It was brutal, and yet...the place is compelling, and fascinating, and in general, something of a sensory overload. Very unlike anywhere else we've ever been. And since we were there to tourist, tourist we did, because Cape Town is gorgeous and full of amazing (if sometimes difficult) things to see.
As luck would have it, our final lovely and plush hotel was directly next door to the Springbok Experience Rugby Museum, and so that was our first stop. The ground floor contains the "experience," wherein one can play all sorts of goofy interactive games...
...or take a photo and then plaster one's face into any of various Springbok photos. And so Mike did. (Haaaah.)
The upper floor contains the museum detailing the development of rugby in South Africa, although I must confess that all I knew about the Springboks (the national rugby team) I learned from the movie 'Invictus,' which is the based-on-a-true-story version of how Nelson Mandela used the Springboks--a very white, very Afrikaner team that had been sanctioned and boycotted and protested by the majority of the rugby-playing world for the better part of 50 years--to unite all citizens of the country after he was elected president in 1994. Guaranteed it'll make you cry. And, predictably, I cried at the 1990s-era exhibit in this museum, too. (Yes, I cried in a rugby museum. What.)
From the 1960s through the 1980s, the Springbok team, seen as a symbol of racism and oppression of people of color in South Africa, met with increasingly hostile resistance from anti-apartheid protesters especially in New Zealand, home of their greatest rival, the All Blacks. This photo is a page from the 1981 Book of the Unwelcome, containing the signatures of 3,764 citizens of New Zealand expressing condemnation of apartheid and demanding that the South African rugby team go home.*
Very nearby to the rugby museum is the Two Oceans Aquarium, and so we went, because I heart aquariums. This tank was simply labeled "NEMOS" at the top, and boy, were they! (All the little fishies lying on the acrylic cylinder are completely healthy: since they've all been raised in captivity around said cylinder, they think it's their reef.)
Never seen anything like this before: a basket starfish. (Google it. So amazing!)
A tank full of Knysna seahorses, from the southern coast.
The aquarium's centerpiece tank--a huge one with sharks and turtles and some massive fish--also had a handful of these gorgeous, meter-plus-wide rays. Loooove.
This place even had a little "beach" full of rockhopper penguins! One of them was quite noisy, bellowing on occasion for no apparent reason, and he sounded almost exactly like one of those little cylinders that you invert to make a cow sound. Heh.
Post-aquarium, we got cleaned up for dinner and headed to the fantastic Kloof Street House, a lovely (if far trendier than I'm comfortable with...!) restaurant with really excellent food.
We got to eat outside on their shabby-chic-fairy-garden terrace...
...and man, was the food good. And copious. Like idiots, we ordered starters of baked camembert (yummmm) and some garlic prawns, and then decided to go for that evening's special: the massive seafood platter you see above. So we doubled up on shrimp, but there was also calamari; a slab of kingslip fish; mussels; and coconut rice underneath everything to soak up the juice. (The thing also came with some excellent steak fries, and, because I'm a veggie addict, I insisted on a big side salad as well, which was fantastic.)
The next morning, we headed out on the Footsteps to Freedom tour, a walking tour through some of Cape Town's historic districts, focusing on the rise and fall of apartheid. I suppose there's no better place to insert this extraordinarily shortened (yet somehow overly wordy) explanation of apartheid--the racist system of laws and oppression that kept South Africa's white Afrikaner minority in power for nearly 50 years--so here goes.
As usual, it all began with European colonialism and the slave trade, which officially lasted from 1652-ish until 1834. First Dutch colonists, then British, and then Dutch again seized fertile and profitable lands from native African populations, and with the country's independence in 1910, legislation was passed to entrench already-existing racial discrimination with regard to labor, salary, housing areas, and even whom was allowed to travel. In response, the African National Congress--future activist group of one Nelson Mandela, among other extraordinary figures--was formed in 1912 (!), and in successive years, the ANC would ally itself with Indian, Chinese, coloured**, and Communist groups fighting against increasingly discriminatory apartheid policies, the main body of which became law in 1948, when the (Afrikaner) National Party swept to power in elections already limited mostly to white voters.
