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By Root 1351 0

of reading the airline magazine, kulula.comic, and presents a safety demo as funny as it is thorough, grabbing the attention of every passenger. When the plane lands in Cape Town, one of the attendants gives us arrival instructions. “There are three no-nos inside the terminal: lighting up anything to smoke, cussing at the baggage handlers, and smirking smugly at people who arrived on South Africa Airways,” the stodgier establishment competitor. In a rib on South Africa’s reputation for crime, the speaker says, “If you are returning home from a grueling business trip and you parked at the airport, we sincerely hope your car is still where you left it.”

Crime is such a common problem in South Africa—the murder rate, for example, is twelve times higher per capita than in the United States—that residents joke about it to relieve the tension in the air. Along with poverty and high unemployment, it’s largely a legacy of the harshly racist Apartheid policy that flourished in the last half of the twentieth century. Generations of blacks and “coloreds” (mixed-blood descendants of blacks, Europeans, and Asians) grew up in hovels in segregated townships with scant access to education, jobs, and basic liberties. The repression and total denial of opportunity bred bitter resentment, still widespread but ameliorating with time under a new government dedicated to racial equality and peaceful coexistence. In Cape Town, much of the hardship and violence is concentrated in the Cape Flats, a vast shantytown that visitors glimpse coming from and going to the airport.

Despite this and other areas of blight, Cape Town ranks near the top of any list of the most beautiful cities in the world. The mammoth profile of Table Mountain, often draped in a tablecloth of clouds, looms over the town center between the booming harbor and the striking beaches fronting the frigid Atlantic coast. Many tourists, including us, take the Explorer bus system around to the most attractive and interesting spots, hopping off to see various sights and then reboarding another bus later.

Our bus climbs the steep slope of Table Mountain slowly, providing grand vistas of the city and the hillside vegetation, including magnificent wild proteas, the exotic flower we’ve always associated with Hawaii. “At home,” Cheryl says, “I pay $7 to $9 per stem for proteas, making this a million-dollar view.” A midpoint cable car station offers access to the flat summit, but we bypass the chance for a nature hike in favor of strolling the shore along Camp’s Bay Beach. Wide and deeply sandy, the beach brims with tanners and volleyball players, who have an arena with seating for their sport. Across the street, parked in front of small upscale shops and restaurants, a fast-food delivery car advertises “wheely good chicken” on the tires and on the sides, “perfect breasts, thighs, and legs for the beach.”

Another stop on the tour casts a shadow over the pulchritude and playfulness. District Six, a large neighborhood on the fringes of downtown, stands almost completely in ruins. Once a poor but vibrant working-class area, home to thousands of Africans and coloreds, it slid into decline by the 1950s when the government and absentee landlords stopped investing much of anything in maintenance. The following decade, the Apartheid regime started a forced removal of the residents to the Cape Flats ghetto, declaring the neighborhood would be bulldozed and reserved for whites only in the future. The authorities displaced 65,000 to 70,000 people and demolished their homes, churches, and businesses, but the brutality of the relocation and destruction stirred up so much local and international furor that they never rebuilt District Six for whites. It remains a monumental scar in the center of Cape Town.

The District Six Museum documents the story with photos, physical artifacts, oral histories, musical recordings from the past, and more. Most poignant of all, it encourages former residents to serve as guides for visitors, recalling their memories of joy and suffering in the neighborhood. Joining