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Outside Magazine, June 2004

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Technicolor Darkness (cont.)


	Peacekeeper: an armed policeman on the cliffs at Waterval Boven (Jimmy Chin)

THERE'S SOMETHING CREEPY about gawking at poverty from an air-conditioned bus, so I sign on with Adventure Without Limits, a township-tour outfit that lets you gawk from a bicycle. For $46, I get transport to the Cape Peninsula's Masiphumelele township, a rattly bike, and the guiding expertise of a 23-year-old Xhosa woman named Noluthandu.

We pedal down potholed roads past shacks that are more like collages of tin, brick, wood, plastic, and cardboard. Families share communal taps and toilets. Residents run jury-rigged wires along the ground to poach electricity from power lines. A woman sweeping her stoop waves us over. She's watching Days of Our Lives.

Noluthandu shows me a spaza shop, a penny arcade where a single cigarette or a slice of bread can be bought. Then we stop at a shebeen, or bush pub, but one of the men inside yells something rude in Xhosa. "Let's go," she says. It's afternoon, and the boys are well lubricated.

Masiphumelele sprouted up in the early eighties as an unnamed squatter camp for unemployed Africans and those working for whites in Cape Town. Concerned with slum conditions and rising crime, whites petitioned to relocate the squatters. Police ran them off, but after the laws preventing blacks from moving freely were abolished, in 1986, people slowly returned and built an "informal settlement" whose population has grown to 26,000. In the end, Masiphumelele—Xhosa for "We Will Succeed"—prevailed.

Outside the township are shacks built on a swamp—a case of squatters squatting on squatters—and we push our bikes to a small hutch. Inside are three sangomas, or healers, all women. A drum starts up and the broad-hipped matriarch leads the trio in a foot-stomping dance. At the end, they stand before us, panting.

"Ask them questions. They are fortune-tellers," my guide says.

"Do you have a question?" I ask her.

"Me? No, I don't believe in this. I am a Christian."

We ask the matriarch what she sees in Masiphumelele's future.

"This township is doomed. AIDS will destroy the people. We have nothing. The men have no work. There is no medicine."

I pedal away, wondering how to digest a tour in which misfortune is the main attraction. On the way out, an eight-year-old boy hops on the back of my bike and cadges a ride. When it comes time to jump off, he high-fives me and smiles. Like any kid anyplace.

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