First published in the Daily Maverick 168 weekly newspaper.
Across the room, two round men shoo away a lawyer whose suit sleeves are kissing his knuckles while he attempts to kiss something more plump and profitable. The round men have more urgent matters to conclude. The icebergs peeking out from their noontime whiskies are disappearing fast.
Am I wrong to feel, when the plane gurgles and coughs into descent, that this cloudless hothouse is steamed pink with the worst and best aspects of our tribe, marooned here at the barrel-tip of this revolver-shaped continent? Easy targets for some gruesome, industrial-scale cataclysm. Some grand, god-like gesture. “He says the government should give the many houses it owns to the residents of Khayelitsha. Then they (the people) can rent them back to the government,” I overhear the old lady telling her lunch partner.
The scheme makes economic sense to me. It’s the kind of casino/crisis capitalism that has carried us to this point of perpetual collapse and inequality, and it appeals to the burlesque sense of doom buried somewhere prominently in my cynicism. And, isn’t it bad manners to argue with your elders?
“But what if they (the people?) decide to sell it,” one of the elderly ladies points out to the other while spraying cake crumbs on the faces staring up at her from the obituary section of the newspaper she is reading.
It is hard to keep track of what is genuine gesture of enquiry, and what is begrudging genuflection in the presence of ancient power. And what is grandiose vision. It’s even harder when you’ve been slinging bourbon cocktails on the company’s dime, smarting for a confrontation, like a guerrilla soldier waking up in the crucible of gentrified dystopia, realising that 20 years have passed since the struggle for freedom was supposed to have ended.
Realising that this is what freedom is really like. What it sounds like.
“Go to the west end of Camps Bay. The sunsets there are beautiful,” the old lady prompts, abandoning the socioeconomic treatise she was treating her friend to, as if she sensed my gloomy thoughts; sensed that something fatal was threatening to spill over.
I don’t stay to find out. I fake-search my pockets as the waiter approaches with the black ledger that will transport his 10% cut.
Cape Town is gorgeous, but it has an ugly history and its present isn’t much better. Volumes have been written and spoken about the psychic trauma it burns on to black bodies and brown minds and white souls.
Beneath Table Mountain, the city simmers with racial tension, gang violence, poverty and a looming climate shock. The last, dubbed Day Zero, has somehow, like the other three issues, disappeared, thanks to a combination of mass marketing half-cloaked as governance; analysis paralysis catalysed and radicalised into pure incomprehension by social media; and cognitive compartmentalisation necessary for holidaying. And that is the effect of Cape Town’s overwhelming natural beauty amid life-and-death bleakness of sprawling shack cities.
Places like Blikkiesdorp and Khayelitsha and the 437 other informal settlements around the city.
Cape Town is gorgeous, but it’s ugly.
I stay clear of the poverty-porn tours. Gawking at poor people. Smiling, and fake-searching my pockets every time someone comes close.
A study by a team of University of Cape Town and German social scientists found that about half of what we call “middle-class” people in SA regularly slip back and forth between poverty and stability, between R1,000 and the paradise that lies beyond it.
More than half of that half often does not make it back to the security of relative prosperity. The effect of these teleportations, the study concludes, is an impaired ability to imagine a better life or to take the daily steps needed to get there. A kind of blindness.
SA’s upper-bound poverty line is R992 per person per month. The line that divides alive from dead, economically speaking. The study also found that one in four South Africans could be classified as stably middle class or elite.
More than 50% are chronically poor. The rest, 20%, are the transients. In and out, in and out. This is the truth of our failing lunge toward prosperity for all. When you’re in Cape Town, you do your best to stay away from this truth. I do, to avoid getting pulled into those dark thoughts. Anyway, I can’t stay too long, either. I can’t afford to. Instinctively, I fake-search my pockets when I think of this truth. It’s soothing.
When you exit Cape Town by train, the view of the mountain quickly disappears, replaced by a sprawling industrial wasteland.
The four days spent gorging yourself on the wonders of the mother of cities blur and fade, and you try to zoom in on details and deeds and piece together some sort of insight or meaning.
The man in the seat in front of you can’t take it. He rolls down the metal window cover on the discordant backdrop. He turns his head away from the non-view, leaning into a slipstream aroma of baby formula, slap chips and sweat, gushing down the aisle between rows of pleather seats. A banquet of bodily emanations, betraying the pulse of patience and parting. I fake-search my pockets. The feeling of certainty and the safety of not wanting to know, beneath the lint and the loathing, is no longer there. DM168
This story first appeared in our weekly Daily Maverick 168 newspaper which is available for R25 at Pick n Pay, Exclusive Books and airport bookstores. For your nearest stockist, please click here.
