side of the moon
There’s an ugly side to the fairest Cape, writes John Matshikiza
There’s a startling image that always strikes you when you fly into Cape Town.The same thing must have struck Vasco da Gama and Jan van Riebeeck as they approached it from the sea; that extraordinary relationship between an immovable object, the huge, flat, granite mountain, and the all-too- moveable things that scurry nervously around it: the ocean, the wind, the clouds – and human history.
The Cape Peninsula has a primal energy that you can’t escape. It fills you with anticipation as the plane drifts slowly down, dreaming dreams of adventures in paradise. And yet, on the ground, nothing is quite as it should be.
My first excursion to Cape Town was in 1992, after the dust had settled on the war against all-white beaches. The taxi driver who drove me into town, a tired white man in a shabby sedan, took the first opportunity he could find to disabuse me of my sense of enchantment. I was saying how beautiful the Cape was. “Ag, it’s all right,” he growled, “but it’s the people who fuck the whole thing up. Look at how they want to live.”
We were passing our first human settlement, the overflow of the world- famous Crossroads, jumbled up against the highway that was wafting us toward the mountain and the city. “These are the ones who call themselves [Nelson] Mandela’s people,” he pointed. “What do they know? Mandela comes out of prison and he stuffs his pockets full of money and goes to live in Jo’burg.”
I bit my tongue. I knew he wanted me to say that I was one of Mandela’s people too, but that was a dead-end dialogue. Anyway, I was trying not to let him ruin my first breath of the Cape.
We drove on until we had mercifully left behind the shame of the black and coloured sprawls that he was somehow holding me and Mandela accountable for, and were finally climbing the foothills of the mountain.
We wheezed past Groote Schuur (“They do all sorts of funny things in there, like put a monkey’s heart into a man,” my guide commented.) – and then suddenly we were cresting a rise on De Waal Drive and emerging into the breathtaking vista of Table Bay.
“That’s the city of Cape Town,” the driver said, chewing round the corners of his fourth cigarette. “That’s the harbour. That’s Lion’s Head over there, that round thing. Oh, and you see out there in the bay? That’s Robben Island. Where those chaps were sitting all those years, wasting everybody’s time.”
It is an image that has never left me, one that renews itself each time I am in Cape Town.
An elderly (white) lady I got to know several journeys later put it into words for me. “We’ve lived in this house for 30 years,” she said, gazing from her Clifton Beach patio out across the placid ocean. “We feel very lucky to be here. During the bad old days, I always used to tell myself that we were living in paradise. And that,” she said, pointing towards Robben Island, “that was the serpent in the garden.”
Here, on my first day in the peninsula, however, I hadn’t yet shaped my impressions into such profound images. I was getting my first glimpses of real Capetonians: Malays surging with giddy abandon towards taxi ranks; migrant labourers from the lands across the mountains, wrapped in thick hats against the summer heat; and plenty of money, oozing in large limousines around the tree-lined streets of Sea Point.
All this human life moving with a subdued roar around the base of Table Mountain, and no one looking anyone else in the eye. Anyone who lives in Cape Town needs only to glance up at the mountain to marvel at its godlike majesty. But Capetonians seldom seem to take the time to do so. In Cape Town, everyone seems to look down at the ground and see problems.
The mountain stands like a huge, indifferent moderator between the conflicting worlds of Cape Town. Its face is turned towards the open sea, with paradise – the playground of lush, white houses, the business district and the Waterfront – dribbling down its chest.
The back of the mountain is like the dark side of the moon. Athlone, Manenberg, Guguletu, Langa (the sun), Nyanga (the moon), Mitchells Plain and Khayelitsha all huddle sullenly behind the mountain’s back.
If you’re a back-of-the-mountain person, you don’t have much truck with front-of- the-mountain people, except in the case of such unavoidable matters as work. Apart from that, you don’t even bring each other into your conversations, if you can help it.
1998. I’m downing a lazy and somehow illicit breakfast in Camps Bay, staring out towards Robben Island, looking up and watching a para-glider who has launched himself off Lion’s Head sail slowly like an eagle on the champagne air, finally landing softly on the all- white beach.
“It’s a beautiful day,” I say to someone on the phone, making what I think is a local call, to confirm an appointment on the other side of the peninsula.”Where are you?” comes the reply. “You must be in town. Back here the wind’s blowing up a gale and there’s dust everywhere. It’ll be raining just now, you watch.”
And, as if on cue, black rain clouds come scudding into view from over the other side, and I’m plunged into the misery of what it’s really like to live in paradise. In paradise, nothing’s ever good for very long.