By this point in time, racial discrimination in the areas of education, good jobs with living wages, education, property ownership, and voting rights (none for blacks, and eventually none for coloured) had been codified, and this was all before the NP made things far worse with yet another series of laws designed to limit even further the rights of anyone not white. People of any color were restricted to specific geographic areas, and black people could only travel if issued passes; interracial marriage made illegal; police granted the right to arrest any person of color at any time for any reason; public amenities (e.g., toilets, benches, parks, theaters, you name it) made separate and deliberately unequal; public gatherings and demonstrations banned; education separated by race and then dumbed-down (assuming there'd be no need for higher education in the black "homelands"); etc., etc., etc., etc. It was like Jim Crow on steroids, and most of these laws were on the books until the 1990s, when the disapproval of the rest of the world finally sunk in, and more liberal leadership rose to the top of the National Party. Mandela was released from prison; free elections were organized; the nation's first democratic constitution created; and the long process of unwinding all of that evil finally began.
Friends, there's obviously way more to this topic, but the bottom line is that this kind of racist crap and increasingly severe, violent, legislated oppression were just the state of things in South Africa (officially) from 1948 until 1994.*** After which point there was much rejoicing and hope, but, as usual in circumstances so horrifying and so protracted, there's still a long, long way to go to create an equitable state of existence for citizens of all colors. (Hmm...sounds so familiar...)
And now, back to our tour.
Our guide, Ivor, was a white Cape Town native whose family moved to Israel in the 1980s because the racial situation in the city was "unbearable." He moved back in the 1990s and raised his family there, and now leads these tours--and trust me when I say the guy's knowledge base is both broad and deep. He knows something about everything and loves his city deeply.
We started at the Mount Nelson hotel, Cape Town's counterpart to the Victoria Falls Hotel. (That is to say, a luxury hotel opened in 1899 by the British, with the intent of catering to wealthy and/or famous white visitors. It was apparently the first hotel in South Africa to have hot and cold running water, and was painted pink in 1918 to celebrate the end of WWI, starting a brief craze in Europe for painting hotels pink.)
A stroll past a replica of the gardens planted by the Dutch settlers who colonized this area in the 17th century in order to supply fruits and vegetables to ships rounding the cape.
Parliament, where apartheid laws were born, and where they eventually died.
The Slave Lodge museum, originally built in 1679 to house slaves brought from Madagascar, Guinea, Angola, parts of southeast Africa, India, Indonesia, and Malaysia, both by independent, landed, Dutch farmers and by the Dutch East India Company. (The slave trade, equally as brutal as that in the Americas, persisted until 1807, after the British occupied the Cape and banned the slave trade in the entirety of the empire; emancipation, however, did not occur until 1834, and even then, indentured servitude was the next step to freedom for many slaves.)
Memorial at the site of the former slave market, right in front of the Dutch Reformed Groote Kerk. "You could go to church in the morning and buy your slaves in the afternoon," said Ivor. (The Dutch Reformed church in South Africa was the only Christian church to officially support apartheid, a stance which it defended until 1986. You can actually see the church to the immediate left of the Old Slave Lodge, in the previous photo.)
Nearing the Grand Parade, we stumbled onto some I was not expecting at all: South African Art Deco. Gorgeous.
Looks just like something from New York...
...except with elephants on the corners, instead of eagles.
And monkeys. (There's also a 118-meter-long Art Deco frieze depicting scenes from the colonial history of South Africa that wraps around three sides of this building, but I just could not manage to get a decent photo of it. Sigh. It's astounding. Same for the carved animals on the imposing General Post Office building, which is across the street from this place. I am the worst at photos.)
Another amazing building. (At least I got this one.)
Cape Town's magnificent--and massive--City Hall, which, nowadays, sits mostly unused, except for the occasional philharmonic orchestra concert.
Just a few months prior to our visit, this statue of Mandela was installed on the front steps of City Hall, where, in 1990, he gave his first public address just a few hours after his release from 27-plus years in prison, to a peaceful crowd numbering in the hundreds of thousands.
Near Greenmarket Square is this small memorial to the Purple Rain protest, which occurred on September 2, 1989. A group of peaceful protesters marching towards Parliament was met by fully-geared-up riot police, who brought water cannons full of purple dye to use on the marchers, the better to ID and then to arrest protesters with). In the chaos, one protester somehow managed to commandeer one of the cannons and turned it on the police (and the nearby National Party headquarters, hah), and the next day, graffiti appeared throughout the city proclaiming, "The purple shall govern!" (a play on a line in the ANC's Freedom Charter, "the people shall govern"). This was the last protest suppressed by police during the rule of apartheid; eleven days later, 30,000 people--led by Archbishop Tutu, clad in purple--marched through the center without police interference.
