Experiencing the 'other' - a night in a township provides a different perspective

Bishops is one of the wealthiest and most privileged schools in South Africa, and the exact same can be said of the 700-odd boys that attend it for their five years of high school. Living almost entirely in bubble, spending a week in the life of any one of these boys’ lives will not give any indication that just 40 minutes down the road lies some of the worst poverty imaginable. The area known as the Cape Flats is almost completely covered by shacks no more than a couple of rooms in size, each housing entire families, made by hand with whatever scrap wood and iron sheets can be found. Drugs, crime and gangsterism are part of life here. One such suburb on the Cape Flats is Langa, an area fortunate enough to have its own school, known as LEAP. It is through LEAP, a twin school of Bishops, that once a year about 25-or-so Bishops boys volunteer to spend a night with one of the LEAP students on a ‘one-night exchange’. All boys who are going on international exchange will do this, and it is one of the best ways to truly experience how the majority of the country lives.

I was one of the boys who went last year, around mid-August. The two-day program started at Bishops where we met our exchange partners, had ice-breakers and got to know each other a little better. In the afternoon we traveled together into Langa, stopping off at a place know as ‘the container’. Basically, because many of the LEAP students have such an inadequate study environment at home (having a desk, proper lighting or even peace and quiet are luxuries), LEAP set up a small, pre-fabricated building a short walking distance from where the majority of these students live that can be used for doing homework or study in the evenings, and which was to be our base camp. Then came the tour of the Langa township, a first-time experience for most of us, with LEAP students leading us umlungu (white people) through their backyard. The ‘roads’ are dirt and every square inch of space not deemed to be a road is taken up by a sea of shacks and shebeens (township pubs). We were lucky enough to get the chance to go inside one of the nicer shacks (i.e. one that had brick walls) to find a kitchen, completely bare except for a sink in the corner and no floor. An old lady living there showed us her bedroom behind the kitchen, a room which she shared with two other families. She had been living in that house with those conditions for 17 years.

The government is supposedly trying to do away with these shacks, and the result so far has been scattered clumps of rectangular, apartment block-type buildings built to replace the shacks. These tiny apartments, a couple of rooms in size, usually house multiple families and often have faulty plumbing or no hot water. They vary in condition and age, often being extremely run down and drug or gang hotspots. It was in one of these apartments that my exchange partner, Aviwe, lived, his block being one of the newer, nicer ones with paving and a row of small trees outside.

After the tour and dinner at the container everyone began moving off with their partner back to his or her house for the night. It was getting dark by this time and I admit that I felt a bit nervous as we left the rest of the group and walked the streets alone, but his house wasn’t too far away. Aviwe and his family live in an apartment with four rooms, a bathroom and a kitchen, all of which they share with another family. Bathing is done by filling a large metal tub with warm water from the kettle and washing in it. I was introduced to his parents and two younger brothers, who slept together in one of the rooms to make space for me on the floor of Aviwe’s room (where his brother normally slept), but before we went to bed, Aviwe thought he would show me around his neighbourhood first. We walked down the road to a place he referred to as ‘the Valley of Dreams’: a warehouse-type building filled with rooms (more accurately, compartments), each privately owned as individual apartments. We visited a group of Aviwe’s friends, hanging out in one of these compartments watching that night’s episode of ‘Generations’ (local soap opera) on a small TV. After that, we all went for a walk through the streets, for the lack of anything else to do, until we decided to call it a day. I actually found the evening extremely interesting and entertaining as a whole, living completely differently to how I would normally and experiencing how they do it instead. I would never before have imagined myself walking through the streets of a township at night, and the dodgy looks I got from people on more than one occasion kept reminding me of this.

We returned home and started getting ready for bed, Aviwe ending his day by playing a quick game of pinball on the PC tucked away in the corner of his room and playing some of his favourite Eminem music. The next day we woke early and got ready for school, walking down to the bus stop to catch the LEAP school bus. We traveled through to the school, which is quite far away from Langa itself, and spent the morning there, discussing not only what we had experienced, but also the whole cultural divide in general, with the students and staff. In catching up with the other Bishops guys a whole variety of stories came out, some similar to mine, others very different: sleeping on the dirt floor of a one-roomed shack, having a partner who was the sole caretaker for their younger siblings, getting water from a central, public access point were all mentioned, as was staying in a full-size brick house with your own, proper bed and even en suite bathrooms. This just shows the disparity that can happen within one community, although those extreme examples would’ve happened on opposite sides of Langa to one another. One thing that was consistent throughout all the views, however, was that this was definitely not a place to just write-off as poverty-stricken and dangerous. The spirit and friendliness found in a place such as this, where everyone knows their neighbour, where everyone is united in their struggles and where everyone is in the same boat when struggling to put food on the table, is something special and wonderful. In our bubbles, we hardly ever leave long enough to meet anyone on the other side; not many of us coming from our rich, white suburbs can say that we know who our neighbours are beyond the high walls and electric fencing dividing us. This community has had it tough for generations: our past government and its laws, our present government and its broken promises and the general disdain with which the rest of the world looks down upon them, but this is not the way it should be at all, and often all it takes is a night in someone else’s shoes to realize this.