Inside Cape Town

From the accouter of a 40-foot baiter plying the arctic amnion of Table Bay, Paul Maré gazes aback at the aflame skyline of Cape Town.It is aboriginal evening, at the abutting of a ablaze day in December.Maré and his crew, antagonism in the Royal Cape Yacht Club's final regatta afore Christmas, elevate the jib and arch the baiter out to sea.A angry southeaster is blowing, archetypal of this time of year, and Maré's aggregation associates acclamation as they tack annular the endure chase beacon and acceleration aback adjoin bank and a celebratory braai, or barbecue, apprehension them on the club's patio.

Maré, the brood of French Huguenots who immigrated to South Africa in the backward 17th century, is admiral of the yacht club, one of abounding white colonial vestiges that still advance in Cape Town—South Africa's "Mother City." The club, founded in 1904 afterwards the Additional Boer War, has fatigued an about alone white associates anytime since.(Today, however, the club administers the Sail Training Academy, which provides apprenticeship to disadvantaged youth, a lot of of them blacks and coloureds.)

After Nelson Mandela's African Borough Congress (ANC) won adeptness in South Africa in the autonomous elections of 1994 (it has absolute since), some of Maré's white accompany larboard the country, fearing that it would ache the bread-and-butter decline, bribery and abandon that befell added post-independence African nations.Maré's two developed accouchement immigrated to London, but the 69-year-old engineering adviser does not affliction actual in the acreage of his birth.His action in burghal Newlands, one of the flush enclaves on the blooming slopes of Table Mountain, is abiding and comfortable.His leisure time is centered about his yacht, which he owns with a adolescent white South African."We'll be accepting accessible for our next bridge soon," says Maré, who has sailed three times beyond the generally bitter south Atlantic.

More than a decade afterwards the end of apartheid, Cape Town, founded in 1652 by the Dutch East India Company's Jan van Riebeeck, is one of the fastest-growing cities in the country.Much of this sprawling city-limits of 3.3 actor humans at Africa's southern tip has the feel of a European or American playground, a amalgam of Wyoming's Tetons, California's Big Sur and the Provence arena of France.White Capetonians adore a superior of action that a lot of Europeans would envy—surfing and sailing off some of the world's a lot of admirable beaches, tasting wine at vineyards accustomed added than 300 years ago by South Africa's aboriginal Dutch settlers, and abundance biking on wilderness trails top aloft the sea.Cape Town is the alone aloft city-limits in South Africa whose ambassador is white, and whites still ascendancy a lot of of its businesses.Not surprisingly, it's still accepted as "the a lot of European city-limits in South Africa."

But a afterpiece attending reveals a city-limits in the affliction of transformation.Downtown Cape Town, breadth one saw about few atramentous faces in the aboriginal 1990s (the ageism government's canyon laws afar about all atramentous Africans from the Western Cape province), bustles with African markets.Each day at a axial bus depot, combis, or minibuses, drop immigrants by the hundreds from as far abroad as Nigeria and Senegal, about all of them gluttonous jobs.The ANC's "black bread-and-butter empowerment" initiatives accept animated bags of ahead disadvantaged Africans to the average chic and created a new bearing of atramentous and mixed-race millionaires and even billionaires.With the ancestral bureaucracy dictated by ageism outlawed, the city-limits has become a blatant mix of aggressive constituencies and ethnicities—all jockeying for a allotment of power.The post-apartheid bang has aswell apparent ambagious abomination in atramentous townships and white suburbs, a top amount of HIV infection and a apartment curtailment that has affected tens of bags of bankrupt atramentous immigrants to reside in alarming face camps.

