Wes MooreFromThe Other Wes Mooreby Wes MooreThe legacy of apartheid was glaringly obvious in South Africa’s cities. The institution ofa legal, government-sanctioned racial caste system was overturned in 1994 with the firstdemocratic elections, but its effects still haunted the country. Government-supported racialsegregation had given way to economically enforced segregation.Langawas established in 1923 as Cape Town’s first black township. Similar toKhayelitsha, Gugulethu, Kopanong, and other historic townships in South Africa, it was createdfor the sole purpose of isolating black Africans in small, destitute enclaves where laws wereinstituted to control the residents and police entered to harass, not to protect. When thesetownships were established, Afrikaners, or whites of Dutch ancestry, made up 9 percent of thepopulation. Black Africans, who generally lived on only 5 percent of the nation’s land, made upover 80 percent of the population. These were South Africa’s “projects,” areas where despair andhopelessness were not accidental products of the environment but rather the whole point. It wasobviously a far more egregious situation, but I could sense faint echoes of Baltimore and theBronx in the story of these townships.The van bounced steadily up and down as the shocks attempted to adjust to the transitionfrom the paved, multilane highways to the pothole-laden, dirt-covered streets of the township.Kids, dozens of them, lined every street we drove down, staring at the vehicle as we cautiouslycruised by them. Their smiles were bright, and they gave us the thumps-up as we rolled pastthem, as if they had known us from somewhere else, which just reinforced my disorientingfeeling of familiarity.
