11. Cape Town
It was the Portuguese explorers that first sailed past the southern tip of Africa naming it ‘Cabo da Boa Esperança’.
With a natural harbour in Table Bay beside Table Mountain, next the Dutch East India Company (VOC) settled Kaapstad (Cape Town) in 1652 with its grid of streets until the British took control of Cape Colony and started to shape the city after the 1814 Anglo Dutch Treaty.
They focused on making it a revictualling port for ships en route between Britain and India. Slavery was rife but not outlawed until 1834 when free slaves established their own neighbourhood at Bo-Kaap.
Dutch-Afrikaners also subsequently abandoned the city for the interior and with the opening of the Suez Canal in 1869, this began to impact passing shipping traffic volumes.
The discovery of diamonds and gold minerals in Witwatersrand had triggered a land grab across South Africa under Rhodes.
Of special significance, since the creation of the Union of South Africa in 1910 (The Cape, Natal, Transvaal & Orange River) and under the ‘Natives (Urban Areas) Act’ in 1923, black persons access to Cape Town was restricted as Pass Laws were introduced.
The National Party had extended this state of residential apartheid where each racial group could ‘own land, occupy premises and trade only in its own separate area’ under the ‘Group Areas Act’ of 1950 with the aim of securing ‘separate development’ of the races of ‘whites, coloureds, Indians and natives’.
In consequence new extensive informal settlements evolved across vacant areas as the Cape Flats. This was perpetuated with suburban townships until 1994 when the whole regime in South Africa was finally overthrown with the eventual accession of Mandela as President of the African National Congress and creation of the new Republic.
In the mid-20th century the city of Cape Town had been described by the young James Morris in geographical terms, as follows:
“Cape Town is a strangely delicate, maidenly city for a seaport and a capital, and what sense of power she has lies chiefly in her setting. She clusters most obscurely about the massif of Table Mountain… Only the mountain stands firm, it sits above the city in an attitude of righteous supervision… If you drive down from Paarl early on a winter morning, you may see its flat platter protruding brilliantly above the clouds that envelope the city, a sudden thin sliver of rock encouched in a cushion of white. At other times, if you stand on the green slopes of the mountain, you may observe the cloud resting soft as a feather-down upon its plateau… This is an old and lenient capital. The fine white houses of the Dutch colonists still ornament its streets and the castle is full of lovely Dutch furniture and pictures, a most comfortable, polished, gastronomic kind of fortress. There are flower-stalls (like Nob Hill) and Oriental quarters (like Chinatown) and down by the City Hall a jolly open-air market sets up its trestle tables with a swagger and restores to the city a trace of its nautical roll… Cape Town is an inconclusive, unregimented, individualist city at least by the cramped standards of South Africa.” *
This synopsis whilst emphasizing the stunning topography, ignores much of the built development and coverage and enforced informal development of the city with its slums, segregated areas and controlled townships.
Subjected to these over-riding forces and pressures of ongoing racial patterns of segregation, the central city as portrayed above is quite different from its deeply divided outer districts.
Today the city is both the legislative capital of the Republic, and a major economic hub in the region.
However, it has wide extremes of inequality not just between the Southern Suburbs and the Northern suburbs but more significantly with districts as Cape Flats with its poverty, gangs and violence.
Here, the township – such as Khayelitsha – is one of the fastest growing township areas.
With rural to urban migration from the Eastern Cape, it contains approx. 0.5 million people mainly Xhosa, living at very high density.
Infrastructure and service provision is poor, making living conditions challenging.
As a result, an increasing volume of the population of Cape Town is inhabiting marginalised areas that remain a significant management challenge for both the Mayor and the Metropolitan Municipality.
*Jan Morris – Cities – Pantheon Books, 1963.
