The Last Train to Zona Verde: My Ultimate African Safari

2. The Train from Khayelitsha

SOME WEEKS BEFORE MY VISIT to the Ju/’hoansi, who sleep flat on the ground in their simple lean- to shelters, ever wakeful because of the nighttime prowling of predators, I woke from a sound sleep in a soft bed in a luxury hotel, between the swooping green flanks of Table Mountain and the aqueous glitter of Table Bay. This was in Cape Town, with its heights and cliffs, the only city in Africa with a claim to grandeur.

Yawning toothily like a baboon, I switched on the TV and saw the turmoil in Europe, the sort of improvidence and chaos that people usually associate with Africa, and gave thanks that I was far away. I would head north one of these days by road to Namibia, Botswana, and Angola, and perhaps farther. No long-range plan was required. I was alone, traveling light, and needed only a cheap one-way ticket. A daily bus ran to Northern Cape province, to isolated Springbok, and continued overnight past the Namibian border, which was the east-west course of the Orange River.

An aging traveler now, I took my morning pills, two different ones to keep gout away, a vitamin, and a dose of malaria suppressant, and then dawdled, still groggy from jet lag. And remembering that I was on a journey, I dated and wrote the first line of my diary, about waking in a soft bed in a luxury hotel.

In such a pleasant place, no matter how far away, you never imagine you’re too old to travel. I can do this till I die, you think as you summon room service for lotuses to eat (“On second thought, I will have the pepper-crusted Wagyu steak with the black truffle vinaigrette”). It’s only when in a hovel in the bush, or being stared down by a hostile stinking crowd (“Meester! Meester!”), or eating a sinister stew of black meat or a cracked plate of cold, underdone, greasy, and eye-speckled potatoes, or banging in a jalopy for nine hours down a mountain road full of potholes — with violent death as close as that dark precipice to the right — that it occurs to me that someone else should be doing this, someone younger perhaps, hungrier, stronger, more desperate, crazier.

But there is such a thing as curiosity, dignified as a spirit of inquiry, and this nosiness has ruled my life as a traveler and a writer.

In much of Europe and North America a curious gaze is considered a hostile intrusion, and curious questions often arouse a vicious or unhelpful response. “You writing a book, pal? Well, leave this chapter out.” But in Africa such close attention is taken for welcome concern, a form of friendliness, especially when customary pleasantries are exchanged and tribal niceties observed. What brought me back to this beautiful city, and this continent, was the wish to know more at first hand, that vitalizing itch that keeps all of us amazed and some of us on the road.

Over breakfast — salmon, scrambled eggs, fruit, guava juice, green tea, brown toast, and “Please pass the marmalade” — reading the Cape Times, I saw the headlines “Mountain Closed at Night” and “City Responds to Attacks.” The reason for shutting down Table Mountain after dark was crime — muggers, thieves, or in South African slang, tsotsis and skelms, the local names for thugs. A number of nighttime strollers and people beaming in admiration at the city lights from their parked cars had been attacked, beaten senseless, and robbed. How it was possible to close such a mountain was anyone’s guess. This enormous, dominant upswelling of rock, two miles wide on its plateau, constituted a ridge that extended forty miles to Cape Point.

But this was Africa, so subject to sudden change. Less than a month later, Table Mountain was named (along with Halong Bay in Vietnam, the Amazon rain forest, Iguaçu Falls, and three others) one of the Seven Natural Wonders of the World. Recognized across the globe as a marvel, Table Mountain was proudly reopened to the public.

That same day of my waking at the luxury hotel, I went for a walk. At Texies Fish and Chips on Adderley Street, in the Grand Parade near the train station, while I was eating my lunch of broiled kingklip and admiring the view, the apparent prosperity, the busy to-and-fro of shoppers, the scavenging pigeons pecking at crumbs tossed by passersby, I noticed some young men in the shadows of the arcade near where I sat at an outdoor table, returning my gaze. Seeing that I had had enough of my meal, one of them, a skinny teenage boy, came over and hesitatingly asked, “Can I finish?” I simply nodded, because he had taken me by surprise. He carried the remains of my food — the plate of greasy chips — a short distance away, scattering the pigeons, and wolfed them down.

Travel writing is sometimes no more than literary decor for a sort of mocking misanthropy or mythomania or concocted romance, but at that moment I felt only helpless pity. And I was to see this same desperate reflex a number of times during these African travels, the hungry lurking man or boy, waiting to take my leftovers, or someone else’s, and eat them with his dirty fingers.

If I wondered why I had come back to Africa, I suppose I had to answer: to happen upon that, among other chance encounters. It was wrong for me to say that I was seeking something. I was not seeking anything. I was hurrying away from my routine and my responsibilities and my general disgust with fatuous talk, money talk, money stories, the donkey laughter at dinner parties. Disgust is like fuel. It took the curse off the zigzagging flight from New York to Dubai, and the next leg to Cape Town, twenty-two hours of flying, thirty hours of travel. But I was glad to get away. It was travel as rejection, as though in leaving I was saying to those fatuous people, Take that. And perhaps hoping they’d say afterward, What happened? Where is he? Was it something I said?

