on South Africa's Beauty

Our South African Rainbow Greeting

Today I write from Cape Town, South Africa, two days into my trip. On a drizzly and windy evening, I’ve already come to realize that even when it rains this city is absolutely beautiful.  In one direction you find the Atlantic Ocean, stormy waves breaking off the rocks only to recede and crash again, creating a soothing cycle. In the other direction sit steep cliffs with a blanket of clouds draped over the flattened peak of Table Mountain. This puffy white sheath is referred to as the Mountain’s “table cloth.” The clouds descend so close it feels like after only a short drive up you could reach out and tear a piece off, just like cotton candy. Cradled between the reflective water and the etched mountains is the cosmopolitan scene of city lights, flickering white and orange in the dark sky.

Cape Town is picturesque, despite June being the middle of winter for the coastal town. The city’s beauty is one of things that has captured me the most on my first trip to Mama Africa. And though the city is more beautiful than I could have ever imagined, the striking beauty doesn’t seem to blur the legacy left by South Africa’s ugly history of apartheid.

Nearly 16 years after the end of the policies resulting in the segregation of blacks and other people of color from whites, Cape Town is still largely run by white people, or Afrikaaners. The president may be black and the people 80 percent black, but in most other economic aspects the Afrikaaners still run South Africa. The businesses are white-owned and the servers and other support staff are mostly black. The neighborhoods have remained still overwhelmingly segregated as they were when all nonwhite South Africans were displaced and relocated to separate communities known as townships and many of Cape Town’s black citizens still live in derelict shantytowns.

I know that years of racist sanctions take far more time to reverse then they do to institute them, but I never expected to travel to an African country and ask, “Where are all the black people?” Seeing monuments to Nelson Mandela and how the country honors his famous political platform of reconciliation and forgiveness, makes it even harder to accept the whiteness of Cape Town. The feeling of being a minority on the shores of the motherland sits uncomfortably in my gut. Traveling the distance of ocean only to be confronted with the same questions of how race became such a worldwide marker for social inferiority is disheartening.

I am thankful to have been given the opportunity to travel to South Africa, a trip that most won’t make in their lifetime. And although I wish I could arrive back in America reporting that a rainbow welcomed me into South Africa, that wouldn’t be the truth. In reality, I was greeted by the roofs of the impoverished shantytown sitting underneath the landing path of incoming flights into Cape Town’s airport.

South Africa may be gorgeous, but for me its beauty is blemished by the inequality that remains from the years when apartheid reigned.

Part of the Gugulethu Township that sits along the landing path of the Cape Town International Airport