The Last Train to Zona Verde Read online

  So what had happened since then?

  On my second day in Cape Town, after another gourmet breakfast at my hotel, I took the thirty-minute drive down and around the mountain to the squatter camp. I had found a taxi driver who lived near New Rest, in an older settlement called Guguletu, where I also wanted to go, having visited it ten years before.

  No visitor to Boston, where I was born, rises in a luxury hotel and, after a great breakfast, catches a taxi to tour, out of purely voyeuristic curiosity, the poorer parts of the city — the black section in Roxbury, where Malcolm X Boulevard enters Dudley Square; the poor districts of Charlestown and Chelsea; or the mean streets of Everett, with its corner shops, pool parlors, and three-decker wooden houses. Gawkers are not welcome in these places, but even if they were, no one would casually visit, because the poor sections of American cities are perceived as dangerous. So I was keenly aware of my privilege as a visitor to South Africa — that I was doing something I refrained from doing at home.

  And it wasn’t hard to accomplish this. In Cape Town, many poor townships, some of them nearly identical, make up the itinerary of the well-advertised sightseeing tours of the city.

  “This is Imizamo Yethu,” the guide says over the loudspeaker as the City Tours bus approaches a hillside of ramshackle houses and dirt roads. “This means ‘Our Struggle.’ It began as a squatter camp. It is now a township. It began in the 1980s when the pass laws ended. It grew in the nineties. You may get off here if you wish to be taken on a tour by a person who lives in the community. Another bus will follow in thirty minutes …”

  My driver’s name was Thandwe. Xhosa by tribe, he had come here as a small boy, twenty-seven years before, from Port Elizabeth in the Eastern Cape, to live with his uncle.

  “I go home now and then,” Thandwe said, “but this is where I intend to stay.”

  We were headed down the highway, the road most foreign visitors see, since it is the main road to Cape Town International Airport. I wanted — hoped — to find good news, to see something different.

  “New Rest — it is there,” Thandwe said, and indicated a settlement of tidy, russet-roofed houses that lay behind a high fence beside the road. They were not reconditioned huts or renovated hovels; they were new and solid-looking, and they stood very close together in what were obviously the footprints of the shacks and sheds that I had seen a decade before. This was the “in situ upgrade” that the urban planners had hoped for.

  We turned off the highway onto the side road that led to New Rest and cruised through this now much-improved township. Forty years ago this was a rural area with a spiritual aura and a ritual significance to the local Xhosa people. Initiates (mkweta) in circumcision ceremonies (ukoluka) were concealed in the bush here. When their penises were foreshortened with the blade of a spear (mkonto), the youths stayed as a group until their wounds healed. Ten years before, I had been told that in June and December, the newly circumcised boys were seen, “sometimes many of them, hiding in the bush on the far side.”

  That was no longer the case. Every bush had been cut down, houses stood where there had been scrubland, and there was not a tree standing. But I had seen a change, and I understood how it had evolved. First the new people from provincial villages created a squatter camp out of plastic sheeting, rags, and cut-down tree limbs; then the shelters were improved to hovels with old planks and scrap tin, to become the shantytown; in time came the addition of communal toilets and a standpipe for water; and at last, because of the tenacity of the people — the ones who on my previous visit had told me, “We are staying here. This is our home” — and the volunteer urban planners and well-wishers, it had been upgraded again. There was a government department, the Reconstruction and Development Program, dedicated to improving and rebuilding the squatter camps.

  “It has shops now. The school is near,” Thandwe said. “One of the reasons for these improvements was the World Cup.”

  After South Africa was named the host country for the 2010 FIFA World Cup, three enormous football stadiums were built in its major cities, and the seven existing stadiums were extensively renovated. New hotels were built, and public transport was improved, and with all this investment came a self-awareness that meant money would be spent on housing for the people who would be employed at the new facilities. The low-paid workers who maintain South Africa as an agreeable place that has solved the servant problem — the domestics, the gardeners, the mechanics, the scrubbers, the floor moppers, the bus drivers, the cabbies, the waiters, the nannies, the nurses, and the teachers — live largely in these townships. So improvements to their living conditions were essential to the running of the city.

  Another day, another departure from my lovely hotel in the center of the city, another driver. This man was Phaks — pronounced “Pax.” He had been recommended to me as an authority on township life and was himself a resident of the great sprawl of Khayelitsha, with its population of half a million and its more than 80 percent unemployment, the place with the worst reputation for crime, idleness, gambling, fighting, and binge drinking.

  “But it’s not all bad,” Phaks said as he drove down the highway. He was fairly jolly but seemed to have unresolved matters weighing on his mind, and at times his expression darkened and he became aggrieved.

  We swung past District Six, a lively area of Cape Town in the apartheid era that had defied the racism and thrived as a safe, multiracial inner-city neighborhood well known for its music, its food, its color and zest. In the late 1960s, wishing to reclaim the land and create a white area, the city government had forced its population of sixty thousand to leave and divided them by race, resettling them in specific townships — the whites to white areas, the blacks to Khayelitsha, the mixed-raced people (“coloreds”) to Mitchells Plain and Bonteheuwel.