Now Cape Town has amorphous advancing for what will be the city's highest-profile accident aback the end of white-minority aphorism in 1994.In 2004, the apple soccer federation, FIFA, alleged South Africa as the breadth for the 2010 Apple Cup.Preparations cover architecture of a $300 million, 68,000-seat advertise amphitheater in the flush Green Point adjacency forth the Atlantic Ocean and massive investment in infrastructure.Not surprisingly, the action has generated a altercation brave with ancestral overtones.A accumulation of flush whites, who assert that the amphitheater will lose money and abase the environment, has been alveolate adjoin atramentous leaders assertive that opponents wish to anticipate atramentous soccer admirers from calamity into their neighborhood.The altercation has abated acknowledgment to a affiance by the Western Cape government, so far unfulfilled, to physique an burghal esplanade next to the stadium."For Capetonians, the Apple Cup is added than just a football match," says Shaun Johnson, a aloft controlling of a bi-weekly accumulation and a top abettor to aloft Admiral Mandela."It's an befalling to appearance ourselves off to the world."

For about two years, from August 2005 until April 2007, I accomplished Cape Town's generally surreal contradictions firsthand.I lived just off a ambagious country alley top in the Steenberg Mountains, adjoining Table Abundance Borough Esplanade and overlooking False Bay, 12 afar south of Cape Town's city-limits center.From my perch, it was simple to overlook that I was active in Africa.Directly beyond the alley from my abode sprawled the Tokai forest, breadth I jogged or mountain-biked a lot of mornings through close groves of ache and eucalyptus buried by Cape Town's English colonial masters about a aeon ago.A bisected mile from my house, an 18th-century acreage boasted three gourmet restaurants and a admirable clientele; it could accept been plucked accomplished from the French countryside.

Yet there were approved reminders of the bequest of apartheid.When I collection my son down the abundance to the American All-embracing Academy anniversary morning, I anesthetized a array of atramentous workers from the townships in the Cape Flats trudging acclivous to manicure the breadth and apple-pie the houses of my white neighbors.Next to my bounded arcade mall, and beyond the alley from a golf advance acclimated about alone by whites, stood an even starker admonition of South Africa's contempo past: Pollsmoor Prison, breadth Mandela spent four and a bisected years afterwards accepting confused from Robben Island in April 1984.

I aswell lived aural afterimage of Table Mountain, the sandstone and granite massif that stands as the iconic angel of the city.Formed 60 actor years ago, if bedrock access through the earth's apparent during the agitated tectonic breach of Africa from South America, the 3,563-foot aiguille already rose as top as 19,500-foot Mount Kilimanjaro.No added abode in Cape Town bigger symbolizes the city's admirable scale, embrace of alfresco action and alteration face.Table Abundance Borough Park—the bottle that Cecil Rhodes, prime abbot of the Cape Antecedents in the backward 19th century, carved out of clandestine farms on the slopes of the mountain—has developed into a 60,000-acre abutting wilderness, extending from the affection of the city-limits to the southern tip of the Cape Peninsula; it includes dozens of afar of coastline.The esplanade is a abode of amazing biodiversity; 8,500 varieties of bush-like flora, or fynbos—all altered to the Western Cape—cover the area, forth with wildlife as assorted as abundance goats, tortoises, springboks and baboons.

One December day I drive up to the park's rustic address to accommodated Paddy Gordon, 44, breadth administrator of the esplanade breadth that lies aural city-limits Cape Town.Gordon exemplifies the changes that accept taken abode in the country over the accomplished decade or so: a mixed-race science alum of the once-segregated University of the Western Cape, he became, in 1989, the aboriginal nonwhite appointed to a authoritative job in the absolute borough esplanade system.Within 12 years he had formed his way up to the top job."Before I came forth we were alone laborers," he says.

We drive top aloft the city-limits forth Kloof Road—a active band of nightclubs, French bistros and pan-Asian restaurants.After parking the car in a day-tripper lot at the abject of the mountain, we activate aggressive a bouldered aisle that hundreds of bags of hikers chase anniversary year to Table Mountain's summit.In a angry summer wind (typical of this season, if frigid antarctic currents bang with southern Africa's abating landmass), Gordon credibility out fields of agrarian olives and asparagus, fynbos and chicken blaze lilies, which access into anniversary afterwards wildfires that can arise there."We've got the greatest assortment in such a baby breadth of anywhere in the world," he says, abacus that development and tourism accept fabricated the challenges of absorption added difficult.In January 2006, at the acme of Cape Town's summer dry season, a ambler alone a lit cigarette in a parking lot at the abject of this trail.Within minutes, blaze advance beyond the mountain, asphyxiating addition climber who had become adrift in the smoke.The blaze austere for 11 days, antibacterial multimillion-dollar houses and acute the efforts of hundreds of firefighters and helicopters ferrying endless of seawater to extinguish."It austere everything," Gordon tells me."But the fynbos is advancing up appealing well.This getting has an amazing adeptness to change itself."

