The object of the Dutch East India Company in establishing a station at the Cape of Good Hope in 1652 was but a means to an end. It desired a place where its ships, sailing to and from the East Indies, could obtain refreshments, and where the seamen could recuperate after a long voyage. There was no idea at first of making the place a colony where men and women from Holland could settle and build up a strong colonial possession.
C. Graham Botha (1926)
In the Kirstenbosch Botanic Gardens, on the eastern slopes of Table Mountain, you can touch the past and find it still alive. Today I did just that, sitting in the deep shade of a hedge planted 333 years ago. For long the imaginations of South African writers have been stirred by the symbolism of these bitter-almond trees, their low tangled branches contorted but their foliage still vigorous. Jan van Riebeeck planted this hedge to exclude the Khoikhoi and their cattle from the first white settlement in southern Africa. Once it extended for miles along the mountainsides, now only fragments remain. I stole a leaf as a souvenir.
When van Riebeeck landed on 6 April 1652 there were no blacks around, only the pastoral Khoikhoi – and the San, hunting and gathering in the least accessible regions. Three hundred and forty-one years later things are very different and the Mother City is worried. Involuntarily, since 1982, she has acquired an additional 700,000 black children, making 900,000 in all. (The majority are ‘refugees’ from the intolerable poverty of the Xhosa ‘homelands’.) Understandably, the Peninsula’s one and a half million Coloureds and whites have been made uneasy by this mass migration. Their Mother is undergoing a personality change about which nothing can be done. Daily ‘they’ travel in from their ever-expanding townships and squatter camps (to be politically correct I should call the latter ‘informal settlements’) on the sandy Cape Flats. All over the city centre and throughout the suburban ‘villages’ they are to be seen hawking and loitering and desperately job-seeking and to most Capetonians they seem ominously omnipresent. Yet it surprises me, given their nearby numbers, that so comparatively few appear on ‘white’ territory. The younger generation speak little English; their elders, often fluent English-speakers, are always polite but maintain a dignified reserve.
Since 28 May I have been based in Retreat, some ten miles south of the city centre on Route 4, overlooked by the sheer silver rock-walls of nearby Constantiaberg and Steenberg. Here Margaret’s friends live in a large bungalow facing level grassland with the Rondevlei Bird Sanctuary beyond. They gave me the sort of welcome that dissolves inhibitions about staying indefinitely. I have been made to feel not like a guest, surely the greatest compliment one can pay one’s host and hostess.
Here I delight in travelling by taxi, usually a battered old kombi driven at death-defying speed and overcrowded with jolly Coloureds. (The darker skinned the jollier, it seems; those who could pass-for-white – a considerable minority – tend to be rather more buttoned-up.) For my benefit some fellow-passengers speak English among themselves and even when they don’t I can relish their enjoyment of repartee, their laconic, quick-on-the-draw wit. The politically progressive say ‘we’ meaning blacks and Coloureds; the rest say ‘we’ meaning whites and Coloureds. For generations their language-bond with the Afrikaners, implying a shared culture, reinforced Coloured self-esteem. But then came rejection, Grand Apartheid’s demotion of all non-whites. Since that time, in urban communities, many Coloureds have pointedly tried to learn English. (The prosperous middle class, not usually encountered in taxis, are bilingual, speaking perfect English.)
In June 1971 the Afrikaanse Studentebond Congress in Pretoria sought to repudiate their distant cousins by passing a resolution affirming that the Coloureds’ only ancestors were the Khoisan and Asian and black slaves. Ten months later they got a nasty shock. In the South African Medical Journal Dr M. C. Botha, an internationally acclaimed immunologist, reported that genetically Afrikaners are 7 per cent non-white. After all that effort to segregate, no such thing existed as a racially pure Afrikaner society. And soon Dr Botha’s horrible findings were confirmed by independent research of an entirely different sort. Dr J. A. Heese, of the DRC Archives, had studied the Cape’s early marriage records and calculated that Afrikaners are 6.9 per cent non-white.
