Cape Town: Part One, Saxes to Shantys

Cape Town is an incredible city. (I used the thesaurus to look up another word for amazing, haha.) It is modern as well as full of culture, history and diverse people. I really enjoyed it and would suggest it to anyone who is thinking of traveling internationally but doesn’t know where to begin. I would have liked to see and do more outside of the city itself, but only having a few days and being signed up for trips that meet at the port is a little bit limiting.

My first impressions of Cape Town were extremely positive –there wasn’t an industrial harbor! It was a lovely commercial harbor and there was an extremely swanky hotel right in front of where the ship was docked called the Table Bay Hotel. There was also lots of shopping –including two malls and lots of restaurants with views of the bay. The V &A Waterfront, as it is called, is also near the Cape Town Aquarium and is where the ferry to Robben Island is located.

As soon as we were debriefed by the diplomats from the US embassy in South Africa, we were allowed to get off the ship. So, since I didn’t have a trip until the afternoon, I decided to wander around in the mall for a while. This mall was huge. There are even Gucci, Louis Vuitton and Jimmy Choo stores on the top floor. They have everything from African souvenir stores and a Crocs store to a movie theater and a grocery store. It was just huge, but there were many pedestrian walkways to stroll around the other stores outside, just like a boardwalk in the US would have lots of different stores and restaurants. There was also a small outdoor amphitheater that had groups performing at various times as well as street performers –dance groups, jazz bands, marimbas bands and even some kind of magician storyteller. I quickly ate at a fish and chips place with the girls I was with so I could hurry up and get back to the place near the ship where our trip was meeting.

It was a city orientation trip. The first stop was at the Castle of Good Hope, which actually looks more like a fort. I has five bastions sticking out around it, kind of like a star. It was mostly controlled by the Dutch, who were the first to settle and colonize Cape Town. There was a brief period that the British controlled it, then power went back to the Dutch. The castle was used as the governor’s house then and is still used by the military in addition to being considered one of the museums of Cape Town. We went inside the portion that was the governor’s house that has many paintings of Cape Town –it was interesting to see the city from Table Bay and False Bay, which is now entirely built up by the city, completely green and uninhabited. In the upstairs of the governor’s quarters was a long room that was designed to accommodate over 100 people for dinner set up with a series of tables stretching from one end of the room to the other. (There were no pictures allowed in that room for some reason.) The second-in-command (I forget what his title was) also lived there. We even checked out a dungeon, too, where slaves were held and punished.

Our next stop was a stroll through the Company’s Gardens, which is flanked by buildings like the Parliament’s House, the South African equivalent of the White House, where the president works and the National Library. Cape Town is South Africa’s legislative capital and Johannesburg is the judicial capital. The gardens were begun when the Dutch East India Company, who founded Cape Town, decided to colonize the southern part of Africa as a refreshment port for ships rounding Africa on the trade routes. There is also an extensive botanical garden that I believe was started by the same man that started the gardens. The gardens are used like a mall with people strolling through them and others taking naps on the grass. We stopped at a café there to have coffee and scones. The weather was beautiful for mostly entire trip and it was breezy but sunny, perfect for sitting at a café.

Our next stop was the Natural History Museum in Cape Town, which had a really good display featuring some of the prehistoric cave drawings and the significance of the migration from Africa, which we have been studying in Global Studies. They also had the typical natural history exhibits on dinosaurs, fish and mammals. The fish exhibit featured huge whale skeletons in a large hall connecting all three floors of the museum. The mammal exhibit reminded me of the Carnegie museum –all the taxidermied samples that are about 30 years old. There was also a traveling exhibit featuring a nature photography contest sponsored by the World Wildlife Fund. It seemed like the museum was under some construction, which is probably warranted because of the big event happening in Cape Town in 2010 –the World Cup! We saw the semi-completed stadium many times, because it is not far from the waterfront. A lot of the places in Cape Town are getting ready for that –they’re repaving a parking lot in front of the city hall to make it a pedestrian-friendly “Fan Walk"instead.

I came back from the tour and didn’t have very much time –I got back on the ship really quickly to change for my next trip, which was the “jazz safari.”It was really cool –we went to a jazz club and a trio played for us –a drummer, a bassist and a saxophonist. They only played for a little while, but they were really good –the sax player and the bassist did some awesome stuff. I got a compilation CD that has a track that we heard performed. We were in the upstairs of the club and I would have liked to stay there longer, but the second part of our evening was worth it. We got back in our respective vans and even though there was a total of 40 of us each van went to a different house.