Gordon credibility out a ablaze trailside beck created by brume abstract at the top of the plateau."It's one of the alone baptize sources on the mountain's western face," he says.The stream, Platte Klipp, was the primary acumen that the 17th-century Dutch seaman Jan van Riebeeck congenital a accumulation abject for the Dutch East India Aggregation at the abject of Table Mountain.The abject grew into a advancing outpost, Kaapstadt; it became the starting point for the Voortrekkers, Dutch immigrants who beyond arid and veld by ox wagon to authorize the Afrikaner attendance beyond southern Africa.

The Mother City-limits has steered the nation's afterlife anytime since.In 1795, the British bedeviled Cape Town, advancement their authority over the absolute antecedents for added than 100 years.Even today, English-and Afrikaans-speaking whites approach adjoin adverse corners of the city.English speakers adopt the southern suburbs about Table Abundance and beachfront communities south of the city-limits center.Afrikaners tend to reside in arctic suburbs a few afar civil from the Atlantic coast.The British alien the aboriginal racist laws in the country, but it was the Afrikaner Daniel François Malan—born just alfresco Cape Town—who became the capital backer of white-racist philosophy.In 1948, Malan's Borough Affair swept to victory; he became prime abbot and codification his racist angle into the acknowledged arrangement accepted as apartheid.

The Accumulation Areas Act of 1950 abandoned all atramentous Africans from Western Cape province, except those active in three atramentous townships.Cape coloureds (predominantly mixed-race, Afrikaans-speaking birth of Dutch settlers, their disciplinarian and bounded aboriginal inhabitants) became the capital antecedent of bargain labor; they remained cheap citizens who could be evicted from their homes by government decree and arrested if they so abundant as set bottom on Cape Town's absolute beaches.From 1968 to 1982, the ageism administration forcibly removed 60,000 coloureds from a adjacency abreast the city-limits centermost to the Cape Flats, 5 afar from city-limits Cape Town, afresh austere their houses to accomplish allowance for a proposed whites-only development.(Protests chock-full construction; even today, the neighborhood, District Six, charcoal abundantly a wasteland.)

During the acme of anti-apartheid protests in the 1970s and 1980s, Cape Town, geographically abandoned and cloistral from ancestral affray by the abreast absence of a atramentous population, remained quiet in allegory with Johannesburg's barmy townships.Then, during the dying canicule of apartheid, blacks began to cascade into Cape Town—as abounding as 50,000 a year over the accomplished decade.In the 1994 acclamation campaign, the white-dominated Borough Affair exploited coloureds' abhorrence that a black-led government would accord their jobs to blacks; a lot of chose the Borough Affair over the ANC.While abounding blacks resent mixed-race Capetonians for their abortion to embrace the ANC, abounding coloureds still abhorrence atramentous antagonism for government grants and jobs."The bisect amid blacks and coloureds is the absolute ancestral accountability band in Cape Town," I was told by Henry Jeffreys, a Johannesburg citizen who confused to Cape Town endure year to become the aboriginal nonwhite editor of the bi-weekly Die Burger.(A aloft editor was the artist of apartheid, D.F.Malan.)

But the gap is closing.The Western Cape province, of which Cape Town is the heart, boasts one of the fastest-growing economies in South Africa.An beverage of adopted and bounded investment has adapted the already corrupt city-limits centermost into what borough baton Shaun Johnson calls a "forest of cranes." In backward 2006, a Dubai bunch paid added than $1 billion for the Victoria and Alfred Waterfront, a circuitous of hotels, restaurants and shops—and the terminal for ferries that carriage tourists beyond Table Bay to Robben Island.The amount of absolute acreage has skyrocketed, even in once-rundown bank neighborhoods such as Mouille Point, and the balloon shows no signs of bursting.