The fickleness of Cape Town can only be partly attributed to the weather. The character of any city is really defined by the actions of its founders. Rome kicked off with a certain arrogant swagger it has never lost, when a chap called Romulus compulsively slaughtered his own brother, and then decided to build a city in his memory.
New York took its fast-talking, take-it- or-leave-it cue from Peter Stuyvesant’s breezy way of dealing with the Indians who found out too late that they’d sold him Manhattan Island for a handful of glass beads.
Amsterdam got its stoical start when a boy called Pieter stuck his finger in a leaking dyke.
Cape Town, on the other hand, labours under inauspicious beginnings that it has never been able to shake off. Cape Town was never supposed to happen, but was brought into existence by dogged foolishness, against the odds. Its inhabitants have been paying the price ever since, locked in an ongoing comedy of terrible errors.
Cape Town was founded, as we all know, by Van Riebeeck. The trouble is, Van Riebeeck never wanted to found Cape Town. He was tricked into setting up a supply station at the Cape of Good Hope by the mean-spirited directors of the Dutch East India Company, as punishment for a minor misdemeanour in Indonesia.
He spent the next 10 years trying to get the hell away from the Cape. All he wanted was to return to his quiet trader’s life in the Far East.
Instead, he found himself arguing with and killing dark-skinned people he didn’t care two hoots about in the first place, imprisoning their leaders on Robben Island, and setting up the slave posts which would pave the way for the establishment of the Cape’s Malay communities. Everything else about Cape Town flowed from that misadventure.
I’ve been introduced to a guy with a fabulous dream. David’s dream will wed a monumental sculpture with infallible science, producing a symbolic artefact that floats in free space, while still being firmly bolted into the granite at the foot of Table Mountain.
David is part of a team that has dreamed up The Fin. He is eloquent and passionate about his mission to see The Fin in place, rooted in the earth of what was District Six, by the end of the millennium. That timetable coincides, of course, with the end of Mandela’s period at the helm of South Africa, and David is not averse to The Fin being seen as a tribute to a national hero at the same time. But that is not its primary purpose. The primary agenda for The Fin, he says, is not political, but artistic, educational and scientific.
But how can it not also be political? A tall, elegant structure such as this will be, rising from the ground where District Six was uprooted in the 1970s, has to have political significance.
The Fin is many things. It is an intricate sundial, calibrated with scientific precision, with cross- reference to any part of the world you choose. It is bound to be a landmark – as important to a new generation of South Africans as the Taalmonument has been to earlier, more exclusive generations.
David originally came from the Cape Flats, those areas at the back of the mountain that expanded infinitely when District Six was destroyed. He now lives far from that, on the front end of the mountain, an international citizen with an abiding desire to see this dream take root. It’s not easy. The very idea of making something magical grow out of the shattered earth of what used to be District Six would seem to be hard for the Mother City to get its head round.
What happened to District Six is the same as what happened to my grandparents’ house in Queenstown – the thing was forcibly removed, ostensibly to make way for a white settlement. In both cases, nothing was built to replace what was destroyed. In the case of District Six, an ugly scar, adorned with two or three mosques and churches that somehow managed to escape the bulldozer’s claw, stands in embarrassing silence between Woodstock and the city.
As with the empty spot where my grandparents’ house once stood, what do we do about District Six? Do we have the energy, the passion, the time to go to the Land Claims Commission and try to take it back? On behalf of our ghosts? The word is that that is happening, somewhere in the background, on behalf of District Six. But in the foreground, all that is evident is forgetfulness, the desire of the living to forget the pain of the dead and carry on with their lives, even if that means making do with a crime-ridden existence on the dark side of the moon.
The Fin, ultimately, is a weapon against forgetfulness. It is an important weapon, because District Six, by all accounts, was one of those rare oases of humanity nestling in the bosom of the Mother City. It was a black thing and a white thing and a brown thing and a Malay thing, and it was also a boozy, drug-infested thing with lots of poverty, but it was a thing with a warm heart, and it belonged to everybody.
The sense of collective ownership is a distant memory in the Cape Peninsula. This is particularly sad because there was another, post-District Six surge of collective energy that seemed to have the power to unite the inhabitants of this beautiful region. That was the era of the United Democratic Front (UDF).
The success of the UDF in hammering nail after nail into the coffin of the old order was remarkable. In particular, it succeeded in focussing the politics of the region against diversions like the Tri-Cameral Parliament charade, and in making people put aside ancient racial and religious divisions for the greater common good.
