Walking Tour of Langa

February 22, 2018

            When we are in school in Isilimela, and when we go up to the second and third floors, we have a stunning view of Table Mountain, and several block apartments, and then right up next to us, densely packed fields of shacks. Langa packs in 150,000 people in a mostly single-story seven square kilometers. Yesterday was the day of our walking tour of Langa. It was sure to be  powerful, because so much of what we observe here is both beyond our experience and by design just out of reach. Last year, the tour was bleak. It was a poverty and injustice tour. Our students had walked the entire way in a respectful, shaken silence. This year, though, felt so different, still taking us to the stark results of deliberate apartheid planning in a visit through steel- roofed lean-tos and rows of government apartment blocks, but we were also led through markets and life, brought into shacks where babies were cared for and where traditional rituals and ceremonies were described; we were prepared with greetings so we could engage with residents we passed. There was still the political activism of the tour--see us--but also the vitality of daily life and traditions passed on--see this.

            We started at Guga S’thebe, an arts, education, community resource and skills center since 1998, richly supplied with art and light and workers who clean and guide and sell art. Guga S’thebe, we learned, means “old platter,” and our guide explained that the old platter is both tradition and also Apartheid, and that we keep and rise from what is old. This is a stunning, vibrant place with mosaic murals and various forms of art everywhere, including the shape and reach of the buildings themselves. In one room, people are working with molds to make ceramic pottery which they fire and paint; in another, a group of musicians is amped up and playing in a large hall designed from recycled containers and other materials; in another room, a person is making mosaic images from shards of tile and glass; in another, paintings, art from sand, carved wood, wire. Still another room provided Wi-Fi to community working quietly on computers. Elizabeth, one of our parent drivers, had been longing to return to its coffee shop the whole time, and it didn’t disappoint. Later we would return and shop. For now, though, it was a starting point, a walk from future directly to the past.

            Because right next to Guga S’thebe is the old courthouse used to process Dompas violations. In the nineteenth century, Langa was a place to house migrant labor; but later, after the Group Relocations Act, Langa was designated a township for Blacks only, and people were brought to the courthouse and jailed if they failed to have the Dompas, which you couldn’t get if you weren’t registered with a company in Langa, and you couldn’t be registered with a company in Langa if you were a woman. If you were from another township, you would need a special pass to come into Langa. Otherwise, jail. Pumi, our guide, explained the whole colonial structure surrounding the courthouse, as well as the company hostels we would later see on our tour.

            One of the most powerful visits on the tour, for me, was entry into a “pub.” Last year, we were warned not go to the beer hall, and before our tour, Ms. Plesha told Pumi we could only look on from outside. But we were brought anyway. We had entered a two foot alley between shacks and entered a wider boulevard and were invited into a shack that was nearly black with soot. This was the pub. We crowded in, a woman sitting quietly beside a frothing can the size of a garbage bin. There was jug of beer placed on the floor in the middle of us all. Pumi then described what this was, how it was made, but most of all, how this was used: shared and passed during rituals, ceremonies, and all important passages. It’s a beer with little alcohol content but long in tradition. Our rear guide made us feel the ritual of the moment as he picked up the jug and said, this is how you drink it, and he explained, how to blow the top first, and with both hands, and to drink, and to pass. He explained about its use before boys were sent into the forests and deserts to become men, and three weeks on, when it had happened. Pumi would not explain this particular ritual, because it’s only for men to know and they keep private what it is they experience there. But our other guide explained what he could: At 18, young men are sent to the woods alone, without drink and with only a corn cake for food: the week is spent in a spiritual journey, but also in dehydration, which aids in the circumcision that occurs after the week. They have two more weeks after this, relying on themselves once more, encountering who knows what—only the Xhosa men—and when they have returned, goats and more are slaughtered, and they are expected now to behave, changed, healed, as men. And the beer is passed round once again. We were in a shack we were shown last year only to pity. But here it became a living room, and a sacred place.