Stories from the Townships

Today we went on a long tour of the townships and met with people along the way. This post is dedicated to the stories that I heard today from our guide and from locals we met.

We started the day traveling around District 6 which is very near the Cape Town city center. This was a rather diverse neighborhood, but had a large coloured population. During the set up of Apartheid all non-whites were relocated from Cape Town itself. District 6 was a location of resistance to relocation and was the site where Colleen, our guide, lived. She told us stories of how the police were required to hand out 3 notices to homeowners before their house could be demolished. When the police were coming, she would run to a local store to phone her parents and tell them not to come home. She said that as a result of the attempts to relocate, she lived in 29 houses during this period before she was finally relocated. When at the District 6 museum, she showed us pictures of the neighborhood before and after the relocation. If you Google pictures of Richmond Street in District 6 before and after relocation you can see how powerful the Apartheid regime was. As soon as the police had distributed a third notice, they would come and demolish the home regardless of whether the owner’s goods were still inside. It was really interesting to see Colleen interact with the museum and neighborhood that she once called home. She knew everyone in the museum and even some of the guests who were wandering back in. This was her home that was forcibly destroyed by the Apartheid regime. I think we often picture the Struggle as between blacks and whites, but seeing Colleen’s coloured neighborhood facing the same damaging regime. Her whole childhood was wiped out and her only memories can be found in this museum. Colleen knows everything on display and everyone who walks through the doors. She told this story about one of the men who is the shopkeeper at the museum. During those times men would apparently bet on carrier pigeons in races. They would teach them to race home and then release them. One day after he had been relocated, he released his pigeons. The birds flew away and he couldn’t find them. Finally, he went back to District 6 and there on the foundation of his house were the pigeons. They had gone home to a place he could no longer call home.

After leaving District 6 we went to the townships and traveled through Longa and Nyanga to Guguletu. The story we heard there was not a recent one, but one from near the end of Apartheid. We stopped on the side of the road near a gas station to hear this story. Amy Biehl was a 26 year old Stanford graduate on a Fulbright Scholarship in the early 1990s. She was working on voter empowerment leading up to the election in 1994 in and around Cape Town. On August 25, 1993, she was driving a friend home to the Guguletu township. When she got there, a mob of Africans was just leaving a political rally. Seeing her white face, they began to throw stones at her car and smashed the windows. She got out of the car and ran, and was chased to the gas station where we had stopped where she was stabbed to death by four African men. These men were convicted initially, but in 1998, Amy Biehl’s parents argued for their release and pardoned them. They founded the Amy Biehl Foundation Trust to attempt to keep Africans off of the streets in the townships where their daughter was killed. In fact, they went so far as to meet the killers and actually began to build friendships with them. They have actually taken in one of the men who killed their daughter he never leaves Linda Biehl’s side. I don’t know how they found it within themselves to forgive when so much was taken away from them. I can only hope that I would respond in the same way. This is what it means to love your enemies, to serve the ones who have done you the most harm. I can only hope to learn from this example and do the same in my own experiences.

After leaving Guguletu, we headed to Khayelitsha, the largest township surrounding Cape Town. There are 1 million people living in mostly tin houses here and it stretches in every direction as far as the eye can see. It was the most concentrated form of poverty I have ever seen. Most people were living in very tight living conditions made entirely of temporary materials and trash littered the streets. There were very limited water sources and bathrooms were basically non-existent. We were told that in some areas of Khayelitsha unemployment reaches 60%.

In amidst this huge city of poverty lies Philani Child Health and Nutrition. This is the nonprofit I will be working with this quarter and I am very excited about my time with them. We had a chance to actually stop at their site and it is an oasis in the midst of the chaotic sand dominated shanty town. They started in 1970 and have been working ever since. Though initially they dealt mostly with child malnutrition and in providing enough food, they now work with both kids and mothers. The mothers work on craft projects which allow them to learn a skill and make money to support themselves. They do a variety of weaving and dying of fabrics as well as construction of small items from used cans and other things. Kids are able to attend kindergarten here which is not normal in this country as well as receive dental care and food. I am going back tomorrow to meet my supervisor and to start work there. I will let you know when I find out what I’m doing!

We stopped for dinner at a restaurant in the Longa township. It was quite a fun time as our group of around 30 was the only group there. We were greeted by a live marimba band and a very energetic woman who had lived there since 1960. They prepared 26 different African dishes for us to try in a buffet style. I was very full by the end of it as they allowed us to go back to the buffet as much as possible. After finishing our meals, several of us went and got to play the drums with the band and though we didn’t play anything complicated it was still a fun event.

The last story I want to tell is not a story of tragedy, but a story of hope, though it may not seem like that initially. In the township of Khayelitsha, we met a woman named Beauty. The first thing she told us when we walked into her home is that she is HIV positive. Not many people here will divulge that information and she is one of the few who will do it openly. In fact, she keeps her Antiretrovirals (ARVs) on her mantle so that anyone who enters her house can see that she is positive. She wants people to know that HIV is not a death sentence. For a living, Beauty runs a bed and breakfast, but also sews garments. She is particularly good at making formal dresses and her walls were covered with pictures of dresses she had designed and then constructed. Feeling like she wanted to help build up the community, she began teaching other women in the community how to sew. Overall, she has taught over 100 women how to sew and now those women are joining the market and beginning to work for their own support. People like Beauty are hard to come by. She could have easily said that life was too hard for her. She is HIV positive and she lives in one of the poorest places in the world. Instead of rolling over and dying, she has taken the step to make a difference in her community. We need more people like Beauty who humbly take up the cause of those around them and work to make a difference in this world. I hope that I will not be discouraged by difficulties in my life that would prevent me from really making a difference.