Which is the real South Africa?

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Day 5 in Cape Town, in a week in which we've found out why the first Dutch settlers called it the "Cape of Storms". Every night since Tuesday we've listened to howling gales at our 11th floor window. On Wednesday, driving rain came down all day, and there were floods elsewhere in the province. This has meant that we haven't been able to go up Table Mountain (shrouded in clouds since day one), haven't made it to Robben Island where Mandela was imprisoned (the boats can't sail when it's windy), and haven't made it out to the Cape of Good Hope to see the penguins (there was zero visiblity the day we were supposed to be going). Oh well, at least we're not at work, and we've still got one day left...

We did, however, have a very interesting day when we visited the South African Parliament in the morning, which is about a 30 second walk from our hotel. We tagged along at the back of a tour being conducted by a guide called Kenneth for a group of schoolchildren. Kenneth's speech slipped between Xhosa, the main language of the Western Cape, and English, often changing mid-sentence; it's a common south African habit, although on the tourist trail it's most often an Afrikaans-English hybrid you hear. We sat in for a few minutes on a meeting of Parliament's Public Enterprises Committee. This was presided over by a black female chairperson, and a young coloured (in the South African sense, which is not racist / derogatory as it is in the UK) female civil servant was being grilled on the details of a lengthy report on departmental policy on whistleblowing by a multi-racial group of MPs of both sexes and all ages. It was utterly mundane, but it was politics-as-normal, and when you think where South Africa has come from not so long ago, the achievement of such mundanity is really something for the Rainbow Nation. You get the feeling that this achievement of normality still means a lot to people: when the school group walked in, the Committee chair looked up, smiled, welcomed them all and asked them if any of them wanted to be President one day. I can't imagine a Westminster MP doing that somehow.

In the afternoon, we found out just how far South Africa still has to go when we visited some of the townships on the Cape Flats, where 60% of Cape Town's 7 million people still live. The accommodation ranges from simple, single storey brick buildings at the top end, to corrugated iron shacks in the middle, to loose collections of cardboard, bottles and whatever else people can pull together to make a roof over their head at the bottom. We dropped in on a hostel for migrant workers from the countryside, where 13 families share a handful of small rooms and a single toilet; a mother was trying to look after her sick baby on a filthy single bed in a fetid, airless bedroom shared with several others. There is hope in the townships: our guide, Njongo, who himself lives in one of the better houses in Langa, was keen to stress how much has improved since apartheid ended in 1994. The police no longer drop in unannounced to beat up and arrest people at random, the government is building houses for people as quickly as it can, schools are flourishing in a way they never have done before, and in general people have enough to eat. Compared to many of Africa's people, township dwellers don't have it so bad. But there is still an awfully long way to go, and this remains a hugely unequal country.

I'm running out of credit, so will sign off now. Will try and fit in one more blog before we head off into the wilds on Sunday.

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Comments

[M]

Afrikaans
Afrikaans is actually the main langauge of the Western Cape. English and Xhosa are both second with about 25% of the population speaking each of them.

[M]

Population
Cape Towns population is only between 3 and 3.5 million, not 7. Cape flats does not contain 60%(it is far smaller). It is one of the smaller townships. The black townships are actaully considerably larger.