Cape Town Calling: From Mandela to Theroux on the Mother City

by Justin Fox, J.M. Coetzee (contributor), Nelson Mandela (contributor)

From Paul Theroux and Peter Moore to Jonny Steinberg, JM Coetzee, Jonathan Kaplan, Nelson Mandela, Mamphela Ramphele, Tom Eaton, Breyten Breytenbach, Pieter-Dirk Uys and Gabeba Baderoon: Discover Cape Town with top contemporary authors both well-loved locals and international travel writers. Selected and with an introduction by Justin Fox.

Read how JM Coetzee fails to get into a good school. Nelson Mandela misplaces his spectacles on the Grand Parade. Jonathan Kaplan faces arrest at St. George s Cathedral. Paul Theroux meets a fellow pessimist at Cape Point. Jonny Steinberg is revolted by prison food. Joseph Lelyveld joins Crossroads residents singing hymns. Richard Rive walks with ghosts in District Six. Rian Malan haggles for snoek in Kalk Bay. Pieter-Dirk Uys attends a fake wedding on Greenmarket Square. Edwin Cameron climbs Table Mountain with the help of antiretrovirals. Judy Kibinge parties in Long Street. Plus many more...

Genres: Travel

232 pages, Paperback

First published April 30, 2010

About the author

Fox is a novelist, travel writer and photographer based in Cape Town, South Africa, and is the former editor of Getaway travel magazine. He was a Rhodes Scholar and received a doctorate in English literature from Oxford University after which he was a research fellow at the University of Cape Town, where he taught part time for 20 years. His articles and photographs have appeared internationally in a number of publications and on a wide range of topics, while his short stories and poems have appeared in numerous anthologies. He has written scripts and directed award-winning documentaries and is a two-time Mondi journalism award winner (1999 and 2004). Recent books include The Marginal Safari (Umuzi), The Impossible Five (Tafelberg), Beat Routes (Karavan), Place (Umuzi) and, most recently, a World War II series of novels, starting with The Cape Raider (Penguin and Sapere) and The Wolf Hunt (Sapere). Justin was longlisted for the 2011 Alan Paton Award for non-fiction, the 2012 Olive Schreiner Prize for Literature, and his debut novel, Whoever Fears the Sea (Umuzi 2014), was longlisted for the Etisalat Prize for African literature.

Reviews

[Jeanne Marshall · Rating 5 out of 5]

I moved from Cape Town to London 6 years ago. My relationship with Cape Town is a romantic one and I've never stopped pining for it. I read this as a way of marking my return and readying myself mentally for my first journey home. This is a beautiful and enlightening collection that brought the city to life for me again.

Some of the stories are heart wrenching; the District Six chapter in particular. I visited the District Six Museum with the words freshly imprinted in my mind and it was an overwhelming experience.

This is the perfect travel book. Through it you will learn about the politics, geography, traditions, history, legacy and vernacular of the Cape. The spirit of resistance is apparent throughout. An essential read for travellers and lifelong Capetonians too.

[Kevin Carney · Rating 3 out of 5]

Cape Town Calling: From Mandela to Theroux on the Mother City
Edited by Justin Fox

This anthology is a collection of short extracts examining Cape Town from many different perspectives and of different qualities. Most are interesting because they show the new, democratic South Africa in its fledgling years after the pivotal election of 1994. Some are perfunctory without much insight. Several are excellent. I’m concentrating on the section called the “The Flats” featuring South African writers, poets, activists, famous and lesser known.

Jonny Steinberg leads off with a fascinating look at the city planning of “pre-removal” Cape Town, when the neighborhood boundaries between the different races were porous and integration possible, and “post-removal" Cape Town(1966-early 1980s), when the apartheid neighborhood boundaries were rigid and integration criminalized. The white city planners implemented the Foreshore Project, initiated in 1940, which overhauled the inner city through slum clearance of mixed neighborhoods and created modern “Garden Cities” for the underclass, far away but close enough that the Coloureds and the Blacks could make the long commute to service the whites in the city proper.

Steinberg looks at the effects of this modern urban design through the coloured family of the teenager Magdien Mekkas, whose entire family was abruptly uprooted. His immediate family ended up in the township Heideveld separated from their extended family and friends. The houses of their new neighborhood were arranged in inward-looking clusters around a courtyard surrounded by a greenbelt intended to be a play area. Each cluster-block became its own insulated territory cut off from other block clusters by the “greenspaces,” which became “intraversable scrublands” (102) controlled by gangs. In effect, the “cluster children” were locked inside this labyrinth. White modernism resulted in the creation of “micro turfs” and “micro identities”(104) drawing communities into micro wars. This is the Cape Flats.

The next excerpt shows that even though SA was experiencing democracy, the past in many ways was still very much present. In 2003, nine years into SA’s democracy, the writer Zubeida Jaffer is still weighed down by the painful memory of the 1987 murder of her fellow United Democratic Front (UDF) activist, Ashley Kriel, and deals with it by writing a memoir about her generation’s experience dealing with apartheid.

