It is summer, and in Cape Town the tourists are looking for 10 years of democracy. First they try Government Avenue, where they stroll among panhandling squirrels, but they can find no way in.
Then they snap photographs of Louis Botha at the end of wide and windswept Roeland Street. And at last they come — hesitantly — to the parliamentary visitors’ centre in the sunless canyon beneath the ministerial office tower at 120 Plein Street, and the taxman’s old bunker at number 90.
Here the Taylorist architecture of apartheid bureaucracy bulks up against the sky, a reef of concrete between the neo-classical world of the legislature, and the dingy Edwardian shop fronts of the eastern city.
This part of Plein Street is a gloomy trench, lined with unprepossessing shops and greasy cafés. There are a couple of furniture outlets, where you can hock yourself to the eyeballs for an unforgivable headboard, and two Chinese wholesalers, where terms are strictly cash. In between are a hundred ways to court botulism on your lunch break.
The celebrated branch of Adult World sits squarely across the street from one of Parliament’s more heavily trafficked entrances.
Location is important in the discreet business of pleasure, and the country’s biggest sex chain seeks out the ropey fringes of respectable neighbourhoods close to the client base, but not close enough to risk an embarrassing chance encounter. Urban renewal may be putting an unfamiliar gloss on more and more of central Cape Town, but the quadrant bounded by Plein and Spin streets remains stubbornly seedy.
Patrick Chauke and his home affairs committee think the shop is an assault on the dignity of the legislature, and altogether an unwholesome thing. Perhaps they have not noticed that it is exactly two doors down from Bathong Travel, where bored-looking staff still snack at their terminals and wait for the liquidators.
It is a facile point, but one can’t help wondering whether the moral rage of members like Mr Chauke, who are embroiled in the voucher wars, isn’t some kind of displacement activity.
Perhaps ANC MPs should have pointed out that the site used to be occupied by a Democratic Alliance office, wallpapered with posters far more galling than the come-ons of the pornographers. They might suggest that Adult World retails a more diverse range of fantasies than the opposition.
The more salient point, however, is that Parliament has so far failed to engage with its urban context in any meaningful way. The presidential cavalcade snarls up the traffic occasionally, but for many this is the only clear evidence that the legislative engine of the state is in the middle of the city. If you know what to look for you can spot MPs, staff, journalists, and lobbyists in lunch spots across town, but the physical institution turns its pebble-dashed back hard against the day-to-day life of the place.
Perhaps it is because many of Parliament’s managers don’t like Cape Town, with its strange ethnic politics, apartheid spatial planning, and funky weather. Perhaps it is because they are used to thinking of it as a temporary encampment in hostile territory, and dream of relocation to Midrand, where there is no history at all to complicate life.
But change is in the air. Number 90 Plein Street is being renovated to make way for an expanding parliamentary staff, and there is a new entrance that should open it up to the street a bit. More importantly, there is talk of the awful parliamentary villages at Acacia Park and Pelican Park being exchanged for accommodation closer to the legislature.
But better physical and economic coordination between Parliament and the city, like the fast-growing staff complement, will reflect largely on its increasing corporate maturity. The fundamental questions of institutional character posed so crudely by Bathong and Adult World seem likely to persist.
During the sustained shelling of the travelgate saga, the presiding officers have seldom grasped opportunities to assert the independence of parliament. Baleka Mbete may have acted properly in releasing the names of those implicated to the Chief Whips, but because almost all of them were ANC members, and the ANC wasnšt telling who they were it looked like a politically motivated cover up.
And when she told the DA’s departing arms deal interrogator, Raenette Taljaard, that she could not ask Jacob Zuma questions about the Shaik trail, she was probably correctly interpreting parliamentary rules aimed at protecting the courts from interference. But the decision, and the heckling between majority and opposition benches that followed, certainly sounded like politics to the school-kids in the gallery.
Meanwhile, in that withered organ of our constitutional compromise, the National Council of Provinces, dozing representatives let a resolution condemning President Thabo Mbeki’s remarks on rape and HIV/Aids slip through without objection. When they recovered a few days later, council chairperson Joyce Kgoali felt she needed a transparent manipulation of procedures.
Why? There is no threat to ANC hegemony in Parliament, nor is there likely to be for some time. When it does come, the party will want a credible institutional culture just as much as the Democratic Alliance, which is currently calling for a thorough overhaul of parliamentary practice.
The speaker, the secretary, and the chair of the NCOP, should have the backing of ANC leadership to assert the institutional integrity of the legislature, even if it means appearing to act against party interests.
A more adult world inside Parliament would make it so much easier to find the heart of the place.