Cape Town: Where Ann Arbor, Michigan ............. meets Selma, Alabama

See our Cape Town album at Cape Town

After our safari tour of southern Africa ended at the Johannesburg airport, we headed to Cape Town on a six-day independent exploration with friends Gail and Janet.  What a beautiful city!  It sits on a gentle slope above a wide bay, dominated by an enormous  sandstone  monolith called Table Mountain, rising 3500 feet into the sky and flat as… well… you know.

It was out first real encounter with modern African culture, and we were charmed.  Our prior three weeks were spent in four remote bush camps—beautiful, well-appointed, and well-staffed, to be sure—but the tour was designed for the wildlife, not the people.  We spent eight days in Botswana, and never even saw their currency.  Our only contact outside the bush was the last couple of days in Victoria Falls, Zimbabwe.  The Falls, on the Zambezi River, were magnificent and the small city of Vic Falls on the Zimbabwe side of the river was dotted with craft markets and outfitters and hotels, but they had a supermarket and local restaurants, too.  It was way low season, so there weren’t a lot of tourists around.  There is something dreadfully wrong in Zimbabwe (South Africa’s neighbor to the north) and we mention it here as a counterpoint to what we would find in Cape Town.

We knew something was wrong immediately when the hawkers began thrusting Zimbabwe bills at us through the bus window when we pulled into Victoria Falls.  They are selling their old hyper-inflated currency to the tourists for more than it was worth when it was in circulation. So you can buy a $30,000,000,000,000 note (that’s thirty trillion dollars) for a couple of bucks, and various denominations in the millions and billions for something less.  While you wouldn’t have known it from our experience at the bush camps, Zimbabwe is fucked up.

Zimbabwe bank note 2008;
Below its current value in constant dollars

 

The whites in Zimbabwe (Southern Rhodesia at the time) were rightfully dethroned in 1980, but it has been on a tragic, downward trajectory ever since.  The government is comprised of equal parts corruption and incompetence, with an icing of oppression. It’s all headed up by Robert Mugabe, who has been in power since independence.  Transparency International ranks Zimbabwe near the top of the list for corruption, with only a dozen countries ranked more corrupt (including Iraq and Afghanistan, two regimes that we die for and pay for).  Hyperinflation just four years ago was running at figures variously described as 23.1 million per cent, or 11.4 million per cent.  Whichever.  It was a lot.  Their currency became worthless (hence the hawkers), and they finally gave up.  THEY HAVE NO CURRENCY.  They use U.S. dollars almost exclusively, and the bills are dark, shop-worn, and thin; though they are fairly new, they would have been burned in the U.S .years ago.  These bills have been around.

A friend sent us an article that described the current economic condition.  After the government paid salaries and expenses at the end of 2012 (that’s a few weeks ago), the cash balance in Zimbabwe was $217, “the same financial standing as a fourteen-year old girl after a really good birthday party.”  Unemployment is 80%, and they been importing basic grain for the past dozen years from neighboring Zambia , to which Zimbabwe had expelled its successful white farmers beginning in 2000. 
 

Zimbabwe makes Detroit seem functional.

 

Now to Cape Town

Like Zimbabwe, South Africa extricated itself from minority white rule.  But the results were very different, if our six days in Cape Town gave us an accurate observation. 

The city is beautiful, with colonial architecture, and tremendous views of Table Bay to the west and Table Mountain to the east.  It has remarkable city parks and botanical gardens, including the 17^th century Company’s Gardens, a Dutch legacy that is right downtown, and Kirstenbosch Botanical Gardens, the 19^th century wonder bequeathed by Cecil Rhodes.  Occasionally a stiff southeasterly wind blows over Table Mountain, creating a thick white blanket of clouds that locals call the Table Cloth.  It is a glorious sight, with thick billows of white pouring over the rim of the mountain like a waterfall.  The clouds dissipate over the edge before reaching the city on the slope, which basks in bright summer sunshine.  (See the album; it is amazing.)

'Table Cloth' cascading over Table Mountain, from city park

Cape Town is a functioning cosmopolitan city, too. Nelson Mandela took over as national president in 1994, and his progressive philosophy of Truth and Reconciliation seems to have taken root in Cape Town. It is far more racially integrated than Detroit.  You see it at concerts, at museums, in the parks, in the shops and restaurants. 

 

And the city seems to work!  There is almost no litter, the street lights function, they pick up the trash, they developed their waterfront into a tourist mecca, and they meticulously maintain their many parks with pride.  They have public transportation, an aggressive public recycling program, strict zoning laws to prevent decay, and they maintain what seems to be a sustainable level of public corruption, like Chicago. Their seaside suburbs and public beaches are gorgeous.  It was enough to make us Detroiters envious as hell.

 Their legislation, post independence, is decidedly inclusive and progressive.  It is known as the Gay Capital of  Africa (same-sex marriage has been recognized since 2006, we were told), and virtually all forms of discriminatory laws on the books have been corrected since independence.  They celebrate their past, and revel in how far they have come.  Robben Island, their version of Alcatraz in Table Bay where Mandela was imprisoned for 18 of his 27 convict years, is a national park and World Heritage Site.  They have public statues and historical plaques everywhere, and several museums are dedicated to the anti-apartheid struggle; it is impossible to come away from Cape Town ignorant of the social transformation that has taken place there in less than two decades.