  The idea was to create a whites-only neighborhood of new houses, to be called Zonnenbloom (“Sunflower”), but it hadn’t worked. No one wanted to live there, and ten years ago it had sat empty, a barren field bordered by two old churches — all that remained of District Six were its churches.

  But some houses had been built since I’d last seen it. In 2005 the Reconstruction and Development Program had put up a number of new houses, and many of them — but not all — were occupied.

  “They are for those who want to come back,” Phaks said. “But some people are resisting.”

  “It’s central, it’s safe, the houses are new,” I said. “Why would they not want to move back in?”

  “They say it’s not the same, so they stay away.”

  “What does ‘not the same’ mean?”

  “It’s not multiracial anymore. Just black.”

  Next he took me to Langa township, which was a bit nearer to Cape Town proper and, like many of the other townships, just off the main airport highway. Langa’s distinction was that it was one of the first black townships. Phaks said that it had begun to be settled in 1900, but the local historian contradicted him and said it was 1927. Then Phaks said that the name Langa meant “Sun,” and the local historian said that it was designated Langa after a famous nineteenth-century chief and anti-government activist, Langalibalele, who was exiled as an undesirable to a site near here.

  The local historian, subcontracted by Phaks to join us, was a Xhosa man named Archie, who explained that this township was the consequence of the South African apartheid system, in particular the Group Areas Act, which compelled nonwhites to live in designated places. This hemming-in of nonwhites was enforced by the Pass Laws Act of 1952, which required all of them to carry an identity document known formally in Afrikaans as a Bewysboek, in English as “the Reference Book,” and universally among the carriers as the dompas, or “stupid pass.”

  The dompas was, in effect, a passport, with as many pages as a normal passport. “The most despised symbol of apartheid,” according to the South African parliamentarian and anti-apartheid campaigner Helen Suzman. “Within the pages of an individual’s dompas were their fingerprints, photogra
ph, personal details of employment, permission from the government to be in a particular part of the country, qualifications to work or seek work in the area, and an employer’s reports on worker performance and behavior.”

  Protests against the pass laws — first by brave women in the early 1950s, then in the 1960s by men inspired by the women — led to suppression, outright massacre in Sharpeville, and more protests, which brought the apartheid struggle to the world’s attention. South Africa now celebrates these protests with two national days, Women’s Day and Human Rights Day. After thirty-four years of internal passports ruling the lives of South Africans of color, the pass laws were repealed in 1986.

  With indignation bordering on rage, Archie was telling me about the hated pass laws and the Group Areas Act as we walked through the Langa streets, which were littered with garbage, old tires, and broken bottles. Even the recently planted flowers and patches of fenced-off grass had been trashed.

  “Your Bill Gates helped us with the cultural center,” Archie said, showing me around the Guga S’thebe Arts and Cultural Center, where in a back room three women were painting designs on ceramic pots and mugs, in an effort to teach skills and create employment. South African women seemed to have a spark, but more than 60 percent of the adult males in Langa were unemployed. The cultural center, brightly painted and with ceramic artwork on its façade, built for workshops and performances, was an imaginatively designed post-apartheid building, perhaps the only new one in the township. It had been deliberately constructed near the spot where in 1954 a demonstration by thousands of Langa residents had been held to protest the pass laws — a mass burning of the dompas — and a march to the center of Cape Town. Only ten years old, the center was already in a state of disrepair — unswept and seemingly neglected. On the township tour itinerary, it had more tourists visiting than local residents.

  “How did Bill Gates help?”

  “He gave us these computers.”

  Four unused computers, with grubby keyboards and blind screens, sat on desks.

  “Unfortunately they have been out of service for a year.”

  What Archie did not say, and perhaps did not know, was that the Gates Foundation had given money to support an effort to increase awareness of HIV/AIDS. Langa had one of the highest rates of infection in South Africa. Saturday is “burial day” in Langa, and there were usually around forty burials each Saturday. In spite of efforts to educate Langa’s people, the death rate from HIV/AIDS was rising.

  “Come this way,” Archie said.

  When he kicked a beer can with the side of his foot, I used that as an opportunity to ask him why the carefully planted flower gardens in front of the cultural center were blighted, and the whole of this street and its sidewalk littered with beer cans and waste paper and blowing plastic.

  “We don’t know what to do with it. People throw it and it blows.”

  “Why not pick it up?”

  “It is a problem.”

  “Archie, all it takes is a broom and a barrel.”

  “The municipality cares for it.”

  “If that’s so, why is this crap still here?”

  I deliberately put him on the spot because he was, so he said, the spokesman, and the cultural center was the primary destination of the township tour — as it happened, a busload of white visitors had arrived and were looking with that “where are we?” squint of tourists just off a bus. In a place where tens of thousands of people had no job and nothing at all to do — a number of people were conspicuously sitting around and talking, or gaping at the tourists — not one was picking up the masses of litter.

