My first glimpses of Cape Town were seen through the window
of an airplane. Sitting three seats in from the nearest window, the first image
I saw besides the sky was of the ocean, vast and glittering blue. The plane
banked for a turn, and when we leveled out I saw between heads the massive
stone immensity of Table Mountain, level with the altitude of our descending
plane. After that, I saw glimpses of city and structures before others’ heads
blocked the window, and at last we touched down.
We were greeted like family by Vernon, Marita, Ben and Liz,
and led out of the terminal to where a bus was waiting. I knew from my prior
research that the Cape Town International Airport was located on the Cape
Flats, an expansive low-lying region to the east of Table Mountain and the city
proper, an area where many of the black townships are located. Our bus took us
out of the airport and along a smooth highway, passing shiny warehouses and
billboards that advertised the new BMW 4 series, an Afrikaans historical drama,
and a new texting app. So far the Cape Town I had seen was consistent with the
city’s designation as World Design Centre for 2014, with the glossy images from
South African Airways’ promotional Sawubona magazine, the high-tech
splendor of Cape Town International Airport, and with the New York Times’
recent article that named Cape Town the #1 place to visit in 2014.
And then, as our bus climbed a ramp to pass over the main
highway, a wall of shacks rose into view. Gleaming in the African sunlight,
this city of haphazardly built shanties confirmed one of my suspicions about
Cape Town: that it would lay bare, in plainly apparent terms, the vast
differences between the lives of people who live on opposite ends of the social
hierarchy. I saw a black child running down a dirt pathway between shacks,
kicking up dust with his bare feet. The settlement was ringed with razor wire
topped fences that extended for miles along the highway and even crossed
rivers. At times the highway dropped down slightly below ground level, so that
all that could be seen of the informal settlements were the thousands of
electrical poles jutting up into the sky, each anchoring a dozen tangled power
wires. A middle class neighborhood bordered the other side of the highway, and
Newlands stadium was visible past the townships. Minutes later, we passed a
manicured golf course, seen through densely wooded trees on the side of the
highway. A few of my co-educators later described disbelief upon seeing that
golf course and the wealthy white men who were driving by in their carts, but I
cannot genuinely say I was surprised. From the moment I first saw the
shantytown from the highway, I grimly acknowledged that the disparities I had
heard about were as undeniable and plainly realized as I could ever have
imagined.
Though a discussion of Apartheid is too complex for this
blog post, I will say that enduring proof of South Africa’s history of brutal
racial domination and segregation is written on its face: in the very design of
the city, the distribution of residents, and the location of neighborhoods. The
environment itself was built to enforce existing codes of segregation, by
separating neighborhoods with highways and walls. The beauty I saw upon descent
into Cape Town, the immense majesty of nature in grand scale, was partitioned
on the ground by a system of spatial control. Everywhere I have gone in the
Mother City I have found walls and fences, and yet everywhere I see Table
Mountain rising in the distance beyond. I’ll put my thoughts into one last
question: how can a society move on to right past wrongs when it remains built
on a foundation of past injustices?
Something tells me that South Africa will act as a looking
glass through which I can better examine my own socio-cultural context in the
United States. You can count on hearing more about that later. For now, good
night. Loch Road is sleeping, and I should be too.
Cheers,
David Andrew
University of Connecticut, Individualized Major: Health and
Social Inequality, December 2014
UConn in Cape Town, South Africa, Spring 2014
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