Crossing the racial divide: when a white South African family moved into a black township, it stirred up a heated national debate.

• Author: Polgreen, Lydia
• Position: INTERNATIONAL - White couple Ena and Julian Hewitt experienced living in a black township

Regina Matshega was gossiping with a neighbor one day in August when she spotted something very unexpected: two white South Africans, a man and a woman, with two blond toddlers running at their heels.

"I couldn't believe my eyes," Matshega says. "What are white people doing here?"

The white couple wandered over, past the gutter overflowing with raw sewage, to introduce themselves as Julian and Ena Hewitt. To experience what life was like in a black township, they had moved from their comfortable home outside Pretoria into a 100-square-foot shack with no electricity or running water.

"They said they wanted to see how we are living," Matshega says. "Can you imagine?" The Hewitts spent the month of August living an experiment: Could a white middle-class South African family make it on $10 a day in the kind of living conditions that millions of black South Africans endure every day? "It is one thing to know from an academic perspective what divides us," says Julian Hewitt, who also blogged about the experience. "But what is it like to actually live it?"

In South Africa, where deep racial divides remain at the core of the nation's identity 22 years after the end of apartheid, the Hewitts' experiment made headlines and spurred heated debate.

Apartheid was a government-run system of rigid racial segregation that was in place for much of the 20th century. In a nation that was then 70 percent black, a white minority ruled, denying blacks basic rights and essentially treating them as outsiders in their own land.

Apartheid officially ended in 1991, with Nelson Mandela elected as South Africa's first black president three years later. But apartheid's legacy of inequality persists.

Poverty, Crime & Unemployment

While South Africa has become a democracy and its economy is the envy of most of the continent, about half of South Africans still live in poverty, almost a quarter of its workforce is unem ployed, and violent crime has soared.

Among the most stubborn legacies of apartheid are the geographic boundaries that separate the races in practice, if no longer by law. Remote, overcrowded townships like Mamelodi, where the Hewitts stayed, were once the only urban places blacks were permitted to live. Since apartheid ended, middle class blacks have moved into formerly white suburbs, but whites have generally not integrated black areas. Indeed, even poor whites have their own slums, far from blacks.

The Hewitts live in a gated suburban community, but for...