She captures the terrorist nature of the white government when she describes the funeral for her young, murdered comrade. The small New Apostolic Church is surrounded by masked police with automatic weapons, armored trucks, sharpshooters on the rooftops, and rows of yellow riot vehicles and Casspirs (military vehicles). An army helicopter hovers above. When the older traditional church members exit the church, they are surprised by the massive military presence. As the mourners are carrying the casket, the police launch rounds of teargas to disperse and to terrorize the people. The young khaki-clad activists in attendance realize they need to jump in and try to preserve some semblance of dignity and honor for their fallen comrade. Zubeida writes, “… I see the coffin dancing grimly on the shoulders of the young men moving rapidly down the streets…as different waves of comrades pass the casket on like a baton in a relay and run with it as fast as they can…”(109). The funeral service merges with a mass rally presided over by Archbishop Desmond Tutu. This unforeseen chaos challenges but strengthens the movement and reveals the terrorist nature of the white government to the world and hastens its eventual downfall.

The next excerpt, “Steering by the Stars,” is by Mamphele Ramphele, who tells the story of a young Xhosa woman named Bulelwa and the many challenges she faces living in the Cape Flats and trying to get a good education. The author appears to be conducting some kind of educational research project at Gugulethu Comprehensive School and meets Bulelwa when she is in 9th grade, around 1991. The narration alternates between the author/researcher, Bulelwa and Mrs. Leseka (Bulelwa’s mother).

In addition to Bulelwa’s family and financial problems, she must also contend with the disruptions in public education caused by the fighting political factions in the run-up to South Africa’s first democratic election in 1994. The author helps Bulelwa transfer to the private Rhodes High, helps her find small jobs and counsels her through her parents’ unexpected divorce. Bulelwa graduates from high school in 1996 and gets her first job at an insurance company, a huge achievement under the circumstances. This is a happy ending for a disadvantaged learner, but sadly this kind of intervention is not available to most learners, whose lives do not have such a happy ending.

The next excerpt, “Notes on the Cape Town Skollie”, is short but very relevant in South Africa today, July 2026. In 2005 A group of Muslims in a community called the Rylands in the Cape Flats believed that the new Black South African government was not protecting their interests so they formed a vigilante group called PAGAD- People Against Gangsterism and Drugs, which, on the surface, may sound reasonable. They ended up shooting and burning a known gangster in the street, Dirty-Harry style. The author, Suren Pillay, recognized these ruthless vigilantes because he himself had marched with them in the 1985 school boycotts in the Cape Flats. But twenty years later he realizes that these PAGAD vigilantes, who believe they are enforcing the law, quickly become criminalized themselves creating bigger problems than those they’re trying to solve.

My favorite excerpt is from “Sea Mountain, Fire City” (2001) by Mike Nicol, a journalist who interviews a heroic NGO healthcare worker named Mariette Williams in the township of Manenberg about the TB/HIV crisis in Cape Town. Manenberg is ground zero of South Africa’s many dysfunctions: gangs, crime, drugs, health crises, poverty, inadequate health facilities and too few professional healthcare workers. Like a true warrior, Mariette marshals her resources, gathers her “care supporters” and ventures into the neighborhoods to address a myriad of health problems face-to-face. Each one of her 20 “foot soldiers” is personally responsible for caring for 7-10 patients, providing meds to each and insuring that the correct dosage is taken every day for 6 months. Wrong dosages and/or interruptions could allow the TB bacillus to mutate rendering the original medication ineffective.

Mariette and her team have lived and worked with the people in Manenberg so closely for so long that they know and trust each other deeply. Even during the gang wars, Mariette and her team had a really good compliance rate. They did not pull out but remained patiently in place. Mariette said, “People would wait until the shooting died down then duck out and run to the care supporters”(123). This is the time when the residents needed their lifeline the most. Mariette and her team’s commitment to the community was heroic.

The last excerpt from “High Traffic” (2005) by Gabeba Baderoon is full of interesting details of the place names, neighborhoods, the geography and the building trade stores in the Cape Flats. There is so much information about house construction that it is easy to forget that the story revolves around the death of the writer’s father, Galiema. The story line is simple: a sister and brother are shopping at Lansdowne Boards to buy floor boards to install in the bedroom of their mother and her new husband, Imam. I did not feel emotionally connected to this story as to the others, and I did not get a good sense for the characters mentioned. I know that the idea of “Traffic” is important to the story, but I really do not understand its purpose. In any case, the story does provide a good sense of place for the Cape Flats.

This anthology is a good introduction to Cape Town and a good sample of its writers.

[Elena · Rating 4 out of 5]

Very interesting collection. However, I expected a collection that would place Cape Town in a good light. I encountered a collection of stories that focused more on the shady, underside of Cape Town. Rather disappointing I must say