The Last Train to Zona Verde Read Online Free PDF Page A

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 theReconstruction 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 ofemployment, 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