Ahead of World Cup, Cape Town Shack Dwellers Relocated

Slum dwellers in the suburbs of Cape Town have been forcefully relocated to a shack housing complex out of town -- and out of sight of the hundreds of thousands of visitors expected to descend on the city for this year's soccer World Cup.

1 minute read

April 13, 2010, 8:00 AM PDT

By Nate Berg


"The housing unit, known as "Blikkiesdorp", is a "temporary relocation area" (TRA). Rules are strict - no building, no cooking outside, no leaving your shack after 10pm. Except for the fact that the residents are human, the unit is hardly any different from that of sci-fi film District 9.

While the government says that the shantytown residents of Symphony Way were moved because they required "emergency housing", one of our Observers who's been to the Blikkiesdorp tells us tells us that the conditions they now live under are much more urgent than the ones they were in before."

More than 15,000 people have been moved here ahead of the World Cup. Photographer Gareth Kingdon lived in the area for a few weeks, and has documented the living conditions there.

Monday, April 5, 2010 in France 24

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