Travel story   |   Cape Town   |   South Africa

A strange dichotomy was created in Cape Town

Text   |   Anninka Kraus
Photography   |   Tobias Kraus

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South Africa

The minute we landed in Cape Town and queued to pass immigration, we were back in Africa, on African time. Only one counter was open and the officer behind it stared at the immigration area rapidly filling up with passengers of a fully booked A380. She then shouted for her colleagues, who were apparently still on break though our plane landed on time.

 

When after five minutes, the rest of the troop one by one walked to their cubicle and, unhurried, began processing passengers, the punctual German in me already struggled with this relaxed indifference towards time. On our first visit to the continent in 2012, I learned to appreciate its values, but I failed to call them to mind after an eighteen-hour journey from Zurich.

 

As with the sudden immersion into African time, we soon sensed the perceived volatile dichotomy that underlies this country. A rigid segregation that from a cursory glance appears to be based solely on skin colour yet in retrospect reflects the tension induced by cultural identity differences. I would consider it presumptuous to voice my view on life in South Africa that I know nothing about, but curious to learn, we talked to the locals. Mostly white South Africans that is, not by intention but because they, without exception, welcomed us warmly.

 

Before our 3-week vacation to South Africa and Namibia, I met a consultant from Cape Town, for lunch. She was interviewing top management in the company I’m with to provide guidance on her client’s career development. Like most white South Africans she is of European descent and spoke English and German fluently. I assumed she is in her early sixties but she may in fact be much younger.

 

She walked slowly and her walking stick prematurely suggested old age. In much the same way, her soft-spoken, kindly appearance questioned her highly sought after competencies as management and transition coach. For her international clients she spends only two months a year at home in South Africa, and divides the remaining ten months between Europe, the States and Asia. Her experience and insights into (management) culture the world over made her very interesting to talk to. As did her views on South Africa, black women and motherhood in general.

The continent she loves most is Africa, she said, because of its slow but lively nonchalance-rhythm of life.

 

I was surprised because her lifestyle suggested anything but a relaxed attitude towards time. Yet again her busy schedule may well be the very reason she enjoys the African slow movement culture. I could well relate to her love of Africa. What we’ve seen so far is a place more vivid, colourful, and soulful than many others.

 

Minutes later when she spoke of women in the workforce and the difficulty of combining family and career, she surprised me yet again. In her opinion, the worst thing to happen to a woman was having (or opting) to stay home with the children. I expected this busy lady to be an advocate for women’s rights and equal opportunities in the workforce but not call the time she spent playing with her two year old ‘awful’. Fortunately for her, and this came as the biggest surprise to me yet, she thought, ‘black women are wonderful to look after children.’ ‘Black women,’ all of them apparently, love children and other people’s as much as their own and thus make for perfect nannies.

 

She obviously appreciated the nanny she employed to help raise her child. And I believe African women are indeed very capable of looking after children (as much as women all over the world, or men for that matter). But the unmistakable association of black skin colour with a certain profession (and by implication disqualification from other professions) was disquieting and foreign. She never spoke of ‘black women’ with disdain. But the obviousness with which she spoke was worse.

Our favourite restaurants and hotels in Cape Town and Stellenbosch
a history of racial segregation

Uthando Tour of the township of Khayelitsha

Several weeks later, while driving through the township of Khayelitsha on the Cape Flats in Cape Town, I was reminded of my conversation with the consultant when Xolani, our Uthando tour guide, spoke of the Bantu Education Act. In 1953 this legislation enforced separation of races in education and severely limited the opportunities of the Bantu. The latter term initially referred to the speakers of Bantu languages in Sub-Saharan Africa but in South Africa was used as an ethno-racial designation during apartheid. 

 

At the time, Hendrick Verwoed, who in 1958 became Prime Minister, explained this act, ‘There is no place for the Bantu in the European community above the level of certain forms of labour. What is the use of teaching the Bantu child mathematics when it cannot use it in practice? That is quite absurd. Education must train people in accordance with their opportunities in life, according to the sphere in which they live.’


A rigid if not decreed racial segregation on the employment market is still in place today but now equally discriminating against black and white South Africans. Given the country’s history, discrimination against the former is undisputed. Tobi, who works in the Swiss subsidiary of a South African private medical company, confirms that all but one of his South African colleagues in management are white. Positions in government and the administration on the other hand have been widely denied to white South Africans since the first black government took office. Furthermore BEE policy (Black Economic Empowerment) and B-BBEE (Broad-Based Black Economic Empowerment) strategy were implemented in 2003 that, as their names suggest, grant preferential treatment to black South Africans in the job market. 