According to Dr Botha, the Cape Coloureds are the only authentic Capetonians, the only community to have evolved on the tip of Africa. And by now they form, in his words, ‘an anthropologically distinct population’. They also form, visually, a genetic jigsaw puzzle. Looking around any group of Coloureds, each face seems a tantalizing enigma, the possible combinations endless. Here are genes from all over Europe, from West Africa, Mozambique, Madagascar, India, China, Malaya, Indonesia, Arabia, the Philippines … Most of the European genes were contributed a long time ago: first when there was a serious shortage of white women and the original Dutch settlers took Khoikhoi brides, then while it was acceptable for a Boer farmer to lie with his nubile slaves, who might be African or Asian. Van Riebeeck soon realized that the Khoisan were resolutely uninterested in cultivating land for the settlers’ benefit; instead, slaves were imported and a slave-state existed for 182 years.
I gleaned much information yesterday during a nine-hour session in the magnificent and well-ordered South Africa Library, founded in 1818 with funds obtained through the imposition of a special wine tax. A translation of van Riebeeck’s detailed Journal revealed that by the time he left for home, in 1662, many familiar nastinesses were already firmly rooted. The Khoisan had been put in their place, Robben Island chosen as an ideal place of banishment and the deadly ‘tot’ system instituted – the origin of the Coloureds’ notorious drink problem. Instead of cash, farmworkers – from the age of 13 or so – were given a quart of rough wine at intervals throughout the day. Despite increasing criticism over the past twenty years, this system has not yet been completely eradicated. In Lambert’s Bay one farmer told me ‘They’re never late, being late means missing your morning tot! And they’re never off work without a genuine excuse, they work much harder for wine than for cash.’
Bo-Kaap begins at the interesting end of Longmarket Street, where it leaves the fumes and speeding traffic of white Cape Town and is reincarnated as a steep cobbled laneway climbing straight up Signal Hill. Allegedly the Group Areas Act spared this Muslim district because the authorities recognized its potential as a ‘picturesque’ tourist attraction. But Bo-Kaap is not merely picturesque; it has that indefinable quality usually defined as ‘character’. The district covers less than a square mile. Some streets run level along the side of Signal Hill, intersecting with other vertical streets which climb and climb until one is level with the sheer, gaunt, upper slopes of Table Mountain – from here Cape Town’s city centre ‘developments’ look like Lego constructions. All these narrow cobbled streets are lined with one-storey, narrow-fronted, flat-roofed terraced houses on high stoeps, painted in contrasting colours. Many date from the 1780s and have family names engraved over the main entrance. Some are in a sad state of disrepair, others have recently been restored.
Quite a number of the present residents’ ancestors were political prisoners, exiled rebels from the Dutch East India colonies, learned and once-wealthy gentlemen who provided spiritual and intellectual leadership for their enslaved fellow-Muslims. In 1694 the pioneers arrived: a Bantamise resistance leader, Sheikh Yussuf of Macassar, and forty-nine of his followers. All were dispatched to labour on a farm far from Cape Town, up the Olifant Valley. A Tidore prince from the Moluccas, Imam Abdullah Kadi Abdus Salaan (Tuan Guru, for short), was the most illustrious ‘criminal’; while imprisoned on Robben Island he transcribed the Koran from memory and without error. The richness and complexity of an Islamic East Indian background enabled these exiles and their descendants to maintain their own identity and escape the worst horrors of slavery. The Cape was then critically short of craftsmen and women (most early European settlers came from the least gifted strata of their societies) and soon the talented newcomers – joiners, stonemasons, plasterers, metalworkers, seamstresses, tailors – gained tacit acceptance as an élite; the design and decoration of the distinctive Cape Dutch farmhouses are their most conspicuous legacy. Being in such demand, they could evade the standard oppressions of slavery and charge commissions for their work and thus eventually achieve manumission. As vryezwarten (free blacks) they took over the lower slopes of Signal Hill and created Bo-Kaap.
