Plastic arts

Recent acquisitions - the chicken is made out of plastic bags. Which reminds me of some art works I saw at the Joburg Art Fair a few months back - collages/paintings/bas reliefs made entirely out of melted plastic - apparently the artist, Mbongeni Richman-Buthelezi, couldn't afford paint when he started to create art, so instead he collected discarded plastic bags and melted them with a cigarette lighter - see his web site at http://www.plastic-arts.net/ to get a sense of how surprisingly effective this is - though you have to see the originals up close to understand how difficult it must be to work with this medium.

The elephant isn't South African - it is of course a model of Elmer the Patchwork Elephant invented by David McKee, found oddly enough in a souvenir shop in Brittany.

Cape Town demographics

Cape Town and the surrounding areas don't feel very African - a black colleague of mine said it was the only place in South Africa where she felt like a member of a minority when she visited - which is in fact the case, as a recent census put the black population in Western Cape province at 27%, with the white population at 18% (9% in the country as a whole) and the amorphous "coloured" population at 54%.

Cape Town under apartheid was strictly segregated - after 1948 the National Party introduced legislation to favour coloured people over black people for jobs in the city, and black men were only allowed to enter the city if they had jobs (black women weren't allowed in at all). Non-whites weren't allowed to own property in the white areas - which were of course the most desirable areas of town. In 1966 the government went a step further by redesignating a neglected suburb called District Six as a whites-only area and forcibly relocating 60,000 residents to a desolate area 25 kilometres away called Cape Flats.

Fifteen years after the fall of apartheid, the city doesn't feel very different - there are shanty towns (or "informal settlements" as they're politely called) lining the road to the airport, whereas in CT itself the housing provision is of a massively higher standard - and the divisions are still largely racial - a home in the previously-white suburb of Rondebosch which cost seven thousand pounds in the 1970s is now worth more like two hundred thousand (while the value of property in formerly black areas has fallen) - so the barriers to integration are now economic rather than legislative. (And the economic divide in the country is still enormous - for example, black ownership of listings on the Johannesburg Securities Exchange was a mere 6% in 2006 - nevertheless an improvement from pre-1994 when it was zero.)

In a restaurant in Hermanus, some sixty kilometres east of Cape Town, we noticed for the first time ever in SA that all of the waiters were white. In Joburg I've always felt very uncomfortable that the patrons of restaurants in the northern suburbs are often mostly white, while waiters and waitresses are nearly always black - and yet in Hermanus it somehow felt worse that black people weren't performing service jobs, as if they were being denied access to even these job opportunities - and we saw a township near the port, so it certainly wasn't a question of there not being a black population in the town. (But is a township always populated by black people? Apparently so - when I asked about white people living in Soweto I was told that there were a few, out of at least a million, and they were there because they were married to black people). We also noticed in Hermanus that most of the villas lining the coast were shut up - presumably because they're second homes belonging to rich folk who only go there in the summer. I don't know what the demographics of holiday home ownership are in SA, but whatever they are, the injustice of people living in corrugated-iron shacks a couple of miles from luxury houses standing empty most of the time is striking.

I don't know how to sum this up - I suppose in the end the inequalities in the Western Cape are similar to the pattern across the country - and are just another example of the consequences of SA's long divisive history under colonialism and then apartheid. Visitors like me have to go on reminding themselves that the changes only began very recently; it's obvious that there's still a very long way to go.

(Some of the statistics above come from an excellent book by Mamphela Ramphele, Laying Ghosts to Rest - which investigates the challenges of post-apartheid SA.)

Cape fauna

As always in Africa, it seems, wildlife is never very far away - it was winter in the Cape (but very mild - although two weeks ago it was snowing and there were nine-METRE waves, so we were just lucky) - it was the wrong season for insects or reptiles, but we did see some wonderful birds (one that I didn't manage to photograph was irridescent blue and green with a bright red band across its throat) - including the penguins at Boulders Beach, one of the only two places in the world, apparently, where you can see penguin colonies on the mainland (the other place is just along the coast at Betty's Bay) - usually they gather on islands - in fact they avoided the mainland in the past largely to stay out of the way of predators such as leopards, which are now pretty rare in the area. However the Boulders penguins have recently been put behind a fence, partly to protect them from dogs and pet-hunters ( it would certainly be easy enough to grab one, they have no fear of humans - but you're warned not to touch them as they have razor-sharp bills and can peck something cruel), and partly to protect the surrounding properties - residents were complaining that the penguins were digging up their gardens and also creating a stink - in fact you can tell from some distance away that you're in the presence of something with a fishy diet. These are African penguins which are quite tiny, no more than two feet tall - they used to be called jackass penguins because they make a sound like a donkey when they feel like it (with their noses pointing straight up in the air) - but then someone pointed out that South American penguins make exactly the same noise, so the jackass penguins became African to avoid (human) confusion.

