot of weird looks from people when we say we’re living in Langa since most people think of it as really violent, poor, and dangerous, so it’s been a really interesting experience seeing where people’s expectations of the township are in relation to what we are actually living. On some levels, their expectations are correct: none of us are allowed to walk anywhere by ourselves, we must keep all valuables hidden when we do walk (with people from the community), and we’re not allowed to use public transportation in the area, at least until the Independent Study period, so we have private buses to take us to and from our classroom. Even our buses are unwilling to enter the townships at night because there are sometimes carjackings and muggings. While I don’t know enough about Langa to say that calling it dangerous is a misconception, I can tell you that the street I live on, Moshesh, is really wonderful. There are tons of kids that are always playing outside- soccer in the streets, cards on someone’s front porch, and in the evenings, the moms all sit outside on plastic chairs and chat. On my first day, my Mama told me that if something bad were to happen on this street, everyone would know it was caused by someone who doesn’t live there since they know and trust everyone. I feel safe in my house and on my block because already everyone knows me, but I know that if my 13 year old Sisi uses caution when she leaves the immediate area, I should too, especially since I obviously stand out.

So, last week, we went on a tour of Langa run by an environmental NGO with its base just two blocks from me. Even though my noble ideas about Development were ripped apart and then stamped on by Lubkeman’s Development Anthropology class last semester, the organization seemed really great- it was dedicated to building community gardens, selling artwork and jewlery made by community members, and giving tours of the township to tourists looking for the “real South Africa.” (Speaking of these tourists, we saw some of them while we were walking and they were so unreal- literally, Hawaiian shirts, beige shorts, strapped sandals, sunhats, sunglasses! And I think that I stand out in Langa…)

The types of housing in townships in South Africa literally range from slums and tin shacks all the way to mansions and Langa is no exception. On our tour we visited the “Beverley Hills” of Langa- a block with enormous gated mansions with driveways and cars in them. These are some of the only two-story houses in the side of the township we’re in. (Two of the students in our group were very luckily placed there and one has an amazing view of Table Mountain from her second story window. And her own bathroom. With a shower. I’m not jealous.)

Literally two blocks from Beverley Hills is Joe Slovo, an informal housing settlement of tin shacks with cardboard floors. Housing is a huge issue in South Africa and the housing system here is completely foreign to me. Basically, since 1994, the ANC has built homes for the poor because the new democratic constitution basically says that everyone has the right to shelter that they own. However, you must meet specific qualifications and standards in order to be given a “free” house and the new homes take time to build. I say “free” because they are expensive once you move in- you must pay electricity and water bills which are really expensive here. Even my homestay, though my family is not “poor,” (I mean this by comparison to the much poorer people here, but compared to American standards, most of the rest of the world is poor) conserving water and electricity is really important because it is so expensive. But I digress- basically, in South Africa, and in the continent of Africa as a whole, there is a huge trend of rural to urban migration- the movement of massive amounts of people towards large cities and their surrounding townships and suburbs in an effort to look for jobs (unemployment in South Africa is at 40%). But many of these migrants set up shacks on municipal land, and law states that if people have called land home for 4 or 5 years, they are allowed to fight for that land in court and the government cannot take it away.

So basically, Joe Slovo is this neighborhood of shacks right next to mansions of people who have claimed the land as their own and are given free electricity and free running water by the government. And what often happens is that people don’t want to move into homes because these amenities are so expensive that when they are awarded a home, they often stay in their shacks and rent out the home to others, or sometimes move into the home and stay in their shacks. To make matters worse, they often rent to illegal (and legal) immigrants, mostly from other parts of Africa, so immigrants are often living in the homes that were rightfully built by the government for citizens of South Africa. This, among other things, has created a huge backlash against immigrants, especially those from Zimbabwe, and there was a lot of xenophobic violence last May, mostly in townships outside of Jo-Burg.

As we continued our walk through Langa, we also saw some other really cool things:

1) An old woman killing chickens she kept in crates. She was just wringing their necks really casually and even smiled to let someone in the group take a picture. (I of course didn’t bring my camera since we were told not to take pictures of people in the neighborhood or to flash our wealth around, but I’ll have to steal someone’s pics off facebook and post them here.)
2) These two guys with a shopping cart full of bloody goats’ heads. Apparently they (goat brains) are a delicacy here. They were pretty gross but also really cool. I’ve probably eaten some and not even known it since my sisi cooks unidentified meat with really weird-shaped bones all the time. (If I have had it, it’s delicious, because everything she has cooked has been amazing.)
One other Langa-related thing I’ve learned since I’ve arrived. South Africa has a huge transportation crisis. There’s no public bus system or bus lines and the trains are so overcrowded (think worse than Santiago overcrowded, for anyone who went to Chile with me) that today we were driving and a train passed and all the doors were open and people were literally hanging out of the train doors with five or six people standing on the rickety link between the cars as it sped by. It was UNREAL. The only bus system they have is in the form of mini-buses- like 12 person white vans that are privately owned and run on routes that only locals know. They tend to be safe, but you should never get in them by yourself if they are empty and you shouldn’t ride them after dark into the townships

South Africa supposed to host the World Cup in 2010 but government has to deal with the public transportation issue before they do because at least 1 million tourists are supposed to descend upon the country and they won’t be able to move around easily anywhere.

Basically, getting in and out of the townships is really challenging for ordinary working people and it’s something I find really interesting in terms of the “ideal” system of apartheid which physically separated blacks and whites in schools and restaurants, etc. but also geographically separated them and really, to this day, has prevented many of them from being able to rise out of poverty because of the huge distance needed to travel daily to get into the center of the cities for labor. When we read Nelson Mandela’s autobiography, he talked about sometimes having to walk from Soweto (township outside of Jo-Burg) into central Jo-Burg when he couldn’t afford transport into the city. It was at least a twenty minute bus ride from central Jo-Burg when we visited his home in Soweto.

So since the government is faced with this issue, they are attempting to create some kind of public bus transportation system, but the mini-bus drivers are really angry because they’ll lose out of business so they held strikes all of last week and kids couldn’t get to school and many people had no way of getting to work. My sisi stayed home from school for three days last week because she couldn’t physically get there. I tell you this because there’s a rumor going around in the townships that they plan to strike for ten days this week since they don’t think the government is taking them seriously. Shane (Irish Academic Director with two pairs of glasses) doesn’t believe they will because it will cost them too much money, but stay tuned.