Realizing Royalty in a State of Poor

On Wednesday we went first went on a bus tour of Cape Town, the city parts of it, with a tour guide. She took us to all the touristy places, like the garden (can't remember exactly what it's called and internet is pay per megabyte so I'll ask someone later) and the waterfront (where there are a bunch of shops and restaraunts that tourists go to, as well as some really nice hotels), and the castle (also don't know officially what to call it...) And then we left that tour and went to eat lunch in a township, where there was live music (marimba and drums). Our guide was a man who grew up in Langa (a township in the Cape Flats of Cape Town, its name means "sun"), which was awesome. The townships are where the black and colored South Africans were forced to move when the white settlers decided that everyone should be separated by race. It's obviously so much more complicated and violent than that, but I don't have enough space here to explain it. But anyway, our tour guide was recognized as the number one poet in South Africa and recited two of the poems that he wrote, which were amazing. That's where the title of this post came from, it was my favorite quote. In the townships, kids are playing all over the street. It's ridiculous what people live in. Sixteen people from three families in a room that's probably 10x7, with three beds, a TV, a refrigerator, a stove, and everything else they own stuffed over or under their beds. The eleven of us barely got in and we were basically on top of each other, that's how much floor space there was. The parents sleep in the three beds, and their kids sleep all together in the big communal room that has a sink and two tables. And off of that communal room there are four or five total rooms, each which has three families just like the one that we saw. And these were some of the nicest living arrangements that we got to see. So many of the people live in shacks – hundreds and hundreds. The government bulldozed a ton of them so that they could build some newer houses, like townhouses where multiple families could live, but there's still a ton of shacks, way more shacks than houses, and no one lives in the houses yet, because they can't decide whether the people whose shacks they bulldozed should live there or the people who've been in Langa for generations and generations. Langa is the oldest township. We also went inside a man's place that does potions and the like, with dead animals and unrecognizable things hanging from the ceiling and placed everywhere. All of the townships are divided by color and separated by train tracks and/or streets, and the people just don't cross, according to our guide. So the colored neighborhoods are on one side and black on the other (colored people are descendants of slaves and European masters). The comparison of the two tours was so interesting...the first one with a white Capetonian showing us the nice parts of the city, conveniently leaving out anything that spoke too negatively of the white settlers, and the second one with a former street kid who was the tour guide with the truth.