Editor’s Note: With the fanfare and glitz of the World Cup over, we thought it was an opportune time to look at how the majority of South African live: in the Townships.

We hesitated before going to the one of the Townships.

Average South African home. (Photo | Ali Lauren Jacobs)

Originally, the Townships were like camps for migrant workers, set up temporarily as a means to get cheap Black labor during the day but keep the workers out of sight after dusk settled. We were not sure up until the very afternoon we departed whether we would go to Langa or Bonteheuwel or even Gugulthu, where Amy Biehl was brutally murdered. We ended up going to the Crossroads Township, an unending sea of plywood shacks that looked at first glance like an awful parody of an American suburb in Virginia Beach or Indianapolis.

The houses, though, were the size of sheds for lawn mowers in those places and the locks on the doors were more flimsy than kids in the U. S. used on their bikes.

The houses were a patchwork quilt of sheet metal, fragments of glass, and sections of fabric.

Our bus had to ride slowly to avoid getting hooked on the spider web of electric wires that looped and hung like Spanish Moss from the electric poles on main roads leading into the Township. The low hanging stolen electricity  appeared ready to spark and sizzle off the metal top of our vehicle.

The future of SA. (Photo | Ali Lauren Jacobs)

We were only a short ride from the glittering and wealthy waterfront, but it seemed another planet. It was how Paul Theroux later described it, a place of “heightened contradictions.” As he said in Dark Star Safari, “No sooner had I decided the place was harmonious and tranquil than I discovered the crime statistics – carjackings, rapes, murders, and farm invasions ending in the disemboweling of the farmers. Some of the most distressed and dangerous squatter settlements of my entire trip I saw in South Africa, and among the handsomest districts I had seen in my life – Constantia comes to mind, with its mansions and gardens – I also saw in this republic of miseries and splendors.”

In our few hours in the Crossroads Township, we went to a school where students taught us how to play traditional African flutes and drums, we ate in a local restaurant that served papaya stuffed with rice, sweet potatoes mixed with cheese, and deep-fried dough, and we spent a few hours in a shebeen, a bar where the men sat slumped in corners drinking bottles of Castle lager.  Women and children gathered outside the shebeen to sing with us. Many of the young girls asked us if we knew Whitney Houston or Oprah, as if as Americans we might run in the same circles on occasion.

The pre-adolescent boys, all wearing wool skull caps and wide white smiles, danced around in a circle, and some of our female students joined them. The younger boys stood back, shy toothless grins peaking from their faces.

A South African momma. (Photo | Ali Lauren Jacobs)

I remember one woman in particular. She had close-cropped hair and chipped front teeth. Her grey sweater was tattered from age. She was most likely in her early forties, but she could have been seventy. Her eyes were that old. As she sang and danced a South African folk song, she swayed to the music and manufactured what she seemed to think was a smile, but her eyes suggested such a deep sadness and hopelessness that nothing her lips did could suggest anything but defeat. Besides, she had been drinking heavily. That was clear from the way her body listed in the dark ocean that the evening had become. Her eyelids began to droop from the alcohol. And she started to slur her words. She looked into my wife’s eyes as we were about to board the bus to leave, and said, “I will remember you. Remember me. Remember me, please.”

As we drove past the palm trees and office buildings in the center of Cape Town, along the immaculate streets, toward the harbor and our ship, I wondered how long she would remember us or we her. I tried hard in the flickering shadows of the bus light to see the faces of the students who had gone with us to the Township — the diminutive young woman with short brown hair who had danced with the young boys in the streets, the adult passenger who had made such a valiant and inept attempt to play a kwela, something like an Irish pennywhistle, and the young men who had kicked the soccer ball around a dust-choked yard with a group of teenagers who howled with delight.

I tried to recall the face of the woman who had spoken to my wife,Jo-Ellen, to fix her image and those of all the students who had come with us in my mind so that I would not forget.

Remembering seemed the only decent thing to do.

This essay is an excerpt from Dr. Pearson’s book Innocents Abroad Too: Journeys Around the World on Semester at Sea. It is available on Amazon by clicking here.