Chicken wire sculpture of Mandela in the oddly-named Mandela Rhodes building, the atrium of which is full of photos and insanely inspirational quotes from this extraordinary man. The one behind the sculpture is from his inaugural address on May 9, 1994, and reads, "We enter into a covenant that we shall build a society in which all South Africans, both black and white, will be able to walk tall, without and fear in their hearts, assured of their inalienable right to human dignity – a rainbow nation at peace with itself and the world." (Seriously, this guy was one in 110 billion; I am positive there was no one else in history who could have negotiated a peace deal with that racist, unjust government, and brought hope and freedom into such an oppressive society, with such grace, forgiveness, and courage.)
After our tour, we decided to tackle something a little lighter, especially given that the weather was decent (i.e., not crazy windy): Table Mountain, looming grandly and strikingly over the city, and--in my opinion--making it one of the most beautiful naturally-set cities I've seen.
View from the cable car going up, with the Lion's Head to the left. The cable car has an elevation gain of over 1,000-meters, and the (Swiss-designed) cars rotate so that everyone gets to see the entire view.
The top is a ginormous rock pile....
...but the views, as one might expect, are stellar.
Cape Town looking east-ish...
...and west-ish.
Just visible off the coast is Robben Island, the former prison colony where Nelson Mandela was held for 18 years. (The prisoners' cells were 7 feet wide and 9 feet long.)
There's apparently all kinds of wildlife at the top of Table Mountain, but all we really saw were a few birds; some calla lilies in the wild (ok, that's actually pretty neat)...
...and a couple of these ridiculously chubby marmoty things called dassies. Hee.
Back on the ground, with a little time to burn before dinner, we went back to the subject of apartheid with a visit to the small, but deeply moving, District Six Museum. Established in 1867, District Six was a neighborhood in Cape Town where many races and religions lived and worked harmoniously. (These included Malay, Eastern European, Indian, African, English-speaking white, and coloured residents; Christians, Muslims, Jews, Hindus, and practitioners of traditional African religions; immigrants, ex-slaves, and refugees; artisans, musicians, merchants, laborers, etc., etc.) Conditions were crowded and somewhat impoverished, to be sure, but community spirit reigned. In 1901, a plague outbreak gave government officials an excuse to "quarantine" (i.e., relocate) District Six's black citizens to a township outside the city and to raze parts of the district, and thereafter, as some wealthier residents began to move into the city's greener, more spacious hills, the ensuing decrease in resources led to an increase in the neighborhood's state of neglect.
In 1966, District Six--by now, predominantly populated by coloured families that been there for generations--was declared a "White area" by the prime minister, again under the guise of slum- and crime-clearing; however, the actual goals were to end the dangerous mixing of races (the horror!) and to reclaim prime city real estate for white Cape Town residents. Beginning in 1968, the government forcibly moved the non-white residents of District Six to tiny, shoddily-built tenements in the wasteland suburbs of Cape Flats, 25 kilometers to the southeast of the city, destroying both the residents' sense of community and their way of life. Some hold-outs managed to stay in the district into the 1970s, but ultimately, over 60,000 people were removed from the area, and most of the remaining structures bulldozed into oblivion by the early 1980s. (The only buildings left standing were places of worship.) Astonishingly, the human rights violations that occurred left a lingering sense that the land was tainted, and to this day, it remains mostly empty. The District Six Museum, created and run by activists and former residents, exists to commemorate what was lost there; to help protect the land from insensitive development; and to work towards restitution and social justice for former residents of all colors.**** We took a short guided tour with Mr. Brown, a very kind and passionate Muslim man of Malaysian descent, whose family was one of those displaced.
The Museum is housed in a former church; the map on the floor displays a layout of the neighborhood, with notes and signatures from former residents.
Mural on the upstairs wall commemorating the district and its citizens.
Street signs from the neighborhood, preserved by (of all people) one of the government's bulldozer operators.
"Whites only" sign.
Single rooms like this one served as entire homes for families relocated to the townships; this one was reconstructed by Nomvuyo Ngcelwane, who, after her family's eviction from District Six, lived with her parents, two sisters, and a brother in a single, upstairs room exactly like this one. (I asked Mr. Brown how many people typically lived in these rooms, and he said, "If you were a family of 10 people, then 10 people lived here.")
