This strip, in Cape Town,
South Africa, divides the beachside community of Strand
from the township of Nomzamo. They're only a few meters apart. But the
people on each side live very different lives. Strand has backyards and driveways. Nomzamo is much more dense. And the people here
have fewer basic services: Less piped water. Less internet access. And Nomzamo is majority Black,
while the area across the line is majority white. If we use dots on a map to represent race,
you can see how stark that divide is. If we zoom out to the whole city,
we can see it's actually everywhere. And this is the case
across much of South Africa. The color of your skin here
often determines where you live. It also determines
your quality of life. This map shows where jobs and opportunities
are primarily concentrated in Cape Town. And this is where most of
the city's Black people live, in informal settlements called "townships"
on the city's periphery. "People have to move by public transport
for up to three hours a day, and they can't take care of
their obligations in the community, with the rest of their family,
because they're always working and they're always traveling." For decades, South Africa
was under apartheid: a system that wrote
segregation into law. A white minority controlled where
non-white people could live, work, exist. Many were forced out of their homes. In 1994, a democratically elected government
took power, and ended apartheid. It was supposed to be a new beginning. But a lot of the country still looks like this. And that's because South Africa's legacy
of racial division goes back centuries. In the 1600s, the Dutch took over
the southern tip of Africa, to supply ships with food
along the trade route to Asia. 150 years later, Britain seized it,
and named it "Cape Colony." Many Dutch colonists
moved here, further inland, to escape British rule and
continue exploiting enslaved people. Just like the Dutch, the British used Cape Colony
as a strategic location for trade; it wasn't economically significant. But in the 1870s, that changed, when
the British started mining diamonds there. Suddenly, Cape Colony was one of Britain's
most prized and exploited colonies. In order to get the diamonds
out of the country, they built railways, to connect the mines up here
to the coast. The railways allowed the British
to access a global diamond market through the port city of Cape Town. Soon, the economy of Cape Colony
was centered around the railroads. Especially this main route. The green areas on this map show
the Black regions of Cape Colony, largely left out
of the railroad economy. Racial inequality in Cape Colony
was being reinforced by location. To keep it that way, the colonial government
started writing segregation into law. The Natives Land Act of 1913
pushed Black people into these areas: only eight percent of South Africa's land; and restricted them from
owning land everywhere else; or, relocated them to the edges of
the major cities, to work for white people. These laws began to shape the region. Cape Town's growth from the increased trade
turned the port town into a major city. Many migrants from the rest of the
colony, and elsewhere, moved here, to what was then the
outskirts of Cape Town, where former enslaved people,
merchants, artists, and immigrants, were forming a neighborhood
called District Six. As the city grew around District Six,
so did the neighborhood. For decades, District Six was
a thriving, integrated community. "We were a very cosmopolitan,
you could say family, almost. Because there were people
from all different nationalities, from all different walks of life." "This was the statement:
Your child is my child." But it wouldn't last. In 1934, Britain's legal hold in what was now
the Union of South Africa officially ended. The remaining white minority, the descendants
of Dutch colonists, took control. And they built on the foundation
the British were leaving behind. Between 1949 and 1971, the all-white government passed
148 laws solidifying apartheid. "Apartheid allowed for the
full realization of the ambition of the fascist project
in South Africa." In 1950, the Population Registration Act
officially classified people by race: white, colored, and native (or Black).
And eventually, Asian. Then they made laws saying
where people could live. Around the country, Black South Africans
were moved into these areas, called homelands, or "bantustans." Bantustans were rural areas
and had underdeveloped economies. Many of them were in the areas Britain had
already excluded from the railway economy, and where Black land ownership
had been restricted to. Black people were forced
to carry "pass books," that specified where they
were allowed to work or travel to. In cities like Cape Town, the "Group Areas Act"
moved the remaining non-whites into separate urban areas. "The most prime land, and the land
closest to higher-valued property, was allocated to white people." In 1966, the government declared that
District Six was now a whites-only area. The residents of District Six received
removal letters like this one, that said living there was illegal,
because they were not white. Bulldozers drove into District Six,
and razed it to the ground. "We lived here. We had a life here." "It was very traumatic for a lot of people." "It's like ripping out someone's heart." More than 60,000 people were
forcibly removed from their homes. This kind of violence against non-white people
was commonplace around the country. But, after decades of pressure,
both from within South Africa and abroad, apartheid rule finally came to an end. The new government lifted restrictions
on where people could live. Millions of people, who had been excluded
from economic development for centuries, migrated to major cities, looking for
basic services and economic opportunity. "For any family with
no prospect of employment, the most rational, logical choice to make
is to migrate to an urban center." They settled where there was empty land, creating townships on the peripheries
of major cities like Cape Town. The government built millions of homes,
and expanded clean water and electricity. "But it had a number of unforeseen consequences,
the most important of which is that the only land that could be used for the public
housing program was on the periphery of the city. And for that reason, a brilliant intention
to overcome the apartheid legacy unintentionally reproduced the very
same legacy it was trying to undo." Today, 60% of the mostly Black
population of Cape Town lives in these townships
at the edge of the city. The thing is, Cape Town's City Center
has land to develop. But because of its location, it's valuable, so it usually gets sold to private
developers, who build luxury apartments. Nearly a billion dollars worth of them
are going up by the coast. But, right in the heart of Cape Town,
by all the expensive developments, District Six remains largely untouched. The former residents have fought
against private development, and they've actually succeeded. Some have even managed to return
to houses built by the city. "I wanted to come back here,
where I was born, which was part of
our family's heritage." "I couldn't believe that I was back. It was a sense of relief." But there are still hundreds of claimants
waiting to get back to District Six. "We haven't done the difficult
and the painful work to confront what the
intergenerational consequences are of colonialism. Of apartheid." The story of Cape Town and South Africa's
racial segregation starts far in the past. But it's very much entangled
with the present. Apartheid and colonialism here are over. But many of the barriers they built
have yet to be dismantled. "The kind of psychic scars that's left
on individuals and on communities. We haven't begun the work of saying, How do
we live together, in the face of that history?"
