Cape Town Township Tours With Teens

There’s a lot to do with kids in South Africa—beaches, safaris and whale watching are just a few of the attractions. But the country has a rich, if sometimes troubled, history and in Cape Town you can join the small but growing number of visitors who take a walking tour around a township, one of the residential areas that were designated for non-whites during the racially segregated apartheid era. Today, township tours are promoted as “cultural tourism,” and the only way to see Nelson Mandela’s country. They are aimed at visitors who want reality rather than a fantasy experience.

Is it “Politically Correct”?

We visited Cape Town last year with our daughter, 16, and son, 13. Unsure about how appropriate it would be for white tourists to wander around the poorest areas, we consulted the black doorman at our hotel, a local known as Uncle Brian, who had grown up in the city.

He gave us a very personal history lesson. In 1966, when he was 14 years old, his family was among thousands forced to leave their homes when their area, District Six, was declared “whites only.” His community collapsed, and they moved to the barren outskirts of the city, the Cape Flats, where he grew up in a township. He told us, “Visiting a township is the only way you will understand about apartheid, the only way to see how far my country has come since those days.”

For my children, it was a challenge to put these events in a context that was meaningful. My son, with his customary tendency to relate everything to football (or soccer, in the United States), couldn’t believe that all this had happened, not in some dim and distant past, but “in the year England last won the World Cup.”

The Tour

We joined four other foreigners (few white South Africans ever visit the townships) and set off for Langa, Cape Town’s oldest planned township. Though Langa lies just about 12 miles from the heart of the city, the contrast is striking.

 

• A mural in the Langa Township.

sir goatboy

Piling out of the minibus, feeling horribly conspicuous, we took in our surroundings while setting off on foot with our guide down the narrow, dust-filled alleyways. We smiled uncertainly at people we passed—mainly women and barefoot children. A few smiled back, but most took no notice.

We were shown into one of the dwellings, though there wasn’t room for more than two at once. “Mum, it’s smaller than my bedroom,” my daughter whispered, eyes wide, trying to imagine an entire family living in this cramped space.

We visited a shebeen (tavern) where we sat self-consciously passing around a foaming bucket of home-brewed beer, watched impassively by local men. My son nodded to one wearing a grubby football shirt, and he strolled over. Football provides a universal language, and after this common ground was broached, we all relaxed a bit.

At a stall, women sweated over boiling pots of flyblown sheep’s heads, complete with wool. We cringed when a man in another group asked loudly if the “white stuff” on the women’s faces was “some sort of tribal thing.”

“No sir, that’s sun cream,” their guide replied laconically. Sensing the snorts of laughter bubbling, we moved the kids on quickly.