this strip in cape town south africa
divides the beachside community of
strand from the township
of nomzamo they're only a few meters
apart
but the people on each side live very
different lives
strand has backyards and driveways
nomzamo is much more dense and the
people here
have fewer basic services less piped
water
less internet access and
nonzamo is majority black while the area
across the line
is majority white if we use dots on a
map to represent race
you can see how stark that divide is
if we zoom out to the whole city we can
see it's actually
everywhere and this is the case
across much of south africa the color of
your skin here
often determines where you live it also
determines your quality of life this map
shows where jobs and opportunities are
primarily concentrated in cape town
and this is where most of the city's
black people live in
informal settlements called townships on
the city's periphery
people have to move by public transport
for
up to three hours a day and they can't
take care of the obligations in the
community with the rest of the family
because they're
always working and they're always
travelling for decades south africa was
under apartheid a system that wrote
segregation into law
a white minority controlled where
non-white people could
live work exist many were forced out of
their homes
in 1994 a democratically elected
government
took power and ended apartheid it was
supposed to be
a new beginning but a lot of the country
still looks like this and that's because
south africa's legacy of racial division
goes back centuries
in the 1600s the dutch took over the
southern tip of africa to supply ships
with food along the trade route to asia
150 years later britain seized it and
named it
cape colony many dutch colonists moved
here further inland to escape british
rule
and continue exploiting enslaved people
just like the dutch the british used
cape colony as a strategic location for
trade
it wasn't economically significant but
in the 1870s
that changed when the british started
mining diamonds there
suddenly cape colony was one of
britain's most prized and exploited
colonies
in order to get the diamonds out of the
country they built railways to connect
the mines up here
to the coast the railways allowed the
british to access
a global diamond market through the port
city of cape town
soon the economy of cape colony was
centered around the railroads
especially this main route
the green areas on this map show the
black regions of cape colony
largely left out of the railroad economy
racial inequality in cape colony was
being reinforced by a location
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to keep it that way the colonial
government started writing segregation
into law the native lands act of 1913
pushed black people into these areas
only eight percent of south africa's
land
and restricted them from owning land
everywhere else
or relocated them to the edges of the
major cities to work for white people
these laws began to shape the region
cape town's growth from the increased
trade turned the port town into
a major city
many migrants from the rest of the
colony and elsewhere
moved here to what was then the
outskirts of cape town
where former enslaved people merchants
artists and
immigrants were forming a neighborhood
called district 6.
as the city grew around district 6 so
did the neighborhood
for decades district 6 was a thriving
integrated community
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we were a very cosmopolitan
you could say family almost because
there were people from
all different nationalities from all
different walks of life
this was the statement your child is my
child
but it wouldn't last
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in 1934 britain's legal hold in what was
now the union of south africa
officially ended the remaining white
minority the descendants of dutch
colonists
took control and they built on the
foundation the british were leaving
behind
between 1949 and 1971
the all-white government passed 148 laws
solidifying apartheid a pub date allowed
for the full realization of the ambition
of the fascist project in south africa
in 1950 the population registration act
officially classified people by race
white colored and native or black
and eventually asian then they made laws
saying where people could live around
the country black south africans were
moved into these
areas called homelands or bantustans
bantustans were rural areas and had
underdeveloped economies
many of them were in the areas britain
had already excluded from the railway
economy
and where black land ownership had been
restricted to
black people were forced to carry past
books that specified
where they were allowed to work or
travel to
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in cities like cape town the group areas
act moved the remaining non-whites
into separate urban areas the most prime
land and the land closest to higher
valued property
was allocated to white people in 1966
the government declared that district 6
was now
a whites only area the residents of
district 6
received removal letters like this one
that said
living there was illegal because they
were not white
bulldozers drove into district six and
raised it to the ground
we loved you we had a life here
it was very traumatic for a lot of
people it's like ripping out someone's
heart
more than 60 000 people were forcibly
removed from their homes
this kind of violence against non-white
people was
commonplace around the country but
after decades of pressure both from
within south africa
and abroad apartheid rule finally came
to an end
the new government lifted restrictions
on where people could live
millions of people who had been excluded
from economic development for
centuries migrated to major cities
looking for basic services
and economic opportunity
for any family with no prospect of
employment the most
rational logical choice to make is to
migrate to an urban center
they settled where there was empty land
creating townships on the peripheries of
major cities
like cape town the government built
millions of homes and expanded clean
water and electricity
but it had a number of unforeseen
consequences the most important of which
is that the only land that could be used
for the public housing program
was on the periphery of the city and for
that reason
a brilliant intention to overcome the
apartheid legacy
unintentionally reproduced the very same
legacy it was trying to undo
today 60 percent of the mostly black
population
of cape town lives in these townships at
the edge of the city
the thing is cape town city center has
land to develop
but because of its location it's
valuable
so it usually gets sold to private
developers who build
luxury apartments nearly a billion
dollars worth of them
are going up by the coast but
right in the heart of cape town by all
the expensive developments
district six remains largely untouched
the former residents have fought against
private development
and they've actually succeeded
some have even managed to return to
houses built by the city
i wanted to to to come back
yeah where i was born which was part of
our family's heritage i couldn't believe
that i was back it was a sense of relief
but there are still hundreds of
claimants waiting to get back
to district 6. we haven't done
the difficult and the painful work to
confront
what the intergenerational consequences
are
of colonialism of apartheid
the story of cape town and south
africa's racial segregation
starts far in the past but it's
very much entangled with the present
apartheid
and colonialism here are over but
many of the barriers they built have yet
to be dismantled
the kind of psychic scars that's left on
individuals and on communities
we haven't begun the work of saying how
do we live together
right in the face of that history
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