Most of all, I wanted to go back to Africa and pick up where I’d left off.

Ten years before, I was here and wandered through the slum of a squatter camp, called New Rest, on the desolate sand flats on the outskirts of Cape Town. On my return, the first place I wanted to go was this camp, to see what had become of its shacks, its outhouses, its bedraggled people who had settled in the wasteland beside the highway.

Was it still vexed, a slum made entirely of scrap lumber and ragged plastic, still shonky amid the windblown grit?

The majority of black South Africans live in the lower depths, not in picturesque hamlets or thatched huts on verdant hillsides. Three quarters of city-dwelling Africans live in the nastiest slums and squatter camps. But what happens to these places after a decade or so?

“Don’t go to a squatter camp. Don’t go to a black township. You’ll get robbed or worse,” a mixed-race clerk at Cape Town’s central railway station had said to me one Sunday morning ten years ago, refusing to sell me a ticket to Khayelitsha.

I asked why. His adamant certainty captured my attention. He was not making a racial generalization. He would not sell me what he regarded as a ticket to violence. He explained that the train to Khayelitsha was routinely stoned, the windows broken, the passengers assaulted, by unemployed youths in the township and the nearby squatter camp.

The next day, provoked by his warning, I went to the New Rest squatter camp, and I wrote at the time of the 1,200 shacks that had been accumulating for a decade on the sandy infertile soil of Cape Flats, beside the busy road that led to the airport. Most of the 8,500 inhabitants lived in squalor. It was dire but not unspeakable. There was no running water; there were no lights or any trees. It was windy and bleak. Because it had been plopped down by squatters on forty acres of sand, there were no utilities, and as a consequence it stank and looked hideous. The houses were sheds made of ill-fitting boards, scrap lumber, bits of tin, and plastic sheeting. The gaps between the boards were blasted by the gritty wind. One man told me that he constantly had sand and dust in his bed.

Life could get no grimmer than this, I had thought then — the urban shantytown, without foliage, too sandy to grow anything but scrawny geraniums and stubbly cactuses; people having to draw water into plastic buckets from standpipes and burn candles in their huts; the huts cold in winter, sweltering in summer, very dirty, lying athwart a main highway and its noise. What could be worse? Call them “informal settlements,” as some people did, and they would smell just as foul.

Yet for all this squalor the people at New Rest were upbeat and had a sense of purpose. One of the residents, the man who complained of sand in his bed, took me to the New Rest committee that met regularly in one of the shacks. The committee members told me that these squatters had come from the Eastern Cape, the old government-designated homelands of Transkei and Ciskei, as well as from the slums of East London, Port Elizabeth, and Grahamstown, industrial cities that were not faring well in South Africa’s post-independence economy. The New Rest committee explained their aims: roads, piped water, electricity, and — in a process known as “in situ upgrade” — a permanent house to be built where each shack stood.

A master plan had been outlined and blueprinted by volunteer urban planners from the University of Cape Town. Every miserable shack, no matter how small, had been numbered and its plot recorded. A census had been taken. The idea of transforming a squatter camp into a viable township by upgrading existing dwellings — turning a slum into a subdivision — had been accomplished in Brazil and India, but not as yet in South Africa. The driving force behind this was the pride the people took in having found a safe place to live. The goodwill of foreigners had also helped: well-meaning visitors had contributed money to support the day care center, to purchase three brick-making machines, and to establish a trust fund to benefit the place. The fund was administered on a pro bono basis by a safari company and the New Rest/Kanana Community Development Trust, which promoted township tourism. Some children were sponsored by Americans and Europeans who sent money regularly to buy them clothes and for school fees. It was an improvisational, hand-to-mouth arrangement, but the element of self-help in it made me a well-wisher.

So what had happened since then?

On my second day in Cape Town, after another gourmet breakfast at my hotel, I took the thirty-minute drive down and around the mountain to the squatter camp. I had found a taxi driver who lived near New Rest, in an older settlement called Guguletu, where I also wanted to go, having visited it ten years before.

No visitor to Boston, where I was born, rises in a luxury hotel and, after a great breakfast, catches a taxi to tour, out of purely voyeuristic curiosity, the poorer parts of the city — the black section in Roxbury, where Malcolm X Boulevard enters Dudley Square; the poor districts of Charlestown and Chelsea; or the mean streets of Everett, with its corner shops, pool parlors, and three-decker wooden houses. Gawkers are not welcome in these places, but even if they were, no one would casually visit, because the poor sections of American cities are perceived as dangerous. So I was keenly aware of my privilege as a visitor to South Africa — that I was doing something I refrained from doing at home.

And it wasn’t hard to accomplish this. In Cape Town, many poor townships, some of them nearly identical, make up the itinerary of the well-advertised sightseeing tours of the city.