Achmat Davids and his wife Karima Davids-Jacobs live halfway up Signal Hill, directly opposite the miniature Boorhaanol Mosque, built in 1884 and now a national monument, lovingly described by Achmat in The Mosques of Bo-Kaap. I was lucky to find this remarkable couple at home. Only yesterday they returned from six months in the USA, where Achmat – an authority on the evolution of the Afrikaans language – had been a visiting professor in Yale’s Linguistics School. He is also a pioneer social worker – the first produced by the Bo-Kaap community – as is his poet wife. Karima’s being quarter-Irish nicely proves Achmat’s point that ‘Cape Malay’ is a misnomer, resented by the people so called. They should be described as ‘Cape Muslims’ since it is religion, not race, that binds this little society together. Most slave names, Achmat explained, indicate places of origin and less than 1 per cent of ‘Cape Malays’ came from what we now call Malaysia. The confusion probably arose because the East Indian slaves’ common language was Malayu, for centuries the main trading language from Madagascar to China – now extinct, though traces remain in Afrikaans.
Only sixty years ago many educated Afrikaners habitually spoke English, their Dutch having lapsed. In contrast, uneducated Afrikaners spoke neither English (still regarded as the enemy’s language) nor Dutch – only Afrikaans, scorned by their superiors as kombuistaal, a kitchen-language. Yet it had been named ‘Afrikaans’ in 1875 by a group of intellectuals who had just named themselves ‘Afrikaners’. These men were determined to forge a new national identity for the Boers, too long suspended in a vacuum – neither European nor African – and now threatened with absorption into the loathed British Empire. (In 1877 the Transvaal Republic was annexed by Britain.) At that point it became expedient to fudge the origins of Afrikaans. Much was denied and then forgotten, like the fact that the Cape Muslims were the first to write the language, using the Arabic script. The first book published in Afrikaans, in 1856 – a homily on the Islamic faith – was written by a Cape Muslim when most Boers were only semi-literate, if that.
Achmat’s researches into the origins of Afrikaans have aroused the right-wingers’ ire. How dare this cheeky ‘Malay’ analyse their language’s component parts and assert that it is far from being a thoroughbred descendant of High Dutch? Smiling tolerantly, Achmat pointed out that his academic work is the reverse of treasonous; he has merely reinforced the cultural bond between Coloureds and Afrikaners.
In 1925 Afrikaans was at last included in the constitutional definition of ‘Dutch’ and soon High Dutch vanished from the South African scene leaving Afrikaans to develop, astonishingly quickly, into a coherent modern language. This marked a significant turning-point in the fortunes of poor whites, hitherto barred from public service by their ignorance of both English and Dutch. But then – as Karima dryly recalled – a mere fifty years later the attempt to impose Afrikaans on black pupils provoked the ’76 Soweto uprising, an event now identifiable as the beginning of the end for white supremacy.
Like many Bo-Kaap houses, the Davids’ is much bigger than it looks from the street; several large rooms open off a long hallway. As we talked, much laughter and a merger of delicious aromas came from the kitchen where three generations of the extended family were preparing a ‘welcome home’ feast. (The Malay cuisine – so called – is universally acknowledged to be South Africa’s best.) This Cape Muslim community is exceptionally tight-knit; even now, many parents encourage their married children to live nearby. Monogamy is the custom (pace the Koran) and because Muslim marriages were not recognized in the old South Africa most couples also went through a civil ceremony.
