Khayelitsha Township
Florence Gallez | Western Cape, South Africa
Photographer: Florence Gallez
Exhibit Title: Khayelitsha Township
Location: Western Cape, South Africa
Created during Apartheid as a dormitory area for migratory workers, Khayelitsha is today the largest and youngest black township in Western Cape, located on the Cape Flats in Cape Town. While Khayelitsha, ‘Our New Home’ in Xhosa, is notorious for its high crime and unemployment, it is also a vibrant community, known for its entrepreneurial spirit and social development initiatives.
By the mid-1980s, Cape Town was one of the most segregated cities in South Africa. Khayelitsha was established in 1985, when the Apartheid regime forcefully relocated people from the growing black population around the city.
Today Khayelitsha has a population of 2.4 million, 90.5% Black African. Many residents still live in shacks and have to walk 200 meters to access water. Despite infrastructure and welfare interventions, only a little over 50% of Khayelitsha's total working age population is employed, and crime rates remain very high.
But more residents are now being moved to formal houses, and Khayelitsha has a small but growing middle class, with a growing business district and new entrepreneurs.
Florence Gallez is an independent documentary photojournalist and black and white photographer from Brussels, Belgium, currently based in Paris. Gallez received a BA degree in English and Russian from the University of London in 1996, an MSc in journalism from Boston University in 1999, and a digital media focused MSc from MIT in 2012. She spent eight years as a Moscow-based journalist covering Russian politics, economics, society, and culture for The Moscow Times, the U.S. publisher Bureau of National Affairs (Bloomberg BNA), and most recently CNN’s Moscow Bureau. As a photographer of social documentaries, she seeks to bring more visibility to people who are in challenging situations and often not cared for by society, especially women and children. In Paris, she is also contributing local and international news and social documentaries to the French photo agency Wostok Press and Russian news agency Sputnik/Rossiya Segodnya.
Florence Gallez
Photojournalist
fgallez@alum.mit.edu
http://florencegallez.com
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