CAPE INDULGENCE
My Love Affair with Cape Town Noluvuyo Bacela
Take a glorious plate of food, add to it a beautiful backdrop, and throw in some beautiful people. And what do you get? I call it home.
I
’ve been in Cape Town for a little under two years and to be honest, it isn’t all that it’s cracked up to be. For one, manna doesn’t fall down from the mountain and neither does snow. The mysterious mist that hovers over the mountain doesn’t extend to the city; it just stays there almost bubbling under the heat. And, it’s not as green as I’d hoped. I’m pretty certain that my hopes were a bit too high - yes, media played a part as I distinctly remember something about seeing movies stars and musicians on every corner, and yet it hasn’t happened. On the up side though, I have seen the majority of evening news crews and some of the most famous politicians and criminals in front of parliament and the Magistrates court. I can safely say I’ve lost count of how many times I’ve had to talk myself down from taking a quick snap and sending it to my mother back in the Eastern Cape.
40 IMBO/ ISSUE 13/ 2013
the diversity of the city Cape Town is beautiful and just looking at the historical, rundown buildings evokes some kind of emotion reeling you in to tell a grander story than the one told in High School textbooks. The people may be diehard skeptics but once you gain their trust, and you also stop being paranoid, they let you in and introduce you to their ways. Even though there’s still much division from the pre-democracy Land Act there’s some kind of unity amongst the locals. I’ve lived in a Muslim area and its taken six months to gain the shop owner’s trust so I can get away with being 50cents short. To this day nothing compares to the warmth I had in my heart when he first said “you can give me later” when I was short for half a loaf bread. Experiencing parts of the Muslim culture firsthand through partaking in the Festival of the Lights, sharing biryani after Eid and how can I forget waiting for the shop owner to come back from the Mosque during Ramadhaan makes you one with the culture.