Cape Town is safer and more cosmopolitan than ever before. ADAM ALEXANDERtakes a stroll around a city transformed since his arrival there 20 years ago
IN THE TYPICALLY inspiring and dreamy rhetoric of the new South Africa, the rainbow generation just emerging in the past 18 years since the end of apartheid are called “Born Frees”. According to recent studies, Born Frees “are much more socio-culturally cohesive, meaning they are far more tolerant towards immigrants and gay people, have much more inter-racial contact, feel less discriminated against and are more satisfied with life.”
This is wonderful news. In what is arguably the greatest experiment in racial harmony on earth, things are on the right track then and, in the 20 years since I first started visiting Cape Town – the dreamiest of all South Africa’s cities – this is my overriding impression too. So much so that you can’t help but feel a bit sorry now for all those South Africans sitting in Australia, Canada, New Zealand or the UK – still waiting for the imminent catastrophic implosion of their once-beloved country, and trying to light their braais.
In what is perhaps a welcome hangover from the recent World Cup, the first and most striking thing to note about Cape Town these days is the New York-style security.
There are cops literally everywhere and where there are not cops there are security men in yellow bibs or parking marshals desperate to guard your car, and CCTV cameras watching everything. Not just for the very wealthy either, as I soon discovered when I caught the wrong train and ended up alone in the townships, exactly like the kind of idiot tourist that I once preferred to laugh at.
Even there, in Langa township, where I was told that police are patrolling day and night and the shebeens are forced to close by 9.30pm, there were so many security men in yellow bibs guarding the platform that the most I had to endure was a little embarrassment (and one or two faintly surprised looks) until another train came along – complete with a ranting, railing, sweating preacher on board – and calmly ferried me out again.
This is also a measure of how complacent and relaxed I had become in a city where I wouldn’t even have ventured to take any metro-train 20 years ago, let alone the wrong one. The city, which if it has changed at all in the long time I’ve come to know and love it, has clearly only gotten better – not only safer, but more cosmopolitan too, and with the emergence of a much more noticeable black presence in the fancier establishments along Long Street – and perhaps even a tad more equal as well.
My only fear now for tourists visiting here is that they will be so busy taking the cable car up Table Mountain or diving in shark cages or rushing off to the Western Cape’s epic new Sanbona game reserve to see animals such as the elephant, lion, leopard, zebra, and the increasingly-besieged rhino – known as the Big Five – that they will miss out on one of the biggest kicks you can get here. Which is simply to take a wander around the heart of this historically rich, uniquely blended, bite-size city, where the people are just as varied, colourful and fascinating.
Begin your stroll with breakfast on trendy Kloof Street in somewhere such as the very friendly and popular Arnold’s cafe and you will find yourself surrounded by one of the most lovely if slightly self-conscious creatures of all here – the white Capetonian.
For the white Capetonian, Cape Town is more than just a city, it’s a lifestyle choice. One that first dispels the notion that there is any conflict whatsoever between the need to try and stay healthy, and the even greater need to let the day go to hell in a hand-basket – preferably on some of the best wine available anywhere in the world. Certainly not when you can do both anyway.
Often seen coming in and out of any building that has the words “fitness”, “wellness”, “holistic” or “organic” on the front, or more often than not just plain “bar”, witness how the white Capetonian thinks nothing of ordering the healthy-choice breakfast of fresh fruit, granola and Bulgarian low-fat yoghurt, then following it immediately with a Marlboro. Not that you would ever see anyone raise a eyebrow behind all those sunglasses anyway. Then try not to look bemused while the discussion turns to where to get the best astrological chart-reading, or what to do if Café Paradiso is already fully booked.
It is a mistake though to spend too long in the shallow-watering holes where this creature’s enviable la vida Chardonnay can become too much of an assault on the senseless. Move on instead to begin your stroll in the Company Gardens – perhaps the most beautiful inner-city park in the world – now perhaps the only place where gangs of well-organised muggers are allowed to act with brazen impunity, in the form of the gardens’ famous and always-hungry squirrels.
This is real Cape Town, where the cosmopolitan mix of religions, cultures and colours comes together in a tranquil place of perfumed rose-gardens, Victorian colonial splendour, and sun-dappled almost tropical beauty. A place where you might see an Indian wedding, maybe, or a film shoot or, most heartening of all perhaps, a mixed-race couple cuddling on a park bench under the glorious backdrop of that ever-present natural wonder of the world, Table Mountain.
Head out past St George’s Cathedral, the church where for years Desmond Tutu stood in the pulpit as the last, lone voice against apartheid not in prison – and Cape Town city centre can suddenly feel like a backstreet in Cairo, with Muslim men in skull caps and business suits, women in full-flowing burkhas, street cleaners with “Jesus Saves” bibs on, Xhosa or Zulu dancers, Cape Malay flower-sellers, Zimbabwean taxi-drivers, Congolese curio-sellers and perhaps even the odd immaculately uniformed commander of a Pakistani submarine milling around enjoying the sun on his face and dry land under his foot.
If you want the most eclectic mix of people though – the real characters – Long Street with its antiques stores, funky eateries, second-hand bookshops, old-style barbers and tobacconists, is the perfect place for that famed Cape Town institution – the sundowner. Wise-cracking gangsters, hookers, dreamers, lovers, backpackers – all life is here. With its overhanging balconies and thumping musical back-beat, Long Street is one of the world’s great thoroughfares, bearing an uncanny resemblance to Bourbon Street in New Orleans, but without the tackiness or the overwhelming number of tourists.
This is the place to reflect on the Cape Town I arrived in 20 years before, when I thought I’d rediscovered the wild west. The breathtaking scenic beauty, the wonderful cuisine, the talk of becoming an African Hollywood. Like the best of frontier nations, a foreigner could be anything they wanted to be here. A white face was a passport to anywhere, and Cape Town, where you had to leave your gun at the door before you went into a bar, was a place where you felt you could get away with murder (although not any more).
The edginess is missing now, but anyone who enjoys a bit of irony can get their kicks instead these days in a country which largely escaped the banking fiasco by either listening to people who have just arrived home from holidaying in Paris lamenting how much Europe is going to the dogs these days, or even more bizarrely, by reading in the newspaper about how Angola is having to bail out its former colonial master Portugal.
Only a hopeless optimist though wouldn’t notice that for millions of people here who still live in grim circumstances, the great South African dream has not yet materialised. While heaven is more heavenly here than anywhere else, for others, hell is still more hellish.
Like America, South Africa has become one of those places where the dream will always remain that much more powerful than the reality, because the dream is such a good one.
GET THEREAir France has launched three weekly flights from Dublin to Cape Town via Paris Charles de Gaulle on Mondays, Wednesdays and Saturdays. Fares start from €745 return, including taxes. See airfrance.ie