Around "Gugs"

Xolani (not the driver -- pictured here with me at JL Zwane) runs township tours, which are becoming quite popular with tourists to Cape Town, and are also offered in Soweto and other townships around Johannesburg (aka Jo'burg, Jozi). He took me and two other Americans working at JL Zwane on an abbreviated tour. Guguletu and other townships are a remnant of apartheid, and are areas set aside for black South Africans outside the major cities, where the white government would not permit them to live. Blacks and other groups were forcibly removed from the city centers on several occasions in all the major cities. See this link for the story of District Six, one such community here in Cape Town (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/District_Six). Note that some of the chronology in the Wikipedia article is incorrect, although it is accurate overall.

So Guguletu and other neighboring townships are mostly made up of simple houses, plus numerous squatter camps that have grown up among and around the neighborhoods of cinder block houses. As I have said before, these houses vary from being in good condition (even quite nice) to being pretty run down. Then of course, there are the "informal settlements". The pictures I am attaching are mostly from the squatter camps. You really need to see a picture to understand, as my words won't be good enough. Even these pictures are insufficient unless you image being in the middle of a couple square miles that look just like this.

I want recommend a book I am reading to you all, written by an American named Kevin Winge who spent some time working with AIDS issues here, which provides a good introduction to issues in Guguletu and at JL Zwane. The book is called Never Give Up and is available on Amazon.com (I checked). As I read more books, I will let you know about them. If you want a general intro to South Africa, read the classic book Cry, The Beloved Country by Alan Paton (if you didn't read it already in high school).

Just before I wrote this, Xolani and I drove to Philipi (a township nearby where he lives in an informal settlement) to pick up a bunch of kids who are doing a performance of gumboots, a traditional dance done in "wellies", for the Habitat group. Thr gumboots dance was developed during wars between the Zulu and Tembu in the early twentieth century, and the wellies element came in with workers in the mines who wore such gear. If you are super interested, here is a link to check out: http://otoplasma.com/gumboots/dance.html I had six kids, plus Xolani and me in my little car, and another fourteen kids fit into a station wagon. Xolani joked, "Hey, it is a white man driving a cockroach!" (which is what they call the combis, or mini-bus taxis, which don't go anywhere until they are full of way too many people. In Istanbul they called these things dolmus, which is also the Turkish name for stuffed grape leaves).