Karima is the main inspiration of a pioneering organization called Streets. Cape Town’s street children, who prefer to be known as ‘strollers’, are heart-breakingly numerous and she spoke with passion of the need to deal with the emotional/psychological reasons for each child’s transformation into a stroller. ‘Sometimes you find that poverty is not the main reason. The best way to help is to make contact with the children’s local community – persuade them to identify individual problems, then set up neighbourhood support groups for both parents and children.’ Karima deplores the dependency culture fostered by do-gooders who concentrate on effects while ignoring causes. She sees little hope for the Cape’s impoverished Coloureds unless they are encouraged to take some responsibility for their own advancement. Before going to Yale she saw one of her projects completed: the publication of a substantial anthology of strollers’ poems. This indeed is social work with a difference.
From Longmarket Street I rambled on through Bo-Kaap where many men wear kufias and many women and girls are veiled. The city centre being so close, Bo-Kaap has a predictable post-apartheid problem: whites see it as a desirable residential area. What to do? According to one agitated old gentleman, who invited me to drink tea on his stoep, market forces will destroy what the Group Areas Act left untouched. Bill Rawson Estates is now busily distributing leaflets (I was shown several) to let householders know their property is ‘worth a lot of money’, a message often reinforced by repeated telephone calls.
‘This is cultural genocide!’ exclaimed my host, whose family have occupied the same elegant little house since the 1840s, when most Boers were still living in mud huts. Strong language, yet I see what he means. Bo-Kaap’s nine mosques, to which muezzins successfully summon males to prayer five times a day, are central to both the religious and social life of these Sunnis – a devout and quite orthodox community though not at all fanatical.
Some white newcomers cause offence by drinking alcohol on their stoeps while listening to very loud pop music ‘with lewd lyrics’. A few communes have been set up ‘where boys and girls share bedrooms and if they are married or not married is all the same’. Still worse, these communes are attracting the much-feared Cape Flats drug dealers. In desperation, a campaign has been started to have Bo-Kaap protected as ‘a cultural heritage site’ where only Muslims can buy property. However, this demand for a new sort of exclusion order uncomfortably recalls the bad old days, as estate agents are quick to point out. Most of the residents to whom I spoke have already accepted, with varying mixtures of grief and rage, the fact that Bo-Kaap as a cultural entity is doomed.
A Coloured middle class has existed for generations in Cape Town, many now living in Retreat and Grassy Park, across the railway line from my base camp in white Retreat. Were one to walk through without seeing anybody, this residential area might be mistaken for a dorp. The same solid well-maintained bungalows (though on average a trifle smaller); the same tidy gardens populated by gnomes and Bambis; the same well-polished cars and children’s swings and litter-free verges. Only when the residents appear does one notice a difference: the Coloureds, of both sexes, dress with a flair and good taste rarely seen among dorp whites.
Two days ago, in the middle of Grassy Park, on my way back from the Rondevlei Bird Sanctuary, I met Jimmie: a 20-year-old Arts student, stocky and fair-skinned and crinkly-haired, wearing an ANC T-shirt and also riding a mountain bike. He appreciated Lear’s special qualities, we discussed my journey, then he invited me to supper. ‘Come tomorrow evening, I must warn my mother and give her time. She’s uptight about whites, she’ll want to impress you, she doesn’t understand the new South Africa!’
Mr and Mrs Currey and Granny Currey, wearing their best bibs and tuckers, were I fear rather taken aback by my slacks and Chris Hani T-shirt. (I had thought, correctly, the latter would please Jimmie.) A slight conversational logjam was deftly shifted by Jimmie’s remarking that I was the first white ever to visit the family socially, as distinct from whites calling on business.
I asked, ‘But why? Why now only on business?’
Jimmie chuckled; his narrow eyes, above chubby cheeks, almost disappeared when he smiled. ‘Dad is rich and influential, wrong colour, right bank balance. Not fit to jol [relax] with but still worth knowing.’ Dad looked embarrassed, Mom beamed fondly at her one-and-only. I had the impression she would approve of almost anything he said or did.
