ABSTRACT
It is on a Tuesday afternoon and Phumlani walks from the train station to his house in Athlone – a Coloured area in Cape Town. Phumlani is 17 years old and has recently moved to Athlone from Khayelitsha where his parents used to live when they migrated to Cape Town from the Eastern Cape. Khayelitsha is the biggest township in Cape Town and is notorious for its high crime figures and a range of social problems related to poverty and marginalisation. Both his parents are primary school teachers and they have looked forward to the day when they could afford to buy a house in an area they considered better than Khayelitsha. Crime rates are lower in Athlone and it is more centrally located, which means it is closer to former White areas. The locality enables them to send their two sons to a former Model C school (for Whites during apartheid) in the city centre because of the cheaper commuting.
