Cape Town’s rabbit holes
‘OH NO! Not another travel book about Cape Town,” you may be thinking when you pick up The Cape Town Book. But it’s unlike anything you’ve encountered before. In fact, it’s probably closest to being an official guide of the Mother City because it’s written by a fact-checker extraordinaire.
Nechama Brodie – journalist, talk show host, martial artist, hobby runner and sometime singer – has painstakingly written what I regard as the definitive guide to Cape Town and rightly called it The Cape Town Book. It covers the city, warts-and-all, and goes beyond the postcard imagery of Table Mountain and the V&A Waterfront.
There are chapters about our gangs, the Muslim burial sites or kramats, and a host of other threads she calls the “micro histories” of our city.
I met Nechama – who holds a senior position for fact-checking outfit Africa Check – on Twitter a few days ago and found a kindred spirit. I was having a whinge and a joke about the new Cape Town version of Monopoly – that it carried all the clichés and was a bit onedimensional. Nechama took the chance to alert me to her book.
The next working day, The Cape Town Book arrived on my desk and I’ve battled to put it down. It follows The Joburg Book in 2008, a book she edited and co-authored, about the social history of the city.
“It took me quite a long time to work out how to divide Cape Town into these kinds of geographies. What I found very interesting was when I realised that Joburg was easier to ‘divide’ because, from the start, it had been a segregated city outside of small pockets, like Brickfields, or Sophiatown, or Fietas.
“Cape Town, on the other hand, had been mixed from the start, and it was only the last 50 or so years that this had changed. Note, when I say Cape Town was mixed, I don’t necessarily mean it was integrated in a social way, that there was no colour divide, and it was all peace and brotherly love.
“You don’t even need to do a detailed study of Cape Town’s history to realise its social structure and politics were complicated and divisive. But – before Group Areas – Cape Town was the most integrated city in South Africa.”
What makes the book unique was how Nechama delved into our past and went down what she calls “rabbit holes”. It doesn’t just gloss over the details, and there are a lot more shades in her book between Jan van Riebeeck’s arrival and present day Cape Town than your conventional travel book.
“This is a history book disguised as a travel book – although I suppose The Cape Town Book does teach you how to travel-navigate the past, by using the spaces of the present.
“This is a really significant concept for me. The whole premise of the book’s structure – by geography and place rather than along a linear historical timeline – is to help us find physical anchors in the now, that can reconnect us to what came before. I love the idea that you can touch the past, literally.
“This approach challenges how we tell our stories – suddenly the emphasis shifts from ‘famous white men’ (growing up in white apartheid-era schools, this was my experience in particular; but I think this is how we are still taught history) to all of the individual and communal lives and spaces that were happening in parallel, and changing in response to colonisation, apartheid, etc.
“You can’t tell the story of Cape Town without discussing who came before – the Khoisan groups that were wiped out, assimilated, forced off their land. You can’t tell the story of Cape Town without telling the story of nearly 200 years of slavery. You can’t tell the story of Cape Town without remembering Ndabeni (not just the name – which is all that lingers).
“You can’t tell the story of Cape Town without remembering not just District Six, but also District One and Roggebaai, and what the southern suburbs and Kalk Bay and Simon’s Town were like before Group Areas.
“And you absolutely, positively, cannot tell the story of Cape Town without discussing the Cape Flats, which (according to the last census) is now where more than 50 percent of the city lives.”
Nechama adds: “I wanted to write a history of Cape Town that I wanted to read, and that I could not find. I thought there might be other people who would also want to find and read the same kind of book, a book that wasn’t just about the beautiful beaches and the mountain and Jan van Riebeeck. A book that had a bit of sadness to go with all that beauty. A book that reminded people (taught people?).
“Cape Town was not just a mixed city, it was a black city almost from the start. I know this term is fraught, I use black to include black and coloured; I’m not trying to impose any identity on anyone, although I know language does this inherently.
“The problem with saying something like this is, it begs the question: who am I, to assume or suppose I can tell other people their own history? This is a good question, and the only answer I have for now is that I hope I am not; not telling people how to tell history, that is. History needs to be constantly told, and re-told, by lots of different voices. History is not and should not be static.
“Cape Town is often sort of excluded from some of the country’s historical narrative – in the same way as visitors praise it for being so wonderfully cosmopolitan when they actually mean very ‘European’. I used to think this way too, rather critically. It has taken me a long time to learn Cape Town is a truly African city, and it’s amazing when you see it for what it is. The real secret is: this is a book for Capetonians.”
Before Nechama started working on the book, she set out provisional chapters – mostly based on specific spaces or areas. She knew the first two chapters would be based on the geological and environmental history, and then she looked at who were our first people and what happened when the colonisers arrived.