Post-museum--and radically switching gears again--we got ready for dinner and the big game: the Springboks were playing Scotland this evening--in Scotland, unfortunately--and we decided to head towards a pub in the Newlands stadium neighborhood to watch the game. While Barrister's wasn't nearly as raucous as we'd been led to believe, we had a lovely dinner and a fun time cheering for the local team, looking like idiots in our brand-new Bokke gear.
Here I have to confess that Scotland is my team, so I was only cheering for the Springboks on the outside. (Sorry, South Africa. I tried to be a fan, but it just wasn't in me, although now that I have your shirt, I will wear it proudly any time you're not playing Scotland.)
And while the Springboks triumphed on this particular occasion--much to my (very quiet) chagrin, and that of the other two Scotland fans in the pub--it was really fun to be involved in something so all-encompassing: on our way into the hotel, no fewer than three people (none white) asked us the results of the game, and enthusiastically shook Mike's hand when we told them the news. It was all very warm and fuzzy, and a nice, laid-back way to spend our final night in South Africa.
The next morning it was off to the airport for the looooong flight home (11 hours to Munich, and then another one to Zürich)...but I'd go again in a heartbeat. What an extraordinary place. (Obviously, there's so much more to see than just the handful of stuff we saw, and it's all still in my heart and in my head. Can't seem to stop writing about it, at any rate.)✦
Next up, something very bougie and very European: a long weekend in Paris, plus a few other things that have happened since November. As things are wont to do.
*Obviously, this is the condensed version of the rugby/apartheid story. To generalize in a big way, the black population viewed Springbok rugby a major symbol of white oppression (and cheered against the team at every opportunity), and the white population loved and supported them wholeheartedly, and how Mandela managed to use the sport to bridge the divide--and to help prevent an actual civil war between the races!--is a miracle for the ages, and one worth reading about. The Wikipedia article is here, and a good condensed summary, as well as an indication of the lingering legacy of apartheid policies in rugby is here. (I also just finished the book upon which 'Invictus' was based--a very interesting read after Mandela's memoir, since it added exterior perspectives on Mandela's leadership during the time prior to the 'Invictus' story. Which, by the way, was not covered in his memoir; it ended as he became president in 1994.)
**It was the intermarrying of slaves from Madagascar, Guinea, Angola, parts of southeast Africa, India, Indonesia, and Malaysia, as well as the Dutch, English, and native African peoples (specifically, in Cape Town, the Khoisan) that created the "coloured" population in South Africa. Unlike in the US, "coloured" isn't an antiquated, derogatory term (at least, not for many people), and simply means someone of mixed heritage, whatever that heritage may be. It's also the reason Archbishop Desmond Tutu began referring to South Africa as the "Rainbow Nation," which is pretty much the most beautiful idea I can think of.
***"But why was this explanation necessary?" you might ask yourself. "I already know most of this anyway," you might say. Well, the history major in me is compelled to explain the history of the places we visit, because history always informs the place (whatever it may be) in modern times, and I kinda miss academic writing on occasion...but mainly, this history is still so recent, and writ so, so large in modern South Africa. The intensely negative ramifications of what apartheid did to South Africa, and to its coloured and black populations in particular, will be felt for generations yet. (For other people like me, always going down the historical rabbit hole, here's a tremendous and readable article on the pre-history of apartheid.)
****Efforts at property reclamation, restitution, and/or rebuilding by former citizens have been theoretically in the works since 1994, but the legal process has (obviously) been geologically slow, and complicated tremendously by claims to land ownership outside of those of former residents, as well as by the number of government agencies and various land and legal commissions that all somehow need to be involved in order to determine who gets what. (A small amount of housing for former residents has been constructed, but something like 90% of people who've filed claims for restitution or housing there--including claims made in the 1990s which remain unaddressed--still have nothing.)
✦Um...sometimes I know I probably dwell on the nastiness of history too much, or lecture too much, or maybe convey too much how weighed-down by liberal guilt I feel, so I want to state absolutely and for the record: Cape Town, whatever its issues, is a remarkable and wonderful place, and has so many good things going for it. Good people, good food, amazing architecture, gorgeous scenery, and so much potential for so much more good that it's sickening. If you get the chance, go.
