The power of the cape

What's in a name? Ask a murder of subeditors and they'll tell you: not much. Certainly, my title last week got short shrift, ending up in shreds on the cutting-room floor. Not that I'm complaining.

Subeditors know which headlines will travel and which won't. It's their job to save columnists from themselves, and as someone who is incapable of writing interesting, attention-snagging headlines, I am particularly grateful: left to my own literary devices, I would end up calling all my columns "The one about something I thought of this week".

Still, I found it interesting that my guardian angels at The Times had gravitated to the one phrase I had deliberately avoided in my title: "Mother City". It revealed that they are good at getting to the point, but more relevant to my point, it also revealed that they do not live in Cape Town. "Mother City" is a nickname largely eschewed by Capetonians. Hearing it sends a shiver of annoyance and embarrassment through us, like when the nurse steps into the waiting room and shouts all six of your names to let you know that Doctor will see you now.

It's probably not just us, though. I suspect that very few people ever embrace the other names given to their own cities. For example, I have yet to hear a Johannesburger refer to the "City of Gold". Which speaks well of their powers of observation, given that most of the time it is the City of Dejected Yellowish-Brown. On the other hand, Port Elizabethans do have a tendency to mention the "Friendly City" when they welcome the biannual visitor who has got lost in a midnight rain squall and followed the neon "vacancy" sign to their solitary motel. But are their smiles real, or do they simply have lockjaw from chewing on rusty railway tracks in an attempt to alleviate the boredom? Maybe, like all of us, they hate their city's nickname.

Still, "Mother City" seems particularly silly. In what way is Cape Town like a mother? Does it endlessly wish you'd married that nice girl from secretarial college who at least had a marketable skill? Does it insist on giving you the latest update on Cousin Todd's vasectomy complications?

The ideologues who cooked up the name at the end of World War 1 would no doubt have been appalled by such flippancy: they might have been cynical about power, race, gender and capital, but mothers were sacrosanct. The name was politically astute. It reminded pro-Empire English-speakers of the Mother Country while still giving Anglophobic Afrikaners a sense of rebirth, all the while removing the prior claims of black South Africans from the debate - after all, how could they have existed before their mother? But it also appealed directly and perhaps less cynically to the softer virtues of motherhood.

Unfortunately, like most rebranding schemes trying to sell us something we don't need, it was carefully designed to replace critical thought with sentimental brain-lint. If any of South Africa's cities are mothers then they are cold and neglectful ones. Most of their children cling to the edges of their skirts, and even their favourites are left to entertain themselves, without ever being taught a sense of belonging or even a coherent sense of their own worth.

The good news, though, is that Cape Town is young enough, and unformed enough, to rebrand itself once again. In an era of negotiable origins, we can choose the histories (or create the fictitious ones) that offer us meaning and a safe home. The twenty-somethings are already doing it, clinging to the fashions and accessories of the 1980s, where tapes and leg-warmers and Cold War nihilism offer a more real and reassuring world than the post-human cyber-wilderness they inhabit every day. Even our superhero mythologies are becoming introspective and retrospective, going back to their origins to find meaning: Superman, Batman, Spider-Man, Harry Potter and James Bond are all gloomy, introverted orphans, recently wrestling their childhoods so that they can better understand their adult selves.

It sounds grim, but there is hope for Cape Town's mother complex in all this revisionist hopelessness. If heroes and Millennials can reboot themselves just by wishing it so, then so can Capetonians. And, given that the Man of Steel is currently swooping through the pop zeitgeist, I suggest that we look to his mythology for inspiration.

Imagine the potential in a city of Supermen and Superwomen, orphans from the planet Klyfton, spending their days incognito as mild-mannered pseudo writers, disguised by gorgeous lustrous hair and thick-rimmed glasses and - oh, wait. Those are Cape Town hipsters. On second thoughts, forget the reboot: let's stick with Mother for the time being. After all, she's the only one we Capetonians have. Just as long she doesn't mention Cousin Todd's tubes.