The Cape of Good Hope: Khayelitsha

On Wednesay, Ginn and I spent the day in Khayelitsha, the second-largest township in South Africa (after Soweto near Joburg), and home to around 1.3 million peope. Khayelitsha (pronounced kiya-LEET-sha) was established by the apartheid government in 1985. In the Xhosa language, the name means "our new home."

A short history lesson:

In the 1950s, the Group Areas Act was passed in South Africa which prohibited blacks from living in the cities and resulted in forced removal to townships on the outskirst of large urban areas. As more and more blacks arrived in the Cape Town area seeking work, the existing townships became overcrowded and Khayelitsha was established in 1985. After the historic elections in 1994 when apartheid ended and Nelson Mandela was elected president, blacks were allowed to travel from the Transkei region, and many flooded into the Cape Town area in search of work, settling in Khayelitsha and building informal settlements or "squatter camps," piecing together houses out of scrap metal, cardboard, and pieces of wood and plastic. Such informal settlements exist in Khayelitsha today, and stretch for miles and miles.

The ethnic makeup of Khayelitsha is 90% black and 10% colored (mixed or otherwise non-white). Xhosa is the predominant language, with many people also speaking Afrikaans and English. The unemployment rate in Khayelitsha is a staggering 50%, and those who do work often make the long commute by train into Cape Town to work as domestics and also for jobs in commercial areas. There are as many as 14,000 orphans in Khayelitsha due to the spread of HIV among the residents, where the rate of infection stands at 27%. Due largely to extreme poverty and unemployment, the crime rate in Khayelitsha is extremely high.

Ginn and I went to Khayelitsha to meet with some community leaders and discuss the possibility of organizing a workshop on leadership. We met with Commander Zet, whom I've mentioned before, and two other men whose roles were not explained to me. The meeting got started in normal meeting fashion, but it wasn't long before it was an out-of-control speech-fest among the three men. Their accents were so thick that I couldn't really follow what they were saying. Commander Zet could talk on into infinity, I think. I could understand enough to know that he was saying basically the same thing over and over, with great passion, and it was just as irrelevant to the purpose of our meeting every time. The other men gave similar soapbox speeches. I'm not sure what to attribute this phenomenon to. Later on the train I met a girl who had lived in Khayelitsha, and I was telling her about the meeting. She laughed. "So now you are in Africa!" she said. "This is how it goes with Africans."

And so possibly this is cultural, which is fine, but I can't help feeling like it is a waste of my time. I like meetings to be efficient. I like to know when they start, when they will end, and what the topic will be. These meetings are completely chaotic, and I can't ever grasp why the men are talking and talking, or why Ginn is allowing the conversation to lurch so far from the purpose of our gathering. On top of all that, Commander Zet makes me vaguely uncomfortable. No one has ever explained his history, and at the meeting yesterday, he went on and on and about how he was not a criminal, and no one should call him a criminal, and he was in prison for ten years, but he was framed! I have no context for any of this. I have no idea why we are working with him, what his role is in the township or in Ginn's foundation, or why he needs to spend so much time defending his lack of criminality. Anyway. It was a confusing meeting. I'm not sure if we accomplished much other than a tentative agreement about who would pay for the catering for the leadership event.

That's Commander Zet in the white jacket and black hat.

At one point, I left the meeting and wandered around outside. These cows were heading down the road in the rain.

These are informal settlements in Khayelitsha.

The township functions like any other municipality, with residential sections and more commercial sections. This woman is a street butcher, and below a woman runs a fruit stand out of her station wagon.

Khayelitsha chickens.

The informal settlements stretch for miles and miles.

I met these kids on the street. I pointed at the little one and said to his mother, "He's so beautiful!" Before she could say anything, he pointed his finger at me and said, "Oh yes!"

This guy ran up for a picture because he really wanted so see himself on the digital screen. Some people didn't want to be photographed at all, and others couldn't get enough of it.

The thing about Khayelitsha is this: people may be extremely poor, and life there may be a little more difficult than my life is on any given day, but all I saw there were people going about daily life as best they could. The poverty of the place does not preclude ordinary happiness. I doubt there is anyone there who would trade her life for my life. Within Khayelitsha, there is love and heartbreak, there is hard work and pride and joy and new life, just like in any life. The point is not for me to show these pictures and evoke pity. I don't think anyone in Khayelitsha wants my pity.

But look at these photographs and imagine: how did it come to this? Look at what we have done in the name of race and in the name of God, forcing people to live in such a way as though they do not deserve anything better. 1994 has come and gone for South Africa, and things are not changing overnight. Apartheid is over, but apartheid still has its claws in the muddy ground here. Look what we humans have created. Look how we have systematically tortured other human beings, and what will not change with one election, but will take the passage of generations, if it ever changes at all. What was once explicit racism now lives as implicit suggestion, and the townships continue and the lines around here are rarely crossed. I don't know what the answer is. I don't know how to undo a crime perpetrated on such a massive scale. We can't pretend like it's not still happening, though.