The new bread-and-butter action is adorning South Africans who couldn't dream of administration in the abundance not that continued ago.One ablaze morning, I drive south forth the slopes of Table Abundance to Constantia Valley, a abundant amplitude of villas and vineyards; its abounding byways abridge the advantaged lives of Cape Town's white elite—the horsey "mink and admixture set." I accept arise to accommodated Ragavan Moonsamy, 43, or "Ragi," as he prefers to be called, one of South Africa's newest multimillionaires.

Here, bougainvillea-shrouded mansions lie hidden abaft top walls; horse trails wind up forested hills buried in chestnut, birch, ache and eucalyptus.Armed "rapid response" aegis teams convoying the quiet lanes.I drive through the electric gates of a three-acre estate, casual landscaped breadth afore I cull up in foreground of a neocolonial mansion, parking beside a Bentley, two Porsches and a Lamborghini Spyder.Moonsamy, cutting jeans and a T-shirt, is cat-and-mouse for me at the door.

As afresh as 15 years ago, the alone way that Moonsamy would accept acquired access to this adjacency would accept been as a agriculturalist or laborer.He grew up with eight ancestors in a two-room abode in Athlone, a atramentous belt in the Cape Flats.His great-grandparents had arise to the South African anchorage of Durban from southern India to plan the sugar-cane fields as attached agents in the backward 19th century.Moonsamy's parents confused illegally from Durban to Cape Town in the 1940s.He says he and his ancestors "saw Table Abundance every day, but we were indoctrinated by ageism to accept we do not accord there.From the time I was a adolescent teenager, I knew I capital to get out."

After admission from a absolute top school, Moonsamy dabbled in anti-apartheid activism.In 1995, as the ANC government began gluttonous means of affective "previously disadvantaged" humans into the boilerplate economy, Moonsamy started his own accounts company, UniPalm Investments.He organized bags of atramentous and mixed-race investors to buy shares in ample companies such as a accessory of Telkom, South Africa's state-owned buzz monopoly, and bought cogent stakes in them himself.Over ten years, Moonsamy has put calm billions of dollars in deals, fabricated tens of millions for himself and, in 1996, purchased this acreage in the a lot of absolute bend of Upper Constantia, one of the aboriginal nonwhites to do so.He says he's just accepting started."Ninety-five percent of this abridgement is still white-owned, and alteration the buying will yield a continued time," he told me.Speaking figuratively, he adds that the city-limits is the abode to appropriate opportunity: "If you wish to bolt a marlin, you've got to arise to Cape Town."

Not everybody catches marlin.Zongeswa Bauli, 39, is a loyal affiliate of the ANC who wears Nelson Mandela T-shirts and has voted for the affair in every acclamation aback 1994.One afternoon I biking with her to her home at the Kanana face camp, an actionable adjustment axial the atramentous belt of Guguletu, abreast Cape Town's airport.In 1991, the dying canicule of apartheid, Bauli accustomed actuality from bankrupt Ciskei—one of the alleged "independent atramentous homelands" set up by the ageism administration in the 1970s—in what is now Eastern Cape province.For nine years, she camped in her grandmother's backyard and formed as a calm assistant for white families.In 2000, she purchased a artifice for a few hundred dollars in Kanana, now home to 6,000 atramentous migrants—and growing by 10 percent annually.

Bauli leads me through albino alleys, accomplished shacks complete of abominably nailed copse planks.Mosquitoes army over pools of brackish water.In the courtyard of a long-abandoned apprentice auberge now taken over by squatters, rats butt about abundance of adulteration garbage; association acquaint me that anyone dumped a physique actuality a ages ago, and it lay alien for several days.While chargeless anti-retroviral drugs accept been alien in Cape Town, the HIV amount charcoal high, and the unemployment amount is added than 50 percent; every macho we meet, it seems, is jobless, and admitting it's alone 5 p.m., a lot of arise drunk.As we abreast her dwelling, Bauli credibility out a torn alfresco baptize pump, vandalized the anniversary before.At endure we access at her tiny board shack, disconnected into three cubicles, breadth she lives with her 7-year-old daughter, Sisipho, her sister and her sister's three children.(After years of agitation by squatters, the city-limits agreed in 2001 to accommodate electricity to the camp.Bauli has it, but bags of added contempo arrivals do not.) Afterwards dark, she huddles with her ancestors indoors, the chiffon aperture locked, abashed of the gangsters, alleged tsotsis, who ascendancy the affected at night."It's too alarming out there," she says.

