Khayelitsha

This guide to Khayelitsha in Cape Town opens with a 1986 protest chant that failed: "we will not go to Khayelitsha." It traces how the apartheid minister Piet Koornhof ordered the township into being in 1983 to empty the overcrowded settlements of Crossroads and KTC, and how a vigilante militia called the witdoeke set those settlements ablaze that same decade, driving thousands here with whatever they could carry. Site C alone already held some thirty thousand people by 1985, families rebuilding street by street on ground that had been open scrub.