South Africa’s changing cities give us clues about what groups need (and what they don’t) to have a happy existence.
Counter Currents: Experiments in Sustainability in the Cape Town Region
Edited by Edgar Pieterse (Jacana Media 2010)
The opening line of Counter Currents would not be out of place in a dystopian sci-fi book. “Cape Town is heading for disaster,” writes editor Edgar Pieterse. The essays in the book bear this out to varying degrees, although in many cases leavened by a modicum of hope.
It’s doing the nuanced contributions to this book a necessary disservice, but to summarise crudely: the majority of Cape Town’s residents are extremely poor, its infrastructure is falling apart, our politicians are useless and our government departments are, at worse, populated by a bunch of self-serving individuals seeking only personal or party-political gain or, at best, by people of good will hamstrung by their urge to achieve consensus decisions instead of having the balls to make the hard choices.
Yes, this is a gross over-simplification. But, on the other hand, when you read Lucien le Grange and Nisa Mammom’s essay on the problems of repatriating District Six, perhaps it’s not gross enough. Since 1994, only 24 claimant families have been resettled in District Six. A vast swathe of land in Cape Town lies unused, a cultural and economic vacuum that should be a constant reminder for all of us of the ineptitude that bedevils the city.
What exactly is the master plan here? Wait until everyone dies and then turn the place into a golf course? I mean, how hard can it be? Well, very hard, according to the essay. But still, at this rate, we might as well sell the District Six Theme Park concession to Disney and employ dispossessed peoples as Jolly Dancing Natives. At least then the lonely 24 huddling in their windswept houses will have something to do besides counting vagrants trudging disconsolately past their doors.
The essayists propose several solutions to the problem, but the difficulties seem insurmountable. For example, claimants get a R55 706 subsidy per household to build a new house, a number apparently calculated by taking the average amount a City Bowl Capetonian spends on cappuccinos a month and then dividing that by the cost of parking at the Waterfront.
There are many obstacles to progress in building a sustainable Cape Town, but the overriding one appears to be people. For every reasonable suggestion, there’s someone who, through incompetence or venality, stymies the effort. In that sense, Counter Currents is its own best analogy. The book appears to have been copy-edited by a gerbil with ADD and an eyepatch. I assume this is either because some poor copy editor was paid a pittance or because deadlines started squeezing. Or perhaps it’s a question of a skills shortage.
It’s damnably irritating having a glaring error every few pages, but we shouldn’t let this stop us reading this book. There are several worthy highlights. David Schmidt’s The Dynamic of Leadership in Cape Town is fascinating, providing precious insight into the fraught process of establishing a nonracial system of local government after 1994. Schmidt’s insider tales of the shenanigans of the buffoon Peter Marais, and of the devolution of Nomaindia Mfeketo from sturdy politician to ineffectual mayor, are required reading for any Capetonian struggling to understand “a political practice as poisonous and untrusting as that of Cape Town in recent years”.
Ashraf Jamal’s essay on artist Jane Alexander is slightly out of place, but beautifully written. It’s included in the book because, we are told, “her art is neither a reflection nor obvious representation of the strengths and ills of urban living, but seems lodged indigestibly in the very gut of our unconscious realms where, thrusting forth its horned and gnawing probes, it can — potentially — assist us in understanding the strangeness of what we deem the real”.
Initially, I guffawed at the awkward juxtaposition of this precise intellectualism with, for example, an essay such as Crane et al’s Towards Urban Infrastructure Sustainability. Then I read Mark Swilling’s excellent chapter, Dealing with Sustainability, populated by ogres and monsters. He asks the trenchant question: “What changes the city?” The short answer is — and I’m paraphrasing heavily here — evil, scum-sucking real estate developers, bankers and lickspittle architects. It’s a compelling story, one of many that make Counter Currents a salutary read for South Africans interested in where our cities are headed.