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Thompsons Walk To Freedom Halfday Tour

Cape Town, Western Cape, South Africa

The Thompsons Walk To Freedom Tour is supposed to give you some information about the history of South Africa, its politics, and the current state of affairs. The morning half day takes you to a local museum and one of the oldest townships in Cape Town, Langa. Unfortunately, I felt it was fairly poorly executed. It felt like one big excuse to try and extort money from 'rich' tourists.

We spent the first 10-15 minutes of our tour waiting for our guide in our hotel lobby, who showed up late. He first took us to the District Six Museum and gave us a short tour around there. We had about 20 minutes to look around on our own before we went off to the townships.

The townships are the poor areas of Cape Town, which are really no more than shanty towns. Our guide parked the car and introduced us to a resident of the Langa township. Our guide said the resident would be giving us our tour of the area. He claimed that his friend was a registered tour guide, but I didn't believe it. He didn't have the usual badge that all the other tour guides in South Africa had.

The new guide explained to us that it was common for people to feel moved by the poverty they saw, and that it was OK to provide assistance to people that he would point out to us on our tour.

We first went in to one family's apartment. The apartments were built during the apartheid era as dormitories for men who had permission to work in the city. Now, entire families are living in the small shared bedrooms. In the apartment we visited, there were two kids watching TV and eating some bread, but the accommodations were pretty poor. The beds were just thin mattresses on concrete slabs, but from what our guide told us, the beds were for the adults and the kids slept on the concrete floors. Our guide told us this was an appropriate time to make a donation, so we did.

We then went to see another family who lived in slightly better conditions, where we also gave a donation. These apartments were the same dormitories that had been renovated into larger family units by the government. We went to a school where the kids sang a couple songs for us, and they had a white 'donation' box where we were told we could leave another donation. So we did.

We then went to a local "bar" where we tried the traditional beer - a pink beverage (m!komboti). The beverage was served out of a pail. It looked disgusting, but hopefully the alcohol content killed anything that was growing in it. We did not get sick from it. Here too, our guide informed us it was appropriate to make a donation, so we did. The "bar" was located in a very poor area in the township where all the buildings looked like shacks made out of whatever random material was available.

As the last stop on our tour, we visited a new part of the township were the street was lined with new two-story homes. The homes were modest but significantly better than the other buildings we saw.

I couldn't help but feel that the entire tour was set up as some sort of organized extortion. It wasn't all that expensive, but it made me feel uncomfortable - but maybe that was the point. The environment is not a comfortable place where you feel OK saying "no". The poverty is real (although it's probably worse in other places), but I was definitely made to feel that donations were expected. I didn't like that.

We gave 150 rand in 'donations' throughout our tour. There were also opportunities to buy crafts from people who were set up to sell items to tourists in case you wanted to take home a souvenir.

The township felt fairly safe and when it was over, we gave a donation to our local guide, and met up with our 'real' guide once again who took us back to our hotel in Cape Town.

Overall the half day tour gave us some interesting insights and first hand stories about the recent history and politics in South Africa.

Update: We contacted Thompsons about our experience, and they forwarded our request to Hylton Ross, the company that operated the tour. They confirmed that it was normal to be handed off to a freelance guide in the township (the Joe Slovo Informal Settlement), although they weren't sure why our guide's tourism badge wasn't visible. They also said it was normal to have the opportunity to give cash donations when appropriate, and they apologized for any discomfort we experienced. Their customer relations department looked into our concerns very quickly - we were pleased at the speed of their responses.