Then Mr and Mrs Leonard arrived: he tall and lumbering-obese, she scarcely five feet and wispy, both argumentative. He is Dad’s business partner and brother-in-law, she runs a privately funded remedial school for strollers and greatly admires Karima. Within moments the Leonards had plunged us all into a stormy ocean of debate about the election, the ANC’s role in the new South Africa, Bishop Tutu’s role at the Hani funeral (both families are devout Anglicans), how to rehabilitate the Lost Generation, how to reduce the Cape’s black population by setting up industries in the Transkei – and whether or not it would be safe for me to cycle through the Transkei on my way back to Jo’burg.
During a superb five-course ‘Malay’ meal Mrs Currey recalled her student days at the University of the Western Cape (UWC) in the early 1970s when enthusiasm for Black Consciousness swept the campus, causing much turmoil and once prompting the Afrikaner rector to close the university for six weeks. ‘For us educated Coloureds,’ said Mrs Currey, ‘those years were a turning-point. Ever since, our best political leaders have seen we must struggle with the blacks, not separately, looking for privileges for ourselves.’
‘We should never forget Steve Biko,’ agreed Mr Leonard, accepting a third helping of pudding – a luscious concoction of fruits and whipped cream and brandy and something strange but wonderful.
‘How would he have fitted in now?’ wondered Mrs Leonard. ‘What would he have thought about the negotiations? He was against the Freedom Charter.’
Her husband said, ‘Steve would have fitted in fine. BC [Black Consciousness] wasn’t a racist philosophy, that’s Nat propaganda. It was what we all needed then, Coloureds and blacks and Indians. We needed to be kicked out of our torpor, made proud and assertive and self-reliant. That’s what BC was all about – not hating whites but loving ourselves.’
‘I knew him,’ said Mr Currey. ‘We were exactly the same age. He was a great man – I mean great. Losing him was like losing Hani.’ He glanced at my shirt. ‘Biko taught us Coloureds that our ancestors backed the wrong horse. Why did we ever imagine if we stuck with the whites, one day they’d love us? Instead they tricked us out of our voting rights and threw us out of our homes!’
‘Twenty years ago,’ remembered Mrs Currey, ‘I called myself “black”. Mostly we did, on campus. Now the struggle’s won it upsets me when our kids call themselves black. In the new South Africa we can all be proud of what we are!’
‘Those kids are chameleons!’ said Mrs Leonard. ‘They call themselves black to get in with the Young Lions and go rioting and looting, saying that’s “political activism”. Give them jobs and they’ll change back to what they were born.’
‘You’re wrong!’ said her husband. ‘It’s the old wanting-to-identify mistake the other way round.’ Having paused to light a fat cigar, he turned to address me. ‘Look, let’s face it – you won’t meet many admitting this but we’re going to have an identity problem for a while yet. Grand Apartheid detached us from the whites – and wow! that hurt! Next there has to be an interim – you’ve noticed “interim” is our buzz-word? An interim government, an interim constitution … And another interim for us to get a grip on our identity and learn to feel secure with it.’
‘I feel perfectly secure!’ protested Mrs Leonard. ‘You do talk nonsense!’
‘I’m not referring to you,’ retorted her husband. ‘Or to anyone here. I’m thinking of the uneducated poor – that’s most of us.’
‘Identity is why I’m going to UWC,’ said Jimmie. ‘I got a place at UCT [University of Cape Town] just to prove I could but the other is our university. And it won’t ever be any good if all the brains go to UCT.’
‘You’ll regret that,’ pronounced Mr Leonard. ‘I told you so at the time – a UWC degree is like a used postage stamp. People throw them out. And now it’s swamped with illiterate blacks it can only get worse.’
Mom rose to her son’s defence. ‘Jimmie’s an idealist and we need those around.’
‘Ideals butter no parsnips,’ said Mr Leonard conclusively.
Later, as Jimmie drove me home, I asked why he still thinks of UWC as ‘our university’. ‘Aren’t those days over? You’ve got me confused.’