“This is Imizamo Yethu,” the guide says over the loudspeaker as the City Tours bus approaches a hillside of ramshackle houses and dirt roads. “This means ‘Our Struggle.’ It began as a squatter camp. It is now a township. It began in the 1980s when the pass laws ended. It grew in the nineties. You may get off here if you wish to be taken on a tour by a person who lives in the community. Another bus will follow in thirty minutes …”

My driver’s name was Thandwe. Xhosa by tribe, he had come here as a small boy, twenty-seven years before, from Port Elizabeth in the Eastern Cape, to live with his uncle.

“I go home now and then,” Thandwe said, “but this is where I intend to stay.”

We were headed down the highway, the road most foreign visitors see, since it is the main road to Cape Town International Airport. I wanted — hoped — to find good news, to see something different.

“New Rest — it is there,” Thandwe said, and indicated a settlement of tidy, russet-roofed houses that lay behind a high fence beside the road. They were not reconditioned huts or renovated hovels; they were new and solid-looking, and they stood very close together in what were obviously the footprints of the shacks and sheds that I had seen a decade before. This was the “in situ upgrade” that the urban planners had hoped for.

We turned off the highway onto the side road that led to New Rest and cruised through this now much-improved township. Forty years ago this was a rural area with a spiritual aura and a ritual significance to the local Xhosa people. Initiates (mkweta) in circumcision ceremonies (ukoluka) were concealed in the bush here. When their penises were foreshortened with the blade of a spear (mkonto), the youths stayed as a group until their wounds healed. Ten years before, I had been told that in June and December, the newly circumcised boys were seen, “sometimes many of them, hiding in the bush on the far side.”

That was no longer the case. Every bush had been cut down, houses stood where there had been scrubland, and there was not a tree standing. But I had seen a change, and I understood how it had evolved. First the new people from provincial villages created a squatter camp out of plastic sheeting, rags, and cut-down tree limbs; then the shelters were improved to hovels with old planks and scrap tin, to become the shantytown; in time came the addition of communal toilets and a standpipe for water; and at last, because of the tenacity of the people — the ones who on my previous visit had told me, “We are staying here. This is our home” — and the volunteer urban planners and well-wishers, it had been upgraded again. There was a government department, the Reconstruction and Development Program, dedicated to improving and rebuilding the squatter camps.

“It has shops now. The school is near,” Thandwe said. “One of the reasons for these improvements was the World Cup.”

After South Africa was named the host country for the 2010 FIFA World Cup, three enormous football stadiums were built in its major cities, and the seven existing stadiums were extensively renovated. New hotels were built, and public transport was improved, and with all this investment came a self-awareness that meant money would be spent on housing for the people who would be employed at the new facilities. The low-paid workers who maintain South Africa as an agreeable place that has solved the servant problem — the domestics, the gardeners, the mechanics, the scrubbers, the floor moppers, the bus drivers, the cabbies, the waiters, the nannies, the nurses, and the teachers — live largely in these townships. So improvements to their living conditions were essential to the running of the city.

Another day, another departure from my lovely hotel in the center of the city, another driver. This man was Phaks — pronounced “Pax.” He had been recommended to me as an authority on township life and was himself a resident of the great sprawl of Khayelitsha, with its population of half a million and its more than 80 percent unemployment, the place with the worst reputation for crime, idleness, gambling, fighting, and binge drinking.

“But it’s not all bad,” Phaks said as he drove down the highway. He was fairly jolly but seemed to have unresolved matters weighing on his mind, and at times his expression darkened and he became aggrieved.

We swung past District Six, a lively area of Cape Town in the apartheid era that had defied the racism and thrived as a safe, multiracial inner-city neighborhood well known for its music, its food, its color and zest. In the late 1960s, wishing to reclaim the land and create a white area, the city government had forced its population of sixty thousand to leave and divided them by race, resettling them in specific townships — the whites to white areas, the blacks to Khayelitsha, the mixed-raced people (“coloreds”) to Mitchells Plain and Bonteheuwel.

The idea was to create a whites-only neighborhood of new houses, to be called Zonnenbloom (“Sunflower”), but it hadn’t worked. No one wanted to live there, and ten years ago it had sat empty, a barren field bordered by two old churches — all that remained of District Six were its churches.

But some houses had been built since I’d last seen it. In 2005 the Reconstruction and Development Program had put up a number of new houses, and many of them — but not all — were occupied.

“They are for those who want to come back,” Phaks said. “But some people are resisting.”

“It’s central, it’s safe, the houses are new,” I said. “Why would they not want to move back in?”

“They say it’s not the same, so they stay away.”

“What does ‘not the same’ mean?”

“It’s not multiracial anymore. Just black.”

Next he took me to Langa township, which was a bit nearer to Cape Town proper and, like many of the other townships, just off the main airport highway. Langa’s distinction was that it was one of the first black townships. Phaks said that it had begun to be settled in 1900, but the local historian contradicted him and said it was 1927. Then Phaks said that the name Langa meant “Sun,” and the local historian said that it was designated Langa after a famous nineteenth-century chief and anti-government activist, Langalibalele, who was exiled as an undesirable to a site near here.

