Two Cities, Contrasting Yet Identical
Jenna Canavan
What I thought was very interesting about Cape Town was how wildly different the two cities that we visited were. While Johannesburg I got a real sense of the deep history and struggle of the apartheid, and while in Cape Town I felt as if I had left South Africa entirely and was in a completely new country.
In Johannesburg we were largely focused on the issues at hand during and after the apartheid ended. The people of Johannesburg and the surrounding townships were very proud people, proud of the struggle they went through, and proud of the the struggles that faced them now. They were people with a lot of fight still left in them and with a world of courage and loyalty behind the fire inside that kept them going. It was so interesting to see how these people who had been through so much, and were still being treated unfairly, we able to never get discouraged and never back down to anything that challenged them. It was admirable and it was an atmosphere I will never forget for as long as I live. Even in Kliptown, an informal settlement outside of Soweto, we met the happiest people, and people that were determined to change the future of others.
In Cape Town, the feeling was entirely different. It was a city that had never resembled anything like Johannesburg, and never would. They were on two different diverging courses, and I think it was very interesting to see how different two cities who lived under the same apartheid rules could be so different. The fight didn’t seem so apparent in Cape Town, even though I know for sure that it was there and happening. But Cape Town has a sort of “tourist cloud” over it, which I think is a huge disadvantage for those that are still living under oppression in the townships there. Cape Town wants to appeal to the westerner it seems, and it does so by adapting to the same culture and social climate that people from the west enjoy. But being such a tourist destination, a lot of the issues at hand get clouded over and are not seemingly addressed in the way that they should be. For example, we visited Blikkiesdorp, a Temporary Relocation Area, which was supposed to be a six month ordeal, but has instead turned into a two year nightmare. And now the airport wants to build a new tarmac where the TRA is, and no one knows what lies next for this community. It makes you think that the airport wants to expand more due to a higher influx of flights coming in, and therefore the very people of Cape Town itself get ignored.
Overall the trip was extremely eye opening and I wouldn’t have changed it for the world. It has made me so much more aware of how society functions as a whole, as well as how it functions individually in countries independent from each other. Without this trip I never would’ve been exposed to the things I have seen, as well as be as conscious of the issues that are surrounding not only South Africa, but very much in America.
Comments
Post a Comment