Langa Walking Tour

             Langa packs in 150,000 people in a mostly single-story seven square kilometers. Today, they got to know the township more intimately, on a tour that takes us through 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. There is a disquieting agenda in 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. The whole place is a testament to the vitality and resilience of a community whose hardships were plainly visible in dirt and glass and corrugated tin.

            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, as well as the role of women in the civil unrest of the sixties that delivered Langa to its residents.

  

          Students afterwards reflected on the jarring proximity of very different living situations in Langa—the cell-like houses for migrants, government block houses for the lucky, older ones for the slightly less but still fortunate, and shacks in shantytowns, projects, for those our tour guide said were “just getting started,” and privately bought houses, the Beverly Hills of Langa, including the small cottages where the mamas live. They realized how much they take for granted, and want to learn from the joy and openness of people making rich lives with so little.

               They also felt very uncomfortable during the tour. Alea said the experience made her entirely rethink what it meant to be a tourist. Others, too, explained how uncomfortable they were with turning people’s poverty into spectacle, throwing some rand on the way out. But Kate anticipated the discomfort this year, and our guide therefore explained before we set why people were going to welcome the learners into their homes: it’s a way of making a little money, but also a way of being seen by the outside world.