In Focus

And no wonder; the Maasai are one of the few tribes in Kenya still maintaining their traditional ways of life. Most tours through the region will throw in a short visit to a Maasai village or an adumu ­­— the performance of a traditional jumping ceremony ­— but how often do travellers really connect with these local people? Contribute to their livelihoods, hear their stories?

Peris lives in the Ngong Hills outside Nairobi. I meet her on my first day in the city, when I jump on the Urban Adventures tour A Day with the Maasai. Part of the In Focus range, the tour is run in partnership with One Horizon, a not-for-profit working to alleviate poverty in Kenya and South Africa. All net proceeds go to locally run projects on the ground, projects that are designed to become sustainable and self-sufficient as quickly as possible. Our guide, a friendly Kenyan by the name of Solomon, picks us up from our hotel bright and early. Peris is a Maasai woman and will be our host for the morning, leading us in a class on jewelry-making.

As we drive, Sol points out sprawling slums and new housing estates on the sides of the road. The day is about 20 degrees Celsius — unseasonably cold for August. The locals are baffled, talking excitedly and hopping about to keep warm. A soupy fog clogs the atmosphere, punctuated here and there by telephone poles and Acacia trees.

After about an hour, we park the van in a yellow valley and walk down a path. Three brightly clad Maasai women meet us along the way, singing a traditional welcome song on a lulling loop. We fall into step beside them. When we reach the property at the top of the hill, one of the singers introduces herself as Peris; the other women are her sister Unis and sister-in-law Emily. They smile and clasp our hands warmly.

The property is both Peris’ home and her place of business. After introducing us to her goats (for milking) and two heifers (both pregnant), she shows us around a large veggie patch, pointing out pumpkins, peas, black beans, maize, and Napia grass, used to feed the cattle. It’s only been in action for six months, but already her garden is flush with life. She planted the whole thing herself, together with her kids. Thorny bracken forms a fence around the plot.

With Sol translating, we ask Peris if she sells her produce in town, but she shakes her head. Everything she grows she uses to feed her family. Aside from a few items she still needs to buy, she’s almost entirely self-sufficient. I try to imagine growing everything I need to survive in my own garden, and the enormity of the idea hits me.

Home is what you fight for

Peris is HIV positive. After her husband learned of her diagnosis, she was shamed, threatened, and thrown out of the house by members of her own family. Women in Africa have very few land rights, despite the fact that their labour provides most of the continent’s food resources. Peris was living on the streets when she found One Horizon (and they found her).

First, she was required to undertake an 18-month Women in Equity program to learn more about nutrition and development. As she built up her small jewelry-making business, the organisation covered her rental costs, allowing her to save enough to buy the title deed to some land, and finally build a house.

Right now, we’re standing in that house, in Peris’ very own bedroom. It’s a simple space, fitted with a bed, a shelf, and a small window. A stack of spotty homegrown pumpkins erupts in one corner. Two of Peris’ five kids are in Nairobi, but the rest live here with her, including her 15-year-old daughter, Lois.

In the living room, Lois points to a photograph hanging above an English alphabet chart. It’s a picture of Peris in flowing robes, taken on the day she graduated from the development program. Gazing up at her mother, Lois smiles broadly. “When I finish high school, I want to study medicine,” she tells us in English. With a role model like her mother, there’s no doubt in my mind she could do it.

Maasai beading 101

Despite the weather, our jewelry-making class takes place outside under an Acacia tree. A group of locals — family and neighbours, women and men, Maasai and non-Maasai — gather around the table, sipping tea, singing songs, and gossiping in Swahili. Calm, immune to the raucous party happening around us, Peris shows me how to sew a pattern of tiny beads — red, white, black; red, white, black — onto a woven leather bracelet, her fingers moving deftly. It’s a fiddly business, but I soon get the hang of it. At one point, Emily, Unis, and Peris break into song in their native language, Ma, and the rest of the table falls respectfully quiet.

As I look up, I see Solomon trying his hand with a needle, and smile. In traditional Maasai culture, jewelry-making is a woman’s task, along with cooking, looking after the children, and house-building, whereas men are responsible for doing business, tending cattle, and protecting the community. Here, in her home, on her land, Peris does it all — with the support of family, friends, tourists, and the good folks at One Horizon, of course. She may make traditional jewelry and teach travellers about Maasai culture for a living, but in many ways, Peris is a modern woman. A modern woman with an incredible story.

A Day with the Maasai is part of our In Focus series of tours and runs Mondays to Saturdays, with pick-up from Nairobi hotels at 9am. Learn more about this tour.

Here, in one of South Africa’s most infamous townships, the street is cramped with colourful tin shacks instead. Layers of rusted iron sheets nailed together to forge a home, the leaning structures both support and jostle each other to claim every square inch of the muddy spare ground. People mill about, some run to the bus stop outside, others laugh as they call to each other in Xhosa — one of South Africa’s 12 official languages.