Another denizen of the area is the "rock rabbit" (first photo above) which isn't a rabbit at all but a hyrax, and known locally as a "dassie"; this looks something like a giant guinea pig, although just to confuse things even further it isn't classified as a rodent at all, but is apparently related to the elephant. These creatures are also relatively relaxed about humans approaching them and you can get within a few feet before one of the group will let out a piercing whistle - then they all disappear in a flash. Amazingly, dassie urine is used to make perfumes - the pee crystalises and can be scraped up - so take a close look at the labels of any perfumes you own and if you see the ingredient "hyraceum" you'll know you've been dabbing on the wee of these little critters.

Cape Town has a very wonderful aquarium which has some of the biggest fish tanks I've ever seen - including one where several white sharks cohabit with other fish species and with giant turtles - for a fee you can put on scuba gear and get in with them; we didn't do this. I didn't take the boat tour out to see the whales, either (I can get sea sick in a bath tub if there's too much movement), but my daughters did - thanks to Lisa for the pix above. You can see the whales from the coast east out of Cape Town - this is very exciting, you spot them when they start spouting and then they loll around on the surface for a while, occasionally sticking a fin or tail out of the water. In a boat you can get very close to them - as the whaleboat man said "they watch us just as much as we watch them" - which makes you wonder about all the Moby Dick stuff and the glorification of the whaling industry - apparently you can just motor up to a trusting whale and stick a harpoon in at arm's length should you want to (well at least if it's a southern right whale, which is what these are).

In the "fynbos", which is the Afrikaans name for the heathland found along the southern coast (which boasts a greater biodiversity than tropical rainforests) you also see tortoises - and sometimes you hear them before you see them, because they crash around in the dry undergrowth, presumably not too bothered about non-human predators - although undoubtedly a few have been mystified to find themselves in suburban gardens a short time later, possibly next to a penguin sitting in a water feature.

All of this is wonderful - the cumulative effect of seeing all these beautiful animals, mostly in their natural environment, is to restore some sense of mankind's real or at least original place in the world - just one species of ape in the midst of an incredible variety of lifeforms.

Cape Town

Cape Town made me think about cities and what can make them special - what can cause the casual visitor to say within the first few hours, "wow, it'd be amazing to live here". I've been lucky enough to see some of the great cities of the world, and I think what makes them stand out is usually a combination of the natural setting (so no credit to anyone except the founders) and a less easily defined human contribution - the architecture, the services, the level of courtesy towards strangers, the options for entertainment, culture and other activities, etc. Not all great cities have all of these (think of Manhattan - the architecture compensates for the rudeness; and in London the human/cultural contribution offsets a dull location) but the overall mix has to be right.

So - I'm hardly the first to say it, but Cape Town is one of the great cities of the world, above all for the setting. We all know about Table Mountain, which is certainly very striking, but what I didn't know was that the entire coastline is spectacular, and that the mountains are an integral part of the city itself - Signal Hill and Lion's Head virtually cut the city in half. Just south of Cape Town (which oddly enough faces north to the sea) is the wonderful and enormous Table Mountain National Park which extends some forty kilometres down to Cape Point. We went into the Cape of Good Hope section, which has miraculously been kept in a near-pristine state - there are no buildings except at Cape Point (which discreetly includes a funicular to get the lazy or less ambulatory to the top to see the views from the lighthouse) and as you drive around on the empty roads you see antelope grazing and groups of baboons wandering around (the baboons are in fact a menace - signs warn you not to bring out any food or you'll get a baboon mugging - and outside the Cape Point tourist shop we saw people being adroitly relieved of sandwiches and chocolate bars that they'd just bought; we hid ours under our coats and fled back to the car). In the park and in fact all around the Cape there are dozens of coves and beaches which are completely deserted in the winter - they probably get busy in the summer, but what was striking was that construction has been kept firmly under control in the small beach communities - we didn't see any high-rise apartment blocks or hypermarkets; it felt more like being in Norfolk or Brittany, rather than a few minutes drive from a metropolis of three million people.

Cape Town then scores big for managing to have fitted in to its glorious natural setting without spoiling it too much (though there are a few logo-emblazoned skyscrapers right in the centre - FNB and Absa, shame on you). My colleagues who live and work in CT say that it's also more of a cultural centre than Johannesburg, and it has a very good range of restaurants - so it has some of the advantages of a big city as well. It's also reputed to be - and feels - much safer than Johannesburg. In fact, it's better not to make comparisons, because Johannesburg comes out badly on any level, in my view. Cape Town is a beautiful city; Joburg only exists at all because of a seam of a certain type of metal ore underground, which hardly seems a good enough reason. I know where I'd rather live.