Rundle’s World Cup: from a sea of slums, to brick built suburbs and the shadows in between
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People advise those who are embarking on a South African trip not to visit Cape Town first, and they’re right. Once you’re here, you have no desire to leave and the rest of the country is bound to be, well, another country. Running from the sparkling beaches of the Atlantic coast to the foot of Table Mountain barely 2km inland, a city of grand architecture in a mish-mash of Dutch and Victorian style, and funky suburbs of multicoloured terraces and colonnaded verandahs, ‘the Mother City’ is an impossibly hip destination. Uniquely for South Africa, its population is neither predominantly black nor white, but mixed race or Coloured, in the still extant language of racial classification a product of its existence as a trading/slave/strategic port for centuries before the Union of South Africa drew it in in 1910. When the Afrikaner government established apartheid in 1948, out of the intersecting mix of pass laws and racial restrictions already in place, the Cape was a double problem, since fully half the population were exactly the sort of black-Asian-white mix that the ideology of apartheid had such a horror of. Yet it also made the imposition of full apartheid impossible, since the total exclusion of such people would have brought the city to a grinding halt. Indeed there is something grimly, bleakly funny about a place like Cape Town ending up in the paranoid neo-Calvinist prison of apartheid, since it is one of the few places in the world where people have fully blended, where one sees every conceivable combination of features: dark-skinned, curly-haired men with the square face and angular accent of a full Afrikaner, curvy black women with delicate Indian facial features, Chinese who sound like Boers, and on and on. The city is like one of those sci-fi movies cast entirely with multiracial actors, to suggest a far distant epoch in which humanity has become one. Cape Town is the future. I try this theory out on Akiza, an economist-activist at a bar looking out on the city’s waterfront, a rare example of a still-working port which has had the ‘Docklands/Darling Harbour’ treatment, putting dry docks beside red-brick shopping malls. She snorts into her drink. Damn. “That is the dumbest thing I’ve ever heard,” she spits. “Where did you get that from?” “Well I just, you know, I’m just a fat white bloke looking around…” “I think this is the role that Cape Town plays in the image of South Africa; this is where we’re all going. I don’t think we are, and I’m not sure if it’s much of a trek anyway. Have you been to The Flats?” I hadn’t yet been to ‘The Flats’, a vast stretch of fairly average suburbs on the other side of Table Mountain, because I was scared to. From the car they looked like the poorest western suburbs of Sydney two decades ago: street upon street of fibro houses and cheapjack apartment blocks. Central Cape Town is pretty safe to walk around, and they looked so too. “Yeah, so does south LA from the freeway,” someone had told me. ‘The gangs run the place. I wouldn’t go to The Flats alone.” The Flats owe their existence to the apartheid regime’s increasingly neurotic trajectory in the 1960s, especially as regards to non-white intellectual life. They had already cleared out Johannesburg’s Sophiatown, an area near the university that had been a hot-bed of black artistic and musical culture in the 1950s, demolishing the whole Victorian area and replacing it with an arid suburb named, of all things, Triomf. Cape Town’s ‘Sophiatown’ — an area known as District Six — had survived into the 60s, due to the city’s partial exemption from the Group Areas Act, but its very existence as a working community remained an anomaly, since the official doctrine of apartheid was that separate development was essential for peace. With a mixture of outright sanction and weasally urban development laws, District Six was cleared out and once again largely demolished. Stretching from the railway station across a swathe of the inner-east of the city, most of it was never built on, partly due to an effective boycott, leaving the city permanently lopsided. Freeway overpasses take up some of it, and further up a series of white plaster churches and one large mosque occupy greenfields; houses of worship being the only buildings spared the destruction of hundreds of years of community. In the brilliant science fiction film District Nine aliens make contact with earth, hover over Johannesburg, and unable to return to their home planet set up shanty towns. It was about many things, not least the recent violent hatred directed towards illegal immigrants, but its core story of a white public servant who becomes part alien after being bitten by one was a register of apartheid’s haunting fear that race-mixing of the Cape persuasion was ultimately monstrous. But for the traveller in SA, Cape Town seems like the promised land because it means you can breathe easier; walk around the whole city area without much concern, especially in the daytime. After Johannesburg, where no-go zones live cheek-by-jowl with upmarket ‘burbs, and you have to keep a working knowledge of which main streets not to cross, there’s an entirely different sense of the city. Accurate or not, the place seems bound together by the looming presence of Table Mountain, visible from all points of the city proper. The green slopes seem to reach into the heart of the city. More tentatively, I am expounding this theory to a journalist in a bar when she breaks in. “You should come back when this is all over,” she said. “We won’t be so smiley smiley then.” Oh God. Got it wrong again? “No, look, I mean, this place is still safer than a lot of other places, there’s more mixing on the street, but that’s when there are people on the street. Usually this city closes at five in the evening,” Natasha says. She’s sipping at a peppermint tea, but in every other respect, down to a belted raincoat, she has the air of a reporter in a tough city, as news editor of the city’s afternoon paper The Cape Argus. She has the same mix of love and exasperation that can only come from deep association with a distinctive city. She is determined to burst all my balloons. “You know,” she says, “because I think Cape Town is a European city, it’s trying to be a European city anyway. I don’t think of it as an African city. Johannesburg, that’s an African city. Life feels more hectic there.” “Yeah, ‘cos you don’t know if you’re going to be carjacked or not…” “Well yeah, I think that’s part of it. But it’s got an intellectual life which Cape Town really lacks.” That struck me as true enough. Cape Town had the same air as Sydney, that of big dumb beauty, turned towards the outer world. It’s a city on the way to what all South African cities want to be. And in at least one respect it has come out on top. By some measures it is the most economically unequal city in the world.
