SOUTH AFRICA---Living In Ghettos Of Segregation---OBZURV Documentary

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• published: 04 Jun 2015
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East of the northern and southern suburbs, among the industrial smokestacks and the windswept Cape Flats, reaching well beyond the airport, is Cape Town’s largest residential quarter, taking in the colored districts, African townships and shantytown squatter camps. The Cape Flats are exactly that: flat, barren and populous, exclusively inhabited by Africans and coloreds in separate areas, with the M5 acting as a dividing line between it and the southern suburbs. Described by some as "apartheid's dumping ground", from the 1950s the area became home to people the apartheid government designated as non-White. Race-based legislation such as the Group Areas Act and pass laws either forced non-white people out of more central urban areas designated for white people and into government-built townships in the Flats, or made living in the area illegal, forcing many people designated as Black and Colored into informal settlements elsewhere in the Flats. The Flats have since then been home to much of the population of Greater Cape Town. The era of sand and antelopes vanished completely in little more than a generation. Vegetable farming persisted, but to a much lesser extent, because urbanization enveloped vast tracts of land in short order. During the apartheid era, large housing projects were built here, mostly as part of the Nationalist government's larger effort to force the so-called Colored community out of the central and western areas of Cape Town, which the political theorists of the day had designated as whites-only areas. This meant that only whites could reside there permanently; people of color could work in the city but could not live there. Additionally, other large townships of black people (such as Khayelitsha and Gugulethu) grew up on the flats as a product of both informal settlement and forced government relocations. Since many Xhosa people of the region—including people born and raised in the Cape Town area—were designated under apartheid as residents of Bantustans, many were obliged to live in the area illegally, further contributing to the growth of informal settlements. These consisted in the main of shacks made of "tin" (in reality corrugated iron which, confusingly, is nowadays made from mild steel), cardboard and wood. In 1993, Cape Town had a housing backlog of approximately 40 000 houses and with the numbers of people migrating from the rural areas increasing each year, so the backlog increases. One of the major priorities of the RDP (Reconstruction & Development Program) is to build houses. (Documentary,2015,Full Documentary,New Documentary,Top Documentaries,Documentaries,HD,2015,documentary films,documentary,)