After a long weekend in De Hoop I was not looking forward to waking up early for our township tour on Monday morning. 8:30 to be specific. Though I normally can't sleep past 8:30 because of the road noise, I knew I'd be able to sleep for days after De Hoop. However, I decided to grow a pair and to wake up early. I did not regret it.
Our township tour started off by visiting Langa (meaning "the moon"), the oldest township in Cape Town. Established in 1910, Langa is home to 300,000 people (including one of my flat mates, Babalwa). We visited a local after school program (I forget the name) which dedicates it's time to keeping children ages 4 - 18 away from drugs, gangs and crime in the townships by teaching them music, poetry, dance, and drama. We were treated to a musical performance by 6 of the students (there are normally up to 100 kids there at a time, but it was empty because of the holiday on Monday). These kids were really good; I was really digging the marimbas and really wanted to try one out. Then I got my wish - they invited us up to play with them. I banged on the marimbas for a bit, then on a couple different bass drums, and got to play with them for a good 15 minutes. It was a lot of fun (and you could see the local kids were having a lot of fun, too) and got me really excited for my African Instruments and African Music Ensemble classes.
From Langa, we traveled by van through several other townships: Nyanga (meaning "the sun"), established in 1950, Guguletu (meaning "our pride"), established in 1960, Khayelitsha (meaning "new home"), Crossroads, and Manenberg, the most dangerous township. It's interesting to note that Langa was established before apartheid was officially instated with the Group Areas Act in 1949. Cape Town (and the surrounding areas) is home to 4 million people, 1.5 million of whom live in Khayelitsha. It's definitely powerful to see the shanty towns that people live in inside these townships, and really makes you re-evaluate what you have at home. We ate lunch in Guguletu at a "guest house", which was built by one man alone in the 1990s. He had absolutely no money and built it by going around and scrounging up other people's trash, and by the time we had gotten there had turned it into a very respectable establishment. I forget this guy's name (and the name of his book) but his story was remarkable. To build a guest house (with no money) in the middle of a township, where (according to him) everyone who has ever stayed there has felt "totally safe", is no small accomplishment. And the food at this place - my god, some of the best boerwors (sausage) I've had since I got to South Africa.
The thing I found most interesting about the township tour (though it's not really about living in townships) was the extent to which students were responsible for bringing about the end of apartheid. It was the 1976 student movement, headlined by Hector Pietersen's death (which I wrote about earlier in this blog), which really showed the state that apartheid was not a feasible regime. Our guide said something very interesting, along the lines of "Adults weren't willing to die for equality, rather they wanted to live to see the end of apartheid and to have their rights restored before dying. Students, meanwhile, were willing to die for their cause, and would do whatever it took to bring about the end of apartheid."
This made me think about how different things are in America, especially today. At Pomona, the Stand With Staff people are hated by all the other students (including myself) because they're clearly riding on their high horse and are fighting for worker's rights to an unrealistic extent (I won't get into the whole Stand With Staff stuff, just know that I and every single one of my friends hates it. Right Elan?) Just over 30 years ago, kids our age were fighting for the right to use the same facilities as whites and to not be forced to live in prescribed areas. Just goes to show you how different things are in America and South Africa. People here cherish freedom because they saw what it was like to live under racial and colonial domination. People in America espouse some bullshit idea of freedom under which they have the right to throw a shitstorm if they can't say something. You wonder why foreigners complain Americans are indignant and self-righteous?
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