Monday, January 09, 2006

Grahamstown to Cape Town

Cape Town may be the most spectacular city on earth. To be fair, there are lots and lots of cities that I have not seen, but I also would surmise that I have seen more than your average bloke, and none surpasses Cape Town. Wedged in between a mountain range, the focal point of which is the iconic Table Mountain, and the sea, Cape Town is unsurpassable on a sunny, summer day like today.


And I may have never been happier to see a familiar city skyline as I was this morning. By the time we pulled into the central bus terminal, we were more than three hours late. The bus had left a handful of us stranded (waiting outside, mind you) in rainy, raw Grahamstown last night for more than two hours before finally pulling up. Then it chugged along apparently unaware that buses traditionally have timelines. As usual it was packed, as usual my seatmate had some mysterious smells going on (he was redolent of wet crackers and dirty socks), and as usual, climate control was a mystery -- in the darkest minutes of the night, when there was a chill in the air, the bus was freezing. Sitting in the upper deck, front seat (awesome views coming into Cape Town), I thought I was going to parbroil. It must have been 100 degrees or more, and of course there was no relief from air conditioning. Last night, after the two-hours-late mark had come and gone, I had to admit that these are the sorts of frustrations I do not miss when I am away from Africa.


Cape Town provides a useful contrast with Joburg in more ways than one. Yes, the Mother City is like a year-round work of art where Joburg just sort of shabs along. But there is more to it than that. Where Joburg's geography lends itself to sprawl, Cape Town's makes it compact. Joburg is huge, and it feels that way; Cape Town is a big city, but it feels small once you have been here for a while. Despite its beauty, though, Cape Town's surrounding slums are more immediate. There is almost no way to approach Cape Town and avoid one of the sprawling, desperate former townships. Joburg may not be conventionally pretty, but with just a few exceptions, it is quite difficult to pass through the worst of Joburg's comparable areas without making the effort to do so. It is worth noting, however, that the seeds of the ANC's housebuilding program really has borne fruit -- where once the surrounding areas were awash with corrugated tin, cardboard, and plywood shacks, there are now a lot of the "Mandela Houses," austere, solid little boxes that while modest mark an exponential upgrade over what preceded them.


Afro-pessimists have a hard time reconciling anything good from the new South Africa, but the fact remains that after being absent from here for a few years, I have noticed innumerable little differnces that the naysayers gloss over in their hand wringing. The slums are still bad, dangerous, awful places and much more needs to be done on the house building and general service-delivery front. But things are much better than they were. Crime is still a serious problem. But things are much better than they were. The informal economic sector still has too many children begging in the streets. But things are much better than they were (I noticed this in particular in Grahamstown). Things are not what they can (and I think will) be, but in so many ways, things are much better than they were, And keep in mind that all of these improvements are happening among populations that the apartheid state kept intentionally invisible. Growth in the current South Africa outpaces that of most of the 1980s even though during those days statistics and analysis managed to ignore the vast majorities in the townships and especially the nominally independent and wretched "Bantustans."


I am staying with a good friend from Rhodes, Doug Sanyahumbi, a Zimbabwean who got his PhD in biochemistry (Science! A real PhD!). We have made it a point to cross paths (that is to say I cadge a place to stay for free) whenever I have come back and I also got to see him on one of my England trips, as he spent three years working up in Birmingham. He just took a job in Cape Town, and he is sharing a flat on one of the hills that, from the right angles, looks into the bay. I will be here for most of the remainder of my trip, save for the long return to Joburg. I am very much looking forward to finishing up my research -- at the University of Cape Town's African Studies Centre and the the University of the Western Cape's Mayibuye Center. More importantly, I am looking forward to a week of South Africa's Mother City, frolicking on the beaches and seeking respite in the shadows of Table Mountain.

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