“Yeah, we won the World Cup there alright, Bafana Bafana beat Brazil,” says Patrick, one of the half-dozen people I had contacted to talk about AIDS, a topic of much expertise in the region. Were Cape Town to be merely the city itself, and its sprawling southern suburbs on the other side of Table Mountain, it wouldn’t be in the competition to top the Gini coefficient scale. Indeed it would probably be doing better than a few European countries like Moldova. But south east of its southern suburbs is Cape Town’s other Khyalitsha, the country’s second most famous ‘township’ after Soweto. Township is, of course, an utterly misleading term, confirming what I suspect is the image of such places in the rest of the world taken from news footage in the 80s of running battles in front of an undifferentiated rows of shacks. The shacks are still there, but they’re part of larger conglomerations, and radically different areas, from recognisable brick-built suburbs, to a sea of slums, thousands upon thousands leant up against each other, made of wooden and corrugated iron, roofs held down with stones and tyres. Townships are cities, in other words, with their suburbs and shops, schools and municipal offices. They live in a grey zone between official recognition and shadow existence. On the one hand there’s electric lighting over pretty much all areas. Yet on the other, no-one actually knows how many people live here. “We don’t have a clue,” Kelly, an education activist, said while driving me and three other activists out there. “I mean ballpark, what’s the figure?” “Somewhere between a quarter and one and a half million.” “That’s ballpark?” “It could be more…” “And Khyalitsha’s not the worst place,” someone said from the back seat. “Yeah, they’ve got toilets. You should see Nyanga.” Nyanga is a smaller township. You can see it from the airport as you drive in. In fact you can see it from the plane, as it circles down. When I flew in last week, the seats behind me were full of proud locals pointing out landmarks to two World Cup tourists. “That’s the stadium lit up … oh, and that’s Sea Point where we live…” “What’s that there?” they asked, pointing to a sea of darkness, with dots of dim light. “Oh, that’s, uh, that’s Nyanga.” The travelogue ended. And tonight, after being dropped off in Long Street, at its globalish boho centre — a restaurant called Fork, a bar called Ragazzi — in an essay by Andre Brink, A Vision of the Future, written in the 80s from a mostly annoying collection, I read his hope, from within the bitter end of apartheid, of how it would be:
Yeah, uh, not yet. That mountain is still to climb. And while the country waits to begin that next stage of the journey, Cape Town is shielded, by its own sublime defining peak, from undue contemplation from what is yet to be done. Read Guy Rundle’s latest take on South African townships. Register to read if you’re not a Crikey subscriber yet. |
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18 Comments
Looks like Brink got the timing right, it’s just the place that’s a bit wrong by a few hundred km or so, since
is pretty much what’s happened in Zimbabwe. And hasn’t that gone well.
Your piece would be far more insightful if you had left the Waterfront and actually visited Langa or Khyalitsha to talk to some of the people who live there. You might have got a very different view.
By the way, I am totally with you that Cape Town has the same air as Sydney, spot on.
What is posted on Crikey and here on the website are different which is a pain for readers.
My comments here are based on what is posted on Crikey.
This piece maddens me like hell!
Rundle describes “’The Flats’” as “a vast stretch of fairly average suburbs on the other side of Table Mountain … From the car they looked like the poorest western suburbs of Sydney two decades ago: street upon street of fibro houses and cheapjack apartment blocks.”
This is utter total nonsense. Wherever he was he was not in “The Flats” where hundreds of thousands of people live in incredibly cramped conditions in corrugated iron shacks often with no electricity or running water. These are slums of the worst imaginable kind.
He goes on: “Cape Town … is on the way to what all South African cities want to be.” Maybe his white mates think that but if he had gone to the Flats and talked to people there instead of viewing somewhere else through a car window he would have discovered that those living there do not want these stinking ghastly conditions.
