When the pilot announced that we would be landing into 30 degrees heat, I figured I should be forgiven for thinking that, in my groggy state at that hour of day, we were in KLIA and not London Heathrow. I arrived in London yesterday morning to a scorcher of a weekend – temperatures are expected to soar into the low 30s. Fine and dandy if you live in a country equipped for soaring temperatures, but over here… air conditioning is as much a frivolous luxury as it is a waste of money (and a danger to the environment).
Our host gave us a welcome dance…
My Cape Town adventures have ended, but not the fascination and curiosity for a continent I had never until last week set foot in, never mind explore. I suppose exploring this much maligned and relatively dangerous frontier – armed conflicts and civil wars are not necessarily alien to the Dark Continent – could not have had a better start than in Cape Town, one of the safer cities in the continent. I am aware that Cape Town does not represent South Africa, much less the whole of Africa, but it still allowed an insight to the pain that raged through this country only a few decades ago.
When people learnt that I lived in England, many asked me what I felt about the country now that I had seen it for real, and how that contrasted to the newspaper reports about their cities that I had read. Part of the reason behind why I insisted on going on a township tour was to test these ideas of Africa that have been developed as part of my western-influenced geographical and historical education. And the first misconception that I have now corrected is the state of these townships. Often on tv we are greeted with visuals of shanty towns with houses near collapse, and children running around half clothed, hungry and messy. Nothing could be further from the truth. True, such shanty towns exist but so do brick houses that look as much at home as in Taman Reko as they do in Langa Township.
Safety when out at night was also another issue, and while I felt quite safe walking after dark, I was told by E, one of my hosts’ bosses, that he too felt safe walking at night – and that this was a rarity in this town he’d lived in for many, many years. The presence of the police made him feel things were okay, he said, but this was not a common occurrence.
The gravity of the state of crime in the Rainbow Nation was brought home when watching a news telecast later that night – an American tourist was shot dead wounded (TQ Benito) seconds after coming off a train in Johannesburg during a robbery attempt. It is abject poverty that has driven many from their homelands into informal settlements in townships like Khayelitsha, and it is poverty laced with a touch of drugs and alcohol that has led to crime levels being on the increase.
In the quaint town of Noordhoek, I was told the rich who make this scenic suburb home offered the poor an opportunity to earn a living by allowing them to chop down wood for braai (barbecue). Capetonians from all over would go to Noordhoek to buy the wood as they were of particularly good burning quality; any left over would be purchased in bulk by the Noordhoek rich, ensuring that the poor had money in their pockets to see to their necessities. “The wood won’t last forever,” said the guide who told me the story, “but it’s a start.”
Mula mula ke Bata, kemudian ke Cape Town
Cape Town is, like other cities, rife with problems that are not new: alcoholic abuse, drug abuse, domestic violence, unemployment. But in its corner it has earnest people who want to make things better, and a view that could soothe even the angriest of hearts. And God knows, some hearts need a lot of healing.
