Hout Bay
This is Hout Bay. The name is derived from the Afrikaans ‘Houtbaai’, meaning "Wood Bay". The name can refer to the town, the bay on which it is situated, or the entire valley. When the Dutch established their colony in Table Bay in 1652, they soon found they needed more wood for shipbuilding and housing than was locally available. This chiefly because the annual rainfall is not sufficient for lush tree growth, as current residents of Cape Town are all too well aware. So they found this area in the wetter valley that lay on the other side of a low pass between the southern end of Table Mountain and Constantiaberg, the large, whalebacked mountain that forms part of the mountainous spine of the Cape Peninsula .
Hout Bay has one of the busiest fishing harbours in the Western Cape with an established tuna, snoek and crayfish industries.
And then there is the elephant in the room. There usually is in South Africa if you open your eyes. The Hout Bay Valley area is home to Imizamo Yethu (Xhosa, meaning "Our Efforts" and commonly known as Mandela Park), an ‘informal settlement’ or shanty town of 18 hectares housing approximately 33 600 people. The settlement has minimal water supply, few toilets and no sewerage system. Nevertheless, residents invite tourists in and arrange tours of the preschool, day care, barber shop, auto shop, orphanage, grocery store and local pub, and also their homes in the hope that you will buy some trinkets they have made.
On 11 and 12 March 2017, a large section of Imizamo Yethu was devastated by fires that killed 3 people, destroying 3,500 homes and displacing 15,000 people. They use a lot of paraffin in these settlements for cooking and heating. When a fire breaks out the fire-fighters simply cannot get near the fire because the shacks are so densely packed together.
I’ll probably comment further on the poverty in South Africa later.
Hout Bay
This is Hout Bay. The name is derived from the Afrikaans ‘Houtbaai’, meaning "Wood Bay". The name can refer to the town, the bay on which it is situated, or the entire valley. When the Dutch established their colony in Table Bay in 1652, they soon found they needed more wood for shipbuilding and housing than was locally available. This chiefly because the annual rainfall is not sufficient for lush tree growth, as current residents of Cape Town are all too well aware. So they found this area in the wetter valley that lay on the other side of a low pass between the southern end of Table Mountain and Constantiaberg, the large, whalebacked mountain that forms part of the mountainous spine of the Cape Peninsula .
Hout Bay has one of the busiest fishing harbours in the Western Cape with an established tuna, snoek and crayfish industries.
And then there is the elephant in the room. There usually is in South Africa if you open your eyes. The Hout Bay Valley area is home to Imizamo Yethu (Xhosa, meaning "Our Efforts" and commonly known as Mandela Park), an ‘informal settlement’ or shanty town of 18 hectares housing approximately 33 600 people. The settlement has minimal water supply, few toilets and no sewerage system. Nevertheless, residents invite tourists in and arrange tours of the preschool, day care, barber shop, auto shop, orphanage, grocery store and local pub, and also their homes in the hope that you will buy some trinkets they have made.
On 11 and 12 March 2017, a large section of Imizamo Yethu was devastated by fires that killed 3 people, destroying 3,500 homes and displacing 15,000 people. They use a lot of paraffin in these settlements for cooking and heating. When a fire breaks out the fire-fighters simply cannot get near the fire because the shacks are so densely packed together.
I’ll probably comment further on the poverty in South Africa later.