My dad sent me this article from the Australian online publication, Crikey.

Quite an interesting take and a must read for all! Personally I was taken by the quote, “Cape Town Is the Future.” It took me back to a few years ago when I attended the Commonwealth Games in Melbourne, Australia. The crowd in the stadium (The MCG, if I’m not mistaken) were made to practice a song before they switched live over to TV. the end of the chorus went, “Melbourne, the city of the future, the envy of the world.”

Confident, as all good Ozzies are! But now, suddenly, we have an Aussie handing over that mantle to us!

But it wasn’t all complimentary, as you will see..

Camps Bay Beach – Cape Town
(source)

Cape Town slums — a long way from Mandela’s ideals
by Guy Rundle

People advise those who are embarking on a South African trip not to visit Cape Town first, and they’re right. Once you’re here, you have no desire to leave and the rest of the country is bound to be, well, another country.

Running from the sparkling beaches of the Atlantic coast to the foot of Table Mountain barely 2km inland, a city of grand architecture in a mish-mash of Dutch and Victorian style, and funky suburbs of multicoloured terraces and colonnaded verandahs, ‘the Mother City’ is an impossibly hip destination. Uniquely for South Africa, its population is neither predominantly black nor white, but mixed race or Coloured, in the still extant language of racial classification a product of its existence as a trading/slave/strategic port for centuries before the Union of South Africa drew it in in 1910.

When the Afrikaner government established apartheid in 1948, out of the intersecting mix of pass laws and racial restrictions already in place, the Cape was a double problem, since fully half the population were exactly the sort of black-Asian-white mix that the ideology of apartheid had such a horror of. Yet it also made the imposition of full apartheid impossible, since the total exclusion of such people would have brought the city to a grinding halt.

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[thanks dad]