EMSIE FERREIRA, Cape Town | Wednesday
RESIDENTS of the remote South African fishing village of Cape Agulhas are calling on officials to solve an old geographical dispute — where do the Indian and Atlantic oceans meet?
Cape Agulhas residents claim the oceans come together at their windswept bay, which is home to a few hundred people and as many seagulls, and perches on the southernmost tip of Africa.
They have the textbooks on their side.
“Everybody knows that the two oceans meet at Cape Agulhas,” said Larry Zietsman, professor in the geography department at the University of Stellenbosch.
But tour operators have for decades sold Cape Point, south of Cape Town and some 175 kilometres southeast of Cape Agulhas, as the scenic meeting place of the oceans.
“This is completely fallacious, they are printing brochures stating that and it is just wrong,” said Lizbe van Brakel of the Suidpunt Tourism Bureau in Cape Agulhas.
Van Brakel said Cape Point and its promoters had drawn tourism revenue — it receives some half a million visitors a year — that rightly belonged to the people of Cape Agulhas.
The tourism bureau has formally requested the country’s public protector to probe the matter and has also petitioned Environmental Affairs and Tourism Minister Valli Moosa and the South African Tourism Board.
Said the bureau’s representative Riaan Pienaar: “If only 10% of the people who went to Cape Point instead visited our village we would have earned three million rand ($375,000) last year.”
Agulhas needs money. The point was discovered by Portuguese explorer Bartholomew Dias in the 15th century and legend has it that he named it after the Portuguese word for needle because his compass needle trembled when he rounded Africa’s southern tip.
The rocky coastline is littered with shipwrecks that recall that romantic era, but latterday Cape Agulhas is a poor fishing village with not enough fish or tourists.
It is frequented mainly by South Africans, some of whom Pienaar likes to stand on top of a monument erected in the 1980s and tell: “See that wave is in the Atlantic and that one in the Indian Ocean.”
Pienaar on Monday met with provincial tourism authorities and won a promise that Cape Point would change its marketing after he cited the Monaco-based International Hydrographic Organisation as having ruled that the boundary between the icy South Atlantic and the warmer Indian Ocean is off Cape Agulhas.
But he said the battle would not be won until every tour operator in South Africa and abroad stopped spreading the wrong message and curio-shops no longer sold t-shirts and mugs bearing it.
“They simply must stop.”
Cape Town Tourism executive Cheryl Ozinsky disagrees: “I do not think we are misleading anybody. It is at Cape Point that the fauna and flaura display signs of great variance, of both the warm and cold currents.”
“Besides,” she said, “people must realise that Cape Point is more conveniently situated close to Cape Town”.
But Frank Shillington of the department of oceanography at the University of Cape Town says it is precisely for convenience’s sake that scientists have drawn the border between the two seas on the meridian where Cape Agulhas sits.
“It is convention. Where do the Indian and Pacific Oceans meet? On the southern tip of Australia. People like boundaries,” he told AFP.
“But oceans don’t respect borders, the currents flow where they want to. People say they can see a line in the water where the two oceans meet. Garbage!” – AFP