a most unusual day

Everyday I seem to realize something else about Cape Town and South Africa in general, but the thing that consistently strikes me is how everything seems to exist in a bizarre double world, with hardly anything to physically separate the extremes of rich and poor and black and white.

Today only confirmed that for me.

My friend Nick from San Francisco/Bucknell and I have recently been fascinated by the raw food semi subculture that seems to exist in Cape Town. Of course, this is probably limited to a small group of bourgeois twenty and thirty somethings, but it has enough of a presence here to warrant the publishing of a raw food cookbook written by two Capetonians and based on South African produce. While looking through the cookbook we lamented the absence of a food dehydrator, something considered a necessity by raw foodists. On a whim we decided to check Gumtree, which is basically South African craigslist. For some unbelievable reason, someone had posted a food dehydrator earlier this morning for R300 (about $45). From what I read dehydrators normally cost a few hundred dollars. We could not pass up such an opportunity!

The people selling the dehydrator were located in Brackenfell, which is NOT close to Cape Town. Especially when one is without a car and when public transportation is generally unreliable.


We hopped a train from our neck of the woods bound north to Brackenfell. Trains in South Africa are cheap, sketchy, and unreliable. We stopped in Bellville to change trains, but because it's a public holiday (Human Right's Day), we waited on the platform for over an hour. I have heard a lot of stories about muggings and robberies on the trains and at the stations, and with hundreds of rand and a credit card in my pocket (I purposely left my purse at home), I felt really uncomfortable. Nick and I also really stuck out, being the only white people at the station and on the trains.

Once we arrived in Brackenfell, it was a completely different story. Brackenfell is considered part of the winelands, which are about as white and wealthy as you can imagine. The neighborhood where our dehydrator was located was unbelievable--none of the homes even had the giant electronic security gates in front, something common to almost every home in Cape Town. The people who sold us the dehydrator were older Afrikaaners. When we told them how we planned on getting back to Cape Town, they asked if we were taking a "black taxi," and warned us never to get in one (of course, the minibuses are my main mode of transportation here.)

We got back to Cape Town five hours after we left. Days like today disorient me--I still cannot grasp the world of South Africa where I can sit on a train platform as an obvious minority and five minutes later arrive in a rich Afrikaaner neighborhood whiter than the state of Maine. I know the reasons for the inequality that exists in South Africa, but I don't think I'll ever understand how the people who have grown up here, whether white, black or colored, deal with this puzzling social atmosphere.