  It is possible that Archie, still denouncing the injustice of the pass laws, did not see the disorder, and he seemed annoyed with me for mentioning it. As if to dazzle me — or perhaps to explain the dereliction — he began to declaim.

  “There was a prophet here long ago! His name was Ntsikana — he made a prediction!”

  “What was the prediction?”

  “It was in the year 1600,” Archie said, and in a solemn prophesying tone seemed to quote Ntsikana: “People will come from the sea.” Archie raised one finger for emphasis. “These people will have a book and money.” Archie wagged his finger. “Take the book but not the money!” Archie let his finger droop. “But they took both.”

  “They shouldn’t have taken the money?”

  Archie said, “That was the badness.”

  I remembered the name Ntsikana and later looked it up and found that there was a Xhosa prophet by that name, his life well documented. Indeed, he was a pioneer of “black theology,” a self-created Christian (he’d had contact with missionaries, though he was never baptized and never studied with them) who had flourished in the late eighteenth to early nineteenth century. In 1815 Ntsikana had an epiphany, “an illumination of the soul,” that confirmed in him a belief in monogamy, river baptism, and Sunday prayer to a sovereign God. He wrote hymns and composed poems. Because his conversion had occurred without any missionary intervention, so he said, his followers “claimed a pedigree for Xhosa Christianity independent of missionary influence.”

  “I am sent by God, but am only like a candle,” Ntsikana said, using a felicitous image of illumination and finiteness. “I have not added anything to myself.” Furiously proselytizing, he established rural congregations throughout the Eastern Cape. One day Ntsikana foretold the coming of a race of people to the shores of South Africa. He described them as people “[through] whose transparent ears the sun shines redly” and “whose hair is long as the tail-hairs of a zebra.” Since he had previously seen whites, this prophecy proved accurate, and he apparently did warn his followers not to put much faith in the new people. Ntsikana died in 1821, and his grave, near Fort Beaufort in the Eastern Cape, is a place of pilgrimage.

  Although Archie had a few details wrong, his sudden parable introduced me to this powerful sect, which still had many adherents. We were walking along the broken paving of littered roads that ran between a pair of two-story cinderblock buildings that had the prison starkness of much public housing. They had once been, Archie said, the hostels of migrant workers — all men — who were employed as field hands, common laborers, and domestics in Cape Town during the apartheid era. An effective way to control them was to house them in an isolated place, require them to carry the dompas, and separate them from their wives and children, who remained in distant villages.

  Behind these beat-up hostels were small wooden shacks piled against each other. Ragged children, their noses running on this chilly morning, lurked in the doorways.

  “More people,” I said. “More shacks.”

  “Informal settlements,” Archie said. The name always brought a grim smile to my lips because it conjured the image of people in bright bungalows, sprawled on sofas. “The name for them is siyahlala.”

  I asked him to spell it, and I wrote it down.

  “It is Xhosa,” Archie said. “It means ‘We are staying here.’ ”

  He said five or six people lived in each shack, though there seemed hardly room for two. Scattered around the edge of the settlement, beyond the hostels, beyond the shacks, were shipping containers — great rusty steel boxes — and people were living in those, too, recent arrivals, Archie said. Some containers had been divided into two- or three-family dwellings, doors and windows blowtorched as crude openings in the sides. In front of several were stalls selling blackened sheep heads.

  “We call them smileys.” Archie explained that when the severed head was thrown on the hot grill, “the lips shrivel up in a smile.”

  The locals ate them with “train smash,” he went on, and laughed. “Tomato sauce.”

  As we strolled, teenagers stared at us from where they sat on benches or rubber tires. Some glowered from doorways, others glanced up from card games or from kicking a soccer ball, still others simply stood the way herons stand, motionless, on one leg, the other leg crooked behind it. All of the youths were idle, not a dozen or so, but scores of them, perha
ps hundreds, apparently with nothing to do. A few of them began to follow Archie and me, but they quickly tired of this — maybe we were walking too fast for them. One of my rules in an apparently insecure place was to walk fast and look busy.

  Archie said the hostels had been renovated in 2002, which perhaps meant that was when they had been painted the dull yellow I saw. He showed me inside one of them — a hive of dirty two-room apartments crammed with filthy mattresses.

  “Six rooms here,” he said at another of the hostels. The places were crammed with damp quilts, old clothes, broken shoes, and children’s plastic toys, as well as CD players and radios.

  “How many people live here?”

  “Thirty-eight.” He could see my incredulity. He said, “Some sleep on the dining table. And under it.”

  Misery acquaints us with strange bedfellows. The smell grew riper as we penetrated to the last narrow room, where there were two small beds. It housed a family he knew.

  “Nine people in this room,” he said.

  I tried to imagine where they lay at night on the beds and on the floor of this room, which was no more than nine by five feet. He nodded, satisfied that he had startled me, because some of these township tours seemed designed to shock the visitor. But I also thought that there must be places like this in the United States, perhaps many, yet how would I ever know? There were no tours, no men like Phaks or Archie to guide anyone to them.