Langa

Monica Hunter Wilson, Archie Mafeje

Cape Town is dominated by the colour cleavage which exists between black and white in southern Africa and confines colour groups to separate areas and occupations. Langa is a township on the periphery of the city, very poor by comparison with most of the suburbs, and reserved for occupation by black Africans, most of them Xhosa-speaking. They are not the original occupants of the western Cape, but they have been there in appreciable numbers for a hundred years, mingling with the 'Coloured' people of mixed descent, and working along with them and white South Africans. The Africans come mostly from the eastern part of the Cape Province, where the Portuguese found them in the sixteenth century, and the Coloured people count among their ancestors the aborigines of the Cape, the Khoikhoin people, or so-called Hottentots. The white settlers established themselves in 1652.