As we roll to a stop and get ready to begin our Urban Adventures’ Faces of Cape Town tour, I clutch the camera in my hands a little tighter and silently will my heart rate to slow down. Until now, we’ve been warned away from townships just like this one, by horrifying stories of poverty, crime, and gang violence.

Yet here we are. Standing nervously beside a main road in a township abuzz with activity on a warm spring day.

“Welcome to our home!” A young Xhosa woman bounds over to us with her arms extended. In jeans and a yellow top that wouldn’t look out of place on a Milan Catwalk, her beaming smile radiates like the sunshine around us.

This is Nandipha (Nandi, she tells us), our guide through Imizamo Yethu, an 18-hectare informal settlement formed in 1991 on the slope of a mountain overlooking the Hout Bay area. Officially, the records list about 33,000 people living here, though Nandi points out that this doesn’t account for unregistered or foreign residents. The real number, she estimates, is much closer to 45–50,000.

“Today, you’re our guests. I want to show you the real township and how we live here,” she says. “Imizamo Yethu is Xhosa for ‘our collective efforts.’ We built this community, and we are proud of it.”

Feeling at ease in her presence, we follow her lead, slipping into the rabbit warren of crooked houses and narrow laneways.

Numbered with scrawling black pen, most homes are tin and wood while a lucky few have a sturdy concrete wall. Cardboard and rugs provide makeshift floors, electrical wires run haphazardly overhead. A four-toilet block that services a few hundred people stands locked, the keys kept by a supervisor to avoid vandalism and violence.

Women chat as they hang out washing on lines strung up between shacks and concrete blocks. Small children dart around their feet playing tag, while the sounds of local radio drift along the street. Wandering past the open door of a small shack, an old man watches a small TV set with one eye, and us warily with the other. A woman prepares food with a neighbour’s baby strapped to her back, while a group of teenage boys kick a soccer ball back and forth to each other with considerable skill.

This is ubuntu, a shared way of life. It stems from the ancient Xhosa word meaning ‘humanity to others,’ which Nandi tells us is an intrinsic part of life in Imizamo Yethu, and something that the community is extremely proud of.

Back on the main street we pass by Phillip’s Tavern. It’s one of many pubs in the area, but caters to a younger clientele while the other taverns tend to be frequented by mostly older men in the community. Here, shacks have blossomed into general stores full of food and supplies with business names painted on tin shopfronts. There’s a town hall, and several schools for varying grades and ages. Hardship fosters creativity and resourcefulness, and an entrepreneurial few are turning theirs into success.

Remove the place and the prejudice, and it’s a street scene like any other. Except that here, the wait for a proper government house to be built can literally take a lifetime. But, despite what you might expect, there is clean running water at the communal taps and in the houses. Nandi points out at one of the taps that the water is clean and safe to drink, and laughs at our surprise at just how normal life seems here. “We didn’t invite you here to feel sorry for us,” she says. “This is our collective effort, remember? We may not have much, but we make the best of it. Here, we live by hope.”

Entering a small primary school as morning lessons wrap up, a roar of noise greets us. It’s immediately clear Nandi’s a crowd favourite, and we soon find ourselves in the midst of 30 exuberant 4- and 5-year-olds hugging and dancing with rhythm we can never hope to obtain.

“It’s hard to have good role models here,” says Nandipha later as we wave goodbye to our excited little friends.

Township life can be hard for youngsters here as they navigate the obstacle course of adolescence with the added threat of substance abuse, teenage pregnancy, and high school dropout rates. Many see no hope for their future and turn to drugs to numb their pain, prostitution to put money on the table.

“When girls don’t have that positive person to look up to, they lack motivation, they get bored. They sleep with their boyfriends or take drugs because there’s nothing else to do. They get pregnant, they drop out of school because they can’t cope. Then the cycle continues.”

It’s a cycle that Nandi has been working tirelessly to change through Sistahood, the not-for-profit girls’ organisation she founded in 2010. The club provides teenage girls with tutoring, life skills sessions, and social activities. More importantly, it provides them with a sorority. It’s a safe place for support in tough times, and inspires young girls to dream beyond the township and make plans for their future.

Nandi pauses, and asks us to look out over the Hout Bay Valley below.

“As a young girl, I used to come here and look out at the big white houses in Hout Bay. I was so angry. Why did they get to live there, while I lived like this, here? But as I grew up, I changed my heart. I let go of the anger, let the love in. Now, I’m inspired by the difference. I look to the future, and do my part to make my community a better place.”

That’s not to say Nandi hasn’t had her own struggles. She’s seen family members imprisoned, suffered discrimination, and still struggles to make ends meet some days. For now though, she turns to us with bright eyes. “I hope you’ve come to understand our special community better now,” she says as a farewell to us at the edge of the township. We’re feeling moved, inspired, and hopeful, our preconceived ideas about township life falling away.

If Imizamo Yethu is ‘our collective efforts,’ people like Nandipha are the proof. Inside her lives hope, and everything good about the new South Africa.

Faces of Cape Town is a sister tour to our In Focus series and was developed with the goal of giving insight into how people in the townships live, rather than as an official financial partner of any one NGO or non-profit. Learn more about this tour.