howzzzt.co.za

There’s nothing quite like going into their homes, pointing at them, and then discussing them loudly in a foreign language to make poor people feel like animals in a zoo. Then again, poor people will do a lot of things for money, and letting you do the whole pointing-and-talking thing is not the most demeaning by quite a long way. Thus was born the township tour.

Townships, in case you’ve somehow missed this until now, are the ghettos where white people made black people live because that’s just the way Apartheid rolled. For foreigners these remnants of an unjust past can have a lot of romance as the site of the 1976 riots, for instance, or for featuring the homes of Nelson Mandela and Desmond Tutu, or just because a lot of poor black people are charmingly going about their daily lives in such a genuinely authentic manner.

The problem is that townships aren’t what they used to be. We don’t have our riots in them anymore; these days we hold protest marches in front of government office buildings, because the police don’t cage black people in any more. Mandela and Tutu once lived in Soweto, sure, but they haven’t for decades; they moved to the suburbs a long time ago, as did a great many people with the money to do so.

The most shocking truth about the townships – from the point of view of tourists, anyway – is that they aren’t poor and dirty any more, at least not universally. As the income inequality gap between black people and everybody else has been normalising, so money has been flowing into the townships. The net combined effect has been tremendous, and you can now find a growing number of shiny new shopping malls and franchise retail outlets in townships. Look just to the left of the comfortable new family homes and just to the right of the emerald green sports fields, and you’ll find them.

A good tour guide can still give you a sense of a universally desperate (and repressed) people scrabbling for existence by careful manipulation of the bus route. Please do flip these kinds of tour guides the bird, if your township tour is a must, and choose somebody who’ll take you walkabout or cycling. And under no circumstances should you hand over money to anybody who hasn’t taken you to a local tavern, even if it is a sanitised tourist trap. Telling the folks back home that you drank with the locals in some shitty joint is the best story you’re likely to get.

Oh, and you can take pictures. The poor ignorant natives will not think you are trying to steal their souls with your demon box. Remember: not everybody who doesn’t speak English is a noble savage. Some are just people.