The Mother City

I've landed in the Mother City.

That's the name that residents give to Cape Town, South Africa with well-deserved affection and reverence. This place represents the most unusual intersection of cultures I've ever encountered: Zulu and Dutch, Xhosa and British, Indian and Zambian and Malaysian and German features are all stuffed together into one fractious confederation that is simultaneously genteel and angry, both polishing itself for the future while still fuming from the injustice of the past and present.

My travel partner, a friend and fellow UH linguist named Justin, and I arrived on Tuesday afternoon after the longest air travel period of my entire life. We had left Honolulu the previous Tuesday and flown through Tennessee for a 48-hour stopover. Afterward, we flew to New York for a few days with my college roommate Kim, and then left to catch our plane for Johannesburg just after dawn on Monday. It is truly amazing that one can fly directly from New York to South Africa - almost 8000 miles - so I certainly have nothing to complain about. I can say, however, that sitting on a plane for 15 consecutive hours (in the middle seat of the middle section, no less) will make parts of your anatomy ache that you never knew you had. Other than being long and crowded, however, the flight was remarkably uneventful; my only real regret is that South African Airways has apparently taken all its culinary cues from the British. (Rubber-based sausages and boiled potatoes for breakfast? Really?) Justin had apparently indicated some sort of special dietary constraint when booking his ticket, though he couldn't remember what; whatever it was, though (Halaal, perhaps?) he ended up with some special menu that was infinitely preferable to mine (spicy chickpea curry for breakfast? When the alternative is bangers and whatnot, then yes, please!!)

After a brief stopover in Johannesburg, we caught a final flight to the southwestern coastal city of Cape Town. I watched a tract of South Africa that spanned almost the whole width of the country pass by under the airplane, and found the majority of it remarkably unremarkable: flat, empty, a few scrub bushes, dirt varying among different hues of brown. The last part of the journey revealed some interesting mountains that looked in fact more like wrinkles in the earth, or ripples moving outward in a pool. Then a few trees, some buildings, and we touched down on ground closer to Antarctica than I'd ever been before.

Our South Africa guidebook, made only a few months ago, said that there would be no public transportation options from the airport into the city. We asked at the information desk, however, and were immediately directed to our (literally) brand-new city bus at a shiny new bus stop. Even though we were the only passengers, we were nevertheless accompanied by multiple designated "information assistants" in yellow jerseys who carried our bags, asked where we were going, dispensed advice about Cape Town, and showed us exactly where to get off the bus...and then didn't even want to be tipped afterward! This is truly a city that knows the world is watching.

We spent our first few hours in the city wandering around a lovely, immaculately manicured central garden, as our CouchSurfing host, Sifiso, was still at work. During that first afternoon, I was floored - absolutely stunned - by how incredibly differently this second Africa experience had begun than the first one had. If I hadn't known otherwise, I easily could have thought I'd landed in somewhere in western Europe. Central Cape Town, which is crisp and smells pleasantly like autumn this time of year, is full of museums, cafes, wide plazas with bronze statues of dead (mostly white) guys, cobblestone alleys and even a few nice stone churches for good measure. You can even drink the water right out of the tap (in fact, our host said that the first time he'd ever heard a warning against drinking tap water was during his trip to New York!!) Cape Town is an incredibly easy (re-)introduction to the continent. It feels like Munich with more-proximal penguins.

Unless you venture outside the city, that is. Cape Town feels like Europe because it was forcibly, brutally engineered that way. Under apartheid, which means up until 1994, blacks and "coloureds" (mixed racial people) who lived in areas that were proclaimed "white" were physically removed from these areas (literally, in trucks, while their houses were bulldozed) and left on the outskirts. This means that South African cities are ringed by miles and miles and miles of sprawling shantytowns called "townships," full of corrugated tin and plywood shacks, mud streets, mounds of trash, a raging meth problem...and former government-owned liquor stores, the proceeds from which were used to fund the removal of more blacks from other areas. Seriously.

Our host, himself a black guy originally from the Durban area, has been the most enlightening part of our stay. He's extremely intelligent and well-informed about both South African and world politics, and talking to him is like hearing the hope and anger of an entire nation. Last night he told us about the rampant corruption and ineffectiveness of South Africa's ruling party, the ANC. Mandela himself used to head this party, he told us, and many of its current leaders were prominent figures in the fight against apartheid. Now, though, these same former heroes of the people are government louts, misusing funds and enriching themselves while the living conditions for millions of South Africans haven't changed since the Dutch were in charge. His monologue grew more and more intense until he finally yelled to no one in particular, "Is this what we struggled for??" A moment later, in a quieter voice that was painfully sad, he added, "How the mighty have fallen."