The local historian, subcontracted by Phaks to join us, was a Xhosa man named Archie, who explained that this township was the consequence of the South African apartheid system, in particular the Group Areas Act, which compelled nonwhites to live in designated places. This hemming-in of nonwhites was enforced by the Pass Laws Act of 1952, which required all of them to carry an identity document known formally in Afrikaans as a Bewysboek, in English as “the Reference Book,” and universally among the carriers as the dompas, or “stupid pass.”

The dompas was, in effect, a passport, with as many pages as a normal passport. “The most despised symbol of apartheid,” according to the South African parliamentarian and anti-apartheid campaigner Helen Suzman. “Within the pages of an individual’s dompas were their fingerprints, photograph, personal details of employment, permission from the government to be in a particular part of the country, qualifications to work or seek work in the area, and an employer’s reports on worker performance and behavior.”

Protests against the pass laws — first by brave women in the early 1950s, then in the 1960s by men inspired by the women — led to suppression, outright massacre in Sharpeville, and more protests, which brought the apartheid struggle to the world’s attention. South Africa now celebrates these protests with two national days, Women’s Day and Human Rights Day. After thirty-four years of internal passports ruling the lives of South Africans of color, the pass laws were repealed in 1986.

With indignation bordering on rage, Archie was telling me about the hated pass laws and the Group Areas Act as we walked through the Langa streets, which were littered with garbage, old tires, and broken bottles. Even the recently planted flowers and patches of fenced-off grass had been trashed.

“Your Bill Gates helped us with the cultural center,” Archie said, showing me around the Guga S’thebe Arts and Cultural Center, where in a back room three women were painting designs on ceramic pots and mugs, in an effort to teach skills and create employment. South African women seemed to have a spark, but more than 60 percent of the adult males in Langa were unemployed. The cultural center, brightly painted and with ceramic artwork on its façade, built for workshops and performances, was an imaginatively designed post-apartheid building, perhaps the only new one in the township. It had been deliberately constructed near the spot where in 1954 a demonstration by thousands of Langa residents had been held to protest the pass laws — a mass burning of the dompas — and a march to the center of Cape Town. Only ten years old, the center was already in a state of disrepair — unswept and seemingly neglected. On the township tour itinerary, it had more tourists visiting than local residents.

“How did Bill Gates help?”

“He gave us these computers.”

Four unused computers, with grubby keyboards and blind screens, sat on desks.

“Unfortunately they have been out of service for a year.”

What Archie did not say, and perhaps did not know, was that the Gates Foundation had given money to support an effort to increase awareness of HIV/AIDS. Langa had one of the highest rates of infection in South Africa. Saturday is “burial day” in Langa, and there were usually around forty burials each Saturday. In spite of efforts to educate Langa’s people, the death rate from HIV/AIDS was rising.

“Come this way,” Archie said.

When he kicked a beer can with the side of his foot, I used that as an opportunity to ask him why the carefully planted flower gardens in front of the cultural center were blighted, and the whole of this street and its sidewalk littered with beer cans and waste paper and blowing plastic.

“We don’t know what to do with it. People throw it and it blows.”

“Why not pick it up?”

“It is a problem.”

“Archie, all it takes is a broom and a barrel.”

“The municipality cares for it.”

“If that’s so, why is this crap still here?”

I deliberately put him on the spot because he was, so he said, the spokesman, and the cultural center was the primary destination of the township tour — as it happened, a busload of white visitors had arrived and were looking with that “where are we?” squint of tourists just off a bus. In a place where tens of thousands of people had no job and nothing at all to do — a number of people were conspicuously sitting around and talking, or gaping at the tourists — not one was picking up the masses of litter.

It is possible that Archie, still denouncing the injustice of the pass laws, did not see the disorder, and he seemed annoyed with me for mentioning it. As if to dazzle me — or perhaps to explain the dereliction — he began to declaim.

“There was a prophet here long ago! His name was Ntsikana — he made a prediction!”

“What was the prediction?”

“It was in the year 1600,” Archie said, and in a solemn prophesying tone seemed to quote Ntsikana: “People will come from the sea.” Archie raised one finger for emphasis. “These people will have a book and money.” Archie wagged his finger. “Take the book but not the money!” Archie let his finger droop. “But they took both.”

“They shouldn’t have taken the money?”

Archie said, “That was the badness.”

I remembered the name Ntsikana and later looked it up and found that there was a Xhosa prophet by that name, his life well documented. Indeed, he was a pioneer of “black theology,” a self-created Christian (he’d had contact with missionaries, though he was never baptized and never studied with them) who had flourished in the late eighteenth to early nineteenth century. In 1815 Ntsikana had an epiphany, “an illumination of the soul,” that confirmed in him a belief in monogamy, river baptism, and Sunday prayer to a sovereign God. He wrote hymns and composed poems. Because his conversion had occurred without any missionary intervention, so he said, his followers “claimed a pedigree for Xhosa Christianity independent of missionary influence.”

