Guguletu

On Mother's Day, I had the opportunity to take a tour of a township called Guguletu. The word Guguletu is Xhosa for 'our pride'. However, when this township was established in the 1960's under apartheid, its residents had little to be proud of. Residential areas in Cape Town were declared to be for whites-only, and residents were forcibly moved into townships based on their racial categorization. While Oceanview, the township that I did a homestay in was designated coloured-only, Guguletu was originally designated for blacks.

The townships were one of many ways of demeaning blacks during the Apartheid era. By forcing black farmers off of productive land to make way for white-owned farms, the government was able to both put land in the hands of whites while forcing blacks to move to urban areas to earn money, satisfying a demand for labour in factories and the service sector. Since blacks were not given formal citizenship, they had to carry documentation that proved that they were qualified to live in township housing. To get a house in a township, a person would have to show that they had a job in Cape Town. But in order to get a job in Cape Town, a person would have to show that they lived in the area and would be able to get to work.


When we visited Guguletu, the roads were lined with two room houses. These houses were built by the apartheid government. Although each house only had two rooms, no running water, and no electricity, several families were usually forced to live in one house due to the difficulties of qualifying for housing. When all of the houses were occupied, the apartheid government refused to build more houses. Instead, everybody who was forced to move to Cape Town to look for work would either have to move in with relatives, or build an informal shack to live in.

Our tour guide lived in Guguletu and had lived in both a house and shack in the township before he had been able to build his own home. He introduced himself as Donald, but then went on to say that Donald wasn't his real name. His baas (which is the Afrikaans word for boss, but blacks were forced to call any white man baas) couldn't pronounce his name and told him that from now on, he would be called Donald. He told us that he was proud that under the new government, young men joining the workforce would never have to suffer the humiliation of being forced to go by a different name just because a white person couldn't pronounce their real name.



Part of the tour was visiting a shack and getting the chance to look inside. To get to the shacks, we had to leave the road and walk on a sandy path to a field behind the formal houses. The shacks were built on a hill, and during the rainy season our tour guide told us that it could be almost impossible to get to the shacks through the mud. The shack that we visited was about 3/4 the size of my bedroom at home and was divided into three rooms-- a kitchen area, a livingroom/bedroom, and an entry way. It was built out of pieces of scrap wood and corrugated metal and had a couch, bed, dresser, and television. The woman living in the shack shared it with her husband and her young daughter. She told us that in the summer it got unbearably hot, and in the winter the wind and rain made it cold and damp.

Since the individual shacks don't have running water, the government built pumps every 150 meters. If you want to do the dishes, bathe, or wash your clothes, you have to fill a bucket up with water and carry it back to your house. Forget showers, real baths, or hot water. There is one toilet that is shared between five or six families. The residents of this area were lucky though-- unlike in many townships, this toilet had walls around it.

Another part of the tour was visiting the memorial for the Guguletu Seven. This was a group of seven black young men and women who were sharing a taxi on the way to a job interview. The taxi driver suspected that they were members of the ANC, which was banned during the liberation struggle, and called the police. The police set up a roadblock, pulled everybody out of the car, and executed them.

People have been getting more and more frustrated at the lack of change since the end of apartheid. Even though the government has been trying to create more jobs and provide affordable housing near those jobs, progress had been slow at best. In my classes I had been learning about the ANC and why government progress had been so slow, and it seemed understandable given the legacy of apartheid. But visiting the township and seeing for myself the conditions that people had to live in, I realized how inexcusable it is that people are still being forced to live like this.