And so we come to Cape Town (two words), now the second biggest city in South Africa. For many years, it was the biggest city until the discovery of gold and diamonds led to the growth of Johannesburg – much like what the discovery of gold did to San Francisco.
South Africa has three capitals, of which Cape Town is the legislative capital. (Pretoria is the administrative capital and Bloemfontein is the judicial capital, although the Constitutional Court of South Africa sits in Johannesburg.) There is some dispute as to whether these three cities are de facto capitals because they are where the legislature, the courts, and the administrative centers are placed, or whether they have legal basis.
The placing of various parts of the government in different locations has historical basis. The Republic of South Africa dates from 1961 and replaced the former Union of South Africa, which was formed from four separate British colonies: Cape Colony, Natal Colony, Transvaal Colony, and Orange River Colony. Cape Town, the capital of Cape Colony, had a flourishing legislature and thus become the seat of the Union’s legislature.
(Voting for the Cape Legislature was originally based on the Cape Qualified Franchise which gave the vote to all property-owning men, without regard to race. But this changed so that in 1930 white women were allowed to vote. In 1931, a property requirement for white voters was eliminated. In 1936, black voters were restricted to voting for a separate black legislature. In 1958, the same provision was applied to coloured voters. And in 1960 and 1970, blacks and coloureds were effectively disenfranchised.)
Cape Town is, not surprisingly, situated on the Cape Peninsula. Our trip included visits to various places there, including the Cape of Good Hope, Cape Point (not quite the same as the Cape of Good Hope), Boulder’s Beach (where the Jackass Penguin resides), and Simon’s Town. Off the coast is Robben Island, site of the infamous prison where Nelson Mandela and many others were imprisoned as part of the repression by the apartheid regime. Subsequent posts will include descriptions of these areas and other places in Cape Town.
Cape Town is one of the most diverse cities in the world, both in terms of human population and plants. Before apartheid much of the city was multiracial and multicultural. When the racist policies of apartheid enforced segregated living areas, the multiracial areas were purged or demolished, almost always to the disadvantage of the blacks and coloureds. We were supposed to visit District Six, which when it was declared a whites-only area in 1965 had all the housing demolished and over 60,000 black and coloured residents forcibly removed. (I’ve previously mentioned why we did not get to visit District Six and will try not to harp on that further.)
The apartheid policies resulted in the establishment of “labour preference areas” in which only certain of the non-white population, based on race, were given preference for the mostly menial jobs. Cape Town was an area that gave preference to coloureds rather than blacks. To this day the population of the city, 3.74 million, is 42% coloured, 39% black, 15.5% white, and 1.5% Asian. These figures, from the 2011 census, are based on self-reporting of race.
Cape Town is also an area where Afrikaans is a dominant language. The first language of 36% of the population is Afrikaans, 30% Xhosa, and 28% English.
Housing is an important need in South Africa, and while perhaps a bit less than other places, it is still a problem in Cape Town with a significant amount of substandard housing. About 20% of the population live in “informal structures” (aka shacks), 6% have no electricity, 13% do not have water piped to the dwelling.
As for biodiversity, the area has nearly double the number of species of plants just on Table Mountain than in all of the United Kingdom. (Table Mountain, as we’ll discuss later in this post, is a major mountain that is part of Cape Town and forms part of the Table Mountain National Park.)
So, in short, Cape Town is a city with a rich and varied history. It is a busy and vibrant place, at least in many parts. On the day we arrived, in winter with alternating clouds and rain, I took a few photos just driving around the city.
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Cape Town - 1
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| Cape Town - 2 |
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| Cape Town - 3 |
The central part of Cape Town is located in what is called City Bowl, with the Atlantic Ocean on one side and Table Mountain Park on the other. The photo below was taken several days after our arrival, when the weather had somewhat improved and we were on a boat heading to Robben Island (see subsequent post). Table Mountain is in the center of the photo, and you can see how flat a top it really is. It is about 3,500 feet high and there is a cableway to the top of the mountain.
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| Table Mountain |
To the left of Table Mountain is a mountain called Lion’s Head and to the right is Devil’s Peak. Our trip was supposed to include a cableway ride to the top of the mountain but the day that was supposed to happen there was a “table cloth” on the mountain – i.e., a cloud cover and rain, and the cableway was closed.
Also in Cape Town is the Castle of Good Hope, a star fort dating from the 17th Century, which is considered the best preserved example of a Dutch East India Company fort. (And if you really want to know what a star fort is, and why it is the shape it is, go here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Star_fort).
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| Castle of Good Hope |
The fort is located inland off the coast forming the water side of the City Bowl. The Castle was originally on the bay itself but land reclamation has deprived it of its position next to the water, just as is true of many of the streets inland from the present San Francisco waterfront.
We also passed the area known as the Company’s Garden.
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| Company's Garden |
Like the Castle of Good Hope, this area was developed in the middle of the 17th Century to aid ships of the Dutch East India Company in their voyages from the Netherlands to the Dutch East Indies (now Indonesia). The fort helped protect the routes where the ships traversed the treacherous waters of the Cape of Good Hope. The Company’s Garden grew fresh produce to replenish ships. It uses water from the springs on the lower slopes of Table Mountain. Among the features of the garden are the oldest cultivated pear tree in South Africa (dating from the building of the Garden), a fish pond, and an aviary. During the optional part of our tour, some members of our group went to the Company’s Garden. We chose instead to visit Robben Island.
The last part of Cape Town we visited this first day was the area known as Bo-Kaap, an Afrikaans term meaning top cape. The area is today best known for the very colorful houses which are painted a variety of anything but subtle colors.
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| Bo-Kaap - 1 |
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| Bo-Kaap - 2 |
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| Bo-Kaap - 3 |
But the real story of Bo-Kaap, which is fighting gentrification, is much more than just brightly colored houses.
The area was racially and culturally diverse in the pre-apartheid days and was inhabited by both Europeans and Asians. In 1834, slavery was abolished in the Cape Colony and many of the slaves who had been brought to Cape Town by the Dutch during the 16th and 17th centuries settled in Bo-Kapp. About the same time, Islam was introduced in Cape Town and resonated with the former slaves at least in part because it was not the religion of the oppressor. The first mosque in South Africa is found here, as are many other mosques.
These former slaves and their descendants, who had been brought from Africa, Indonesia, Java, Malaysia, and elsewhere in Asia, were called “Cape Malays”, even though most were not entirely of Malaysian descent. Nonetheless, there are parts of Indonesian vocabulary in Bo-Kaap’s dialect such as “trim-makaasi” (thank-you) and “kanalah” (please). Because the people were incorrectly known as Cape Malays, the area became known as the Malay Quarter.
Historically (i.e., pre-apartheid), up to 40% of the neighborhood was Christian even through the dominant religion was Muslim. Under apartheid it was designated a Malay area under the Group Areas Act and was one of the only sections of the central area of Cape Town that had nonwhite residents.
So, why are the houses painted the bright colors? That’s a good question (says he who doesn’t really know the answer). But the best I’ve been able to find out is that the colors date from the end of apartheid in the 1990s and represent a way to express happiness and joy and thus became a neighborhood tradition. The custom (or rule?) is that the owners may paint their homes any color as long as there is variety.
Tomorrow we continue of exploration of the Cape Town area, and have a most wonderful visit with a legend of the South African judiciary.
Link to Full Resolution Photos
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