But the carnival atmosphere of those revolutionary times retreated like a clap of thunder in the early Nineties, and its death knell was struck with the resounding victory of the National Party in the 1994 elections. Now the people who made it all happen, the workers and artists and poets and student radicals of the time, sit in their different corners of the peninsula and wonder if it was all a dream.
The memories are suppressed, but still too vivid to be easily laid to rest. They come peeping out in the most unlikely settings.
A light-hearted conversation over a cup of tea in Athlone suddenly takes on an edge of intensity when unexpected connections are made.
“Oh yes,” says Zubeida, “the last time I met you was at your aunt’s house in Johannesburg. We were in detention together. And the reason I never forget her birthday is because we celebrated her 64th birthday in jail together in 1986! It’s funny: those were such terrible times, but they’re some of the best memories of my life, because we met each other for the first time in conditions like that, and we became very close and very strong.” Her face becomes reflective as she sits back and relives it all.
“The thing is,” Tamsin chips in, “it’s not like that anymore. What happened to us? We don’t stay in touch. This one’s in Elsies River, this one’s back in Guguletu, this one’s in Parliament. It seems like we don’t have the time to care about each other any more.”
She’s thinking about writing about those days, but somehow never quite gets started. There are still too many secrets to protect, comrades still to cover for, as if we were still in the most desperate stages of the struggle.
In many ways, there is an unrelieved desperation about the way people live on the other side of the mountain. The desperation isn’t really acknowledged because, well, people have their pride, and have to have something to live for. But the desperation is there nevertheless, and is made worse by the way communities have become polarised again.
Driving through to Guguletu, I am arrested by the sight of a huge gathering around a mosque in Athlone. Knots of people, Malays whose dress-code has hardly changed since they came from the East, are listening to the words of the mulauna being broadcast over the mosque’s loudspeakers. The mulauna is intoning his sermon with Koranic musicality, but his words are in Afrikaans: “It is not the death of this young man that we mourn, but the manner of his death.” I have stumbled on the funeral of a victim of the war between People against Gangsterism and Drugs and the gangsters of the Cape Flats.
Nyanga and Guguletu, further down the road, could be frozen in a time warp. The graffitied walls still hiss old rivalries between the African National Congress/Umkhonto weSizwe and the Pan Africanist Congress/Azanian People’s Liberation Army supporters, with a few unflattering references to “the Boers” in between. The cracked streets that wind through the miles of stark housing are a rough contrast to the smooth perfection of the boulevards and English country lanes of The Other Side of the Mountain.
In the streets of Guguletu, an endless stream of ancient Chevrolets, their headlights staring emptily like the gouged eyes of necklace victims, moves slowly through the location, picking up and dropping off passengers on carefully demarcated routes. What looks like an informal transport infrastructure is actually rigidly formal, and overstepping unseen lines can lead to the ultimate penalty.
Khayelitsha, further out on the Flats, is even harsher. Here, the relative formality of Verwoerd-style housing (and the new Reconstruction and Development Programme developments that don’t look all that different) is overshadowed by the sprawl of “squatter” housing.
But nobody here can be seriously described as “squatting” any more. The corrugated iron dwellings have been given the stamp of permanence; firstly by their defiant residents, and then by the formal structures of the peninsula.
Eskom and Telkom have strung up miles of electricity and telephone cables, patching Khayelitsha into the world communication grid. Local government has added its piece, with a network of clinics, schools, police posts and fire stations. The former squatters have turned themselves into accomplished facts, and everyone is making as if this is all perfectly normal.
The interiors give testimony to people’s determination to be people on the best terms they can manage. Local mini- industries have sprung up to supply the semi-bourgeois necessities, like the heavy wooden lounge suite, and the tall cabinet scraping against the roof that houses a music system and the obligatory TV set.
Paradise is where you make it.
The television aerials that across the rooftops of Khayelitsha and Guguletu and Athlone capture the same visions of a Hollywood lifestyle as on the other side of the mountain.
The people of the Cape Peninsula might not connect much in real life, but in the dream world of television, they’re certainly doing the simunye thing: they are busy being one.
They are united in one other thing, too. They distrust people from beyond the mountains even more than they distrust each other. They’ve coined a new name for the rest of the country: they now call us (especially the Gauteng crowd) die rainbow gevaar.
As my plane rises again, over the endless Cape Flats, across the twinkling city bowl and out over the protective ring of mountains, I feel a sense of regret and desire.
I have to wish the citizens of paradise lots of luck in their splendid isolation.