What a Bike Ride in Cape Town Taught Me About Apartheid

We were nearing the end of our 10-mile journey when we turned off a chaotic six-lane road and onto a quiet bicycle lane bordering a canal. This was as serene as the roughly hourlong bike ride had been, from the hustle and bustle of downtown Cape Town to the fringes of Langa, a township in South Africa.

But the stench of the trash-filled canal cut through the idyllic atmosphere. The grass along the path was patchy and unkempt. Instead of a place to slow down and soak in the peace and quiet, I wanted to pedal out of there as quickly as possible.

In March, I joined a group bike ride organized by Young Urbanists, a nonprofit that promotes redesigning urban spaces in ways that narrow the racial, social and economic disparities lingering from South Africa’s former apartheid system.

The ride started on a Sunday afternoon on Bree Street, a vibrant stretch of central Cape Town with restaurants, tall buildings and all the amenities you’d expect in a modern city. It ended in Langa, one of many outlying townships where the white-led apartheid government forced Black South Africans to live.

Along the winding route, I saw formidable physical and psychological barriers left over from a system of intense racial segregation. Even though apartheid ended three decades ago, none of those barriers have easy solutions.

But there were signs of progress.

The quiet yet smelly canal was once a lifeless buffer zone that apartheid officials created to separate Langa and Athlone, a township designated for colored South Africans, a multiracial ethnic group established by the apartheid government. In the past two years, the city opened a bridge over the canal, making the area easier to traverse.

Roland Postma, 30, who leads Young Urbanists, said his organization had proposed revamping the stretch by repaving the pedestrian and cycling lanes, installing proper lighting and putting in a soccer field to attract more residents. An overhaul of this area could resemble an earlier stretch in the ride along the Liesbeek River in a more affluent area.

“Apartheid was not just about dividing Black and white,” it was also about divestment, Mr. Postma said.

During the ride, we traveled along decrepit, apartheid-era infrastructure largely created to maintain segregation. We climbed over bridges, rolled over train tracks, ducked beneath freeway overpasses and hugged the shoulders of wide thoroughfares as cars whizzed past. As we left downtown Cape Town, the bright-green bicycle lanes gave way to faded white lines forming narrow bike paths that drivers pretty much ignored.

Historians say that the apartheid government tore through small, neighborhood streets to build grand thoroughfares that Black and colored workers used to travel in and out of the city as quickly as possible, as they were not allowed to live in the city. On Klipfontein Road, cars moved so fast along six lanes of traffic that my bike sometimes wobbled as they raced by.

We used a bridge to cross over one of the national freeways to reach Langa. At the top of the bridge, Mr. Postma pointed out that there was an express bus lane on one side of the freeway but not the other. The side with the express lane went toward central Cape Town, he said, the implication being that businesses wanted workers to get to the city quickly, but did not care how long it took them to get home.

When we arrived at our destination in front of an art gallery on Lerotholi Avenue in Langa, a fellow rider showed me just how choked off the township was from the communities around it. He used a map on his phone to drop a pin on a school in the neighboring, upper-middle-class suburb of Pinelands. The school was just over a half mile away, but because of a highway, a wall with barbed wire and railroad tracks separating Langa and Pinelands, it would take six miles to walk there.

Of all the remnants of apartheid that I saw, what struck me most were the psychological ones. For many Capetonians, riding a bike to a township would seem like a risky move. As we rode, drivers occasionally honked when we crept into the road, even when it was legal for us to do so. One minibus taxi conductor admonished us for not riding single file, even though we were about two dozen riders.

Some cyclists said that the infrastructure developed during apartheid had created a car-first mentality among South Africans. Urban activists say they’re trying to change that mind-set. They’ve erected large planters and bright yellow bollards to create pedestrian and bike lanes and slow traffic.

They’ve organized street shutdowns in downtown Cape Town and Langa that transform stretches of road into buzzing pedestrian-only piazzas, where South Africans gather freely, regardless of race. And they’ve invited people to take a bike ride that many typically would not entertain.

“Just to show that it’s possible,” said Phano Liphoto, a member of Young Urbanists, at the end of our ride. “Let’s just use what we have and then build from there.”