After
two weeks in Johannesburg, we boarded a plane for Cape Town. While I was
excited to go to Cape Town, I was also really sad to be leaving. I had more
expectations set for what Cape Town would be like because I knew many people
who had been before. So for that reason, I wasn’t expecting to be shocked as
much as I was.
On
every first Thursday of the month, downtown Cape Town’s art galleries,
restaurants, and boutiques open their doors for the evening for a festive
street fair of sorts. I was excited to check out the local art scene on our
first night. While I did in fact enjoy First Thursdays, I was shocked to be
almost completely surrounded by white people.
Johannesburg’s
population is 73 percent black, 6 percent colored, and 16 percent white. We
often found ourselves, both in class and outside of class, in majority black
spaces. Even when we did go to neighborhoods that are predominantly white in
Johannesburg, it felt really strange and almost wrong. This is just a feeling I
am going to have to learn to grapple with because of Cape Town’s racial
demographics being so radically different from Johannesburg. Cape Town is 9
percent black, 45 percent colored, and 43 percent white.
How
I first felt in Cape Town’s First Thursdays reminded me so much of Sandton and
Melrose Arch. Both of these places had a posh and exclusive environment.
Because we spend all day enveloped in thoughts about inclusion and exclusion,
it’s hard to simply enjoy First Thursdays for what it is without thinking about
it in the context of a post-Apartheid society.
On one of our
first days we went to the V&A Waterfront development after biking along the
coastline. That was a really interesting experience because, again like Sandton
City mall, it felt it could have been anywhere else in the world. It was a
beautiful, luxurious shopping along a pier that I enjoyed, but again I felt
strange about being in a highly commercialized space design for tourists and
the wealthy. But, of course with a place this beautiful, a tourism
infrastructure is inevitable and also a good source of income for the city.
Someone at a bar
in Johannesburg told me he didn’t like Cape Town because it was too perfect and
now that I’m here I understand what he means. It has one of the most beautiful
places I’ve ever seen, but as we learned its landscape is what made it even
easier for the Apartheid government to segregate people. White people were able
to stay in the beautiful coastal neighborhoods by the beach and the
cosmopolitan downtown city bowl. While, black and colored people were moved out
to the cape flats far from the central business district and in horrible
conditions. Even 20 years post-Apartheid, those facts remain almost unchanged.
The racial makeup of each neighborhood is still pretty similar to what it was
in the past. For example, we are staying in the Sea Point neighborhood. It is a
beautiful area by the ocean with incredible views of Lion’s Head Mountain.
While it has been getting more diverse with time, it still remains at 67
percent white and 25 percent black and colored. We have also heard a lot about the
rising costs in the area that could continue to make it inaccessible to people.
Many of these feelings I have are conflicting but that is simply the nature of
life.
By Debora Almeida
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