You live in Cape Town, South Africa. It is like Disneyland for white people. It’s the Happiest Place on Earth. 

 

You leave your six-bedroom house with a view of the city, a white stucco balcony, and an electric fence before the cleaning lady and gardener arrive. One of the things you like most about Cape Town is that there are so many poor African people, labor is cheap, and prices are low.

 

You stroll down a hill with Table Mountain in the background to the five-star Hotel Nelson for a massage and chicken salad sandwich for lunch. 

 

You spend the afternoon shopping at the Queen Victoria and Prince Albert V & A Shopping Mall. Afterward, you watch the sun set along the 30-mile Atlantic Ocean coast as you dine at a fine restaurant serving freshly caught fish. 

 

Cape Town is not such a great place if you happen to be black. You live in a one-bedroom house with a corrugated roof. You cannot afford a massage, the clothes in the V & A mall, or fine dining. Your job as a gardener also includes taking care of a white person’s dog. You ride in the backseat of the car while the dog sits up front. You live in a Township run by cartels, unsafe for children to play outside, and rampant with drug abuse. You have a 60% chance of being unemployed; your children are given an inferior education. Your children will become the next generation of cleaners and gardeners. You have no chance of visiting the white person’s Disneyland. 

 

Geoff and I took a month off our five-month tour of Africa by renting an Airbnb in Cape Town. We found a modern two-bedroom house with a city view. We lived in the central part of town, similar to our home in Santa Barbara. Cape Town was a lot like the US, except the shadow of apartheid hung over the city.

 

In post-Apartheid South Africa, Africans can vote, they can use the same door as white people, and they could move out of the Townships if they could afford it. 

 

Cape Town does a good job of documenting the horrors of the apartheid era.

The tourist sites include Robben Island, the maximum-security prison where Mandela spent 18 of his 27-year sentence.  

 

The District Six museum is another site. On 11 February 1966, an area known as District Six was declared a white-only area. Government bulldozers forcibly removed a community of 60,000 Africans to live in a barren outlying area, and their houses were flattened. 

 

The historic Cape Town City Hall has a balcony where Mandela gave his very first speech as a free man on 11 February 1990, exactly 28 years after District Six was declared white. 

 

At the Zeitz Museum of Contemporary Art Africa, all six floors of the massive grain silos-turned-art-museum show the devastating effect of apartheid on the psyche of modern-day South Africans. 

 

Cape Town is a collection of contradictions, just like most places and most people. One morning in our Airbnb, Geoff took out our trash for the week. He found a man, his wife, and children going through the neighborhood trash cans looking for clothes. Geoff asked me if I had any extra clothes. I looked through my closet and found 2 pair of socks, a brand-new sweatshirt I changed my mind about, and a silk pantsuit that required too much ironing. 

 

Using one of the three shopping bags I recently acquired, Geoff took the clothes out to the curb. He couldn’t find the family, but other people were looking through the trash. Geoff gave my clothes to them. Then he walked two blocks to our neighborhood coffee shop for a croissant. 

 

Imagine a cafe and bakery just a block from your house. I told you it was Disneyland for white people. I sure am glad I’m white.