Cape Town by Binyavanga Wainaina

You may not notice it at first. At the airport, you will look at the mountains before you, and the strange plants around you and tell yourself this is ethereal: so soft, shadows arranging themselves to present subtle depths. It’s the light, you see.

To an African like me, used to a sun above, this sunlight coming from strange angles seems so beautiful.I take for granted the stark simplicity of image the sun in East Africa provides me, and wonder when tourists ‘ohh’ and ‘ahhh’ when they encounter this crispness.

Wherever you come from, you will feel a twinge when you drive past the vast cities of shacks on your way to town. You will notice that there is no grass, or vegetable there – only thousands of flowers – yellow, blue and red plastic bags that litter this landscape. Then, quicky the Third World called Langa will fly past you and you will enter the Southern suburbs of the city. Unless you are well travelled and used to such things, you will gape.

The contrast:

A city vast to everywhere you can see, and all of it arranged, and tidied, and pampered, and paved, and designed for you to enjoy, and thrive. With Parks, and Malls, and pavements and Street lights everywhere, and theatres, and stadiums and pretty paved spaces designed for nothing but people to stand around and look cool.

Cape Town is probably the only city in Africa that embraces fully all the cliches associated with that loaded word: civilisation. People are friendly to a fault, things work, and the city is old enough to have developed a very strong and original identity. It is often described by travellers as genteel, or European.

If you spend enough time here, if you get used to the vision of Table Mountain – that flat-topped slab of rock a thousand metres high; if you get used to driving past Cliffs, and sunsets where the ocean turns into molten gold; after you have become jaded with the endless gourmet restaurants – which serve food cheaper than their equivalents anywhere in Europe; after your palate is bored with red wine that flows down your throat like a blessing, red wine that will cost you $2 a bottle; after this, there are some questions you might start to ask.

Part of why I travel is romantic – to be somewhere new – looking at people I do not know, seeing views I have never seen. It is impossible to travel to a beautiful place and be a realist from day one. You are overwhelmed by contrast and colour. By exotic things: an accent, the shape of people’s eyes, even how different their phone-booths look.

But – the other reason I travel is to get perspective - how can I know myself, where I come from without being somewhere else?

As an East African, to do this successfully in Cape Town there are some painful realities to face. For this city, liberal, and friendly is the real story of Apartheid. The rest of the country was too newly settled for raw feelings to go away, for the anger to be forgotten.

Here, Aparthied worked, and in a sense it is still working in the subtle friendly way Cape Town presents. Here is the only province where the National Party has a power base; this is the city with the worst managed and most desperate townships in South Africa.

This is the city that black high income professionals dread to be posted to, “There’s nowhere to go where there are black people,” they say. Most black people – mostly Xhosa in Cape Town live up to an hour’s drive away in large townships like langa, Gugulethu and Khaelithsha.

Now there is a strange and ignored reality to this city – I guess in the same way that Mombasa is a Swahili city, Cape Town is a Coloured city. Coloured being one of those name political correctness has failed to replace. Coloured covers a whole Nation of people: descendants of the original tribes of Cape Town; descendants of Indian and Malay slaves who were brought here; descendants of black people who migrated South looking for work and needed a permit and got one by being classified coloured; descendants of the first Angolan, West African slaves; descendants of the first (black or mixed race) Boers who lived and owned property here, and lost it when the British introduced informal aparthied. There are Afrikaans speaking coloureds, English speaking coloureds, and Xhosa speaking coloureds. There are black coloureds, blonde coloureds, moslem coloureds, cross-dressing coloureds, catholic coloureds – coloureds who miss aparthied, when the blacks knew their place; coloureds who died fighting it.

Right in the centre of the city there are gardens – beautiful old gardens situated where Jan Van Riebeck established the first vegetable gardens to supply ships. They are called The Company Gardens, they belonged to the Dutch East India company. Here, if you wander about, you will see some features and faces from the first tribes who lived here. They will ask you for a cigarette, and will smell of liquor. They will tell you that they are “Coloured” people, but you will notice that they are less of a hybrid of cultures and features than most. They do not remember what their original language was, nobody speaks it any more. They cannot tell you what the name of their original tribe is. It is forgotten. Those proud and healthy people with their fat sheep and cattle who Jan van Riebcek met and traded with do not exist any more, excpet in certain facial features.

You may read about them in the mighty South African library, right here in The Company Gardens. A beautiful old library that contains virtually all books and periodicals printed in South Africa. You might find out about Eva - a Strandloper by tribe. Intelligent and beautiful African by all accounts in the diaries of the first Dutch settlers. This was the late 1600s. She was the daughter of a chief, naive and friendly like most Africans. She learned Dutch, and was adopted by Jan Van Riebeck.

Eva later married a Dutch doctor, and was heartbroken wehn he died. She became an alchoholic. She shed her Dutch clothes and become a Strandloper again. Eva - unwittingly becoming a weapon for the oppresion of her people.

You might ask yourself why she doesn't sound like the "Khoisan" we were taught about in history who seemed barely human.

As you travel you will see various permutations of these people, most of them will seem in the most desperate of straights. They are called bergies – by even the most liberal minded Capetonians. Many suffer from Foetal Achohol Syndrome, a legacy of the days that they worked on wine farms and were paid in cheap wine. This Foetal Achohol Syndrome means your child is born an alchoholic; it means your child is retarded and will probably live out in the streets, unemployable.

This system, called the Dop system only died out in the early nineteen eighties.

In the early days, many Black people had prominent positions in the Cape. One of Jan Van Riebeck’s former slaves was a West African ma. He was given a farm near Paarl and started one of the Cape’s first wine farms. Another, and Indian woman became very wealthy and her daughter brought development to Camp’s Bay, now one of Cape Town’s most exclusive suburbs.

Descendants of these Black slaves became enormously influential over the years. One, Sara the Boer, had fifteen children, and many of the most prominent Afrikaners today are descended from her. A black woman built the original Tuynhuys, which Cecil Rhodes bought, and which became the presidential residence. These are all historical facts which have only recently come to light. Much of Cape Town’s history has been sanitised to present the smiling side. It has been said that Cape Town is a laid back city because if people leaned forward, skeletons will come falling on top of them.

I say all this things just so you see a balance to the beauty you will encounter in Cape Town. And trust me, you will see beauty the likes of which probably no city in the World possesses. Mountains, and endless beaches and beautiful old buildings.

You may spend the day at the Bo-Kaap – the Muslim suburb, and shop for spices, and fabrics, and you may eat Cape Malay food there. Cape Malay cuisine is a delicious combination of dried fruit and spices and often seafood like crayfish or perlemoen.

You may take a boat to Robben Island, and see this this jail Island whose residents read like a history of Oppression. From chiefs of rebellious tribes to Mandela, this tiny island has come full circle, and finally the ideas that were being thrown away by the Mainland, like useless seeds, have grown into large strong trees here.

You will walk into Cape Town Tourism’s office in town, and be given all the advice you need for free. You will drink cappuccinos on the pavements of cafes; and climb Table Mountain on the Cable car, and shaking with adrenalin, see the city and ocean spread before you. You may eat a meal at the restaurant on the mountain, and look down and tell yourself that you have found paradise.