 

For some, this racially selective legislation empowers the previously disadvantaged black population, others consider it revenge to redress wrongdoings of the past with yet more racial discrimination. I find it confusing in any case that a government claiming to abolish racial segregation in fact still groups its people by skin colour.


That a different skin colour however is no prerequisite for racism confirms the upsurge in widespread xenophobia (the hate of foreigners) since 1994 when South Africa’s ruling ANC party took control. The deadly attacks of black South Africans on immigrants from poorer countries such as Lesotho, Nigeria, Mozambique, Zimbabwe, and Somalia frequently made the news also in Europe. It also clearly demonstrates the implications that fear and competition in the labour market may have when the unemployment rate is 27.6% and a staggering 53.4% in the youth labour force (OECD).


The necessity of measures bringing about equal opportunities though is indisputable and painfully obvious in Cape Town. Of its estimated 4 million inhabitants, more than one in four households lived in poverty in 2016 and the high school drop-out rate was 32.7%. In 2014 13.9% of households had no income (https://www.westerncape.gov.za / capetown.gov.za).


That’s the statistics for the whole of Cape Town. The situation in specific areas at the eastern edge of Cape Town is entirely different and in fact much worse. In the Khayelitsha/Mitchells Plain district, 63% of households in 2016 lived on 4’200Rand (~280€ / 336US$) or less per month, 16.3% had no income at all.


This is where the city’s most underprivileged population lives, and you, as a tourist, won’t go unless you book a township tour. My main reason to visit any place for the first time is curiosity. But in this case I was strangely conflicted about my right to visit and gain a better understanding of these communities. Because what was expecting to see – poverty? Reading through reviews for various township tour operators, I was shocked by the motives of some visitors, who actually seemed frustrated that the townships didn’t look anything as bad as they’d expected. Why, they complained, did ‘these people’ suddenly have proper RDP housing (Reconstruction and Development Programme), nicknamed ‘dog kennels’ by the way? I would certainly not intrude on people in their homes to satisfy my interest and was ready to give up when I came across Uthando.


This not-for-profit responsible tourism organization has a different approach and takes you to three or four of its more than 40 community projects in impoverished areas. Reassured that the locals we’d meet didn’t rely on opening their homes to strangers for income but were supported by the organisation regardless of us visiting, I booked a 3-hour tour. On our third day in Cape Town we set off in a small minivan with six other participants for an hours’ drive southeast into a jumble of shanty-town shacks stretching along either side of highway N2. We drove past rows of concrete toilet blocks and blue port-a-loos and goats roaming the littered wastelands before we arrived at the Isiseko “The Foundation” Educare Centre in the township of Mfuleni.


The young children sitting in a circle on two carpets on the floor in a small room with bright yellow walls were clearly excited to see us, or just glad for the interruption. As their supervisor explained the teaching programme for different age groups that includes learning the ‘emotions’, which was never part of my kindergarden curriculum, the kids were chattering away in Xhosa, a local language with click consonants. At least fifty children and a dozen toddlers were sitting on carpets on the floor in three small rooms. These conditions that would be considered totally cramped in most parts of the world, were a privilege here for the few parents, who could afford a monthly fee of R350.


Looking at the row of brightly coloured backpacks neatly lined up against the wall, I naively hoped every child would break the vicious cycle of poverty that banished their family to one of the poorest neighbourhoods in the country. Their chances were indeed better than for most kids in poverty. But not great. At the time of our visit, 11.000 students in the Western Cape were still not accommodated for the upcoming schooling year due to the severe shortage of schools.


The eKhaya eKasi Art and Education Community Centre in Khayelitsha and organic community garden we visited afterwards were similarly in equal parts inspiring and disillusioning.


So much remains to be done. And us? We returned to our comfortable B&B and booked ahead a 6-course dinner and spa appointment on a wine estate near Stellenbosch just because the exchange rate made this ridiculously cheap for us. The hypocrisy of it was staggering – of us thinking that in three hours we’d gain a better understanding of life in townships, of a government promising equal opportunities for all since 1994 but failing miserably, and of black and white South Africans accusing each other of an entitlement mentality, which from an outsider’s perspective strangely holds true for both.

eKhaya eKasi Art and Education Community Centre
gated estate living and poverty

The extent of this disparity is ridiculous

A half-hour drive west of Khayelitsha, we had dinner at La Colombe on Silvermist estate. The restaurant and wine estate surrounded by grape vines sit high above the Constantia Valley. The abundance of fine dining restaurants that Cape Town is famed for and South Africa’s second largest township are close geographically but worlds apart in every other sense.