“I am sent by God, but am only like a candle,” Ntsikana said, using a felicitous image of illumination and finiteness. “I have not added anything to myself.” Furiously proselytizing, he established rural congregations throughout the Eastern Cape. One day Ntsikana foretold the coming of a race of people to the shores of South Africa. He described them as people “[through] whose transparent ears the sun shines redly” and “whose hair is long as the tail-hairs of a zebra.” Since he had previously seen whites, this prophecy proved accurate, and he apparently did warn his followers not to put much faith in the new people. Ntsikana died in 1821, and his grave, near Fort Beaufort in the Eastern Cape, is a place of pilgrimage.

Although Archie had a few details wrong, his sudden parable introduced me to this powerful sect, which still had many adherents. We were walking along the broken paving of littered roads that ran between a pair of two-story cinderblock buildings that had the prison starkness of much public housing. They had once been, Archie said, the hostels of migrant workers — all men — who were employed as field hands, common laborers, and domestics in Cape Town during the apartheid era. An effective way to control them was to house them in an isolated place, require them to carry the dompas, and separate them from their wives and children, who remained in distant villages.

Behind these beat-up hostels were small wooden shacks piled against each other. Ragged children, their noses running on this chilly morning, lurked in the doorways.

“More people,” I said. “More shacks.”

“Informal settlements,” Archie said. The name always brought a grim smile to my lips because it conjured the image of people in bright bungalows, sprawled on sofas. “The name for them is siyahlala.”

I asked him to spell it, and I wrote it down.

“It is Xhosa,” Archie said. “It means ‘We are staying here.’ ”

He said five or six people lived in each shack, though there seemed hardly room for two. Scattered around the edge of the settlement, beyond the hostels, beyond the shacks, were shipping containers — great rusty steel boxes — and people were living in those, too, recent arrivals, Archie said. Some containers had been divided into two- or three-family dwellings, doors and windows blowtorched as crude openings in the sides. In front of several were stalls selling blackened sheep heads.

“We call them smileys.” Archie explained that when the severed head was thrown on the hot grill, “the lips shrivel up in a smile.”

The locals ate them with “train smash,” he went on, and laughed. “Tomato sauce.”

As we strolled, teenagers stared at us from where they sat on benches or rubber tires. Some glowered from doorways, others glanced up from card games or from kicking a soccer ball, still others simply stood the way herons stand, motionless, on one leg, the other leg crooked behind it. All of the youths were idle, not a dozen or so, but scores of them, perhaps hundreds, apparently with nothing to do. A few of them began to follow Archie and me, but they quickly tired of this — maybe we were walking too fast for them. One of my rules in an apparently insecure place was to walk fast and look busy.

Archie said the hostels had been renovated in 2002, which perhaps meant that was when they had been painted the dull yellow I saw. He showed me inside one of them — a hive of dirty two-room apartments crammed with filthy mattresses.

“Six rooms here,” he said at another of the hostels. The places were crammed with damp quilts, old clothes, broken shoes, and children’s plastic toys, as well as CD players and radios.

“How many people live here?”

“Thirty-eight.” He could see my incredulity. He said, “Some sleep on the dining table. And under it.”

Misery acquaints us with strange bedfellows. The smell grew riper as we penetrated to the last narrow room, where there were two small beds. It housed a family he knew.

“Nine people in this room,” he said.

I tried to imagine where they lay at night on the beds and on the floor of this room, which was no more than nine by five feet. He nodded, satisfied that he had startled me, because some of these township tours seemed designed to shock the visitor. But I also thought that there must be places like this in the United States, perhaps many, yet how would I ever know? There were no tours, no men like Phaks or Archie to guide anyone to them.

“And what is most disgusting is that they make use of one toilet,” he said, meaning the thirty-eight occupants of the place.

“Where are the people now?”

“Outside,” he said. “It is too small to live in by day.”

This was also a habit of the village, where people spent the day in the open, under a tree or in the informal courtyard, and used their mud huts only for sleeping or for protection against nocturnal animals.

The next places Archie showed me were roomier, and one looked habitable. Certainly it was cleaner, a two-bedroom apartment in which one family lived. The watchful but polite matriarch nodded at me, and a small, stunned-looking boy peered from the side of a doorway. The rent was 500 rand a month, about $60.

More shacks stood nearby, of the meanest sort, just piled-up lumber and plastic sheeting, with low ceilings. It was hard to imagine anyone living in them.

“We call these vezinyawo, because they are so small,” Archie said. He explained that the word meant “Your feet are showing” or “Your feet are outside,” because one hut was not large enough to accommodate a whole supine human being.

Some streets adjacent to these shacks were lined with bright, compact bungalows, painted in pastel colors, surrounded by fences, with newish cars parked in the driveways. Other solid houses, some of them just completed, faced the main road, the highway to the airport, and these were the houses that foreign visitors would see as they passed by, perhaps saying, “Doesn’t look that bad, Doris,” never guessing at the shacks and doghouses beyond them that were out of sight. At one of them, a woman had set out on a wobbly table an array of beaded bracelets. She had made them with her own hands, she said. That expression made me look at her hands — the woman was wringing them in anxiety. She had nine children, and all of them lived in this shack. She looked pleadingly at me to buy, and I came away with my pockets bulging with beaded artifacts.