Our van went to the home of sax player Robbie Jansen. His son, a chef, cooked us a wonderful dinner, complete with Malva pudding (which is delicious, by the way!). Then Robbie sat with his saxophone on the couch in his living room and played to an accompanying CD. He’s an older man with graying hair and he uses oxygen, since he fell ill (I forget with what) in 2005 and almost died. He had no trouble breathing or talking or anything like that, and his playing was great! He told us the story of how he came from a family of nine and started playing when he was young after learning by ear from the radio. The band he was with won a trip to London and he was introduced to jazz music. He said that at one time he had the chance to play with Eric Clapton. He told some other stories about his experiences playing –making friends with Angolan policemen who caught him and his friends smoking in their hotel room, getting beaten up before a show, playing in Botswana in the pouring rain only to have the clouds break and the moon shine down. “Music covers all,”he said. “There’s no color there.”

It was a great evening and none of us wanted to leave. His wife was extremely nice and welcoming as well and a few of us did the dishes for her after dinner. She laughed and joked right along with a few students out on the Jansens patio while we sat and listened to Robbie play. The night was one of the best on the trip so far.

The next day I got up and ate breakfast in order to meet up with my next trip, which was themed around apartheid. Our first stop was the District Six Museum, which used to be a Methodist church in a neighborhood of Cape Town that was shared by a mixture of races. Sixty thousand people were displaced beginning in 1966. The oppressive government under the racial segregation of apartheid declared the neighborhood a whites only area and forced all of the people to be removed to the dismal Cape Flats township area and bulldozed all of their homes. The museum reminds me of what Sutersville might have been like, and in some regard, is still like. A neighborhood of people who live together and had built things like sports teams, held dances and festivals, and worshiped together. The museum, as I remember the tour guide mentioning, is not just to commemorate the loss of the homes and buildings, but more importantly the social networks and organizations that were lost in the relocation. The sense of community was taken away with the bulldozers. It was pretty powerful. I don’t know if it more sad that the community was lost –or that it was all for naught, because almost nothing has been built on the land where District Six was. The government has tried to rebuild a few homes, but it seems the damage has been done.

Next we visited the Khayelitsha township. Because of the diplomatic briefing before we got off the ship, I was a little worried about us going there. When you see the houses you think that the conditions must be terrible. These shacks are made out of different kinds of ramshackle materials, most of corrugated metal and are the size maybe of a large shed or outbuilding. Some of the shantys and businesses in the townships are ingeniously made out of metal storage containers. There were many hair salons built that way that I thought were really cleaver, most with portraits of different hairstyles painted on the sides of them. Many of the shantys have electricity because of these sporadic poles with dozens of lines cascading from them. The townships in most cases do not have running water, however. There are communal bathrooms and water pumps. Near where we stopped on the bus, at Vicky’s B&B, a shebeen, or tavern, was called the “waterfront”bar, because it was near the communal water. What would be considered a modest home was actually a hotel being run by a woman in Khayelitsha. She began it in 1997 with two rooms and would open her home to visitors from all over so that they could recognize and understand the conditions in the townships. Now, she has two floors –six rooms –and they were pretty nice! I would stay there! I didn’t take too many pictures while I was there because I didn’t want to be too disrespectful. Vicky said that she runs two programs fro children in the community –one that serves bread, soup and fruit to kids before they go to school twice a week and another that collects small items like pens and soap for them for Christmas. I commend her work wholeheartedly. I was glad to see that my perception of what the townships would be like was transformed. I realized that most of the people living there are just people trying to live their lives like you and me. It is quite unfortunate, however, that they have no means by which to improve their status. Many of the people were either historically displaced by apartheid or have joined the townships because they have tried to find work in Cape Town, but because of their low education level, cannot find work. Over 1 million live in the townships outside of Cape Town. It is crazy to see these shacks stretch out beyond the main highway, the highway we took to get there, N2. But, there have been some attempts to improve things in the townships. Some block houses have been and are being built to replace some of the shacks. There are area councils within the townships and Vicky was telling us that in order to set up a shack a person must apply to the council. There is also a semi-organized way of identifying the location of the shacks, which Vicky tried to explain to us –there’s supposed to be two rows of houses, a water source or bathroom and then two more rows between two of the streets. There are schools there –there was even a school behind Vicky’s and we heard a chorus of “Hi!Hi!Hi!Hi!”from the children in the school when we circled around the building. We also hung around the entrance to another school close to where the bus was parked and said hello to the children, gave them high fives, and stickers. It was actually kind of fun, even though it was a strange situation, especially since we didn’t speak Xhosa and the children are so young anyway.

Afterward, we had lunch at a restaurant in a house of a normal size that was on the edges of the township. The meal was served buffet-style and I tried a little bit of most of the things –there was some pretty good vegetable masala-like stuff and chicken fingers (haha!) among all of the dishes, one of which was supposed to be ostrich, I think. There was also a marimba band that played while we were eating. We also stopped at a crafts center called Guga Sthebe or “old platter,”which comes from when everyone would share in the community from the same platter. There they trained people to make small crafts to support themselves like wire art, ceramics and paintings. We were also shown a workshop where ceramics were made, they even have filled large orders from the government for visiting dignitaries. It was very cool.

After that we were taken back to downtown Cape Town in order to catch the ferry out to Robben Island. It’s getting kind of late here, so I will tell you more about that later!