Ignorance is most certainly not bliss, but can sometimes lead to insight.

On Monday morning, I was picked up at my hotel by Sele, the driver and guide from Daytrippers, the tour company I hired to take me to the townships. The bus was full of my friends and colleagues, all of whom had followed my lead so that we could get to learn about an entirely different kind of life. After a little bit of confusion about who had registered and who had not, we ended up a little over capacity and piled shoulder to shoulder into the bus as we went to the district Six museum. I don't necessarily have all of the facts straight, and don't mind being corrected, but my understanding is that what we now know as "district six" used to be a vibrant, multiracial community in Cape Town before the government declared it as a "whites only" area (in the 60s) and all non-white residents were forced to leave their homes, and thus began the history of the townships. I couldn't help but feel a connection, as I thought about my own people who had been forcibly removed from their own homes and forced to live in ghettos by the Nazis. The floor of the museum was covered by a large street map, and previous district six residents had written in where they lived, played, ate, and went to school. The irony is that district six never became a community for the Cape Town whited (not that it would have been any better if it had) and, from what I understand, the process of giving people back their land, homes, and businesses has been slow and difficult.

Because we'd had a late start, and the tour was supposed to end at noon, we decided to ask Sele if we could extend the tour and if he could find us somewhere to eat lunch in the townships. As many of you already know, I always try to engage in ethical touris, as much as possible, and I liked the idea of putting some money back into some of the legitimate businesses in the community.

More later, the people in the email line-up are grumbling loudly....