"Cape Town" a Cape Town Travel Page by mke1963

With Table Mountain looming up behind the city, and the rolling surf crashing onto rocks and wide sandy beaches, Cape Town must be one of the world's most magnificent cities. With a Mediterranean climate, it is no wonder that the whole Western Cape is attracting increasing numbers of tourists wishing to escape the European or American winter: few cities anywhere can match the allure of what South African's call "The Mother City". Yet for all its romantic scenery, wide open landscapes and incredible flora and fauna, Cape Town has not always been so popular. When the Dutch East Indies Company (the VOC), first decided to build on the land two hundred years after Portuguese explorer Bartolomeu Dias had first seen it in 1488, it was with some misgivings. The land appeared to hold few of the treasures desired by these early imperialists. The Portuguese had already recognised that the local population, both the pastoralist Khoikhoi and the San-Bushmen hunters were remarkably unwilling to be enslaved, nor even to lead the Europeans to other clans, bands or tribes who might be.

While the Cape are was fertile, it lay isolated by deserts and high plains with few rivers.
But a few Dutch merchants recognised that the Cape could possibly function as a victualling station midway to the fabulously valuable East Indies, and by reducing the provisions on board the ships by restocking at the Cape, more cargo could be carried back to Amsterdam and Antwerp. So in 1652, Jan van Riebeeck was appointed Commander of the Cape. He was miserably ambitious, and was keen to regain his former job in the East Indies, after he had been sent back to Europe in disgrace for a variety of fraudulent misdeeds along the Gulf of Tonkin. His reports back to the board of directors of the VOC are peppered with increasingly desperate pleas for promotion, more pay and a career move back to the Indies. Despite his barely concealed contempt for the Cape, van Riebeeck was surprisingly diligent in building up the community, although he feathered his own nest as before. Like many Governors after him, he felt constrained by the surprisingly liberal attitudes of the management back in the Netherlands, who prevented him from expanding much beyond the immediate vicinity of the small, dusty fort. Van Riebeeck himself was sacked in 1662, probably rather unfairly; despite his aloof, arrogant and overbearing manner, he did take his duties and the VOC?s objectives seriously, unlike many who followed him. In those early days, the community struggled to survive and it was many years before the VOC agreed to turn the victualling station into a fully-fledged colony and send settlers. Many of the first settlers were a woeful lot, who were expecting large numbers of slaves and servants, and were ill-prepared for a life on the frontiers of civilization. But over several hundred years, the population of free burghers outgrew the number of VOC employees, bringing increased loyalty to the new home, but also a lot of friction with the overseers. Economic necessity - and a pioneering spirit - sent many families and interpid explorers further and further east along the coast; movement north was effectively prevented by the inhospitable deserts that lie less than a few day's march from Cape Town. Just as the people of the Cape were furstrated by the interference of masters in Europe, so the new pioneers heading east disliked the meddling of the officials at the Cape. These pioneers - or trekboers - were constantly pressing against the frontiers of a variety of indigenous populations living in what is now the Eastern Cape. The Great Fish River became the boundary, but it was a fragile existence for both whites and the indigenous people. The indigenous people of the Cape had traditionally been only loosely attached to the land and so were less willing or able to eject the new European settlers, but the Xhosa clans and tribes were landed people, breeding cattle with a spiritual reverence for their animals and their land. Just as the Cape was unable to control their people at the frontier, so the Xhosa chiefs were unable to control their frontier families: strife was inevitable, and it set the scene for a mutual distrust and dislike that grew eventually to become the hated apartheid regime of the 20th Century.

The rest, as they say, is history. The British came, went, came again, went again?and when they come these days, they get only as far as Newlands where they are knocked for six all around the ground. The Afrikaaners got fed up with the Cape Colony and moved on and outwards into new territories. The great mfecane destroyed and created great numbers of clans and tribes across the country, and caused further turmoil. Somewhere along the road, the foundations for a great country were turned on their head and the government and many whites created a vision of hell for the other members of their society. For a long time, too few stood up and said ?No? to apartheid, and the ugly nature of global politics saw even less reaction from foreign governments. The washing of spears turned into the washing of policy. In 1994, democracy washed ashore at last in South Africa, and eleven years on, the country is still coming to terms with who is what, and why.

Cape Town must surely be one of the most memorable cities in the world. However, sadly, not all the memories are good ones - there is poverty, there is desperation, there is crime. But there is also, fittingly, hope. If there is just one place you should visit to feel a spirit of human reconciliation, it should be Cape Town ? and especially the District Six Museum.

Other parts of the Cape peninsula reviewed separately, including Kalk Bay