I was skeptical of the township tour, thinking it would be either exploitative or hopelessly sanitized or both. It was neither, and I count it as one of my most worthwhile experiences in South Africa. There were just three of us on the tour, a young Danish couple and myself. Our tour guide was Brian Smith, a coloured man in his 50s who had grown up in District Six in Cape Town and lived the history he was showing us. Brian was very intelligent, knowledgeable, and articulate.

For a little background, the following is an excerpt from the Insight Guide: South Africa, written by someone who knows more than I do:

"The street lamps lighting Cape Town's white suburbs at night are still shining when Khayelitsha starts waking up. Cape Town's biggest township is well over an hour's journey by overloaded minibus taxi from the city centre and industrial areas. The name means "new home" in Xhosa, but for the one million people who live here, it could just as well mean "early start".

As dawn breaks, low mists mask the woodsmoke still rising from last night's cooking fires. The light reveals the extraordinary array of building materials used in Khayelitshan homes, from broken bits of advertising boarding ranging to garbage bags and flattened tin cans.

Some houses have TV sets resourcefully powered by car batteries; on others, the flimsy roofs are pinned down by rusty upturned wheelbarrows - small protection against the summer southeaster which drives sand into every corner (in winter, by contrast, the roads seldom dry out, and there is mud everywhere). "The rich get richer," goes the popular catchphrase, "the poor get Khayalitsha."

Three-quarters of Khayelitsha's residents live in "informal housing", or squatter shacks. After the apartheid legislation which created South Africa's townships was repealed, this was the first community in the Western Cape to be earmarked for upgrading - but while there's now a core of "formal", serviced houses, electricity and running water remain a rare luxury. People wash at communal taps (one per street), and attend the small corrugated-iron toilets nearby.

Many of Khayelitsha's residents first come to the city because they found it increasingly difficult to survive in the former "homelands", areas ravaged by overcrowding, soil erosion, and a grim shortage of opportunity. Their presence here - and it is a similar story in all South Africa's townships - underlines an urgent and ongoing need for more houses, roads, schools, clinics, and other services.

Crime statistics - especially for violent crimes such as murder and rape - are frighteningly high. Yet strangers are greeted warmly, neighbours help each other. At night the shebeens (taverns) are crowded with merrymakers; on weekends, the churches resound to gospel choirs. Community halls host jazz concerts, ballroom dancing contests and beauty pageants; dusty streets double up as bumpy soccer pitches.

Unemployment here is about 60 percent, but the sidewalks are crowded with hawkers; a parked minibus acts as a shop, with cabbages lined up on the roof. Fires line the roadside, roasting "smileys" (half a sheep's head), (ed. note: what happened to the other half?) along with offal and sausages. Thriving spaza stores (the name means "hidden" in township slang - a reference to the days when blacks were not permitted to run their own businesses) operate from private homes, selling an amazing range of services from groceries to hairdressing and shoe repairs.

The great majority of South Africans are township dwellers. They take their feisty, inventive local culture for granted; yet it is a side to the country that few visitors (and indeed, few white South Africans, either) ever explore."

We started out in BoKaap, which is a traditional Malay quarter in Cape Town. The original Dutch conformist white row houses have been painted alarming tropical colors, colors that might set one's teeth on edge if the houses weren't so small.

Then on to District Six, which is where Brian grew up. Until the sixties, it was a thriving ethnic mix of jewish, indian, coloured, and black residents. Then, in one of apartheid's grossest misjudgements, the government relocated all the residents to the Cape Flats townships and razed the community. It remains an empty field almost 40 years later; no one will have anything to do with rebuilding on it. Some of the rubble remaining from the homes has been used as landfill to build the Victoria and Alfred Waterfront. We visited the District Six museum, reminiscent of holocaust museums, and listened to Brian's personal stories and memories.

When the aparteid government kicked people out of District Six in the sixties they relocated them to 'permanent townships'. Black people were moved to one township, coloured people to a different township, Indians to yet another. These townships were our next visit. They are divided by a road, but might as well be divided by the Grand Canyon. I asked Brian why the townships were segregated this way, and he said that the aparteid government did its best to engender hatred between the coloured and blacks. "Divide and conquer." Some of this hatred lives on.

