My dad has a little pony buried in his back yard. The foal got a bit hoarse and died soon after it was born. My parents swear they can hear the little clippity-clop of hooves. The spirit of a life wandering under land it never got to enjoy.
It resonates with the same haunting cringe you get when you take a stroll through Cape Town, which I did the other day.
My partner was walking around town when she noticed an old white dude leading one of these tours. "Wouldn't it be interesting to see what version of history a man of his kind is sharing?" We signed up.Our guide was fair in his interpretation of history, aside from babbling on offensively about the native Khoi people of Cape Town ("You still see them. They dress in dirty sacks. They don't want to live a modern life, but they still want money").
The hunters for controversy in us left dissatisfied. But the cringe of the Cape still rose from the ashes.
City Hall looms large over the Grand Parade. Throwing shade over the hawkers trying to make a living. A beautiful abandoned gravesite of the workers who built the hall for the British.
Behind it, the mountain looks on. An observation point for those very Khoi people who witnessed the wilderness that fed them become a city that spat their heritage out with the laying of each brick.CEO of Iziko museums Rooksana Omar says: "The decision was taken to dismantle the ethnographic exhibition, outdated in terms of concept and content." On August 7, after more than 40 years of the diorama being on display, Iziko "held a cleansing ceremony to close the Ethnographic Gallery".
But a few other areas, despite the city's best efforts, require a spiritual cleansing as well. A browse through the cartography collection of 1791 proves little has changed. Three significant stalwarts of the city can still be found today. Church Square, Die Groote Kerk and the Slave Lodge.
The next day I took a train to Kalk Bay with my mom. In Claremont, middle-class white women joined us. In Retreat, a Zimbabwean woman. Later, a gangster.
He showed us where a bullet entered his leg. The Zimbabwean woman got into a fight with him for smoking. She claimed she was the sister of Jesus. He claimed she was bad luck.
They pushed each other and screamed "POWER!"
He swigged crackling to calm down and sweetly apologised to us.The trains in Cape Town are the food court of the fancy mall - the great leveller. It takes all kinds. A living, breathing cultural creature. Here is where culture lives loud.
It's where heritage sings at each stop and every station. Like the coloured and Cape Malay demographic - born from the export of ancestors from Asia, who travel from the Cape Flats where they were disposed of, to the colourful beach huts at Muizenberg.
Here is where the children of the Europeans who colonised come and visit, generations later - to ride the tracks their forefathers ordered the people to lay.
Here is where politics shout. Where the gangster cries for his coloured brother who is struggling on the corner, and the young black woman and her brothers agree that they did not vote for Zuma. There are no graves here.
But I could not shake off Church Square from the previous day, when 11 shiny granite blocks commemorating those who made the biggest contribution to the city's heritage and culture surrounded me.My feet ached with the sweat of the slaves below, while the heritage of their owners stood proud above them...