I had no response. But I am infinitely grateful for the small bit of understanding these conversations have brought me.

In happier news, the highlight of the trip so far has been a bicycle trip to the Cape of Good Hope. We joined two other visitors with a guide for a day trip that began with a boat ride out to a large rock off the coast just south of the city. The rock is apparently a favorite hangout spot for seals, and we saw hundreds of them, as well as getting a magnificent view of the foggy, mountainous shoreline that actually reminded me of a drier Kaua'i with lower peaks. We then drove along a beautiful coastal cliff-road (again evoking connections with the scenery of the American Pacific coast and Hawai'i), stopping at a beach full of African penguins! We walked along a boardwalk and saw dozens of them, these little knee-high creatures toddling around, braying loudly at each other and flopping awkwardly on top of fuzzy gray chicks. It was utterly adorable.

We then drove on to the national park surrounding the Cape of Good Hope, where our guide set us off on bicycles and drove on ahead to the halfway point to prepare lunch. The bike ride was amazing: it was the only sunny day we've had yet, and it was absolutely beautiful, with the wide, flat plain lowering gently to rocky shorelines in some directions and rising to mountains and cliffs that dropped into the sea others. At the Cape of Good Hope itself, the dry grassland (complete with two wild OSTRICHES, passively munching not 20 feet from the road) gave way to boulders, then rocks, and then the smallest slice of ocean between any major landmass and Antarctica. We returned our bikes to the guide and then set off on a short hike up a cliff. The Cape is actually two north-south promontories, only maybe a mile apart and in a sort of horseshoe shape; the Cape of Good Hope stretches slightly farther south, but its sister strip of land, Cape Point, is just as stunning and contains a lighthouse. We hiked around the curve and up to the Point lighthouse, where we could marvel at the 360 degree view of water and mountains while being treated to shouted renditions of the soccer songs of South America, courtesy of a rowdy group of Argentines and Uruguayans hanging out at the top.

Another highlight was a trip with Sifiso last night to a braai (cookout) that occurs every Sunday in the township of Guguletu, just outside the city. Immediately upon entering Guguletu, we left Europe behind and entered the Africa that I had been expecting. The cobblestones and cafes and Caucasians were all gone, and we encountered a helter-skelter mass of cars and people and animals and buildings. The braai is held at a tiny butcher shop; hundreds and hundreds of people descend on the shop weekly and stand in line to buy a plastic washtub full of whatever raw meat they want (we chose lamb, beef, and sausage). Everyone then takes their tub to the back room, where there's a fire and a grill rack and a handful of guys running back and forth to cook and deliver a thousand pounds of meat. The crowd then congregates outside in the street to drink beer and dance during the interminable wait (ours was about three hours). House music was blasting from under a tarp, and the few grimy tables that were set up just got in the way of the crush of the cavorting carnivores. Dogs squeezed under people's legs to catch the scraps, cars with their horns blaring parted the crowd from time to time, and the sheer number of people, plus the grill inside the shop, almost helped me forget that night had fallen and it had gotten really, really cold. By the time we finally got our food, much of the crowd had dissipated; we sat at a table and tore up unidentifiable meat chunks with our hands, scooping along with it mounds of cornmeal paste (which I remember as ugali from Tanzania, but which is called "pap" here). By the end of our meal, our hands and faces were slick with an impermeable coat of grease that the cold water provided could do nothing to remove; we finally gave up and just rubbed it in. It turns out that unadulterated animal fat is a fantastic moisturizer; my hands and lips still feel softer than they have in years. The braai was definitely one of the most fun - and most real feeling - experiences we've had in South Africa so far...even for us two near-vegetarians!

We are leaving Cape Town this evening for a smaller town called Mossel Bay, which is east of here along the Indian Ocean coast. I don't know much of anything about the town, but am hoping to use it as a point from which to find transport to smaller towns. Figuring out how to get around by public transportation outside the major cities here is proving really challenging.

Much more has happened in the past week, but Justin has been waiting at a cafe for two hours now, so I should go...more later from Mossel Bay!