For his 80th birthday, a spiritual homecoming: Desmond Tutu was back at St George’s Cathedral in Cape Town, the 19th-century church of colonial origins that he personally transformed into a fortress of resistance to racial apartheid.
“Back then, at a time when there was barbed wire outside and police were not at his side, he stood at this pulpit and dared speak truth to power, truth to evil,” said Bono, the Irish singer, in one of two birthday events held for the archbishop emeritus at the cathedral last week.
Bono went on the describe Tutu and former South African president Nelson Mandela as “one of the great one-two punches in the universe.” Others praised the archbishop as the de facto leader of the struggle when Mandela and comrades were in exile or jailed on Robben Island.
However, as Tutu defied his years to dance with the Soweto Gospel Choir, half an hour’s drive away, another churchman had just completed a month-long hunger strike. Xola Skosana is pastor of the Way of Life church in Khayelitsha, Cape Town’s biggest township. He went without food last month to protest at the treatment of the poor.
“It’s interesting to me that a woman would make up a bed in a five-star hotel then come home to sleep on the floor,” Skosana said from his rudimentary office. “Or cook the best meal for someone else and come back and live off a slice of bread.”
South Africa is frequently described as the most unequal society in the world and it is Cape Town where the cancer of injustice, racial segregation and bitter division is often diagnosed most vividly. There is a Cape Town of opera houses and literary festivals, of Internet entrepreneurs and luxury mansions, a global destination that is the gateway to prosperous Californian-style wine estates. However, the millions of tourists who pour through its gleaming airport each year glimpse another Cape Town flanking the motorway to Table Mountain: a sprawling underclass crammed into flimsy shacks. This is the Cape Town of violence and strife, of cavernous poverty and toxic lifestyles. Its victims are invariably non-white.
It is not, residents say, the Cape Town that Tutu dreamed of and fought for. Seventeen years after white minority rule gave way to multiracial democracy, there is a charge that Cape Town remains an apartheid city in all but name.
“Black people feel this is the old South Africa. If you come to Cape Town, you’ve come to the last post of the colonial history of this country. Both politically and economically, white people are in power. In other parts of South Africa, black people don’t have to wake up and say, ‘Yes baas’ and feel psychologically oppressed. In Cape Town, they still have to deal with that attitude,” Skosana said.
SYMBOLIC CITY
The “Mother City” is where the struggle between master and slave began. Soon after Jan van Riebeeck landed at the Cape in 1652, the Dutch East India Company began taxing indigenous people, shipping slaves and fighting for land and water. Today, the slave lodge is a museum across the road from St George’s, which during the apartheid struggle heyday was itself surrounded by barbed wire, police vans and water cannon. Tutu, elected archbishop of Cape Town in 1986, was the spiritual conscience of the movement. He was a leader of the United Democratic Front and the voice of the campaign to free Mandela, whose first speech after his release was made on the balcony of Cape Town’s city hall.
Yet the city’s role in this historic endeavor is, in some eyes, mocked by today’s uncompromisingly grim reality. Not far from the beautiful beaches, hip suburbs and great cuisine that saw it recently named the world’s top tourist destination by one Web site, women in Khayelitsha could be seen last week drawing water from a communal tap near cesspools strewn with rubbish.
Nobom Nobele, 29, washing clothes by hand, said her shack has no electricity or running water, forcing the family to use candles and a paraffin stove and walk 10 minutes to a friend’s home every time they need to use a toilet. Her children, aged 12 and four, suffer rashes from unclean water.
“The government makes promises at the time they want your vote, but after that they forget,” she said. “There’s been no change since 1994. We’re still hungry, we’re still living in a dirty place.”
Nearby some teenagers were playing soccer in a yard. Sipho Ndindi, 16, who wants to be a doctor one day, said he sometimes travels to the upmarket suburb of Claremont.
“It’s like I’m on the other side of the world, but I wouldn’t say it’s unfair because some of them worked for it,” he said. “There is still racism in this country under the carpet. When you walk down the street here, do you see any white man or white girl? Only black people are in this shit.”
His friend, Anele Krawe, a 19-year-old student, added: “I do feel jealous. I feel like this is not my country. Sometimes I ask myself, if I could take [South African President] Jacob Zuma to live like this, he would not stay for a day. He would want to go home.”
POVERTY
There are efforts to rescue Khayelitsha, with government-built houses and public services striving to keep up with its expanding population, but many still live in shacks in an area where life expectancy is low and HIV infections and drug addiction are rampant.
Police figures show there were 125 murders and 252 sex crimes last year in Khayelitsha, where under-reporting is often an issue. In Claremont, there were six murders and 18 sex crimes. In Cape Town, more than one in four people live in informal settlements and more than one in five is unemployed.
For Skosana, these people are the city’s lifeblood, but see none of its rewards.
“Cape Town is largely for the benefit and entertainment of tourists. Khayelitsha has a million people who must travel long distances to go to the city every day to work, come back at sunset and live in squalor,” he said.
He blames a failure of political will.
“There is a numbing effect, a state of hypnosis. There is always something that postpones the agenda of the poor and takes their place as the most central issue. I think the Bishop Tutu of 1994 would echo my sentiments,” he said.
Western Cape is the only one of South Africa’s nine provinces not controlled by the party of Mandela, the African National Congress, which labels the ruling Democratic Alliance (DA) a front for the wealthy white elite. Earlier this year, Zuma described Cape Town as a “racist” place with an “extremely apartheid system.”
However, the DA contends that Cape Town is the best-run city in the country, with uncorrupted financial management, infrastructure spending and public service delivery that is the envy of its counterparts.
The city has a long history of immigration, including white Afrikaners (whose ancestors were Dutch and German), white descendants of British colonialists, “colored” people (a South African term meaning mixed race, with a broad international ancestry dating back millennia) and a significant Muslim population. Uniquely among South Africa’s major cities, black Africans are in the minority.
Two decades after Tutu made it a shining city of defiance amid seemingly impenetrable darkness, Cape Town is finding economic liberation harder than the political kind. Centuries of colonial oppression and decades of pernicious segregation are a burden likely to last for generations.
Andrew Boraine, chief executive of the Cape Town Partnership, an intermediary body between government and business, said: “Of course it’s changed and of course there are huge things that have stayed the same. The issue is, how are we going to change it? How do we learn from other cities in Brazil and India with problems of inequality? As Tutu always said, winning freedom is one thing — using it is twice as hard.”
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