Illustrative image: Table Mountain (Image: iStock) | Digital Nomad. (Image: iStock) | Euro note. (Image: iStock) 
‘Hey, I work for a tech company,” began a Reddit entry from August 2024.
The author of the post, apparently American, proceeded to explain that he was considering moving his family to Cape Town.
“What sort of lifestyle is achievable with $200,000 [R3.6-million] to $300,000 [R5.4-million] a year? We have two children both primary school age and are aware of safety concerns.”
Not to worry, wrote back an apparently British digital nomad based in Cape Town.
“My 14-year-old would bus and train everywhere in London, he Ubers a lot here but it’s completely fine for him on his own if he’s streetwise. With the kind of money you’re on you can afford a driver for the kids anyway!”
Show this exchange to the average Capetonian these days, and chances are high that you will be met with something close to xenophobic rage.
Digital nomads – mostly young foreign professionals in tech, finance, media or insurance, who stay in Cape Town for months at a time working remotely – have become arguably the most hot-button issue of the moment.
John Maytham, host of the Afternoon Drive show on Cape Town’s most popular talk radio station, Cape Talk, says it is a topic which has the studio switchboards lighting up like a Christmas tree.
“I would say around 80% of the public reaction I get on this subject is negative,” Maytham told Daily Maverick.
From the perspective of the politicians at the City of Cape Town, this is an absolute no-brainer. Digital nomads already have jobs, so they don’t need employment here; they arrive with deep pockets and spend lavishly on food, entertainment and accommodation, pumping money into the local economy.
What’s the problem?
Log on to practically any social media platform and you will hear Capetonians arguing one case in particular: that digital nomads are disrupting the local markets through the weight of their (largely) Western currencies, driving restaurant and accommodation prices to levels completely unaffordable to locals.
“My mom was born and raised in Cape Town,” says Tiktokker Azee Green in a video viewed tens of thousands of times.
“I was born and raised in Cape Town, and I probably will never move out of home unless I live with someone else. I cannot afford to compete against the euro and the pound and the dollar.”
Tiktokker Jaxx-Amahle put things more bluntly in a video in late November.
“I suggest you heed this call and you listen closely: what is happening in Cape Town is unsustainable,” she tells the camera.
“That little Utopia is going to combust. And granted, at this stage, it is black and brown people who can’t afford to live in the city so no one cares – but white South Africans, you are next, I promise you. Because the rand is the rand is the rand. It’s not the euro and it’s not the dollar. And you will also be outpriced living in that city.”
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One of the complicating issues is just how little data there is on this matter. In fact, there’s none.
The City of Cape Town admits that it does not know how many digital nomads are living and working in Cape Town.
Alderman James Vos pointed Daily Maverick to the Cape Town Digital Nomads Facebook group, which he said had 4,800 members. In fact, it has almost 17,000 members – but this is an obviously unreliable metric, since some members appear to be locals, and naturally not every digital nomad will be a member of the group.
Vos’s point was, however, that the number of members on the group paled in comparison with the Facebook groups for other digital nomad hotspots, like Lisbon, Bali and Medellin in Colombia.
It is highly likely that Cape Town attracts far fewer digital nomads than some of its international counterparts in safer locations. Indeed, on the website Nomads.com, which ranks destinations for digital nomads based on public feedback, Cape Town is listed at only number 36 – lower even than Lagos (31), apparently because Lagos is perceived as safer.
Daily Maverick canvassed co-working spaces around Cape Town, popular for use as offices by digital nomads, as to what proportion of their members they estimated to be foreign nationals.
The year-round average is 10-15%, said Cape Town Office; about 10%, reported Cube Workspace. A “significant portion”, estimated Workshop17.
The implementation of the South African government’s remote work visa – introduced by Home Affairs in May, just before the elections, after lobbying from the Western Cape government since 2021 – should mean that in future there will be some nomad numbers available.
Daily Maverick’s questions to Home Affairs regarding the take-up of the remote work visa went unanswered via email and WhatsApp for a week.
The new visa allows digital nomads to stay in South Africa for up to three years. Crucially, if they are spending more than six months here in a year, they need to register with SARS to pay tax.
This could go some way towards mollifying public resentment since one of the major current critiques of digital nomads is that they benefit from South African public services and spaces (roads, beaches and so on) for months on end without paying tax beyond VAT.
The question is whether digital nomads will bother to secure a remote work visa – when under the current system it is perfectly possible for them to stay in South Africa for long periods without one.
On forums like Reddit, one of the selling points of Cape Town as a digital nomad destination is how easy it is to live there indefinitely after initially entering on a 90-day tourist permit.
“You can practically stay here forever without being a resident,” one poster enthused.
“Come into the country, extend [your tourist visa] for another 3 months to 6 months. After 6 months you take a vacation and come back. Just repeat.”
Many nomads do what they term a “border run” or a “visa run”, instead of extending their tourist visa.
YouTube video.
“Another way to get around this visa extension [issue] is by doing a visa run, which is what I did. In order to do a visa run you need to go to a non-neighbouring country for an unspecified amount of time,” she said.
Amy ended up taking a holiday in Zanzibar for two weeks.
“There aren’t any hard rules about how long you should be gone. However, if you’re only gone for about three or four days, and then you come back and try to get a fresh visa, they might only give you a week or two weeks because they think you’re just trying to do a visa run.”
To work in South Africa, even remotely, without a work permit is technically illegal.
Online, nomads swap tips: “Yes you can simply come to SA on a tourist visa and work from there. Nobody cares. Just tell the immigration officer you’re there for tourism.”
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Are digital nomads skewing Cape Town’s rental market?
It depends on who you ask.
Neil Viljoen, a ReMax estate agent working largely in the City Bowl and Atlantic Seaboard areas, says the arrival of digital nomads has been a “massive player in the market”.
Viljoen said that many Cape Town-based property agencies now target digital nomads in their advertising.
“We have people coming for three, four, five months at a time and they pay good money. For a one bedroom, they’ll pay R25,000-R30,000 a month.”
Online, a common refrain from digital nomads is that Cape Town allows them to live “a 5-star lifestyle on a 3-star budget”: 3-star by Western standards.