AROUND THE CAPE
THE tour bus driver, a retired Afrikaner who was doubling as our guide, was having trouble with his terminology and definitions. The focus of his microphone commentary had taken on a botanical slant as the bus climbed out of Cape Town over a mountain pass and on through the leafy rural suburb of Constancia. He had pointed out that not one of the trees we were seeing along the way was an indigenous species; the original native yellow wood and stick wood trees at the continent's southern tip had been wiped out by the early white settlers. In their place, he said, 'exotic' trees such as oaks and pines from Europe and blue gums from Australia had been planted and had flourished, to provide shade and timber for later generations.
Now, in its true dictionary sense of meaning, 'exotic' means the opposite of 'indigenous'. A North American voice piped up from the back of the bus: 'That makes the white man the exotic one here then. I never thought of whites as being exotic.' 'Yes, I suppose it does,' said the driver, unsure of his position, like so many of his race, who for 300 years had been fortunate enough to have been born on the right side of the fence in one of the most physically blessed places in the world. Now, in the new South Africa, the times are changing and our driver is confused. We stop, get out and look from a commanding position over an expanse of land known as Cape Flats. These are the shanty homes to hundreds of thousands of black people driven to the city in search of work. These people have been promised release from the deprivations of their city of plastic, wood and corrugated iron. 'But I don't know who's going to pay for it,' the driver muses, wistfully. 'You are,' the rest of us think.
But there is a further irony: in reality, the black African tribes who for those 300 years have been held economically and politically at bay by the white settlers are themselves exotics in the Cape. They came from north of the Great Karoo, the blinding wasteland that separates Cape province from the rest of the country now known as South Africa. When the great Portuguese navigators first landed here around the time Columbus was discovering America, to be followed by Dutch traders eager to establish a half-way refreshment home on the lucrative East Indies spice run, the locals of the time were light-skinned nomads, hunters and seashore gatherers. As a group, like the yellow wood and stick wood, they are now practically no more.
As the bus leaves politics and the cloud-shrouded Table Mountain behind, we head south to one of those places on the map that every school child first hears about in the early days of geography: the Cape of Good Hope. It is a dramatic spot that reflects the polarities of life in South Africa, perhaps its fallacies too. The weary early explorers' mistaken thought that the slender finger of land pointing straight to the South Pole was the divider between the cold Atlantic and the warm Indian oceans is not strictly true. Romantics still insist it is, but in fact the most southerly point of the African continent is a couple of hundred kilometres to the east.
Sir Francis Drake, the first man to sail around the globe, noted it was 'the fairest cape in all the circumference of the world'. For tourists, it remains spectacularly beautiful as rolling national park land of vivid protea bushes gives way to windswept cliffs, foamy beaches and a surging blue yonder.
We walk to the look-out platform at the peak of the point and gaze. For those who feel the need, the public convenience there certainly merits five stars for scenic beauty in any world Good Loo guide. Then we head back up the coast again through the white colonnades and Georgian homes of Simon's Town and Fish Hoek, bristling with signs that say fresh lobster and mussels. Having seen what we have just seen, we know the seafood is clean. More than that, it's very, very cheap. And so is the wine to drink with it.