The townships brought to mind inner cities of the US, except that the neighborhoods were populated, people were busy, and it was obviously their home. Tiny houses, but each cared for and inhabited with pride. The coloured township (mostly Muslim) is much more spacious and cleaner than the black township, to make broad generalizations. Spacious is hardly the word.

On the edge of the 'permanent' townships are squatter's townships, which is the lowest rung of the 'informal settlements,' where people stay when they're just coming in from all over the countryside hoping to find work. Really ramshackle, beyond ramshackle. It would be kind to even call them structures. No plumbing or electricity.

The next tier up of permanence and affluence offered some type of electricity service and water. Residents generally helped themselves to electricity tapped off of main power lines. There was a scary network of homemade lines running everywhere, across the roads, between houses, into rooms. Subsequently, there are frequently fires that take out entire neighborhoods, because the houses are so close to each other and not made out of anything. Literally cardboard boxes, tins, paper, scraps of wood, whatever will stand up. Water tended to be either a neighborhood tap, or sometimes house-to-house. In some of the townships you could see the government-provided solar collectors for telephone lines. The interiors of the homes are immaculate and the ones we visited were remarkably comfortable.

We visited a woman who runs a soup kitchen in a township, feeding soup, rice, and mostly bean-based food to hungry kids on their way to school in the morning, as well as adults. She operates in a tiny kitchen made out of a discarded shipping container, about the size of my office. I'm not sure how she does it. She gets some help from a NGO (non-governmental organizion, like a nonprofit organization), and she does have to charge 60 cents (just a few US cents), but she doesn't turn anyone away if they can't pay.

We then went to a vocational/art school where they were developing artistic outlets and hopefully job opportunities for township people. One man was a potter who did beautiful work. He was traveling all over the world showing his stuff and spreading the word about his project; he read off his itinerary for the next few months, and it included Europe, the States, and Asia. He's trained 55 young people the trade. We also saw some ladies painting fabric. Parts of this visit seemed like a bit of a hard sell, but it wasn't too bad.

After the visits to the artists' studios, we drove through Guguletu township, and paused at the place where Amy Beihl was killed. She was a young American woman studying at University of Cape Town whose car stalled just as a wild youth ANC (African National Congress) rally was letting out. The young people were really riled up, and she was just in the wrong place at the wrong time. Since then (1985?) her parents have visited the neighborhood several times a year and invested in small businesses and entrepreneurial enterprises. The neighborhood is mostly good people, with some bad eggs.

The last township, Khayelitsha, is probably the most famous one. We visited a young woman who had been declared crazy by her peers when she decided to open up her home as a B&B for visitors. I think it's a brilliant idea - I'm staying there next time I visit. Vicky's B&B has a web site at http://www.journey.digitalspace.net/vicky.html.

Her idea has been very successful. There are now at least four B&Bs in the Cape Flats townships.

When we first got there we took a stroll around the block and were immediately besieged by small children who wanted to hold our hands. Two or three hung from each of our arms, and a trail of kids followed behind. But remarkably, unlike any other country I've been in, the children didn't want anything. They just wanted to hold hands and smile at us. Nobody could understand each other, since most of them spoke only Xhosa. Everyone was genuinely happy and friendly. Brian said that several of the children hanging from our limbs were AIDS orphans. They are absorbed into the households of family or friends.

After the visit to Miss Vicky's B&B, we had a cold Castle at the shebeen across the street. Shebeens are taverns, the local bar and meeting place, which were illegal in apartheid days. Brian told us stories of illegal ANC meetings held in shebeens, where the police couldn't monitor them because the place was so loud and raukus. It was dead quiet in ours, it being a Monday morning. Something told me it hadn't been so quiet the night before. A man was up on the roof repairing it, and several times he threatened to come crashing down onto the pool table.

Needless to say, the townships made quite an impression on me. The majority of South Africans live in townships. Every city, burg, or dorp (the Afrikans word for a small village) has one or several townships. There are poor outskirts to every settlement, moving in toward the center in concentric rings of increasing affluence and razor wire.

The images to the right are two postcards I purchased. Soweto, stands for South West Township. Some descriptions put Soweto, with a population of over two million, as South Africa's largest city. I've heard similar population estimates for the Cape Flats.