We were standing by the side of a four-lane highway in downtown Cape Town. Table Mountain reared up spectacularly behind us, fine wisps of cloud rising from either end of the plateau like smoke from a bonfire. In front lay the Waterfront, the bustling docks, the Atlantic and – out in the bay – Robben Island, where Nelson Mandela spent decades behind bars. These are Cape Town’s landmarks, sites familiar to every tourist.
But Rashaad Felton hadn’t brought us here for the views. He’d brought us to see the vast, litter-strewn stretch of dusty ground sprawling out beside the road – District Six: where Rashaad grew up.
District Six was once South Africa’s most ethnically mixed area, a veritable melting pot. Today it is known as apartheid’s ‘Ground Zero’.
Rashaad recalled that when he was a boy, immigrants from Ireland, the Philippines and the West Indies lived happily alongside indigenous southern Africans, Cape Malays and ‘coloureds’ (people of mixed race). The area had no fewer than 21 religious institutions – mosques, synagogues, churches.
Then, in 1966, the apartheid government decided that such prime real estate – with its spectacular views – was too good for what it deemed the racial underclass. It reclassified District Six as a ‘whites-only’ area, and set about forcibly removing its 60,000 inhabitants to the desolate Cape Flats.
It took almost two decades for the last family to be evicted and the entire area bulldozed. And then – nothing. As protests grew and sanctions began to bite, a bankrupt government was unable to do anything. The planned redevelopment never took place. Today, District Six lies as a wasteland in the heart of the city; a more potent symbol of the pernicious lunacy of apartheid is hard to imagine. But to most visitors it is just a bit of scrub. It’s Rashaad’s job to open our eyes.
I was on a ‘township tour’ run by Grass Roots, one of the growing band of companies catering for travellers keen to gain an insight into ‘the issues’.
It is ten years since the end of apartheid, and the country has been reborn – or rebranded – as ‘the Rainbow Nation’. But political freedom has not eradicated the legacy of apartheid. The economic segregation remains a reality.
Yet it is something most visitors do not see. Though the road into the city from the airport passes the shanty towns of the Cape Flats, few stop to take a closer look. Safety is a major issue for travellers to South Africa and tourists are strongly discouraged from venturing far from designated attractions – Table Mountain, Camps Bay, the Waterfront, Cape Point.
The feeling of being in a bubble is common among visitors to South Africa. “Our first impression of Cape Town was that there aren’t many black people,” said a Dutch couple when I asked them why they had come on a township tour. “ In fact, they make up 70% of the population. But they’re priced out of the city, and you don’t see them in the bars where tourists go.”
Rashaad is aiming to put that right. “Most of you will have formed an idea of what life here is like. My job is to change your perception,” he explained, as we piled into the back of his Mercedes people-carrier. “To do that I am going to give you a lot of information.”
He wasn’t kidding. During the next four hours we were given a crash course in the history of southern Africa, apartheid, linguistics, the law, construction, geography, economics and much, much more. This was serious stuff: tourism with a purpose (parents of young children who are likely to be disruptive are politely discouraged from bringing them along). But the hugely engaging Rashaad – a former used-car salesman – ensured it never became tiresome, bringing the facts and figures to life with anecdotes and personal reminiscences.
After District Six, we headed out to Langa – the city’s oldest black township – a model apartheid development with wire fences all the way round. In Langa we were taken to the Joe Slovo Squatter Camp, a sliver of tin-roofed shacks squeezed between some of the township’s newer, concrete houses (built by the last apartheid government shortly before the elections in the vain hope of winning over black voters) and a local school, run by Maureen Jacobs. As we arrived, three other township tour buses also pulled up, and their well-dressed, well-fed – exclusively white – passengers were led into the two classrooms.
In one, about 50 11-to-16 year olds were going through their maths homework. Next door, the kindergarten children were doing shapes and numbers. The pupils were clearly well drilled for such visits. On cue, they shouted a warm welcome, before filing outside to sing us songs praising Nelson Mandela, Thabo Mbeki (the country’s current president) and Chris Hani (a freedom fighter and political activist).
The songs, we were told, were available on CD – and a number of the tourists duly bought them. We were invited to make a donation to the school. Everyone reached into their pockets. Rashaad told me that when Oprah Winfrey visited recently she offered to pay the teachers’ salaries for three years. As we left, I was handed a pamphlet about the school. Printed on the front was its bank account and branch code details.
Cynical? Perhaps. But who can blame them? There is no government funding and the parents of most of the children are unemployed immigrants from rural areas. As Maureen Jacobs explained, this is the one chance “to awaken their sleeping minds”.
But it does raise questions about the ethics of the tours. As we got back on the bus, I confessed to Rashaad that the whole notion of touring a shanty in an air-conditioned people carrier – much as one would go on safari – made me feel uncomfortable. There is an uneasy voyeurism in looking at other people’s poverty before retreating back to your own luxury hotel, where running water and clean toilets are taken for granted.
Rasheed insisted it isn’t.
“The people in the townships are very proud of their areas,” he protested. “The townships – their homes – are not something they are ashamed of.” Sweeping them under the carpet – ignoring them, or pretending they don’t exist – is the mentality of old South Africa. “It’s very rare to get [white] South Africans on these tours,” he asserted pointedly. That said, he admitted that, when Grass Roots first started in 1997, there was some resistance from the township residents.
“The idea of white people peering at them didn’t go down too well,” he said. One factor that persuaded the occupants otherwise was the economic benefits of the tours. Grass Roots donates 10% of its ticket sales to a charitable trust which funds projects such as the Chris Hani School, and provides seed money for business start-ups.
The economic spin-offs became clear when we got to Khayelitsha – Cape Town’s biggest township, housing around a million people – and the workshop of ‘Golden’ Nongawuza. Golden used to be a miner in Johannesburg – hence the nickname. Today, he has a thriving business making ornamental flowers out of tin cans. As he showed us his handiwork – which, again, we felt obliged to purchase – Rashaad was bursting with pride. “He now supplies four shops in the city, and is able to support his children,” he said. “You can see the benefits of tourism working.”
Our last stop was to meet Vicky Ntozini. Six years ago, Vicky was walking through downtown Cape Town when she saw a busload of tourists taking photographs out of the windows. “I thought, this is crazy. They’re not seeing the real Cape Town.” So she opened a bed and breakfast in Khayelitsha.
It took two years to get her first customers – five girls from Holland. But business is now steady, with about six visitors a week. Her guests – mostly white, young and from overseas – pay around £15 a night for rooms that are basic, but clean. The price includes dinner (vegetable curry and maize) and a breakfast of coffee and porridge. “The people who stay always say this is the highlight of their trip,” she said.
Vicky took me across the road to the Waterfront shebeen, or beer hall, for a drink. Despite the overwhelmingly male crowd, and the metal cage surrounding the bar, the atmosphere was friendly and welcoming.
Meanwhile, my four-year-old daughter had quickly found some friends and was playing happily outside under the watchful gaze of the mums who lined the street washing their laundry.
“I’ve never had any safety problems,” Vicky said. “I usually pick up my guests from town, but many drive into Khayelitsha themselves. The only time I don’t recommend it is at night – and then only because they’re likely to get lost.
“Everyone in the community knows me, and is behind the project. They know they have a stake in it doing well.”
