I’ve always wanted to visit and always knew I would. Landing in Cape Town was with mixed emotions. I could feel the sense of history around. If ever a fascinating country be, this I knew from my pre-study was one of the best from which I could further my education.
It was the land of two oceans: Atlantic and Indian. It was at the very southern tip of the massive continent with neighbours such as Namibia and its famous jagged dunes, Bostwana with the incredible rich diversity of the world famous Okavango Delta. . Zimbabwe and a batter and bruised people with one of the world’s longest reigning despots, to the east Mozambique and its beautiful coastline and last but not least tribalism personified in the mountain men of Lesotho with their incredible Drakensberg Range and the brave Zulu tribes of Swaziland. It was the land where the Dutch and Portuguese set up early colonies. With the Dutch deciding that the Cape should be set up as a farm for its Dutch East India Company exploits to offer its sailors a resting point and an opportunity to search for hidden gold and diamonds. Then in 1806 the British had their time as overlords and encourages its expansion by soliciting the Boers (Dutch, Flemish, German and French settlers) to take plots of lands and build a thriving communities. Conflicts as we know ensued and with despicable Berlin conference of 1848 the crude lines that divide many tribes unfairly across the continent and which lead to the current map we have of Africa was unfairly drawn.
Going from the airport to the Cape was a sad moment. The famous “Cape Flats”shanty towns where tens of thousands of disadvantages black south African’s were hoarded into stuck out like a sore thumb on the horizon. They gnawed at me and insulted everything good in the world. As our taxi speeded by they reminded me of the other such camps of deprivation I had seen before: the slums of Rio and the horrible disease ridden sardine like shacks of Mumbai. This time a different country, but the same old story. I had seen it before and knew it well: inequality, rapaciousness and apathy of the grossest form. All 7 deadly sins were visceral and very much alive. However, as a i studied an old women holding a small dusty dog beside her shack I reminded myself tha this was not the time for introspection. I was conscious while acknowledging the indigenous peoples’ plight and the tremendous social, economical and racially fueled fight they still had on their hands and the false dawns once promised after Mandel’s reign, I was on my honeymoon. There would be another time to think of such issues and I would have time to see my own interpretation of the balance truth of how things for the different demographics in this complex society actually was.
As we passed the towns, and I started to stare at the beautiful Table Mountain one last thought entered my minds as we left the poor behind so quickly. It was that of one of my hero’s ( Professor Muhammad Yunus) dreams - that maybe some day my childrens children’s children would only have to see such poverty in a museum - museum’s of poverty. No longer real in the world. Just relics of a past brutal immature time when man had shrieked some of its essential responsibilities to look after the planet and each other. No more slums, shanty towns or favellas. World Peace. The eradication of poverty as we know it on the earth. (You can learn more about Professor Yunus, his pioneering work on micro-banks and why this eminent Bangledeshi received his Nobel prize, here). As I stared at the unusually beautiful chunk of rock that gives Cape Town such a dramatic setting I quietly smiled to myself, and was content, that with men like Muhammed Yunus and the mighty Mandela, life was beautiful, and I thanked God I was now about to explore one of the world's most beautiful cities with my equally beautiful new wife!
More to come...
