If you’ve never been to a place where you are the only person with your skin colour for miles around, you can’t quite appreciate just how uncomfortable it is to step out of the car. Instantly all heads are turned, standing out as you do like some sort of anaemic sore thumb. If unsubtle stares could kill you’d be a dead man many times over, and you plead desperately with your melanin to make you a little less conspicuous. My oh-so-politically-correct friend Confidence, one of the people who was showing me around, eloquently describes the feeling as being ‘black-washed’. Nice.
Yesterday I went to the township just outside of Bloemfontein (AKA Ekasi, the Location, Manguang, pretty much whatever you want, I think), and the above happened to me. It wasn’t too bad though, because even though the first ten minutes were some of the most uncomfortable of my life, the rest of the afternoon/evening was fantastic. In case you didn’t know, a township is the area where non-whites were forced to live during the apartheid era, and as such the housing is often just shacks and the like. I didn’t know quite what to expect before I went, and while it’s quite hard to sum up exactly what the Location is like, the thread that binds my experience together could well be called ‘haphazard community’.
The vibe within the Location is incredible. Take the feeling of being in student halls, and then multiply it by ten, and you’re sort of getting close! Everyone is up for getting to know anyone, people strike up conversations with complete randomers, house music blares out of a conglomeration of cars which can only loosely be called parked, folk are dancing in the street, wandering over to talk to their neighbours, holding street corner barbecues around trucks with DJs in, eating, drinking, laughing, chatting, and general relaxing in an environment flowing with such community that anything we have in the West pales in comparison. I would imagine it’s like living in Fresher’s week, constantly. I would love to visit there again. I mean get this: a 750ml bottle of beer (which is 1.6 pints, see picture to right), was one pound. And that wasn’t a special offer. That’s just the price!
Added to this, the plan of the area, if it can even be called a plan, is wonderfully disorganised. The houses, shops, streets and squares are haphazardly packed into areas way too small for them, and the variety of architecture is staggering. The houses range from corrugated steel shacks all the way up to small brick houses which wouldn’t look out of place in the UK. The ‘average’ place seemed to be made of breezeblock, but even they were as varied as the people who built them. The difference between the rigidity of Bloemfontein and the structureless marvel of Ekasi is stunning, but I definitely prefer the latter. I would love to come here again.
Like I said, I didn’t really know what to expect before I came, but the afternoon I spent in the township was one of the most fun and memorable that I’ve had during my whole time in South Africa. Apart from getting to know my work-mates better, the trip challenged (and destroyed) preconceived notions that I didn’t even know I held. You see, due to a combination of sensationalist media reports and a general western superiority complex, I had come to believe that western culture was somehow the ideal, that the world would be a better place if all cultures emulated our ‘development’. The idea of suburbs and motorways and shopping malls and skyscrapers had become so intrinsically linked with my idea of a ‘perfect society’ that it took a trip like this to expose the ridiculous fallacies I didn’t even know I counted as fact. I think I expected there to be some sort of eternal unhappiness and anguish in the township because of the lack of material wealth, but in reality, this could hardly be further from the truth.
These folk are far poorer than people in the UK, it’s true, but that richness of society, of community, of emotion and spirit just doesn’t exist in Britain. It seems true togetherness has long been strangled by the stress-filled and structured western life. So yeah, people in the townships have just about nothing. But as far as things that actually matter, it seems, they have just about everything. And I’m really glad I was able to experience some of it.