Bauli dreams of artifice Kanana.The ANC has promised to accommodate new apartment for all of Cape Town's squatters afore the Apple Cup begins—the "No Shacks 2010" pledge—but Bauli has heard such allocution before."Nobody cares about Guguletu," she says with a shrug.Bauli's hopes blow on her babe who is in additional brand in a accessible primary academy in the affluent, abundantly white adjacency of Kenilworth—an unattainable aspiration in the ageism era."Maybe by 2020, Sisipho will be able to buy me a house," she says wryly.

Helen Zille, Cape Town's mayor, abundantly blames the ANC for the apartment crisis: the $50 actor that Cape Town receives annually from the borough government, she says, is about abundant to physique houses for 7,000 families."The cat-and-mouse account is growing by 20,000 [families] a year," she told me.

Zille's own adventure reflects the city's circuitous ancestral dynamics.In the endure bounded election, her Autonomous Alliance (DA), a white-dominated action party, formed a affiliation with bisected a dozen abate parties to defeat the bounden ANC.(Many coloured voters angry adjoin the ANC already afresh and helped accord the DA its victory.) It was one of the aboriginal times in South Africa aback the end of ageism that the ANC had been angry out of office; the acclamation after-effects created a backfire that still resonates.

Zille, 57, is one of alone a few white politicians in the country who allege Xhosa, the accent of South Africa's second-largest tribe, and lives in a racially chip neighborhood.She has an absorbing almanac as an activist, accepting been arrested during the ageism years for her plan as a abecedary in Crossroads, a atramentous face camp.Despite her credentials, the ANC-controlled Western Cape bigoted government launched an accomplishment endure abatement to bound and alter her with a "mayoral committee" heavily represented by ANC members.Their complaint: the city-limits was not "African" abundant and had to be brought in band with the blow of the country.After protests from Zille supporters and criticism from even some ANC allies, the administration backed down.

The wounds are still raw.Zille bristled if I asked her about accepting heckled at a assemblage she abounding with South African Admiral Thabo Mbeki.She said the heckling was "orchestrated" by her enemies aural the ANC."This acclamation apparent the aboriginal time that the affair of liberation has absent anywhere in South Africa," she said as we sat in her ample sixth-floor appointment in the Borough Center, a high-rise overlooking Cape Town's harbor."The ANC didn't like that." As for the affirmation that Cape Town wasn't African enough, she scoffed."Rubbish! Are they adage that alone Xhosa humans can be advised African? The tragedy is that the ANC has fostered the apparition that alone atramentous humans can yield affliction of blacks."

The Koeberg Nuclear Adeptness Station, Africa's alone nuclear adeptness plant, was inaugurated in 1984 by the ageism administration and is the aloft antecedent of electricity for the Western Cape's 4.5 actor population.I've arise to accommodated Carin De Villiers, a arch administrator for Eskom, South Africa's adeptness monopoly.De Villiers was an beholder to one of the affliction crises in South Africa's contempo history, which abundant at Koeberg for two agitated weeks in aboriginal 2006.It may able-bodied accept contributed to the defeat of the ANC in the endure election.

On February 19, 2006, an afflict on a high-voltage manual band automatically tripped the nuclear reactor's individual alive assemblage (the added had beforehand abiding massive accident afterwards a artisan alone a three-inch bolt into a baptize pump).With the absolute reactor al of a sudden out of commission, the accomplished Western Cape became abased on a coal-fueled bulb amid added than 1,000 afar away.As engineers approved badly to get one of the two 900-megawatt units aback on line, Eskom ordered rolling blackouts that bedridden Cape Town and the region, as far as Namibia, for two weeks."It was a nightmare," De Villiers told me.Businesses shut down, cartage lights chock-full working, gas pumps and ATMs went dead.Police stations, medical clinics and government offices had to accomplish by candlelight.After the city's pumps shut down, raw carrion caked into rivers and wetlands, killing bags of angle and aggressive the Cape Peninsula's flush bird life.Tourists were abandoned in cable cars on Table Mountain; burglars took advantage of disabled alarms to wreak calamity in flush neighborhoods.By the time Eskom adequate adeptness on March 3, the blackouts had amount the abridgement hundreds of millions of dollars.

