Cape Town and Environs Part 2 - District Six, Townships, and Robben Island

While in Cape Town, Rishi and I spent a full day touring historic sites from South Africa’s apartheid era. The tour provided us with insights into ongoing division of the country by race and class, but also the tremendous progress that has occurred in just 20 years since apartheid ended.  

In the morning, we took a guided tour through District Six, an area that had been home to a diverse community of colored (mixed-race) people until, under the Group Areas Act, it was reclassified as white in 1966. Though the government claimed District Six was a slum, most likely the real reason for its reclassification was its desirable prime location close to Cape Town’s city center. Between 1968 and 1982, the original homes were destroyed and all District Six inhabitants were relocated to township areas. Today, District Six houses the Cape Peninsula University of Technology, but very little housing as political pressure prevented the apartheid government from building there. The South African government in 2003 began building new homes that are available only to people who can document that their families originally lived in District Six. 

At the District Six Museum, we viewed exhibits on what life had been like in the District. Other exhibits provided the testimony of former residents on how relocation disrupted the fabric of their community and forced them to move from decent housing, close to their employment, into very rudimentary housing within the remote townships in the Cape Flats, which required long commutes into Cape Town. 

This floor in the District Six museum is covered by this map showing the District's former streets. People who once lived there have written on the map to show the location of their homes. 

We then drove to see several of those townships in the Cape Flats area, which were defined under apartheid as black or colored areas. Our guide for the tour still lives in one of these townships, Lhanga, and I have the impression that he and his family stay because they’ve been able to purchase and improve their homes and also because they feel tied to family and community there. However, many of the townships areas are definitely impoverished slums. For example, apartheid era hostels (dormitories), originally built for male workers, now have entire families living in spaces that were once intended only for one or two men, and multiple families share limited kitchen and toilet facilities. 

This beautiful girl is a student at the Philani center that we
visited. It's one of several such centers in the townships
where children attend preschool and receive nutritional
support, while their mothers receive training about
improving family nutrition and also are employed as weavers
 and fabric painters. (See http://philaniusa.org/index.php.)

In other places, such as Khayelitsha and Crossroads townships, people live in row upon row of shanties constructed of whatever materials are available, such as wood, cardboard, corrugated metal, and plastic. Our guide told us that fires frequently breakout in these areas because of the kerosene used for cooking and the highly flammable materials, but firefighters have a hard time accessing the homes to extinguish the fires because the homes are packed so closely together. We didn’t take many photos here, as it was so heartbreaking, but google "Khayelitsha South Africa" if you are interested in seeing photos. 

What a contrast the touristy V&A Wharf, with its perfectly maintained
historic buildings and modern shopping malls, is
to the township areas we had just visited. 

In the afternoon, our morning guide dropped us at the Victoria and Albert Wharf, where we waited for the ferry to Robben Island. Just 45 minutes from Cape Town by boat, this is where Nelson Mandela served at hard labor for 18 of his 27 years as a political prisoner. Many other leaders of the struggle against apartheid were imprisoned there as well.

The gate to the Robben Island prison reminded me of the infamous
Auschwitz gate, above which the Nazis wrote "Abeit Macht Frei" -- work makes free.

Our guide at the Robben Island prison, himself a former prisoner there, described what prison life was like. The exhibit at the left shows the daily rations each prisoner received, which in the wisdom of the apartheid regime, varied depending upon a prisoner's ethnic/tribal group.  

The bars of Nelson Mandela's cell. 

A few days later, while in Franschhoek on the last day of our trip , we stopped by the entrance of Drakenstein Correctional Institution, the prison where Mandela spent his last 14 months as a prisoner, prior to his 1990 release. There, we saw the statue of Mandela shown here.  

Rishi with the Mandela statue at Drakenstein. 

Shown here are two of the inscriptions on the base of the  statue. Note that one mentions the struggle for a "non-racial, non-sexist, democratic and free South Africa." I'm impressed. I've never seen any statue of a major U.S. leader that mentions the goal of a non-sexist society.