it's a rainy day in the neighborhood
i had a thousand things I wanted to do today and I woke up feeling miserable and the day was very very very rainy. So, I went back to sleep, walked around the waterfront a bit, tried to see if there was any chance, with the late start, I could get a reservation on the boat that goes out to Robben Island where Nelson Mandela was imprisoned for most of his term (I couldn't, sold out), and so decided to go back to the ship and see if I could get on the bus that was going to the District 6 Museum and out to the townships. I did get on the bus.
District 6 was one of the largest forced removals of Blacks from Cape Town. In 1966, the government declared it a white area and moved out 66,000 people to outer townships. It took them 25 years to move everyone out.
On yesterday's tour, we were told that what is now the bay is largely reclaimed land. The waterfront was much further up and Cape Town was very susceptible to storms and ships were often damaged. So, they built up the waterfront and pushed it further out to sea. The guide yesterday neglected to mention that much of the rubble that they used to rebuild the land in the harbor came from the the bulldozing of District 6.
The foreman for the bulldozing company took all the street signs from District 6 and hid them in his house. When they were creating the museum in 1994, he gave them -- in secret -- to the museum's curator. He was afraid he would get in trouble for not having disposed of them. The original street signs are now in the museum.
We started the tour at the museum so that we could learn where the relocated people had lived and then where they were moved to. The curator spoke to us and, in her voice, you could hear the anger and the love and the community and the activism and her passionate commitment to preserving the community's memories and stories. The floor is a giant map of District 6 as it existed before 1966. Residents who had lived there have come to the museum and marked their homes and businesses on it.
And they have left their words:
We spent much too little time at the museum (which would have been fine if I were in Cape Town long enough to go back), but having the curator address us was really amazing. We then drove out (40 minutes or so) to one of the townships, passing several others on the highway out. I've put pictures below. There are more on the map. It was raining and several of these are from the bus, so you'll have to excuse the raindrops. Although, the wetness and blurriness almost makes it even harder to wrap your brain around. As if it were possible to get harder.
As with Salvador, the density of the poverty is what struck me most. Shack next to shack next to shack for miles and miles around. As far as you can see. The favelas in Salvador, though, were built up on the mountain. This is very flat. And reminded me in many ways of walking through the 7th Ward in New Orleans last June. I kept having all those comparison thoughts one has: New Orleans was a natural disaster, this is a human-created one. In New Orleans, the houses where spray-painted with Xs, with the quadrants marked counting the number of dead and the number of rescued, the date the house was searched, and the government agency. Here, the spray-paint was the red ribbon of HIV/AIDS:
Some little boys we met:
Apartheid is often thought of as the separation between whites and blacks, but there were actually four government categories of race: race 1 was White, race 2 was Asian/Indian, race 3 was Colored (mixed race), and race 4 was Black (in that hierarchy of privilege). In the townships, the relocation of Colored and Blacks was separate. From the place high up where we got this view:
there is a four lane highway (2 in each direction), busy but small enough to run across. One side was the Colored township and the other the Black township. Our guide is Xhosa and lives in the township we visited. He said the saddest part of apartheid was not just the White-Black hatred but the divisions between the Black people and the Colored people. He said he still doesn't cross the street over the Colored township and no one there ever crosses the street to his. He said his son goes to an integrated school and that he has hope that his son's generation will find a way to heal, because his generation is still not able to. But, he went on to say the kids make friends in the context of school, but crossing the street into each other's homes is much much harder.
poverty & sadness & history & hatred & healing & community & love. All right there in front of us.
I'm off on safari tomorrow. No blogging for the next several days. Take care.
