Becker’s African Diary #5: Impressions on Cape Town

(written on Sunday 6^th June 2010)

Cape Town…

Where to start? Approaching the city one realises early that the setting of this sprawling urban structure must be one of the most spectacular in the world, competing maybe only with Sydney or Vancouver when it comes to expressiveness of location. With the Table Mountain dominating the skyline from any angle and dwarfing everything around it and the city itself squeezed in between the giant and the Atlantic, up its hills and wrapped around.

The hilly streets, 2 and 3 story buildings with strong scents of Victorian architecture, Dutch colonial buildings and faceless 60´s to 90´s business buildings remind me a lot of San Francisco, and the vibe is smooth, the pace doable. As in any multi-ethnic city the food is excellent and diverse, and even now, in the deepest middle of winter, temperatures don’t drop below 12-13 degrees by night and it has all characteristics of a city whose inhabitants grew up in T-shirts and shorts.

So, you’d expect a Barcelona on the southern tip of the world, with street cafes open into the early hours of the morning, some Bossa and Kweito tunes pumping out from pavements at midnight, and a stylish and extremely hip, multi-ethnic young crowd from all over the globe mingling and celebrating youth?

Well, not really…

I thought about this during the last few days a lot, searching for the right word when talking to my friends here, and maybe “controlled” describes it best? There is a certain underlying tension. It is not very obvious at first but it is there. People watch what they do. They give attention to details I am not used to thinking about. Which part of town will we go to tonight? Will we take the car or the cab? It is not very obvious because it became a part of everyday life in the past but, simply put, there is an additional dimension here to life which we Berliners for example, don’t know. A certain level of awareness perhaps.

It does not change the fact that this is a fascinating place full of beauty, but it takes some of the lightness away. Fact is, the city is not only San Francisco, it is also Lagos…and Wroclaw…

As soon as you leave the city centre it feels as if CT would like to display the whole global range of living conditions. Huge suburbs dominated by simple, grey housing from the mid-century; thousands of small warehouses, derelict structures and minor industry; former townships with third world poverty. I have been to other cities with a shocking wealth gap before – say, Marrakech or Beirut – but here there is something different. Wealth and access to all resources with a trouble free, European-style lifestyle is not a privilege of a small, bourgeois upper class of a few thousand people…it is widely distributed and, at a wild guess, is reality for around 20-30% of the population.

But also there is poverty, and it is there for many…far too many. It is in the former townships, and it is in the streets of downtown Cape Town, with the guys selling South Africa flags between cars at traffic lights, and with the glue-sniffing homeless spending the night in agony in the parks of the city. It is a paperbox poverty that should have been erased from this planet by now, and that turns your thoughts into glass.

Very often this poverty is covered in a dark skin, but not always. Actually, one of the most hopeful signs is that the limits of “colour boundaries” – what a fucked up term – are, slowly but visibly, melting and dissolving. Thank God, the homeless white guy is by far not as common as the black couple shopping in fancy designer stores, but there is something moving…
One of the problems that slow the development down seems to be the same lazy fat-ass apathy we Berliners had in the first 10 years of reunification: “What do I have to do in the West/East? Nothing there for me…” People, all groups alike, stick to their old habits, are afraid to be not welcomed in the bars, clubs, shops and restaurants of the “others”, and only the few naive and dumb foreigners like me seem to ignore those boundaries.

No German term has been in my brain so often in the last days than “Die Mauer in den Köpfen.”

Safety? An issue…and a sensitive one. It is like any nation that has not fully developed its identity and self esteem, and yet South Africans are extremely aware of the image of the country abroad – media reports for example – and many here got hurt over the intense security debate around the Cup. But still, it is an issue. A slight nervousness is there in me too, and it originates not in acts or concrete experiences, but in the presence of an army of security staff in the streets at night; the alarm system in my guesthouse going off when I stepped on my balcony at night to have a cigarette; and the relatively small number of pedestrians on the streets in the evenings. The awareness in the visitor is there through reflections, observations that work like a cushion on a billiard table.

The World Cup? If the Bafana performs well, this country will explode. The people will get what they are thirsting for: a symbol to unite behind. A reason for pride. The last preparations are underway, pedestrian streets are paved, every car is flagged, after a series of 11 unbeaten games the optimism is flying high, each and everyone debates what Drogba’s injury means to the chances of Ivory Coast, if Benny McCarthy was rightfully dropped from Bafana because he is fat, and what the Mexican win over Italy really means in the light of the opening game which brings Mexico and South Africa together on the 11th of June…My god, just a few days from now…

The table is set, all ready for unforgettable days. The nervousness and excitement in the people here is growing fast, the spectacle could begin, and the country is ready. Leaving for Pretoria tomorrow, 1.500 km, hopefully in 2 days, and will be based there for 4 days, going to Jo´burg for the opener, to Rustenburg to see the hopes of one Anglo-Saxon team dashed by the other, and then off to Durban, 700 km, to see the kiddy team in Black, Red and Gold trying to run down the ageing kingdom of Oz…

After that the return to this City of Good Hopes…

Andreas