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Thabo and Vuyani told us they were both raised in the Cape Flats and were recruited as kids to be soldiers for Umkhonto We Sizwe (MK).

"In 1985 many young people--including myself--left South Africa and went into exile, in search of arms," said Vuyani, who looked more like a reggae singer, with his hair in thin dreadlocks, than a gun-toting guerrilla soldier. "This is the year we as young people took the decision to not only be prepared to die--for a cause we believed was just--but also to kill for the cause."

Both Thabo and Vuyani were sent to Angola, where they fought alongside Cuban soldiers ("Our compadres!" Thabo said) and against the South African-backed UNITA rebels. Thabo got his military training in East Germany ("Good times . . . hot baths!"), while Vuyani was sent to Tanzania.

When the ANC achieved power in 1994, some MK returned from exile and joined the national army, but many others (like Thabo and Vuyani) didn't. They faced manifold challenges in adapting to the new South Africa, including psychological alienation, post-traumatic stress and chronic unemployment.

"We remained unemployed not because we didn't want to work, but we didn't have the skills necessary for a satisfactory job," Thabo said. "We had participated in the struggle from the time we were 13, 14, 15, 16. When we should have been in school, we took up arms."

WECAT was founded in 1997 to address the hopelessness that faced former MK guerrillas. Its Survivor Support Initiatives are directed at using tourism and education programs to promote job creation and training in the most impoverished townships.

"We want to use our history as a tool to teach the youngsters," said Thabo, a WECAT co-founder. "We try and give you something the tourism board doesn't normally talk about. They don't talk about it because they don't know."

Remembering the martyrs

Back in the van, Desmond drove us southeast toward the Cape Flats. We passed through the last white suburb before the townships. It was pointed out how the walls outside the homes got higher and higher as we closed in. There was barbed wire everywhere.

We passed the power plant that was used by the former government as a border between white and black neighborhoods. The road divided more than just the affluent suburb of Pinelands from the poor township of Athlone. During the apartheid years, "there was no going across that line," Thabo said, "not even for a visit."

Declared a mixed-race or "colored" area in 1936, Athlone was our first stop in the Cape Flats, and Desmond parked in an empty lot next to a roadside exhaust shop. Today this township functions as the commercial and social center of the Cape Flats.

We piled out of the van and were addressed by Vuyani, who had been mostly quiet until now. In deferential silence, we listened to his story of the "Trojan Horse Massacre," which happened here in Athlone, during a time of unrest after the apartheid government had declared a state of emergency.