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It’s as fake as a very fake thing indeed, but that is the perverse charm of the Mama Tembos restaurant – and the whole reason why we point photo-hungry tourists there.

See, not everybody is cut out for a real township tour. And that’s okay, really. Most of us don’t go to Europe and then seek out the poor and dirty neighbourhoods either. Many of us don’t even visit the site of a former Nazi concentration camp, because on some holidays you don’t want to be weighed down with the miseries of the past. You just want Disney World: sanitised, mindless, and ever-so-superficially happy.

That just about sums up Mama Tembos. It’s right in the heart of Linden, an upper middle-class suburb where the cars are shiny and the gardens filled with trees. It’s actually right across the road from a small television production facility. But it pretends really hard to be straight from the township, at least in terms of decor.

The decor is, of course, fake. So is the the menu, which features items with names that reference popular soccer teams and not-so-popular politicians, except the average township tavern has never heard of prawns (and doesn’t sell a lot of premium steak either).

All of which is just perfect. There isn’t a single thing on the menu that is even exotic, never mind gross. The service is good, and in English, and the kitchen is free of gut-rotting bacteria and the stench of the final bowel movements of freshly slaughtered animals. The bathrooms have running water. And you know what? Your friends back home will never be able to spot the fake decor in the background to your awesome pictures. To all intents and purposes you’d have been on that mandatory township tour, at least as far as any of them will ever know. It can be our little secret, promise.

Think of it this way: when you go to the medieval-themed castle in Disney World you don’t have skewered heads on display or diseased men pissing in the corners. Sometimes sanitised is good.

Mama Tembos
Cnr 4th avenue and 7th street, Linden
Johannesburg
Tel: 011 912 7770
www.mamatembo.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.