Slowly but surely, dismantling of city’s history is under way
IT’S A sad day when a monument to one of our greatest men is vandalised within months of being completed.
I refer to The Arch. Not in person, but to a huge artwork recently erected near St George’s Cathedral. It stands at the juncture between Government Avenue and Wale Street. But not for long, it seems.
It’s slowly being dismantled – (presumably) to be sold piece-by-piece on the backyard scrap metal market.
For the price of a fix or two, perhaps? Although, of course, it’s quite possible that, in the dead of night, a group of tourists removed every single engraving depicting a clause in our Bill of Rights: to take home as souvenirs? Rather naively, they (the engravings) were epoxied to the concrete… a sitting target in this day and age.
And it gets worse. The bolts holding those graceful wooden arches together are being dismantled. Only the ones at the bottom, near the ground… But it’s the thin edge of a wedge.
Have you seen the cast iron railings along the Queen Victoria side of our cathedral recently? No? That’s not surprising. They, too, have almost gone… So reminiscent of our colonial past, they’re being replaced with chicken wire. Only as a temporary measure, I’m told – but then, given that it’s far more “ethnic”, perhaps it should stay?
Many would argue that, in a country notorious for its glaring income disparities, we shouldn’t have expensive imported railings – especially around a House of God. Well, I suspect if we didn’t, there wouldn’t be a cathedral, mosque or much else standing. But then, for those who abhor and resent everything brought to this beleaguered continent by white people (and those from the Far East and the Philippines, perhaps?), wouldn’t that be a good thing? A resounding blow for African renaissance?
By the way: the spikes on the top of each section of the stone wall running between The Company’s Garden and Queen Victoria Street are also disappearing. Which means that people are entering the park after it closes. Perhaps to sleep? Who knows? With the drought and ne’er-do-wells simultaneously having a go, it, too, is clearly on the endangered list. But I digress… The point is this: if we don’t do something to protect the more vulnerable historic buildings and open spaces in our inner city from whomever it is that’s doing all this, they won’t attract visitors from anywhere. Which means that jobs will be lost. Perhaps the time has come to stop being politically correct about the criminal element masquerading as homeless people in Cape Town. That’s my take – as someone who has watched them at work in the small hours from the balcony of her fifth-floor apartment. Nobomi Bird Cape Town