“And this is a shebeen,” Archie said, parting the curtain that was hung on the doorway of a shack. The ceiling was so low I could not stand up straight, and the air was rank and doggy and warm with stink. When my eyes became accustomed to the darkness I saw six beer-swilling men inside, three on benches, three squatting on the floor, drunk and incapable at noon on a Monday. An old gaunt woman in an apron presided over the place, stirring a tureen of porridgy liquid.

One man grinned at me and drank from a large enamel cup, as a cat laps milk, and then he shook it, sloshing the creamy liquid inside.

“Have a drink,” Archie said. I was certain he was testing me, showing me the worst of the township. I had tried to appear implacable, with my “How do you spell that?” and “Let’s see another.” But this was like a jail cell or the worst room of a madhouse. “This beer is made of maize and sorghum. It is called umqombothi.”

“How do you spell that?”

A few days later, I heard this word again, in a lovely bouncy song about a proud woman who makes beer, “magic beer,” performed by an energetic and melodious South African singer, Yvonne Chaka Chaka.

By then we had walked a mile or more and were still in Langa township. But Archie wanted me to see something else, something special, perhaps another shock.

“It is Mr. Ndaba,” Archie said. “He is a traditional healer.”

Mr. Ndaba lived in a room, another low ceiling — I had to stoop to enter, and to kneel to speak to him. The healer was seated on a stool, working his knife against something he held in his other hand.

I took a breath and retched. The room had the stinging smell of decay, a maggoty odor, and I soon saw why. Hanging from the walls and ceiling were old yellow monkey skulls and jawbones, the decaying pelts of small animals, fur, feathers, more bones, a dead pangolin, snake skins, porcupine quills, mummified birds, and in a corner a newly dead rat being chewed by a small mangy kitten.

“This is all medicine,” Archie said. “He can cure AIDS.”

“What’s that?” I asked, pointing to the spotted pelt of a dead animal, possibly a civet cat.

“It is my hat,” Mr. Ndaba said, and now I could see that he was eating. He spoke with his mouth full, and he was still stabbing and carving with his knife. The scrape of the blade was a dull sustained note. What he held was a lump of yellow bone and gray flabby flesh. He gouged some meat from it and raised the knife to his mouth.

“And what’s that?”

“I am eating the head of a pig.” As he hefted the thing in his hand, its ears wagged.

The pong of the rancid flesh hit me and I wanted to vomit.

“He is a healer,” Archie said. “He can cure AIDS. He can make someone fall in love with you. He can cast away spirits. He can make you better. We call him an igqirha.”

“How do you spell that?” I asked, ducking and leaving the hut.

As I left, Mr. Ndaba said goodbye in a kindly way. And I thought, How easy it is to mock the healer with a civet cat pelt on his head, surrounded by stinking bones and feathers and snake skins. But anyone who entered, wishing to be healed, trusting in the healer, would experience what scientists describe as a therapeutic encounter — the sense of well-being that you feel in the presence of a doctor you trust, one with a kindly, inquiring manner and with monkey skulls instead of diplomas on the wall. The stink itself, like the sight of a stethoscope, might create a placebo effect.

Still, in the intimacy of these shadowy huts I felt self-conscious, almost as if I didn’t have a right to be there.

What is the point of these township tours? I heard whites in Cape Town ask again and again, cringing in embarrassed disbelief. Why do Africans advertise their squalor and sell tickets to their slums?

It also struck me as odd that tourists were invited to see the townships and encouraged to examine the sad inner rooms, because they were just as dirty, disorderly, and crime-ridden as in the days of apartheid — perhaps more so. And the shocking thing was that when the residents moaned about the bad old days, all one could think of was how awful, how unfit for human habitation, they were now. Later in the day, in Guguletu, I saw a vanload of well-dressed Italian tourists drinking beer and mineral water at a grubby chicken restaurant — Italians who, without question, would not have dared enter the slums of Naples (depicted in the 2009 Italian film Gomorrah and based on a book of the same name by Roberto Saviano), which resembled Guguletu. There were also a few small restaurants in Guguletu that had been discovered by Cape Town foodies and cautiously visited not just for the meal but for the novelty of the filth and menace of their surroundings.

It seemed that curious visitors, of whom I was one, had created a whole itinerary, a voyeurism of poverty, and this exploitation — at bottom that’s what it was — had produced a marketing opportunity: township dwellers, who never imagined their poverty to be of interest to anyone, had discovered that for wealthy visitors it had the merit of being fascinating, and the residents became explainers, historians, living victims, survivors, and sellers of locally made bead ornaments, toys, embroidered bags, and baskets, hawked in the stalls adjacent to the horrific houses. They had discovered that their misery was marketable. That was the point.

Look how the apartheid system forced us to live like dogs in a kennel! was the intended message. But the message that reached me was that the miserable former hostels for men were now filthy overcrowded rooms for whole hopeless families, most of them indigent and unemployed.

Phaks was waiting nearby. He said, “We go back?”

“There’s one more place,” I said. “Guguletu.”

“Gugs,” he said, using the local nickname, and off we rattled in his old van.