For De Villiers and the blow of Cape Town's population, the adeptness failures provided an abashing attending at the airiness that lies just below the city's flush surface.It drew absorption to the actuality that Eskom has bootless to aggrandize adeptness accommodation to accumulate up with the province's 6 percent anniversary advance and opened the ANC to accuse of poor planning and bad management.Now Eskom is scrambling to physique new plants, including addition nuclear reactor, as the city-limits prepares for the Apple Cup.The adeptness collapse aswell laid bald ancestral grievances: abounding whites, and some nonwhites as well, saw the breakdown as affirmation that the official action of atramentous bread-and-butter empowerment had brought amateur humans into key positions of responsibility."Given the corruption of this abridgement à la Eskom, I am alpha to adopt my oppressors to be white," one clairvoyant wrote to Business Day, a South African newspaper.

Paul Maré considers such asperous patches a natural, if frustrating, allotment of the alteration to absolute democracy.Standing on the accouter of the Royal Cape Yacht Club at twilight, with a bottle of South African chardonnay in one duke and a boerewors (grilled sausage) in the other, Maré takes in the bright lights of city-limits Cape Town and the arena of flush white South Africa that surrounds him.Maré's partner, Lindsay Birch, 67, grumbles that in the post-apartheid era, "it's harder for us to get advocacy for our regattas.Sailing isn't a atramentous sport." Maré, however, is putting his bets on Cape Town's future—and his abode in it."I'm an African," Maré says."I've got 350 years' account of history abaft me."

Formerly Newsweek's agency arch in Cape Town, biographer Joshua Hammer is a contributor who is based in Berlin.Photographer Per-Anders Pettersson resides in Cape Town.

As aboriginal as the 15th century, sailors rounding the Cape of Acceptable Hope were addled by what they encountered.In 1580, British charlatan Sir Francis Drake wrote that “This Cape is the a lot of august thing, and the fairest Cape in all the accomplished ambit of the earth.” (Melanie Stetson Freeman/The Christian Science Monitor/Getty Images)

A lot of Cape Town visitors go to the top of Table Mountain, adore top tea at the august Mount Nelson Hotel, attending down to the Atlantic and Indian oceans from the top cliffs at the Cape of Acceptable Hope and appointment the adjacent penguin colony. (Candice Lo)

Aback the 17th century, Robben Island has been acclimated for banishment—for lepers, the mentally ill and countless added amusing outcasts.In 1948, ageism (Afrikaans for "apart,") became the action of the South African government; laws based on ancestral allocation dictated breadth humans could reside and work.Between 1961 and 1991, added than 3,000 anti-apartheid political prisoners, including Nelson Mandela, were captivated on this small, abandoned island.In 1999, Robben Island was declared a UNESCO Apple Heritage Site, and now anniversary year some 600,000 tourists visit. (Karen Sagstetter)

Mandela abutting the African Borough Congress (ANC) in 1944 and began afraid ageism in 1948.In 1964 he was bedevilled to action imprisonment for acute to abolish the government.Until 1982 he was confined at Robben Island; he banned to accommodation his political angle to access his freedom.The account (Mandela is on the left), on affectation at Robben Island, was taken in 1966.Prison admiral acclimated it as advertising to acquaint the apple how acceptable altitude were at the prison.But for abundant of Mandela’s stay, prisoners had basal accouterment and were about consistently cold. (South Africa Tourism Angel Library)

Mandela spent 16 hours a day in his corpuscle and slept on the attic on a mat and three chiffon blankets.There is alone accessible ocean amid Robben Island and Antarctica; freezing apprehension and clammy beef fabricated nights decidedly miserable.Prisoners awoke to day afterwards day of affected labor, beatings and innumerable humiliations. (Cape Town Routes Unlimited (www.tourismcapetown.co.za))

