Cape Town, South Africa TWO

We drove away from Cape Town’s impressive Central Business District around Table Mountain to visit Langa Township. Langa was built in 1923 to house 5,000 male dockworkers (who left their families behind in the country); now 50,000 folks live there in a 1.2 square mile space. We didn’t see what we expected. Our idea of a “township” was a place crammed with tin shacks and no streets or schools. Langa has those features, but it also has a small medical clinic and schools public and private and small middle class houses with tidy yards. But outside the tidy yards are mounds of rubbish and lambs heads being tossed out of a truck and cooked on the roadside.

We visited a “lower middle-class” house that housed 9 families in 9 rooms. The center was the “kitchen” and contained only a large metal table. Apparently the families prefer to cook in their rooms. The washroom is across the road and upscale because it is private - each of the families has a key to it.
Beauty salons and barber shops abounded; hope does spring eternal.

Our hearts melted at the local kindergarten where the children had prepared a program for us, singing “If You’re Happy and You Know It... “etc. Moravian Educate is a private institution that charges tuition. The children are a bigger hope than coiffeurs.