Township Tour

One of the guys in my rez, Tulas, is from a township north of Durban, and he wanted to give the international students a taste of what South Africa is really like. Many of the students who I have met are not actually South African, but from Zimbabwe, Zambia, and Botswana. It is still difficult for black students here to overcome the social barriers and go to post-secondary.

We all packed in to a minibus taxi, and started our tour driving on a road that we are quite familiar with – the way we travel to the mall. During apartheid, the distance between us and the mall was covered with sugarcane. This was a tool that was used to separate the racial groups: white areas had several kilometres of sugarcane between them and the Indian area, and then more sugarcane would follow to separate them from the coloureds (that’s the acceptable term here for mixed race), and then more sugarcane, followed by the black area. The idea behind this is that, if the blacks wanted to attack, there is a large distance to cover between them and the whites, so by the time they organized anything, the whites would know about it and be able to suppress it.

The sugarcane areas are now mostly taken over by illegal settlements, where people have moved from rural areas or townships closer to their work in the city. This is different than the government housing which is also being built on the former sugarcane areas. This housing is subsidized and is still rapidly being built. Unfortunately, the areas where this housing exists is not prime: the place that we visited is under a power line, where there is a higher likelihood of miscarriage, deformities, and cancer.

One of the flats we toured housed 9 people, who lived in a one-bedroom unit. The entire complex is provided with 200 litres of water, after which the tenants have to purchase more. The power here is prepaid via cards that are bought at gas stations. The codes on the cards are punched into the power machine in each flat, and power is supplied. However, during load shedding, these power customers are shut down just like the rest of us.

Load shedding is a colloquial term for scheduled blackouts, which affect the entire country. There is a power shortage in South Africa, and the current solution is to have rotating blackouts. You can imagine the affect no power can have on business, where companies are paying staff for many unproductive hours due to this lack of power. We were lucky not to be on the schedule, but our luck ran out last week when a new, more all encompassing schedule (now even hospitals and the biggest port in Africa are included) put us on the list. We now have class in dark rooms, and often larger lectures are cancelled because there are no windows. There was a new schedule this week because people complained that certain areas were being favoured with better blackout times. Now, we have blackouts at night, which sucks a lot. 6-8:30 pm Mondays with no power: no cooking, no light (it gets dark here earlier now), no nothing.

Our next stop was kwaMashu, which is one of the largest black townships in South Africa after Soweto. There is a train that connects this township to Durban, and I was shocked to see how many people live in shacks along the tracks. Besides the obvious noise concern, fire is a real danger for people who live in these areas. If one shack starts on fire, the entire area is gone is seconds. In Soweto there is a special orphanage for children who have been affected by fire.

There are also other houses in this settlement, and that is where we went to have lunch. Tulas’ mother (well, she is actually his stepmother, but Zulus aren’t concerned about these qualifications. We all called her Gogo, which is an endearing term that means grandmother) welcomed us. We all sat (separated by sex) in the front room, which shows respect to the ancestors. The furniture in their house was given to them by former employers. This was a common occurrence when employers were moving: they would give away their furniture to their staff instead of moving it.

Gogo’s son is a Sangoma, which is someone who mediates with spirits. He did some rituals to ensure the spirits were satisfied with us being in their house, and then did some dancing and drumming. One of the rituals that we had to take part in was drinking Zulu beer out of a shared container. Gogo then showed us some beadwork that she had made with other women in the area. Business innovation is very important here, where jobs are very difficult to come by. We were then served a traditional Zulu meal, which included tripe, sweet potatoes, yams, steamed bread, creamed spinach, chicken… the list goes on. It is customary to have the men be served first, which was challenging to observe. Zulu culture is still very misogynistic: the men are served hand and foot while the women do all the work. It is still quite common for Zulu men to have several wives, but that can get expensive because the families set bride prices that the men must pay, in terms of a number of cattle, in order to ‘earn’ the bride.

Before we left, we noticed a gathering down the hill of people dressed conservatively in all white. We ventured down to find out it was a celebration of the 12th Apostolic Church of the Pentecost. We were observing from afar, until someone noticed us and brought us to the front to have a better view. I’m sure we were pretty easy to notice, being a bunch of white kids. We made our way up to the front, with the entire congregation singing and waving to us, welcoming us to the party. Once we were at the front, we witnessed several people who were overcome by the Holy Spirit come forward and prophesize. Tulas translated some of it for us after: anyone who wasn’t a follower would burn in hell at the Second Coming. I’m sure it had nothing to do with us.