Gugulentu

"Every week," said Laura, "we bury around seventy to a hundred of them."
Due to HIV/AIDS.

--
I took a portrait of the healer in Gugulentu. Cheetah and zebra skins hung outside. She had five and a half teeth. I came to shake her hand, and she embraced and kissed it. When she posed for the camera, she'd shut her mouth only to burst into laughter by the time I snapped the photo. When Laura told her that her husband left her for the third time, she also burst into laughter, warmly and comfortingly. "Get a white man!" she yelled.

Laura said that when she took the call to be a healer she knew that her husband might feel neglected by her spirit which, as a healer, was sometimes over-extended. She underlined that her husband has left her a number of times with no warning, no explanation and that he returns just as spontaneously. It was with raw self-confidence that she told me this, and I felt like she expected me to be in shock, or at least in awe of her resilience.

There was a brief, comfortable pause, and she cracked, "And he just looks at me!!" The "he" being me.

Laura is an entrepreneur. She runs a jazz bar in Gugulentu, where her uncle once played, and co-manages a small company that provides township tours. She lives across the only public green space in Gugulentu and wants one day to turn her roof into a cafe. She picked me up in a Mercedes and, when I told her I came from Lebanon, she was taken aback with shock. "It's war all the time, there," she taught me. Of course, I told her otherwise, touching on how Beirut was far more dynamic and safer than Capetown. In the end, she made fun of herself for thinking like an American.

We drove and walked around two townships--Qualanga and Gugulentu. The poverty was severe, and the stench of trash, piss, and trash hung in the air in the alleyways. We stepped into a room in a government project, about the size of a King size bed, that housed three families. The vast majority of the township homes do not have running water although there is a central tap that residents can use. No one leaves their home at night for fear of crime, which Laura tells me is rampant after the sun sets. In fact, the car that I rode in had been stolen and broken into, but luckily the burglars left it on the side of a road not too far from Gugulentu. Incidentally, I was the only "white" person about.

Unlike Capetown and especially Stellenbosch, Qualanga and Gugulentu had vibrant public spaces. The punishingly cute Cape Dutch architecture of the "Mother City" gives Capetown a sort of haunted feeling, and the bodies on the sidewalks and in the waterfront cafes look like figurines glued into a 3D rendering.

Capetown is hosting the World Cup in 2010. They are building a new soccer stadium in Greenpoint, far far away from any township. I can't imagine how ashamed the organizers must be of their city. It makes me wonder how they will attempt to distract the hoards of tourists from the injustice still ingrained in their society.

The American city has excelled in sustaining such unofficial injustice: I'm sure Capetown has learned a lesson or two.