Cape Town, South Africa

Cape Town, often referred to as "Mother City" by locals, is the legislative capital of South Africa and the capital of the Western Cape province of the country. Cape Town's natural landmarks and long coastline have helped make the city the most popular tourist destination in South Africa; many have called Cape Town one of the most beautiful cities in the world.

Cape Town's culture is a mixture of European and African influence, with a mixed population to match. Despite its unrivaled beauty, Cape Town has seen significant strife in its relatively short history. The scars of apartheid run deep in the city, and its legacy is still felt in the city's class and race inequality.

Landscape

Cape Town gets its name from its position on the northern end of the Cape Peninsula. The city is home to more than seventy mountains, including the famous Table Mountain, which is believed to have once been an island. Table Mountain is a flat-topped mountain that rises more than a kilometer (3,300 feet) high. Cape Town is the largest city in South Africa by area, covering 2,461 square kilometers (950 square miles).

Cape Town experiences well-defined seasons that can be extreme. The Newlands suburb is the wettest part of South Africa due to its position in relation to the city's mountains. The frequent strong winds that pass through Cape Town from the southeast are known locally as the "Cape Doctor," because they carry air pollution away from the city.

The City Bowl, Zonnebloem, and other wealthy areas form the City Centre. The rest of Cape Town is grouped into four districts. The Atlantic Coast encompasses the Canal Walk shopping mall and the Waterfront region in the northeast. The Southern Suburbs lie west of Table Mountain and are home to the more bohemian neighborhoods. False Bay is a throng of seaside communities, including the naval port Simon's Town and a rocky beach called Boulders. The False Bay district also contains the road that leads to the end of Cape Point. The Cape Flats townships are a group of vast, impoverished settlements where nonwhite South Africans were confined during apartheid and where a majority continue to live. In the largest township, Khayelitsha, Black Africans make up more than 98 percent of the population. Only since the late 1990s have these towns begun to receive electricity and paved roads.

People

Cape Town's metropolitan area had an estimated population of 4.890 million people in 2023, making it the second-largest city in South Africa after Johannesburg. Because of its large area, the population density of Cape Town is relatively low, at 1,800 people per square kilometer (4,663 per square mile).

One of the lasting legacies of South Africa's apartheid government is a strict division of all South African citizens into one of four racial groups: White, Black, Coloured, and Indian (all of which were capitalized under apartheid law). South Africa still has strict laws relating to ethnicity, specifically in regards to which people can legally be called "Black." Many mixed-race people with sub-Saharan ancestry are lumped together in a group referred to variously as "Coloured," "Bruinmense," "Kleurlinge," or "Bruin Afrikaners."

In South Africa, Black Africans make up 81.4 percent of the population according to 2022 estimates, while people of mixed race ancestry represent 8.2 percent; white people, 7.3 percent; and Indian or Asian people 2.7 percent. In Cape Town, people of mixed race ancestry accounted for 42.4 percent of the population in 2012, while Black Africans accounted for 38.6 percent, white people for 15.7 percent, and Indian or Asian people for 1.4 percent.

Economy

Throughout its recorded history, Cape Town has been a major port and manufacturing center. More recently, the city's real estate and construction industries have experienced significant growth. Cape Town also has a thriving ship-repair industry, as well as oil refineries and leather, plastic, and automobile manufacturing. However, Cape Town's beautiful coasts and numerous natural attractions make tourism a major industry. According to Statistics South Africa, in 2011, the city's three largest economic sectors were finance, insurance, property and business services; manufacturing; and wholesale and retail trade, catering, and accommodation.

The city's commercial center is the area known as City Bowl. Cape Town is renowned for its wineries, of which there are more than two hundred within a day's drive of the city center. South Africa as a whole was the tenth largest wine producer in the world in 2018. Another major industry is the production and processing of oil and natural gas, due to Cape Town's proximity to popular shipping routes and the discovery of offshore oil and natural gas deposits in the 1980s and 1990s.

Landmarks

Table Mountain, which forms the majority of Table Mountain National Park, is among Cape Town's best-known natural attractions. Many tourists climb the mountain or ride the Table Mountain Cableway to the top. The city's many beaches also attract many tourists, and it is possible to visit several in a day, including beaches on both the Atlantic Ocean and False Bay.

Other landmarks include the former jail cell of South African leader Nelson Mandela and the District Six Museum, which documents the destruction of one of Cape Town's most famous neighborhoods and the city's history of slavery. The Castle of Good Hope, formerly the headquarters of the British and Dutch governments, is the oldest colonial-era structure in South Africa; currently it is the base of operations for the city's military.

History

Little is known of Cape Town prior to 1486, when Portuguese explorer Bartolomeu Dias wrote about his travels around what he named Cabo da Boa Esperanca, or the Cape of Good Hope. Antonio de Saldanha was the first person known to climb Table Mountain, in 1503, but the Portuguese had no lasting interest in the town, since the Khoisan people who lived there were not receptive to outsiders. It was not until the Dutch and the English took an interest in the city in the late sixteenth century that it began to see regular foreign visitors. Even then, the city had almost no contact with Europe prior to 1652, when it became a way station for the Dutch East India Company (Vereenigde Oost-Indische Compagnie, or VOC).

