AFRICAN TOWNSHIP : MARCH 18, 2007

Jeffreys Bay is a tiny little town on the eastern coast of South Africa. It has maintained a quiet sort of status and is only now coming into the limelight because of its reputation for being an amazing surf spot. The town is filled with quaint little shops sponsored largely by the surf companies—Billabong, Quicksilver, and Roxy. Calamari shops dot the street just one block off the sandy beaches. Quaint little cottages and million dollar homes are available for rent, and most people zoom around town in their nice European-imported cars.

The apartheid ended in South Africa in the ‘90s, but the effects can still be seen and felt, even in (or perhaps especially in) a town as tiny as Jeffreys Bay. There are various races of people living together sometimes in outright, evident strife and at other times in feigned harmony. There are the white descendents of British colonialists; then there are the white Afrikaaners who are of mixed European descent but are classically “white” Africans. Then there are the formerly despised black and colored people, who are descendents of different black African peoples (one group is comprised of the descendents of Zulu warriors who made their way down to South Africa, and the other group are the traditional South African natives). Not only is there strife between the blacks and the whites, but the different white people fight against groups other than their own, and even the black and colored people remain separate from one another due to discord.

The town of Jeffreys Bay is owned, run, and inhabited mainly by all white people. As a white South African friend told me, only in the past few years have colored people been allowed to start working at the small retail stores along the strip; by and large, however, the black people are still not permitted to work in town due to racism. And, despite the employment advantages that are slowly becoming available people who were formerly suppressed in nearly every day, the wages do not yet reflect an equitable and fair treatment of all peoples. A colored person working as a waitress will still make only a fraction of what a white waitress will make at the same restaurant.

Aside from the few scant employment opportunities, the town still offers little to the colored and black people who are still forced to reside outside of the town’s borders. As there are outside of all of South Africa’s major towns and cities, a township lays on the outskirts of the town. Less than the equivalent of two blocks past the massive Billabong factory outlet and posh seafood restaurant is the township. Basically a ghetto or slum, this massive shanty-town is home to thousands upon thousands of people. The township is, in fact, made up of two separate townships that, over the years, have ended up blending together due to growth. One side of the township is exclusively for the black people while the other side is for the colored people. Due to dissention, these two groups generally do not mix, and when they do, violence and murder is frequent.

While the town of Jeffreys Bay has an approximate population of 40 000 people, the population of the two blended townships also has a population of 40 000 people. The ghetto covers hundreds of acres of land, even though each individual family only occupies a small shack roughly the size of a North American bathroom. It is only in the past five years that the township got electricity, which flows into community-shared outlets through above-ground power lines. Running water was also brought in around the same time, and there is roughly one communal tap and bathroom for every several hundred people. These projects were brought in by the government as a way to “help these people out.”

Because most people cannot make a decent wage in the city, the community is quite self-reliant. Every Thursday is market day where peddlers line up along the main strip of road to sell their wares. Each man or woman seems to specialize in something—where they’ve obtained these items from, I’m not entirely sure, but there was everything being sold from simple pairs of shoes to canvas bags to cell phone air time (usually one guy owns a cell phone and lends it out by the minute for a price; this is convenient because other than this, there are no phones in the township).

While we were in Jeffreys Bay, we would travel into the township every day to work with a local community center that was being run by some Dutch aid workers. We helped them renovate and fix up their building with some of the money that we brought into the country. We painted a mural and built some furniture for their mess hall. We replaced some broken and vandalized windows. One other girl and I taught English to the local kids from the township. Before the sun went down, we played street soccer with some of the older boys, who were better athletes than all of us put together. We also helped do some work on a new community center that was being built to house a church, a school, a daycare, and sports and arts programs.

This photo was taken just outside of that new community building that was under construction. I turned and snapped a few photos of the surreal surroundings—the African red earth road, the power lines above, the dogs wandering in the streets, the shacks made of whatever refuse could be scrounged or spared.

I am still haunted and inspired by my memories of the township—it was beyond my realm of understanding that anyone in our world today could live in that scene of permanence. And yet, I was inspired to meet the hearty, persevering people that managed to live and survive and sometimes thrive in such an adverse environment. It proves that the human spirit is capable of more than we realize.

WORD COUNT: 1000