We weren’t deluded into believing that South Africa is a harmonious Utopia, though, and there is trouble in paradise.  You don’t have to travel far from Cape Town to see the Townships—the enormous segregated slums that ring Cape Town—and the other South African cities, too.  They were legislated as racial ghettos by the white government in the the early 1900s, and blacks and ‘coloureds’ were forcibly relocated from the cities.  They are still there. And some of the Townships, like Langa, one of many near Cape Town, have populations over a million.  The legislation that created the Townships for ‘non-whites’ is long gone, but the segregation and the poverty are not.
 

There is a quirky side to the South African racial relations, too.  There was a U.S. Civil War naval battle in Cape Town in 1863, and it had an impact. (We heard about it from a couple of sources in Cape Town, and we didn’t believe it, either.  But we later found it on the internet, so it is true).  The Confederate warship CSS Alabama operated around Cape Town in 1863, conducting raids on Union commercial shipping.  Some of the naval engagements were big events in Cape Town, as the residents gathered on the slopes above the city to watch the spectacle play out in Table Bay.  We’d say they were rooting for the South, if we had to guess.  The sailors of the Alabama were treated as celebrities on shore leave in Cape Town, and they left behind some cultural pollination that continues to flower today.  Like minstrel shows.  Minstrel shows!  And the New Year celebration known locally as “klopse”, where the local blacks parade in colorful silk outfits and face make-up and parasols, accompanied by brass bands and dancing.  It is a big local holiday on January 2, and the parades continue through the neighborhoods on Saturdays for the rest of the month (which is where Linda, Gail, and Janet were engulfed in it.  See album.) 




Cape Coons



We described the scene to an elderly Afrikaner woman a few days later.  “Oh.  You mean the Coons”.  “I beg your pardon?” we asked, not sure we had heard right.  “We call them the Cape Coons,” she repeated, smiling sweetly.  We asked if this were a derogatory term, and she assured us that it was not; they are commonly referred to as the Cape Coons.  “But the tourists are starting to complain,” she explained.  “Some are starting to call them the Cape Minstrels.”   We found this on the internet, too, so we know it to be true.

We learned a few other peculiar terms.  Like kaffir ,which is like the N word, only worse; moofie, a term for a homosexual (an Afrikaans term derived from a Dutch word that refers to a castrated sheep); and bergie, their term for the street people, and it refers to the homeless who live in the hills (“bergs”, in Afrikaans) and wander around parts of the city during the day. “They are very funny,” another older Afrikaner woman told us, then she launched into a pretty clever imitation of a toothless bergie complaining about the quality of her handout.  “And they walk around pushing shopping trolleys!” she said.  We didn’t tell her we’d seen it before.
 

This same woman, whom we met during intermission at a folk music concert at the University of Cape Town, gave us a little background on some Bushman folk tunes from the Kalahari we had just heard.  “We used to hunt them, you know, until the 1930’s,” she said with what might have been remorse.  We had heard the story before, but it’s not a subject you pursue with any enthusiasm with a local black bush guide in Botswana. “Wow,” Roger ventured.  “Like as a nuisance, or for sport?”  “For sport,” she said.  “But we don’t talk about it.”

 

Being a Tourist on the Cape



Cape Point, as far south as you can go in Africa

The townships notwithstanding, The Western Cape is one of the most beautiful places we’ve seen.  We took a day-trip tour to the Cape of Good Hope.  Along the way we saw some of the most dramatic seascapes anywhere, and we include Nova Scotia and northern California in this assessment.  We visited a penguin colony near the Cape, biked around the national park , and climbed the dramatic cliffs that divide the Atlantic from the Indian Ocean.  We took the cable car to the top of Table Mountain (one of the Seven Wonders of the Natural World, and a national park), where we hiked the craggy trails and marveled at the panorama spread out before us 3500 feet below.  We hiked around the amazing botanical park at Kirstenbosch, and took another day tour to the beautiful wine country near Stellenbosch.





Our favorite Japanese tourists thought Roger was a tourist attraction.

And we finally got to meet real locals and fellow travelers, too. Our tour of southern Africa was just a chip-shot, but for serious travelers Africa begins or ends in Cape Town.  We stayed at Shanti Gardens, an upscale but raucous backpacker hostel a short walk from downtown.  Being geezers, we opted for their quieter “residential annex” where we had rooms in a converted colonial home around the corner. We met dozens of travelers at Shanti Gardens, many on their way to or from the famous cross-continent truck safaris—taken on behemoth heavy-duty truck-buses—that go from Cairo to Cape Town and points in between.  We met an elderly trip leader, who drives the truck, but only as far north as Nairobi (“I’m getting too old for the long hauls,” he apologized.)  We met optimistic aid workers on R&R, and crazed Japanese tourists on a boating excursion out of Hout Bay.  And we met Nikki and Peter, a young couple from Holland who had a room at our “residence”.  They were an amazing pair, on holiday from their police jobs, and they were determined to suck out every bit of adventure the Cape had to offer.  Self-drive bush safaris.  The world’s highest bungi jump.  Cage scuba diving with the Great Whites.  Sand dune surf- boarding.  Night clubbing til dawn.  And they weren’t too busy to spend quality wine time on the patio with four geezers from the Midwest.  Not such an adrenalin rush there, to be sure, but they seemed to enjoy themselves just fine.