Ten years before, I had walked around Guguletu, noting how the township had achieved notoriety in 1993, when a twenty-six-year-old Californian, Amy Biehl, had been murdered there by a mob. A Stanford graduate, living in South Africa as a volunteer in voter registration for the following year’s free election, she had driven three African friends home to the township as a favor. She had a ticket to California; she was to leave South Africa the next day. Seeing her white face, a large crowd of African boys screamed in eagerness, for this was a black township and she was white prey. The car was stoned, she was dragged from it, and though her friends pleaded with them to spare her (“She’s a comrade!”), Amy was beaten to the ground, her head smashed with a brick, and she was stabbed in the heart. “Killed like an animal,” I wrote in my notebook then.

Four suspects were named; they were tried and convicted of the murder, and the judge, noting that they “showed no remorse,” sentenced them to eighteen years in prison. Three years later, these murderers appeared before the Truth and Reconciliation Commission. They had an explanation for the murder. “Their motive was political and not racial.” They “regretted” what they had done. They newly claimed they had “remorse.” They pleaded to be released under the general amnesty.

Everything they said seemed to me lame and baseless, yet they were freed because Amy’s parents, Peter and Linda Biehl, had flown from California, attended their hearing, and listened to their testimony. They said that their daughter would have wanted a show of mercy, since she was “on the side of the people who killed her.” The Biehls did not oppose the murderers’ being released from prison.

So the killers waltzed away, and two of them, Ntombeko Peni and Easy Nofomela, were — astonishingly — given jobs by the Biehls, working as salaried employees for the Amy Biehl Foundation, a charity started by Amy’s forgiving parents in their daughter’s memory. Around the time I visited, the foundation had received almost $2 million from the U.S. Agency for International Development for being “dedicated to people who are oppressed.”

In 2001, a small cross had been placed near the gas station where Amy had been murdered, and on a crude signboard behind the cross was daubed AMY BIHLS LAST HOME SECTION 3 GUGS — misspelled and so crude as to be insulting.

Now I said to Phaks, “Take me there.”

The gas station was bigger and brighter than before. A new memorial, of black marble, much like a gravestone, had been placed on the roadside in front of it, on the fatal spot.

AMY BIEHL

26 APRIL 1967 — 25 AUGUST 1993

KILLED IN AN ACT OF POLITICAL VIOLENCE.

AMY WAS A FULBRIGHT SCHOLAR

AND TIRELESS HUMAN RIGHTS ACTIVIST.

“They killed her right there,” I said. Phaks grunted, and we drove away. The wording bothered me. “What is ‘an act of political violence’?”

“Those boys, they had a philosophy.”

“What was it?”

“Africa for Africans — it was their thinking.”

“That’s not a philosophy. It’s racism.”

“But they were political.”

“No. They killed her because she was white.”

“They thought she was a settler.”

He had told me that one of the chants at the time had been “One settler, one bullet.”

“But South Africa was full of white people who were part of the struggle. They supported Mandela, they went to jail. Whites!”

“But those boys said they were sorry,” Phaks said. “They apologized to the Truth and Reconciliation Commission. And her parents, they agreed.”

“But what do you think her parents really felt?”

“I don’t know. But you can see, they got their name there.”

“And getting their name there makes up for the murder of their child?”

“It was political. The parents, they hired the boys to work for them,” Phaks said, and now I could see he was rattled, because he was driving badly along the busy broken township roads, muttering at the traffic, the oncoming cars cutting him off.

“Phaks, do you have children?”

“Four.”

“A daughter?”

He nodded — he knew what I was going to say.

“What would you do if someone beat your daughter to the ground and took a brick and smashed it against her head? Then stabbed her in the heart and left her to die?” He winced but remained silent. “Would you say, ‘That’s their philosophy. It’s a political act’?”

“No.”

“What would you think?”

“Myself, I wouldn’t accept.”

“What if they said sorry?”

Phaks was very upset now, so I shut up and let him drive, but he was still fretful from my badgering him and kept murmuring, “No, no. I can’t. Never, never.” Nayvah, nayvah.

The Amy Biehl Foundation had been founded to promote peace and mutual understanding. It had also been instrumental in improving the infrastructure of Guguletu — upgrading huts and bringing in utilities. Doing that was easier than peacemaking. According to data collected by the South African Institute of Race Relations, more than seven hundred people were murdered in Guguletu between 2005 and 2010. This amounted to one murder every two and a half days over those five years.

My challenging Phaks had had the effect of winding him up. Now he was contrary, as I had been, and he was batting the steering wheel with his palm, pointing out the graffiti, the litter, the men and boys idling at shop fronts and street corners, and perhaps with the memory of the boys who’d been released after murdering Amy Biehl he began to see insolence and misbehavior all over Guguletu.

“These kids don’t behave,” he said. “They are out of control. They show no respect — and you know why? Because they have too many rights. Everyone protects them! Even the government, even the barristers!”

“You mean they’re not punished?”

“Not at all. When I was at school, if I did something wrong, I got a hiding. Then I came home, and when I told my father what had happened, he gave me a hiding!”

“Was that a good thing?”