 

We went on our first night in town, after three meals of microwaved airplane food, but the artful presentation and quality of the food, and outstanding service is well-deserving of La Colombe’s 73rd place on the World’s 50 Best Restaurant Awards on any day.

 

What the restaurant could not deliver, the heartfelt conviviality of a home cooked dinner shared with friends, we caught up on the next night. Tobi’s colleague and his wife invited us to a South African braai (barbecue) and prepared a feast. If you are vegetarian however, you need to mention that in South Africa. In this country, even a triathlon athlete eats meat every day, often twice a day. And when you explain you’re vegetarian, and they reply, ‘Sure, no problem, we’ve got chicken as well!’ they’re not kidding. The quantities of lamb, chicken, beef and pork cooked on the outdoor barbecue recalled the days before red meat contained too much saturated fat.

 

Our hosts, we learned, moved houses in Sommerset West just two years ago and their only requirement of a new home was security gated estate living with ocean view. We stood in their living room that boasted a sweeping view of False Bay when they told us, and the security guard at the entrance gate to the estate had greeted us by name. Their new home obviously fulfilled both criteria. I hadn’t thought much about the difference between an electric fence surrounding a single home and one surrounding an estate (which is then called a security gated estate) before.

 

Then our hosts pointed out that only in the estate could they leave doors unlocked and safely walk on the recreational paths within the electrified perimeter. In Switzerland, I can safely walk almost anywhere I chose, by myself and at any time of the day or night. That unfortunately is a privilege enjoyed by women in only few countries. In South Africa, if I could afford security gated estate living, that’s where you’d find me too. In this privileged enclave fenced off from the rest of the (less privileged) world that feels strange and alien to me but offers some space to move freely at least.

 

As much as our hosts liked their new home, they almost put it on the market again last December. On the very day following the election of the new ANC president, South Africa’s ruling party, in fact. President-in-Office, Jacob Zuma, was running for a third term despite facing serious charges for corruption, money laundering and fraud. ‘This country cannot take another Zuma,’ they explained this rather drastic measure – leaving their home country – following on a political decision. With the re-election of Zuma, they expected South Africa’s economy to plummet further and property deteriorate in value, but with Cyril Ramaphosa elected Zuma’s successor instead, they were now hoping for a change for the better.

 

We also talked about the bush fire that had threatened to burn down the estate a year ago and the tremendous effort of the local fire fighters who’d tirelessly waterbombed the approaching flames. And I learned of cat shock collars that electroshock the unsuspecting animal as it passes the invisible fence surrounding the property. It seemed cats wandering through the estate are almost as frowned upon as human intruders.

 

By my third day in Stellenbosch, I was making good progress in my endeavour to visit as many popular coffee shops, restaurants and spas in proximity to South Africa’s second oldest town as I could squeeze into the three days Tobi was attending a conference. After a massage and morning tea at Babylonstoren, a historic Cape Dutch farm, I was due for a 4-course lunch and several amuse bouche deserving of at least one Michelin star at the Petit Colombe.

 

Driving through the vineyards that were just changing colour with the season towards Franschoek, I was enjoying myself. And I realized how easy, almost frighteningly so, it was to blend out the inequality surrounding me when I got pampered in a cheerful environment. Despite the constant reminder of deplorable poverty in the form of an anonymous figure in worn clothes pushing a large shopping trolley brim-full of what looked like scrap metal to me, who was speeding past at 100kmh, across the roadside rubble.

 

The night before, I was on my way to Restaurant Jardine for dinner when in the dark doorway to almost every shop, closed at 7:30pm, I noticed a homeless person. Bundled up in a blanket on the ground, they begged from the crowd frequenting the surrounding restaurants in a local language that I didn’t understand. The palpable injustice in this quaint university town with its ornate Victorian-era porches and thatched roofs that seemed incapable of hardship, brought tears to my eyes. The poverty in the townships sprawling east of Cape Town we visited just two days ago was much greater (not in magnitude for the individual but in scale), yet the misery of many was somehow anonymised by the collective and strangely paled in comparison to the hardship etched into one face.

 

I don’t mind managers working eighty-hour weeks with responsibility for thousands of staff driving a McLaren or two. I’ve met enough of them in my career to acknowledge their hard work. But when the wealthiest 1% of the population has accumulated more than half of the world’s wealth, something is seriously wrong. According to Oxfam, 128 billionaires are as rich as the poorest half of the world’s population. That is 128 people owning as much as 3.8 billion others. I’m a liberal at heart and don’t begrudge anyone their wealth but the extent of this disparity is ridiculous.

 

From Stellenbosch we returned to Cape Town, caught a flight to Windhoek and travelled south in a 4×4 rental, into the Namib Desert.

Babylonstoren