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.)
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Hi
I know it's hard to understand and I certainly don't have the answers. This much I do know. I battle to get "black" people to work for me, they prefer clerical jobs to manual. The closed up villa's on the seafront are mostly owned by foreigners from all over the world. The blacks do not enjoy working late for a number of reasons including personal security going home late at night. Please don't forget that the new super rich in SA are black people and they could easily employ "blacks" if they chose to. You might not be aware that a white SA is denied work now in SA on the basis of his skin color which has turned white South Africans into entrepeneurs or emigrants. There is no easy answer but it is amazing how tolerant we are of all races and religions in South Africa but how in areas that preached to us about injustice how they have become racialistic. We shudder when we hear the direction some of these countries are now taking. I know this may sound a little defensive but I have seen poverty in India, Angola, Nigeria that makes us South Africans look all wealthy. Where ever you come from there will be the elite in mansions and those not so lucky.
Hi Basil, thanks for your considered comment. I know I don't understand the complexities of SA's history and its current demographics/ social realities. But I suppose the difference between SA and all the other countries where poverty and inequalities exist is that the explicitly racial divisions of SA's past are still so recent - and a visitor naively tends to think that more should be done to even out the economic equalities that are still clearly (largely) race-based,even admitting your point about the new rich. I guess it will take a lot longer.
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