The Cape of Good Hope

2009

Leaving the parched continent of Australia we flew to the dark continent and reached the Capo de Bon Esperenza, beyond the Atlas Pillars, the Cape of Good Hope.  

Cape Town sprawls in the shadow of the picturesque Table Mountain, the flat monolith that is the sentinel over this contrast of modernity and basic improvisation, affluence and poverty.

Main Road where I am staying runs between the mountain and Table Bay, in the lee of Robben Island where Mandela achieved greatness through incarceration. It is the artery feeding the affluent suburbs of the west, passing through the seedy suburbs of Sea Point and Green Point.

In the bay ships stacked to the skies with battered containers head for the harbour, top heavy, unwieldy and sea scarred. Bloated liquefied gas ships with their spherical tanks rock in the swell, connected to shore by looms of pipes, like an umbilicus delivering their life blood.

On Main Road, boisterous battle-scarred taxi vans carry their human cargo. Hooting and whistling their way to repetitive destinations, touting for passengers, engorging then disgorging their human fare.

The latest models of Mercedes, VW, Toyota and BMW with personal number plates cruise the road, driven by the businessmen and women, public servants who emerge through spiked cast iron gates from homes screened by high security walls. The rest walk, or succumb to the exhortations of the taxi touts.

Patrons earnest in conversation or reading the Cape Times sip cappuccino’s and latte’s at Giovanni’s, 103 Main Road, They are all white. The deli is stocked with the latest delicacies from Europe supplemented with the best South African produce. An ageing Afrikaaner sells fresh vegetables and herbs from a canvas covered alcove. There are sweet potatoes, pumpkins, cabbages and lettuces wilting in the sun. A pile of fresh dog turd festers on the pavement next to the pots of sage and thyme.

Beggars straddle the pavement steps away, pestering the pedestrians, earnest in survival, their tanned and creased grey bearded faces testament to the cruel deprivation of their lives. Their home is the street, their bed in a roofless alcove, sheltered from the wind. I don’t know where they go when it rains – today it is pouring so perhaps I will find out.

The pulsating beat of reggae mesmerises the patrons at Granny Feelgoods, a café and internet café, advertised by a plate, a cup and a mouse. Conversations across the table or cyberspace, wireless, broadband and analogue mapping the journey of technology in this out of the way place. The patrons are all white.

A walk down Main Road to Sea Point is a study of the fragile fabric of southern African life. The pavement is cracked by the roots of the ubiquitous Jacaranda tree with its purple flowers colouring the grey relief of buildings and security walls. Illegally parked cars take up half the pavement, leaving the rest for pedestrians and hawkers, prostitutes and taxi touts.

An ageing bow-legged bag lady pushes her supermarket trolley packed with her possessions. On the corner of St George Street, the dusky streetwalkers in tight jeans offer their wares near the sign directing travellers to the 40 Winks Guesthouse. The adjacent wall is daubed with an advertisement for a ’hop on and hop off’ bus service and a billboard offers the hottest property in town for sale.

The street sweeper carefully gathers the debris with his yard broom outside a shop, and cleans the tiled shopfront with detergent from a bucket made from half a plastic drum with the handle of interlaced 12-guage fencing wire. The blue uniformed parking inspector stands nearby negotiating with drivers and handing out tickets from the latest hand-held computer. The fruit hawker stacks his boxes into a makeshift street counter and carefully displays the meager offering of pineapples and apples so any blemishes are hidden.

Office workers stride towards their white collar jobs, computer cases slung over their shoulders, income assured, confidence radiating. Whites in white collars, blacks in blue collars or rags.

The newspaper billboards announce the issues of today; the fear of interest rate rises, taxi strikes, political tussles and maternity leave for schoolgirls. The latter highlighting the promiscuity that has brought the level of HIV infection to a crippling 25% across the nation. A whole generation will be decimated with profound effect on the family and economic structure that maintains stability.

There is something missing from the streetscape, sirens – police, ambulances and fire engines. Is this the manifestation of collapsing infrastructure with burgeoning crime and the emphasis on the needs of an emerging population being more important than saving the dying? The objectivity of poverty replacing the subjectivity of affluence as the country slides into the post-apartheid era?

A few blocks away from Main Road, cranes steeple over the waterfront retail development. Acres of shed-like buildings house a vast shopping mall offering everything. Supported by expensive restaurants, wine shops, marimba street bands the waterfront bustles with tourists and their local hosts. No beggars here, it seems sanitized and the shoppers are white, the shop assistants and salespeople black or coloured.

The Rainbow nation is what they call South Africa, a semantic attempt to include all the shades of skin colour that are its people. Black, white, coloured are the primary colours of this rainbow, and they still seem separate as they are in that trick of light. Perhaps merging along the fringes but still remain substantially in their block of colour.

Sixteen or so years after apartheid changes are apparent with most of the blue collar and many of the white collar jobs being held now by blacks and coloureds.

But the whites generally seem to have the money and the separation is socio-economic rather than by law. Apparently there is a rapidly growing middle class of black and coloured people but I haven’t seen many of them.

It seems that the Rainbow nation is on the brink of a storm. The pot of gold as elusive as the myth. The clouds gathering are formed by the sweat of toil and frustration of those whose expectation is to live the life of the affluent blacks and whites. To fulfill the promises of change that were the slogans of the immediate post-apartheid era.

The storm gathers in the shanty towns and the dark clouds cast a shadow over everything. Occasionally the sun breaks through the clouds and bathes everything in golden sunshine and all seems well. The clouds close and grow and the storm will come, as surely as similar storms have rolled down Africa to this last bastion of colonial dominance.

The Cape of Good Hope was the name given by early European explorers to this Southern tip of the African Continent. Another name given by seafarers who battled the meeting of the great Atlantic and Pacific Oceans was ‘The Cape of Storms’.

Which will it be?