At an earlier point Rundle says that he hadn’t yet been to the Flats because he was “scared to”. What sort of journalist is this? Both my wife and I have been to the Flats, sometimes late at night to visit friends there or to take them home. And these really were “The Flats”! Scared? No. And in our experience so many people living there do so with quite extraordinary dignity and resilience.
We had hoped that one of the good things about the World Cup might be that the Guy Rundles of this world would visit the Flats and would talk to the people who live there and tell it as it is there and awaken real interest in the plight of those living there.
But no, we get this nonsense… Oh dear…
Have to agree with your sentiments Gavin. The Flats are not bloody Kandahar, for god’s sake. As a Jo’burger I always felt that (white) Capetonians were drinking serious Kool-Aid the way they crooned about their city. I always questioned them how they could think the place was so fantastic when the majority of the denizens lived in places like Khayelitsha, Nyanga and Langa. If you drive on the N2 highway into CT past these places on a typical gale force wind day, it is difficult to fathom how miserable it must be to live there. In a house made of a few tree branches and plastic sheets built on beach sand. Really wretched. And yet everyone goes on about how FABULOUS Cape Town is. At least in Jo’burg people acknowledge the place is f*&ked.
@Gavin I find it curious that you have no qualms about branding Guy’s description of the flats as utter nonsense, especially when your own appears to be quite one dimensional. I grew up in Cape Town - specifically in Langa, Gugulethu and ultimately the southern suburbs. While I would never ever dispute the dire and horrible conditions that exist in a lot of townships - I will be quick to remind you that squalor, poverty and misery is not the sole township story or experience.
@GregB:
I gathered that by the growing number of South African accents I hear every day in Sydney.
Having lived in Cape Town in recent years I can say the crime is about as bad as Johannesburg; the slums surrounding the city are about as bad as Johannesburg; the dangers of driving in the country outside Cape Town is about as bad as Johannesburg and the city of Cape Town itself is quite seedy. What tourists rave about is the harbor enclave area where they spend their time and there is no denying it is pretty and touristy and enjoyable… but it is not Cape Town city.
South Africa’s tragedy is that the ‘white rulers’ have been replaced by ‘black rulers’ and ordinary people, as always, still suffer.
Roslyn.ross - “What tourists rave about is the harbor enclave area where they spend their time and there is no denying it is pretty and touristy and enjoyable… but it is not Cape Town city.” Which makes it sound even more like Sydney…
” And yet everyone goes on about how FABULOUS Cape Town is. At least in Jo’burg people acknowledge the place is f*&ked.
I gathered that by the growing number of South African accents I hear every day in Sydney.”
As long as they don’t arrive by rickety boat - it will be ok….
well a good crop of ‘you don’t know the real south africa’ stuf, a game i’m getting pretty used to here. a few things:
1 - i thought i made it pretty clear that on the basis of a week’s acquaintance that i didn’t know the real cape town or SA, and was going on impressions, all of which tend to be corrected and repositioned every 2 days.
2 - i didn’t simply present the pollyanna view of cape town - i presented it as the common image and then went over the inequality, the degree to which it applied to only one part of the city etc etc. it’s clear that in trying to reclaim their city centres as safer zones, a lot of cities are seeing CT - or the central ‘city bowl’ area as the sort of place they’d like to be.
3 - the bit about being scared to go to the cape flats was kind of a joke against myself - as i made it clear my acquaintance was pretty transitory. as to getting out of the waterfront, well, i did, as the sentence ’ while we were driving out there [Khyalitsha] ’ might possibly suggest.
Really, the whole article acknowledged its limits in the way it was written. I mean at some point, fuck off.
At which point Guy? When someone disagrees with you? When someone takes you to task in sounding forth when you now more or less admit that you were not in a position to exercise any judgement?
Reasoned debate is important. To end as you did is not part of reasoned debate.
You write some good stuff. This I hope - and especially your response immediately above - were aberrations.
Doug - no-one will care if they arrive by rickety boat, as long as they’re white…
You’re losing it, pal.
I agree Gavin ~well said. Guy can be perceptive, articulate and extremely witty but if you dish it out regularly (as he does!)you must be able to take folks’ comments without reacting like a ten year old.
The issue of poverty and inequality in South Africa is important - it is the inequality that really sticks in my gullet - there is such grinding poverty amidst such affluence - so to get back to THAT issue, here is an excerpt from the Cape Times (the daily Cape Town paper) yesterday:
“TRAGEDY: Nine people, including five children, died in a Lingelethu West, Khayelitsha, shack blaze early yesterday.
THE cause of a Khayelitsha shack fire which killed nine residents, including two sisters, their partners and their five children, had been preliminarily identified as a candle left burning on a plastic chair, said a spokesman for the city’s Disaster Risk Management Centre, Wilfred SolomonsJohannes.