Jimmie was silent for moments. Then: ‘I guess we’re all still thinking apartheid, know what I mean? I’m thinking as a Coloured, what to do for my people. At UWC I can try to up standards in all sorts of ways. For me, choosing UCT wouldn’t be like you see it, meaning I’m thinking non-racist strictly as an academic. I guess all South Africans have a long way to go. Maybe for generations we’ll be thinking racist – no, I mean thinking separate.’
When I asked about his career plans Jimmie laughed. ‘I’ve big plans, I want to be something new, an honest politician – or d’you reckon that’s impossible?’
Briefly I hesitated before replying, ‘In Madiba’s South Africa anything may be possible.’
‘OK,’ said Jimmie, ‘so you think I’m crazy – and weren’t you, aged 20?’
Between Cape Town and Jo’burg there can be no genuine rivalry: when everything is immeasurably unequal, competition doesn’t arise. This city is quite small, easy to cycle around and old enough to have a heart, a soul and layers of history. Often I walk through the Company Gardens in the centre where the very first vegetables were grown for those scurvy-riddled Dutch sailors. (How strange that such an innocent need, for fresh fruit and veg, should have brought such misery to all the indigenous peoples of South Africa!) Since the eighteenth century the Gardens have been an arboreal paradise where mighty trees – wondrously exotic, from every continent – shade smooth green lawns and vivid flower-beds. In this haven of coolness and calm doves coo, grey squirrels beg cheekily, feral cats and kittens live happily in the shrubberies – being fed by friends among the open-air restaurant’s customers – and tall fountains splash and sparkle, their source the underground springs that watered those first vegetables.
Cape Town’s finest colonial buildings surround the Gardens. Most are gravely imposing British legacies: the Houses of Parliament, the South African Museum, the South African Library. Vigilant policemen guard the more modest and very elegant Cape Dutch Tuynhuys, residence and office of the State President – soon to be occupied, if all goes well, by a black ex-convict. Not far away is the Cathedral of St George, its exterior heavily dull, its neo-Gothic interior pleasing enough, all the trappings mainstream Anglican. The Groote Kerk on Adderley Street is the country’s oldest church where eight Dutch Governors rest in peace; whenever I pass by it is locked. On the Grand Parade King Edward VII still reigns monumentally, facing the vaguely baroque City Hall – once pre-eminent, now dwarfed by commercial ‘developments’ of breathtaking ugliness. Nearby crouches South Africa’s oldest building, the pentagonal Castle of Good Hope (style: Renaissance Military) completed in 1697. Since 1666 it has served as a fortress, official Residence, torture chamber, military barracks, prison, bank, museum, administrative centre, warehouse, hospital and church. Just now it is closed for renovation – good timing, pre-election South Africa not being a tourist magnet.
Too many of the visible links with Cape Town’s past have recently been obliterated and, when viewed from street level, the city centre’s architectural excesses seem higher than Table Mountain. Also, the whole peninsula has suffered grievously at the wheels of the internal combustion engine. In times past this must have been among the most dramatically magnificent places on our planet, now tiers of motorways scar the flanks of its noble mountains. And yesterday I found the famous Steenberg Pass defaced by two vast litter-strewn car parks. I could have wept: the violation of such splendour hurts me, deep down inside.
On Sunday mornings the trains from Retreat to the city centre are packed with well-dressed, well-spoken, prayer-book-laden Coloured families faithfully returning from their ‘exile’ on the Cape Flats to those churches in the ‘white’ suburbs where their forebears worshipped for generations. Now some are optimistic – perhaps they can move back? The more realistic see little hope of this. Why should whites who have invested in the improvement of their properties be willing to sell? And anyway, how could the average Coloured afford the price demanded?
These are the sort of people – models of respectability, temperamentally introspective and sensitive – who felt branded in a peculiarly hurtful way when sexual relations between whites and ‘others’ became a crime punishable by seven years in jail. This morning, in the train on my way to a lunch appointment in the Gardens, I sat beside a middle-aged lady resplendent in an old-gold and jade-green ensemble, topped by a flower-laden panama hat. First she recalled her childhood in Wynberg, then she declared, with unexpected bluntness, ‘It’s not pleasant for a whole community to feel labelled as the fruits of past criminal unions.’
