For Cape Town – with love and squalor

Cape Town is a postcard; it is often literally cinematic. Chapel Street, just minutes from the city centre, lent its picturesque poverty to Season 4 of Homeland. A few years down the line, the street is no longer pretending to be in Pakistan, at a steep fee, and the poverty is more anxiously apparent. A roof on a century-old terrace row has caved in or blown away.

A kilometre away, there is a colony living in tents on the pavement outside the castle, opposite city hall from where President Cyril Ramaphosa delivered the State of the Nation address last week. 

Two worlds exist alongside and seeing both no longer requires driving from the seafront at Bantry Bay to the sand-flats squalor of Khayelitsha, or comparing the broken railway line running to the townships with the ease of paying online for a car licence which promptly arrives in the post.

The disparities are fodder for the ANC, which lost control of the city in 2006 and risks losing its national electoral majority next year. Minister in the Presidency Mondli Gungubele called the Democratic Alliance’s flagship project a monument to enduring inequality.

“The point that I’m making to you is that the Western Cape is a test of the resilience of racial exclusion,” he told DA leader John Steenhuisen, who had just delivered an aggressive election speech in response to the president’s address.

The minister “fluffed it”, as one ANC member said privately, by blaming the DA for the dire state of police stations in Gugulethu, Philippi and Khayelitsha.

In each of these townships there is one police officer per roughly 1 770 residents but policing is a national function. Khayelitsha has one of the highest murder rates in the country, with 265 homicides in 2021-22. 

Mayor Geordin Hill-Lewis responded to Gungubele by noting that “around 71% of police stations in our region are under-resourced by the national government”, hence the city has deployed 1 200 newly appointed law enforcers to high-crime areas.