Jan van Riebeeck, an employee of the VOC, is generally regarded as the founder of Cape Town. He established a fort for the VOC and started a garden, now known as the Company's Garden. Van Riebeeck also established a culture of discrimination and segregation when he planted a bitter-almond hedge around the Dutch settlement in order to keep the Khoisan out.

Van Riebeeck imported enslaved people from Indonesia, Ceylon, Malaya, and Madagascar to meet the labor demands of the VOC. Most of the European settlers were male employees of the VOC, plus a few soldiers and sailors, and the enslaved women and girls were often raped by the Europeans. Many of the enslaved people and their children began to intermix with the Khoisan, eventually forming the multiethnic, heterogeneous group that came to be known as Coloured.

A group of non-VOC Cape Town residents known as the Trekboers, and later simply Boers, began to drift away from the center of the city in 1745, creating a unique culture and a new language, Afrikaans. The Boers were mostly uneducated farmers, and they withdrew from society at large shortly before a social, political, and philosophical revolution in Europe.

Ownership of Cape Town passed back and forth between the British and the Dutch throughout the nineteenth century in a series of wars and treaties. The British abolished the slave trade in 1808 and gave legal protection to the Khoisan, but they also instituted a labor system that made it illegal to quit a job or even be in the city without a job. When the British discovered that Transvaal, an established Boer colony, was also the site of massive gold deposits, they attacked the Boers in 1899 in what became known as the South African War. Cape Town was the landing site of most of the British troops, who eventually defeated the vastly outnumbered Boers in 1902.

Descendants of the marginalized Boers, known as Afrikaners, became resentful of the oppression they had suffered and the favor they saw the British granting to Black and Coloured people. The 1948 election of the Afrikaners' National Party changed Cape Town and South Africa forever. The party began enforcing what was referred to as "separate development," which meant the abolition of suffrage for most of the population, specifically the black population. Communities of black Capetonians were displaced so that their land could be used for other purposes. The National Party instituted apartheid (the state of being apart), in which every person was classified by a state-determined race and then granted or denied rights based on their race.

The Group Areas Act designated that certain races were allowed to live only in certain areas. Many black Capetonians were forcibly moved from their homes to so-called Homelands designated by the government. Seeking work, black South Africans set up shantytowns outside Cape Town and other cities. These shantytowns were usually destroyed by the government, killing hundreds of people in the process.

The section of Cape Town known as District Six, east of the city's center, was one of the few places left in the city with cultural and racial diversity. The District was a lively and cosmopolitan, if poor, borough, and soon its influence began to be felt in the rest of the city. Unhappy with this intermixing, the National Party declared in 1966 that District Six would henceforth be a white area and began to evict the area's fifty thousand residents, many of whom subsequently formed street gangs.

Nelson Mandela, the jailed leader of the African National Congress (ANC) party, was moved to a prison in Cape Town in 1982. At the same time, national resentment of apartheid was growing. Eventually, politicians began consulting with Mandela and other incarcerated ANC leaders about the future of South Africa. Even as antiapartheid groups strengthened, military actions against them became fiercer and more violent. With the election of President F. W. de Klerk in 1989, apartheid slowly began to be dismantled. De Klerk repealed discriminatory laws, released Mandela, and granted legal status to the ANC.

The country's first national elections were held in 1994, and Mandela was elected president of South Africa. In 2004, former residents of District Six were given keys to new houses that had been constructed in the rebuilt section of Cape Town, now known as Zonnebloem. Much of Cape Town remains segregated, but the local and national governments continue efforts to reintegrate this diverse city.

Bibliography

Besteman, Catherine. Transforming Cape Town. U of California P, 2008.

"City of Cape Town." STATS SA, Statistics South Africa, www.statssa.gov.za/?page‗id=1021&id=city-of-cape-town-municipality. Accessed 31 Mar. 2019.

Corfield, Justin. Historical Dictionary of Cape Town. Anthem, 2014.

Field, Sean. Oral History, Community, and Displacement: Imagining Memories in Post-Apartheid South Africa. Palgrave, 2012.

Foster, Douglas. After Mandela: The Struggle for Freedom in Post-Apartheid South Africa. Norton, 2012.

Hamilton, Carolyn, et al., eds. The Cambridge History of South Africa. 2 vols. Cambridge UP, 2010–11.

Imagining the City: Memories and Cultures in Cape Town, edited by Sean Field, Renate Meyer, and Felicity Swanson, HSRC, 2007.

Lost Communities, Living Memories: Remembering Forced Removals in Cape Town, edited by Sean Field, Philip, 2001.

"South Africa." The World Factbook, Central Intelligence Agency, 21 Feb. 2024, www.cia.gov/the-world-factbook/countries/south-africa/. Accessed 27 Feb. 2024.

"South Africa Country Profile." BBC, 24 July 2023, www.bbc.com/news/world-africa-14094760. Accessed 27 Feb. 2024.