Kapstadt: The Melting Pot of Africa
Cape Town knows it is beautiful.
This is the first thing to understand. The mountain. The ocean. The winelands forty minutes from the city centre. The food. The weather - four seasons in one day is not a feature, it is a personality disorder. The Capetonians who live under all of this have made their peace with it, which is the particular peace of people who live inside something extraordinary and have decided that the correct response is to accept it as their due.
They are not entirely wrong. This is the most irritating thing about them.
Kapstadt: The Melting Pot of Africa moves through Cape Town in full - the Pink Lady and its afternoon tea, Table Mountain on its own schedule, the south-easter wind that does not apologise, the V&A Waterfront built over Dutch colonial history literally underground. The Robben Island ferry crossing thirty minutes of cold Atlantic. The Bo-Kaap and the Cape Malay cooking class. Mzoli's in Gugulethu on a Sunday when Cape Town shows itself. The winelands of Franschhoek and Stellenbosch and Constantia. Long Street at 3am. Cubana dancing from 10pm. And District Six - the empty land in the middle of the city where sixty thousand people used to live and whose names are written in handwriting on a map on the floor of a museum.
The wine and the wound are the same city. The melting pot still melts.
The third book in the South Africa series by Oloi Shorua - following 220 Days and Counting... There Is Always a Reason to Go Back and Coast to Coast... Where Every Stop Has a Name - and the one in which the Cape Peninsula reveals its full complexity: beautiful, damaged, accumulated, irresolved, and entirely itself.
The mountain is in charge. Everything else is just making arrangements around it.
Come back.
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