Sleeping in art can be disconcerting. In fact, it can make it hard to get up in the morning. In room ‘501’ at Daddy Long Legs Art Hotel, John Wayne’s ass hangs from the wall, and Afrobeat tingles from a complimentary Levi’s mix CD. Downstairs, on hip and hectic Long Street, the nation’s first dib at that coming-of-artistic-age moment – the contemporary art festival – has launched as ‘Cape 07’, a showcase of all things African, in this, the continent’s least African city.
And so I hit the pavement running. Within a backbeat, I’m hit by Congolese bar romps, Cameroonian rare grooves, and kwaito care of Marvellous Mavusana, a.k.a. Double M, a local kid who bangs up-for-it Zulu-tronic I want to export to the world.
At the Victoria & Albert Waterfront, sax-fisted Cape Jazz quartets sing pretty through the gaps in their teeth, screaming Merton Barrow and Basil Coetzee songs for schools of fish-feeders drying out in the sun. Winston Mankunku’s whistling odes to Table Mountain feel like daytime TV when you’re home sick from school and Mum’s making ice cream with sprinkles.
At the Baxter Theatre, at the university, it’s Nobel Prize-winner Athol Fugard’s ‘Victory’, a one-act gem about one harsh reality of post-Apartheid South Africa. But, of course, the festival guide says the real party is somewhere else, and on the same night, deep in the township shebeens, or bars, where the festival goes fringe, and life becomes art. But you can’t do it all, I remind myself, as the white actor cries and I head for the exits, but I could sure as hell do with a drink.
Capetonians love to flee their city. With twelve public holidays a year, that’s a lot of fleeing. On the Sunday before Workers’ Day, the streets are conspicuously silent – only a handful of police on horseback, and some Bo-Kaap kids on candy-coloured corners. With a pile of records and a rental car, I drive out past the blink-if-you-wanna-miss-‘em Cape Flats – the sprawling township that eye-sores the tourist hordes – to deep within the Dub Vaults where the Cape of Good Hope vibes strong, and the tip of the green continent floats gently out to sea. At Simon’s Town, an out-of-the-box, Victorian village by the sea, German submarines arrive to muted fanfare. A commuter train runs the coast to pretty Kalk Bay, along platforms painted blue. And for dessert, at the vineyards west at Stellenbosch, over Chenin Blanc and Chardonnay, real estate prices are distinct yet surprisingly palatable.
Back at Daddy Long Legs, the final port of sleep is the Emergency Room. The walls are bloody with chrome, and the nurse uniform fits tight. Plus it’s Soca time, sings Lorraine Klaasen, so ‘wake up, mama, wake up!’ Above the Pan-African market, where they sell Swazi salad servers and Cote D’Ivoire tribal masks, I find Ntone Mdambe, a gentleman and a DJ, and the be-stylish editor of Chimurenga, a slick lit journal that makes me cringe at my own African agenda. “It’s been a struggle since the beginning,” he says, tilting his beret so right I want to hug him, then be him, “but we’re slowly gaining momentum.” In a country that Time Magazine calls the ‘new India’ for its quality and output of young writers, the New South Africa is a powerful force.
In the end, it’s Freedom Day, the 13th anniversary of democracy in the Rainbow Nation. On a day too stormy for the ferry to reach Nelson Mandela’s jail museum, how do most Capetonians celebrate their nation’s rebirth? By shopping, en masse, in malls. A long way, perhaps, from the socialist vision of Mandela’s African National Congress, but hard history needs cheap therapy. And I can still get six rand to the dollar.
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