Time has given Cape Town a subtly complex persona. Starting as an ad hoc settlement of Dutch market-gardeners, it soon became the inefficient and corrupt administrative capital of a slave-state. Then it acquired gravitas as the governmental seat of a remote British colony, before degenerating into the apartheid state’s parliamentary headquarters. And now it is waiting to clasp to its maternal bosom South Africa’s first multiracial Assembly.
Many Vaalies condemn Capetonians as lazy and frivolous and snobby. I however find them agreeably laid-back and their superiority complex, in relation to other white South Africans, seems amply justified.
Some people, even now, regard the Mother City as essentially English. Since 1805, they assert, its dominant ethos has been ‘English liberal’ rather than ‘British imperial’. Hence the Cape Afrikaners had a chance to absorb civilized attitudes, unlike those rebellious Boers who eventually became the Vaalies and Free Staters. Not all history books reinforce this perception of the English role. Yet it persists, giving many English-speaking Capetonians a certain innocent – almost comical – smugness.
The educated Cape Afrikaners, sometimes described as Anglo-Boers, have been likened to the Anglo-Irish. By 1805 they had lost any sense of loyalty to or affinity with their ancestral lands (Holland, France, Germany) and had suffered much under the decaying and enfeebled Dutch East India Company administration. When the British built schools for their children, engineered roads over formidable mountain passes and opened up a new lucrative market for Cape wines, it seemed sensible to accept British rule. But on the remote eastern border of the Cape Province, where for generations the boertrekkers had been living beyond reach of anyone’s rule, feelings were otherwise. Therefore many of those boertrekkers became the Voortrekkers.
My platteland Boer friends were wont to refer to the Cape Afrikaners as wimps who had got stuck into gracious living on the fertile Peninsula and wouldn’t risk the unknown even if staying put meant being forced by the British to give up their slaves and learn English – while the real Afrikaners were hauling ox-wagons over the Drakensberg and boldly confronting the savages met en route … The Anglo-Boers, in turn, see the platteland volk as unfortunates who spent so long isolated in the wilds that they mutated into a subspecies with limited brainpower, no taste and far too many guns.
I notice here another interesting contrast, in the whites’ attitudes to the Coloureds. English-speakers tend to emphasize their infamous murderous street gangs, their long-established reputation for drug addiction, alcoholism and every sort of domestic violence, their rape and homicide rates – both higher than among either blacks or whites and rising annually. Afrikaners are more likely to tell you about their musical and literary talents, their religious fervour, their outstanding bravery in battle and – if given opportunities, as not many were in the past – their high academic achievement rate. Blood is thicker than water, even if it’s only 7 per cent.
Tomorrow I move to Khayelitsha for eight days, a plan frowned upon by the overprotective among my white friends. Khayelitsha, meaning ‘new home’ in Xhosa, is allegedly the most lawless and violent of the Cape townships. In retrospect, its controversial creation looks like apartheid’s last stand – a final effort to escape the swart gevaar, at least to the extent of keeping them as far away as possible from the city centre. In the mid-’70s the whole world was shocked by the brutal destruction of the Crossroads squatter camp and global protests did bring about a reprieve of sorts. But when the squatters were offered a barren windswept site on the False Bay coast they resolutely refused to move; to have any hope of earning a living, they needed to be much nearer Cape Town. Then their own leaders, bribed by officialdom, betrayed them. With overt police support, those leaders organized a terror campaign of killings, maimings and shack-burnings. In 1986, when the migrants reluctantly gave in, Khayelitsha was founded. Since that date many thousands more have moved south – because for the first time in a century blacks now have a legal right to live permanently on the Cape Peninsula.