HIS HOME IS YOUR HOME
Mzukisi Lembeni mixed his love of Khayelitsha with his determination to succeed — and the result is a walking/bike-tour company that’s all heart, writes Angus Begg
Townships in SA are by definition all about struggle. And there will always be those who rise above, and those who don’t. Mzukisi Lembeni is one who has risen. His iMzu Tours offers walks and bicycle-rides around his “home town” of Khayelitsha — as he says, it’s a town within the city of Cape Town. He collects me in the city, and we head off to join a group of Belgian families for the tour. As we go, he tells me about his childhood. “Life was tough for us, it was me and my mum. We lived in a shack,” he says. He never knew his father.
The details of his career are fascinating. He says a neighbour, who worked at a hotel in Kraaifontein, noticed his diligence at school and his enthusiasm for helping out at home. Lembeni was offered work at the hotel.
“I started cleaning, carrying plates, washing dishes, doing anything, and being paid, it was great. That’s when I knew I wanted to work in tourism.”
Lembeni speaks of the passion that pushed him towards owning his own company. Clearly, the ability to earn his own keep, and not tourism per se, was the major factor. This self-sufficiency is something he wants to pass on to others in Khayelitsha, starting with his friends Thabang Bala, Mxolisi “Ox” Ngema and Lindizwe Ncube, who are all employed as guides.
EYES FULL OF EXPRESSION
Our bicycle tour starts from Lembeni’s office at the bottom of Lookout Hill.
From the wooden platform on top of the hill — reached by negotiating the occasional rotting wooden plank and rusted bolt — are impressive views. Northeast across the mostly red roofs of Khayelitsha’s suburbia is the Hottentots Holland range across
Gordon’s Bay.
Northwest, looking through one of designer Porky Hefer’s yellow photo-opp frames, the likes of which you’ll also find on Signal Hill and at the V&A Waterfront, the profile of Table Mountain sits across the shackland of the Cape Flats.
The Helderberg Dome (at 1,137m above sea level, it’s higher than Table Mountain’s 1,085m — FYI) seems a 20-minute bike-ride away. But we are riding through the sections and suburbs of sprawling Khayelitsha.
“We have close on two million people living here now,” says Lembeni.
Six years ago, I produced an investigative television story on the area, and the population was estimated to be about 120,000. No-one really knows. A census is impossible, with the almost-daily influx of backyard dwellers.
Our first stop on this relatively chilly, steel-cloud day is the informal housing. It stretches up a gentle sand dune, reminding us that False Bay is a kite-flight away.
As with any suburb, it is populated by stories, corrugated-iron structures, neat, fenced yards and eyes full of expression — punctuated with hopes and disappointment.
This is one marginalised end of town, where flea-bitten cats squint against a winter sun from a spotless dirt yard and residents put up fences that would not deter an angry fist.
Lembeni does not plan who he will visit —
he just knocks on a door and sees who answers. Then he asks, deeply respectful, if the occupant will allow him to introduce them to his group of curious tourists. A short question-and-answer session inevitably follows. He always leaves a donation when departing, sharing the tourist love.
Back down the dune and next to the road, he explains the situation with the toilets — which are clearly in a pitiful state.
“It all depends on water,” says Lembeni. “Whether we have it or not.”
I think of the challenges the city faces; the endless stream of migrants coming in search of work and facilities.
“Their friends say ‘Come and put up a shack, the city will build you a house’,” says Lembeni, gesturing to some of the normal suburban houses with shacks attached to their rear ends.
This is real tourism, another side to Cape Town. I notice the Belgians taking it all in.
“Is this your house Thabang?” asks one as we pedal past a grey, unplastered wall on a quiet, narrow street in Mandela Park. It is.
This is a distinguishing feature of Lembenii’s tour: visitors ride deep into Khayelitsha, where life is quieter.
We see where he built a house for his mother, Edna, which doubles up as Sis B&B providing accommodation for guests who want to sleep over.
KIDS WILL BE KIDS
Our next stop is Nomsa Mapongwana Primary School.
We start in the school kitchen, where male volunteers — evidently well into their 60s — are stirring lunch in large pots. There is a broken ceiling, where thieves came in recently, stealing food and implements.
The Grade R classrooms are a gem, with delightful artwork and posters on the walls.
Lembeni is clearly a favourite with the children, and he leads them in song, starting off the first line of that childhood staple I learnt as Frère Jacques in my Toronto kindergarten, and Bana ba Sekolo in a Joburg junior school.
Then it’s the tourists’ turn, singing their Belgian Flemish version, alternating verses with the children. Everything is warm and fuzzy, hugs, smiles and touching hair.
We are led outside into a quadrangle, where the classroom exteriors are beautifully decorated, with play-while-learning clearly the dominant theme. It’s hard not to get sucked in to the moment.
A MAGIC CHANCE
We’ve been on the road for a little over two hours, and it’s time to head back to the office below Lookout Hill.
We pass and chat with recycling vendors hauling cartloads of plastic, the women cleaning the delicacies that will be sheepsheads, or “smileys”, in an area known as Silvertown.
“I was also a magician,” Lembeni tells me later over lunch at what he calls the best local tavern. The fresh meat we order from the counter fridge is taken to be braaied.
He speaks of a Swellendam man named Schoeman, who was impressed by Lembeni’s magic shows “and my attitude”, and offered to sponsor his studies.
This led to his studying tourism at the College of Cape Town, after which he volunteered at the Two Oceans Aquarium and then took a job at the Red Bus city sightseeing operation, studying tour operating part-time through correspondence.
And suddenly our experiences happily meet. Me, a Cape Town-born, Joburg-raised, middle-class northern suburbs boy, with this lad who grew up in a shack.
It turns out we both spent time at the Gordon Institute of Business Science (GIBS) in Joburg. Lembeni says he won a bursary to study marketing there, which has contributed to where he is today, an employer of staff and an inspiration to many.
’GO & GRAB OPPORTUNITIES’
Leaning on my car door as I ready to leave, Lembeni says his life has been all about seizing opportunities when they present themselves.
“It’s up to us to go and grab them.”
Later at home, digesting the morning ride, I think about township struggle, an existence so foreign to us in suburbia. He sends me a Whatsapp, and there below his name is the line that best sums up Mzu Lembeni: “Make Your Passion Your Career”.