Jan van Riebeeck, the founder of the gorgeous city of Cape Town, was pretty forthright about the local black population he found there in 1652: "They are by no means to be trusted, being a brutal people living without conscience," he wrote in his diary. In his bestselling book The Mind of South Africa, veteran journalist Allister Sparks quotes Van Riebeeck referring to the local Khoisan people as "dull, stupid and odorous" and as "black stinking dogs".
Van Riebeeck quickly put prejudice into action. To keep the locals out of what he considered his due, the Cape, he ordered the planting of a bitter-almond hedge around his settlement. "Planted in a half moon and punctuated by watch-towers, (the hedge) effectively isolated the settlers from the African continent. The bitter-almond hedge grew into the apartheid divisions that ran through every aspect of life in South Africa, and that invaded the psyche of the nation," wrote Marilyn Martin in 1996. The hedge still stands today in the Kirstenbosch national botanical gardens, and remains a problematic and contested symbol of our past – and perhaps the present too. Like the hedge, the debate over whether black people feel welcome in Cape Town still rages.
Last week Helen Zille, the premier of the Western Cape – the only South African province governed by the largely white-led opposition Democratic Alliance – angered many black South Africans by saying her province's schools are being flooded by education "refugees" from the neighbouring Eastern Cape. Zille is white. The Eastern Cape is the province that produced two of South Africa's post-apartheid presidents: Nelson Mandela and Thabo Mbeki. Education in that province has collapsed, with national government sending an emergency task team to knock it into shape. The use of the word "refugee" sparked anger, with many saying that this was an example of the popularly held view that the Western Cape – and Cape Town – sees itself as an extension of Europe and the last bastion of white rule in Africa.
Last Friday, the New York Times published a story examining the raging Twitter debate between Zille and various prominent black personalities on the perceptions of racism in Cape Town. In many ways, it is ironic that Cape Town is now the object of racism accusations. When I first arrived in 1989 to study at the University of Cape Town, the city was known as the most liberal in South Africa. When I joined the Archbishop Desmond Tutu-led march to occupy "whites-only" beaches that year, a large chunk of the 80,000 people who arrived at Bloubergstrand beach were white. But the wheel has now turned, and accusations of racism against Cape Town are vented frequently. The north of South Africa is seen as more integrated, more African. The truth is more complicated.
For one, the complex racial gradations of Cape Town constantly challenge those who want to speak of a narrow blackness or whiteness. The majority grouping here are "coloured" people, a problematic term in itself. These are the descendants of the same Khoi derided by Van Riebeeck, Malay slaves and white people. In London they would be considered mixed-race, in the United States black. In 2001, just over 50% of the people of the Western Cape described themselves as "coloured", 30.1% described themselves as "black African" and only 18.4% as "white". The first two groups largely live in poor, satellite townships, while white people are in or around the city of Cape Town.
Many black people still complain that Cape Town is "white", and feel uncomfortable there. Perhaps this is due to the fluidity of political power relations in that province. The National party – the party of apartheid – won the elections there in 1994 during the first democratic elections in the country, in a move that bewildered the north. Then in 1999, the ANC got 42% of the same vote, enough to build a coalition to run the provincial government. The ANC governed in a coalition until 2009.
So what is it, then? The economy of Cape Town's city centre and the beautiful, world-renowned winelands is still extremely white. This is the face of Cape Town, and it is disconcerting for many black people from the north. It is disconcerting to foreign visitors, too, who often wonder whether they are in Africa. We blacks are not used to being a minority in our own country. The whites of Cape Town are not used to serving moneyed, educated, confident blacks. We are suspicious of each other. We wait for the racist white to strike, or the marauding black of one's racist nightmares to threaten to take one's property. In this, Cape Town is no different from the whites and blacks from Johannesburg or Pretoria.
We are a country that cannot escape race. We should not even try. We defeated apartheid – described by the United Nations as a "crime against humanity" – a mere 18 years ago. All our cities have racists, and non-racists. The difference is that Cape Town has a high profile, is a tourist attraction and is being run by a party largely seen as white. Crucially, economic power in the Western Cape is extremely white – from the restaurants right up to the city's many corporations. It is also efficient and well-run, and the city leaders tend to talk down to the ANC leaders to the north.
This does not help. It does not help either that the debate has been reduced to Twitter, where complexity gets short shrift. Three hundred and sixty years later, we are still standing at the hedge, calling each other names.