Sisters Marche, 30, and Nomampondo Mdla, 26, and their boyfriends Bulelani Nqundwana, 38, and David Khoboka, 33, died in the blaze yesterday.
Their five children, Nomampondo’s eight-year-old daughter Asimahle and Marche’s three sons – Aviwe, 5, Luxolo, 4, and six-month-old Spumzo – and daughter Andisiwe, 3, were also killed in the blaze.
A year-old toddler was killed and his twin was badly burnt in a shack fire in Soweto on Sunday. Warrant Officer Kay Makhuvele said the sleeping children were left alone in the shack while their grandmother and older siblings who looked after them had to leave to sell food to support the extended family.”
Pretty much a daily occurrence but this one (unusually) made the newspaper.
Ok Ok So I came across this article and many like this before and it’s come to the point where I feel I need to put across my point of view.
First lets start with the facts, I’m a mid twenties coloured male. Born in Stellenbosch I have moved around quite a bit living everywhere from Johannesburg, Pretoria, the North West and of course in Cape Town (Northern Suburbs, Southern Suburbs, West Coast and City). I have friends in all these different places and have friends of every racial denomination that we have in South Africa so I feel I have a fairly in depth knowledge of my country and its people.
I believe that all this negativity has got to stop anybody telling me how dire the Cape Flats is has probably never spent enough time there to realise how inspirational the people and those “townships” can be Fuck It I’ve moved onto bigger and better things and I’m in the process of realizing my dreams and aspirations but I always long for those days when I was younger I think it made me who I am. Everyday in this beautiful country the only thing I feel is the spirit of this country taking me forward, motivating me, telling me that no matter how bad things are this is still My country My land and My people. I wouldn’t trade this for anything else in the world. I will die defending my South African brothers even though we don’t see eye to eye they are still close to me as they come from this country. I believe South Africa has seen so much sorrow and sadness over the decades and I think we owe it to ourselves to say this will stop now, we won’t be sad anymore but look at the positives and build upon it.
Yes I have been a victim of crime, I have lost loved ones and will probably continue to do so in the future. I don’t agree with the government and sometimes I hate the attitude of those around me but fuck it I’m not leaving, I will stay in my country and make the best of it, I will ignore the bad and try to be the best man I can be and I believe if every South African stops fucking complaining so much and stops looking for the negative then maybe just maybe we can all be happy. And yes we see it on the news every day but lets face it there isn’t a country on earth without it’s problems and if you feel so badly about it then you can join the rest of the ex-pats and head over to greener pasture’s. Just know that wherever you go it will never truly be yours.
Your article is acceptable as it is just a tourist’s point of view and you don’t know much about South Africa but I find some of the comments, I’m guessing most of them from fellow South Africans to be unacceptable to me at least. But hey I’m just another South African with my own point of view. I love my Cape Town, I love My South Africa and will live my life trying to embody the spirit which is needed to heal the wounds of the past and build a bright future for us all. And Yes Cape Town IS the future!
It’s not about elections,
Sanctions,
Proliferations,
He said she said,
My land your land,
No man’s land…
Said the Bono ad for the Word Cup now over,
And it sure ain’t about
the shanty towns,
the homeless,
living in squaller
a few minutes from the squillion dollar spectacle
either.
Might have been for one month every four years,
but the inequality goes on, and on, and on, and on…
Could we please be a little balanced in their perspectives? It’s starting to sound like playground chatter. Things are not as black and white as we would like them to be, so that we can conveniently put things, places, nations and people into out own little ‘boxes’.
It’s a big world out there. Yes, South Africa has real problems with poverty, crime, AIDS, corruption (comparatively, I think we’re not SA is not that bad) and national identity, but which nation is exempt from those socio-economic problems? It may be to a higher degree in SA, but then again, SA has went out of colonialism and into apartheid which created the most unequal of terms.
Those processes contributed to poverty and the resulting social ills. In particular, I’ve noticed a culture of violence in SA, this too, is a remnant of apartheid.
Notwithstanding the causes and contributors to corruption, the SA government needs to take a strong stance against it, to gain confidence internally and to the world. I am not however saying that SA has anything to prove.
There are many expats and foreigners who would love SA to go the way of Zimbabwe. Unfortunately for those doomsayers, there are too many good South Africans out there to allow that to happen.
As for the World Cup: FIFA stopped just short of saying the WC was the best organised ever. This reflects very well on the country. Why do people preoccupy themselves with wondering about the costs vs benefits of hosting the WC? The benefits from investment and future tourism numbers will outweigh the costs over time (not necessarily in the following months).
As for crime, I can understand and sympathise with those who leave SA due to crime. I have no judgement against them and sincerely hope they can establish themselves wherever they find themselves.
I will not write off the country of my birth on account of crime. We need people who are hopeful and inspiring, not fearful, to take on the challenges that area ahead.
Anyway, that’s my view.