“A very good thing. It has an impact, I tell you. It taught me a lesson. But this” — he gestured out the window; idle boys were everywhere, standing, sitting, eternally waiting — “this is really killing us.”

“Not enough hidings,” I said, to encourage him.

“Listen to me,” Phaks said. “Here there is a constitution for children. Can you believe such a thing? If you take your belt and thrash the child, he can go to the police and lay a charge against you.”

“So what’s the answer?”

“A hiding is the answer,” he said. “Take the rapist in Khayelitsha the other day. Did you hear about it? He was beaten. He was stripped naked. I tell you” — Phaks whipped his fingers — “he was really given a good hiding. He was bleeding. That was not the end of it. While he was lying there, three women stood over him and urinated on his body. Ha-ha!”

Phaks was in a good mood now, calmed with this peroration on rough justice. And he pointed out that in this part of Guguletu there were streets of new houses, like the streets earlier he had called “the Beverly Hills of Langa.”

Improbable, this upgrade — it all seemed a neatened version of what I’d seen at New Rest, fixed and improved and hopeful, the transition from slum to township, the structures braced and thickened and made whole. And after this long day of townships was done, anyone would conclude — I certainly did — that a solution to the squatter camps had been found. Hovels were made into homes, and a kind of harmony was established.

This was how, throughout history, cities had been built, the slums made into habitable districts of the metropolis, the gentrification of Gin Lane, the bourgeoisification of the Bowery. I thought of old prints I’d seen of sheep cropping grass in Soho Square in London, of shepherds following their flocks through the weedy ruins of nineteenth-century Rome, of cows grazing on Boston Common.

But the day was not done. We left the bungalows of Guguletu and took a side road into what looked like a refugee camp: thrown-together shelters, sheds covered with tin, skeletal frames patched with plastic sheeting and piled with boulders and scrap wood to prevent the sheeting from blowing away, pigpens, doghouses, crude fences draped with threadbare laundry. The shacks stood close together, with only foot-wide passageways between their outside walls. Smoke rose from cooking fires, lantern light glowed in the growing dusk, and improvised power lines hung overhead, like the web of a drunken spider, spun higgledy-piggledy, the visible images of string theory mapped in the twilit sky — squatters tapping illegally into the national grid.

This settlement was new, housing the most recently arrived people, land snatchers and hut makers and desperadoes. Some had arrived yesterday, more would arrive tomorrow, the shacks stretching for another mile across the dusty wasteland.

What looked like a refugee camp was a refugee camp — for the poor fleeing the provinces, having renounced the countryside and the rural villages, just coming to squat at the edge of the golden city. They too wanted real homes, running water, and electricity. There was no end to this township: the hostels led to the shacks, the shacks to the hovels, the hovels to the roadside and the bungalows, and beyond the bungalows and the shebeens were the newcomers in the twig-and-plastic lean-tos, straggling across the flatland. No sooner had a solution been found than a new solution was needed. It was the African dilemma.

“People keep coming,” Phaks said. “There are more townships you have not seen — Bonteheuwel …”

As he was listing them I saw, chatting by the roadside, in the vilest corner of the squatter camp, three teenage girls in white blouses, blue skirts, knee socks, and matching black shoes on their way home from school. They held satchels that bulged with books and homework. They stood out vividly because of the whiteness of their blouses in the failing light — harmonious and hopeful and a little surprising, like the sudden blown-open blossoms you see in a stricken ditch.

It was growing dark, and I had to return to town. Phaks said, “But I haven’t shown you the last thing. It is a surprise.”

We drove back to Khayelitsha. Phaks’s surprise was a hotel, Vicki’s Place, run by a cheerful woman who advertised her home as “the smallest hotel in Africa,” just two rooms in a rickety two-story house. Many foreign journalists and travel writers had publicized Vicki’s Place. Vicki had the newspaper and magazine clippings, all mentioning her good humor, her effort, her enterprise in this township.

Phaks had yet another surprise: his van wouldn’t start. He sat wiggling the key in its slot, next to a fistful of wires he’d pulled out, hoping to find the problem.

“I’ll take the train,” I said.

“Bus is better.”

Ten years before I had wanted to take the train but had been discouraged from doing so by the clerk in the ticket booth.

“I’m taking the train,” I told Phaks.

He walked me through the back streets to the station and stayed with me and insisted on buying my ticket. When the train arrived we shook hands, we hugged, and he glumly said he’d have to return to his broken car.

“Keep your hand on your money,” he said.

The train was fairly empty because it was headed to the city. Returning from Cape Town, it would be full. I looked for potential muggers and, scanning the passengers in the car, caught the eye of the woman in the seat across from me.

“Why are you here?” she asked.

“Just looking.”

“Whites don’t come here. White people don’t live here,” she said with almost boastful conviction.

“But I’m here,” I said.

“Because you have that man to help you,” she said. She must have seen Phaks at the ticket office. She looked defiant, almost contemptuous. “You wouldn’t come here alone.”

“What are those lights?” I asked her, to change the subject, and pointed to the slopes of Table Mountain.

“Rondebosch, Constantia.” She had answered without looking up.