Africa

With all of the grim economic tidings, both real and perceived, current and forecast, the Western Cape appears to have received some good news. The Cape Town Regional Chamber of Commerce expects the province to see modest economic growth in the coming year even as the rest of the country faces recession.

This weekend’s New York Times travel section featured Cape Town in it’s “36 Hours In . . .” feature. I’ve no idea why anyone traveling to Cape Town would spend so little time there.

One can quibble with some of writer Michael Wines’ choices. And his perplexing analogy at the beginning of the piece. (”Cape Town is South Africa’s Los Angeles to Johannesburg’s New York) is crazy on so many levels it boggles the imagination. (Joburg as New York? Cape Town as the vapid, self-indulgent landscape of LA? It makes me wonder which Wines understands less, the US or South Africa.)  Still, it is nice to see the United States’ “paper of record” feature Cape Town in this way and to be reminded of some of my own past trips to one of my favorite cities on earth. 

I have previously discussed the controversy over changing names of municipalities, streets, and the like in South Africa. These debates tend to be so contentious because they operate at the nexus of history, identity, ethnicity, and mythology, a potent brew anywhere, but particularly pungent in post-Apartheid South Africa. 

About a year-and-a-half ago I tried to wrestle with some of these issues with regard to both naming but also urban identity in South Africa. Given that there is once again momentum to officially change Pretoria’s name to Tshwane, I’d like to revisit some of those thoughts:

One time when I was staying at a hostel in Cape Town in 1999 I overheard a young woman . . . dismissing South African cities as not being African at all, but rather too European. It was a pretentious thing to say from someone who, come to find out, had spent all of three total weeks in Africa, but felt fully comfortable pontificating at length about the fundamental nature of Africanness, urbanness, and African urbanness.

That said, I guess I get a sense of what she was saying without saying it — she had some sense of what is and is not African, and Cape Town did not seem to be it — too white, too cosmopolitan, not tribal enough. In sum, she revealed her own stereotypes about Africa, but couched them in dismissive platitudes. She had her images of what African cities should be, some exotic idea fixe, and when Cape Town fell short of her Heart of Darkness view of Africa, it was Cape Town’s failure, not hers. And of course what better way to solidify one’s credentials as a fan of all things Africa than to blithely dismiss one of the world’s truly great cities by referring to it as “too European”? Then again, I’m the sort of retrograde anachronist who LIKES London, so I am contemptible to begin with.

I could not help but think of that vexing conversation when I spent all day wandering Pretoria, or Tshwane (”We are all one”), as it is also known now. Pretoria was the bastion of Afrikanerdom. It was the heart of Paul Kruger’s Zuid Afrikansche Republiek, later the Transvaal, and Pretoria was the administrative capital of the country, and still is. So it is shocking to wander Pretoria’s streets and look around and think, much like that young woman who so fetishized Africanness, “this is an African city.” I don’t think I meant it in the same way that she did, and a little part of me lamented that white South Africans seem to have forsaken the city that still is in many ways the emotional heart of Afrikanerdom. It is here in Pretoria that the Vortrekker monument Still draws crowds and evokes tears, as it did on Friday when, sadly, too many white South Africans chose to honor the covenant of the past rather than reconciliation with it. Maybe Pretoria is now a “more African” city than it must have been in 1965 if one adheres to a color by numbers view of African cities. And if this transformation is so, it is, on balance, a good thing. But it says a good deal about too many South African whites that it has become this sort of city not because of the demographics, but rather because of white abandonment. To be sure, whites still work in the city, but they come in during the day, park in protected environments, work during the day, and drive to their posh homes in the suburbs at night.

That said, it is nice to see the bombastic statue of Paul Kruger serving largely as a place on which pigeons shit and African children play, blithely unaware of its symbolic past, save perhaps when bothered, verkrampte Afrikaners wait for these cildren to move when they make the pilgrimage into the city to get their photo of their great founder of the Boer republic. I took a picture today of two young black children playing on one of the four Boers that serve as part of the foundation for the sturdy base. I hope it comes out. The picture, that is, not the pigeon shit.

The controversy over what Pretoria or Tshwane will officially be called hits the heart of what it means to be a South African in the new century. The past is past, to be sure, but it is not merely history. And fundamentally, these questions are as much about the past as they are about the present. The past seems capturable, containable, controllable in ways that the present, with its messiness and contingency and infinite possibility (which is itself both exciting and scary), does not.  For those South Africans reluctant to embrace change, whether Pretoria is Tshwane is less about what the city means now than what it once meant, and if what it once meant is so easy to eradicate, that has profound implications for a small slice of white South Africans and their identity in what is at times a frightening new nation.

Dr. Mannavar Sivakumar, chief of the United Nations’ World Meteorological Organisation (WMO) agricultural meteorology division, argues that Africans need to be more aware and “proactive” on the issue of climate change:

 ”He said it was ‘critical’ for Africa, which forecasters predict will be the region worst affected by changing weather patterns, to get its act together. ‘Africa is projected to have a large area covered with arid or semi-arid regions; as the population increases, there will be an increase in demand [for food] while on the other hand there will be less precipitation on account of climate change [to support agriculture]: this will be a ‘double killer’.'”

But this “double killer” also represents something of a dual-edged sword.  While climate change will have deleterious effects for Africans, many rightfully ask if they will have to stall industrial development until they can afford to go green even while the west has been able to go through industrial growth while utilizing technologies that have always been far more growth-friendly than earth-friendly. The poorest nations on Earth will have to confront this problem most acutely, though so too will giants such as China and India.

My colleague Bill Hewitt is doing yeoman’s work over at the FPA Climate Change Blog. He addresses these issues in far greater depth and with far more acuity than I ever could.

Update: Along the lines of Africans taking the initiative on issues related to the environment, climate change and the like, Cape Town seems poised to become Africa’s first “Green City.” 

In recent weeks there have been several travel articles on South Africa. Cape Town and its environs , of course, are always popular, as recent articles in The New York Times and Washington Post reveal. 

But the country’s hinterlands are also popular. The Eastern cape, one of my regular stomping grounds, is a wonderful and often-overlooked part of the country and it is viable for budget travel.

Indeed, the entire country can be very accessible for those for whom every rand will count. South Africa can be expensive to reach, but once there it literally offers opportunities for those with more cash than they know what to do with or for those on a student’s income.