David's reflections on The Golden Arrow

The Golden Arrow

As you might imagine, Mexican food in South Africa is pretty mediocre. At least, this was the impression I got at while dining at a Mexican/Southwest fusion place in town the other night. I was there with a whole bunch of my housemates, and when asked for their opinions on their meals, just about everyone responded with something like “Ummmm, it’s….. good! Yeah.” Then again, it was probably appropriate to have low standards for a white-owned Mexican fusion restaurant on the southern tip of Africa. While joyously celebrating the end of my first week abroad with R15 tequila shots (yes, that conversion’s right!), I noticed that all the customers were white. Since this was a college-crowd restaurant in the leafy, largely white and city-proximate Southern Suburbs, that didn’t particularly stick out to me; however, the entire wait staff was also white, and that struck me as unusual. Every restaurant we had dined at previously had a majority black or wait staff. I thought to myself: where are all the black folks? And then I watched a Golden Arrow bus drive by, packed with black and colored people.

Exploring the bus terminal downtown

If you’re out and about in Cape Town, you’ll constantly see the Golden Arrow buses, which serve the millions of black and colored people who live on the Cape Flats and its surrounding communities and boast the slogan “The Bus for Us!” Along with the Cape Metrorail and the Minibus Taxi, these buses do the work of moving hundreds of thousands of schoolchildren and adults around Cape Town every day, and it just so happens that one route passes right by the Mexican restaurant where we were leisurely dining. As my peers and I sat there preparing for a night out on Long Street, buses full of black and colored folks buzzed by, on the first stretch of a long journey away from the city and out to the distant Cape Flats.

The District 6 Museum

Apartheid-era laws forced black and colored families to relocate from integrated neighborhoods close to the center of Cape Town and out to new racially segregated areas on the distant Cape Flats. Earlier this month we visited the District Six Museum, where we learned about the process of forced relocation that tore families apart, separated neighbors, and distanced black and colored South Africans from their jobs in the city. This forced geographic segregation of racial groups was one of the defining characteristics of Apartheid, and even though the policy of Apartheid has ended and been replaced with Democracy, the legacy of this perverse policy remains alive in South Africa.

And that brings us back to that Mexican restaurant, where cosmopolitan white college students can order the “Obama” burger, get “New York Style Meatballs” in their “El Burrito”, and otherwise kick back and enjoy their privilege, while outside the people who have been oppressed and exploited for all of this nation’s history are shipped out of the city, back to distant and deprived townships on the Cape Flats.

And no amount of $1.50 tequila will let me forget it.

Table Mountain and the city bowl as viewed from Signal Hill