Mandela's and added prisoners' apparition was damaged as a aftereffect of affected activity in Robben Island's adhesive quarry, due to connected dust and audacious sun reflected from the white adhesive cliffs.But in time the quarry was aswell a abode breadth during break inmates aggregate the actual few accessible account abstracts and studied, while affectionate guards looked the added way.With the aid of the All-embracing Red Cross and added animal rights organizations and anti-apartheid South African politicians, the ANC inmates were able—through connected petitioning and ache strikes—to accomplish some improvements in bastille life.Forced activity was reduced, and eventually abstraction was allowed; books could be ordered and abounding prisoners took accord courses at South African and adopted universities. (iStockphoto)

The District Six Building in axial Cape Town abstracts one of the affliction ageism tragedies.District Six was a poor but active burghal adjacency just east of the city-limits center.Multiracial and cosmopolitan, with an abnormally bright artery arena and night life, it was in abounding means the affection and body of Cape Town.Like Harlem and Greenwich Village it was a applesauce mecca; abounding musicians and artists lived there.Some of the residents, mostly coloureds but aswell blacks and whites, had lived there for 5 generations.Then in 1966 District Six was declared a "white area" beneath the Accumulation Areas Act of 1950.The government maintained that interracial alternation bred conflict, necessitating the break of the races. (District Six Museum, Lutz Kosbab, photographer)

Affected removals of District Six association began in 1968.By 1982 added than 60,000 humans were evicted and confused to the austere Cape Flats breadth nine afar east of Cape Town.Former neighbors were beatific to altered townships, bent by their race.Their houses and shops were bulldozed.Street signs in the building (left) were retrieved by a artisan assigned to dump them into Table Bay.Former District Six association are arrive to agenda the breadth of their burst houses and added places on the museum's attic map. (District Six Museum)

Calm and all-embracing abuse prevented District Six from accepting developed as a white-only area, and abundant of it charcoal a boscage (at left, all that is larboard of the aloft Horstley Street).In 2000 the government alternate abundant of the acreage in District Six to its aloft residents, and starting in 2004 some accept confused back, into new homes. (District Six Museum)

Several of the museum's displays (at left, a reconstructed beautician shop) admire and arm-twist the old neighborhood, as do re-created exoteric facades of a café, houses, food and workshops. (District Six Museum, Paul Grandon, photographer)

Beneath apartheid, atramentous South Africans were not accustomed to reside in the city-limits of Cape Town, and abounding of them were removed from areas such as District Six and beatific to townships.Located on the peripheries of towns and cities, these were residential areas aloof for non-whites.In Guguletu, Liziwe's Bedfellow House—there are a bisected dozen guesthouses in the townships that abnormally acceptable adopted tourists—offers walking tours. (Liziwe's Bedfellow House)

Liziwe's Bedfellow Abode has acceptable relations with abounding of Guguletu's residents, and some accessible their homes to participants in the walking tours.In the shacks areas of Guguletu, a archetypal airing to a accessible toilet is 5 minutes, so association usually use buckets at home.There are no bathhouses; humans aggregate baptize and bath out of buckets or artificial tubs. (Liziwe's Bedfellow House)

Mzoli's Meats in Guguletu is actual accepted with both locals and tourists.Here Mzoli Ngcawuzele (center), the architect and owner, is abutting by Andy Rabagliati, a computer programmer, and Tina Marquardt, a mathematics lecturer, both at the African Institute for Mathematical Sciences in Cape Town (www.aims.ac.za).Mzoli's is abreast some of the atomic locations of Guguletu, but this alive business has admiring three ATMs and an upmarket liquor abundance to the area. (Andy Rabagliati)

Liziwe Ngcokoto, the buyer of Liziwe's Bedfellow Abode (serving African beer from a butt to a adopted visitor), bought a artifice of acreage in Guguletu and lived in a berth on the artifice for 5 years.Then with a donation of artery by the aggregation breadth her bedmate had formed for 25 years, they congenital the bedfellow house. (Liziwe's Bedfellow House)