The township of Khayelitsha, which means “new home,” is just outside of Cape Town and is known for having a high crime rate. More than half of the unemployed people there reside there. As a dormitory area for migrant workers during apartheid, it is now the largest and youngest black township on the Cape Flats.
However, Khayelitsha is not the depressing row of shanties it appears to be along the N2 Highway. Many of the township’s population reside in formal residences, which combine older “matchbox houses” from the 1980s with more modern low-cost RDP homes. The township’s business district is also rapidly developing, with an outdoor high street mall just opened for business. The movie “uCarmen eKhayelitsha” popularized the township and won the Golden Bear prize at the 2005 Berlin International Film Festival. The movie gave the opera Carmen a completely new perspective that astonished viewers all over the world by fusing it with the nation’s African choral culture and setting it locally in the township.
And during the Montreal climate change conference last year, a recent low-cost housing project in Kuyasa, Khayelitsha, brought the township greater international acclaim for its potential to cut greenhouse gases and earn carbon credits.
Zibonele Community Radio, established in Khayelitsha, was the first community radio station on the Cape Flats. A health effort led to the creation of the station, which transmitted illegally for the first two hours of each day from a shipping container in Town Two. It has contributed to the government’s Access to Treatment and Prevention of Mother to Child Transmission programs, and it is now a self-sustaining legal broadcaster.