A travel writer for The New York Post likes the city and its natural and other attractions a whole lot, but — surprisingly for this paper’s sensibility — states the obvious about what’s wrong with central Cape Town:
Cape Town was always South Africa’s most cosmopolitan city. Sitting on a vital trading route to Asia, it had a multiracial, multicultural population from the very beginning. That made the city a discomfiting panracial affront to the apartheid czars in the aftermath of World War II. That’s when neighborhoods like District Six, an artsy if impoverished enclave known for writers and musicians of all colors, flouted segregation laws. Sadly, the government reacted by razing the ‘hood and displacing all its non-white locals; the area’s still bleak and largely unbuilt on.
The writer has some of the historical chronology wrong (attempts to clear District Six started way before the end of World War II), but the argument is worth it. The rest here.