Then the settlement’s geography was her guide, starting with the Company’s Garden, the Castle and the Slave Lodge as starting points. But then it got more complicated and she had to dig deeper.
“Sometimes I used rivers to guide me – the Liesbeek, where the first ‘free burghers’ got their land to farm. Even here, after the Liesbeek joins with the Swart, and becomes the Salt River (did you know Paarden Eiland actually used to be an eiland, when the different river mouths cut it off ?)…
“I had to separate out modern-day Salt River and Woodstock, and surrounds, to distinguish what was the more ‘working class’ aspect of those suburbs, compared to the perceived ‘middle-class’ nature of what Capetonians call the southern suburbs…
“When I told friends of mine there was a chapter on the northern suburbs, I can’t tell you how many people would laugh and say but that’s not Cape Town!
“I also had to add in an extra chapter, that was not based on one specific geography or suburb, but which was about the entire city – and this was the chapter on segregation and forced removals (both preceding and after Group Areas).
“This is always the challenge: how much do you keep in, how much do you take out?
“Some of the areas that feature very prominently in other history or tourism books – the Waterfront, the beaches, etc – share rather small spaces in mine. This is deliberate. Honestly (the city and Waterfront will probably hate me for saying this), but I think the less time tourists and Capetonians spend at the V&A, the better. There is so much city to be seen.”
When I saw Cape Town Monopoly, I started the #CapeFlatsMonopoly hashtag on Twitter as a bit of fun.
With her insight, what would Nechama include if given a crack to design her own Cape Town Monopoly?
“Over the past few years there have been several spatial and design initiatives that have promised to position or reposition the city in a certain way – I am thinking about Table Mountain being one of the world’s new wonders; or the Name Your Hood thing; and of course this whitewash Monopoly board.
“In each instance, we’ve been told ‘people voted for their favourites’, as if this was some democratic process. But it’s not representative or democratic when your voting options are predetermined by some committee that’s more worried about hipster coffee than affordable housing.
“I am a fan of the original Monopoly structure using street names – streets can tell us everything about the economic geography of a city. This doesn’t mean it must all be Cape Flats, or Gympie Street (I love that idea though; and Gympie Street must be on the board).
“In my ideal version, I’d still like to see the Company’s Garden represented, because this landscape architecture is older than even the Castle. Plus probably one of the ‘grachts’ (originally canals). And then… hmm… You know, I would really like to see Hanover Street on a Monopoly board. Although, having said that, maybe it would be hurtful. There are a lot of things to consider here!
“One street I would definitely not include would be FW de Klerk Boulevard. I am still opposed to this naming.
“For Chance cards, you hit the jackpot with your Spring Queen chirp on Twitter (“@GasantAbarder or a Chance card that reads: ‘You’ve won 2nd prize in the Spring Queen pageant…’”). I don’t know if I could top that. Maybe we could have a ‘gentrification tax’ on the properties?”
Nechama says not enough emphasis can be placed on promoting domestic tourism. She says locals were still excluded and felt unwelcome at the city’s “shining attractions”.
She questions why it is that tours are more accessible to German visitors than people who live in Athlone. She has placed a heavy focus in her book on the displacement of people in Cape Town.
“For me, the most important chapters in this book are the ones on forced removals, and on the Cape Flats, because I think this is one of the first times they have been included in a more ‘popular’ and conventional narrative, so you see them as part of the Cape Town story, not apart from it.”
Nechama’s says Cape Town’s problem with inclusiveness is not unique but it does have more of a challenge than Joburg.
“Cape Town does have a lot of specific spatial problems that are not yet being effectively dealt with. And by spatial I mean how the majority of the city is excluded from not just spaces and places, but access to services, infrastructure.
“There are artists and collectives doing some really provocative work around this – hip-hop is a really important voice, and has been for years – speaking to the politics of power in Cape Town and particularly the Cape Flats.
“There are graffiti artists which make ugly spaces beautiful, who render difficult questions in spray-paint and wheatpaste; or disruptive provocations like Tokolos Stencils.
“And, of course, more recently we have seen the students (once again) raising fists and voices, wanting to challenge this divisive, exclusionary legacy.
“It will happen, I think, but it will take time. And we will all need to learn how to listen to more voices than just the ones that agree with what we already think.”
Some of the answers already lie in Nechama’s book.
“On the day I launched the book, I went off to the dispatch in Parow Industria to collect copies myself.
“One of the guys at the dispatch wound up talking to me about how he was born in District Six, and which street he had lived on, and what it was like.
“He was busy carrying boxes of books to my car, and sharing these parts of his life with me – just because of a book.
“I didn’t know this was going to be that kind of book, when I started. It makes me feel like maybe I did something that really was worthwhile.”