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A tale of two cities

A FEW days back, Tom Eaton had a column in the Times about how much he hates the tourists from upcountry who visit the coastal city at holiday time. And it really riled me.

Cards on the table: I come from the Cape. I was born in apple country and grew up surrounded by grapes. My biggest culture shock ever was moving to the big city itself. I lived in Cape Town for 11 years.

But those were the days when every last head office had pulled up their roots and schlepped up north to Joburg; Cape Town was a genuine dorp that only came alive when UDF protesters took to the streets, hotly pursued by men wielding cannon that shot purple dye at them.

There was a lot of surfing and scuba diving and so on, but on my salary I couldn’t afford to go to the beach more than once every coupla months. And it was becoming increasingly obvious that in my field (which wasn’t journalism, back then) I would actually literally have to sleep with someone to get a promotion.

And I must say, none of the bosses appealed…

So I packed my sewing machine, my books and my motorbike onto a train and went to live in Joburg. Immediately my salary doubled. I could suddenly afford a little black and white TV, and the Greyhound to Durbs wasn't out of reach. I was in clover.

Within a short while, I began to learn how to be a journalist. I had opportunities that I would never have had in Cape Town back then. I mean, the only real celebrity living in Cape Town in those days was Raymond Ackerman.

Initially, I was shocked by the difference in the men.

I remember going back to Cape Town and sitting drinking coffee on Greenmarket Square, watching with longing the brown, muscular men walk past – I’d not found Joburg’s mountain men yet; all I’d met up to that point were little shrimps who needed lifts to reach the pedals of their cars, but behaved as though they had an awesome six-pack – or rather, as though their Porsche’s awesome six-pack was an extension of them.

Then I reminded myself that about half the passing parade was probably gay in a town that was a serious gay mecca, beautiful but never likely to be interested in me; about a third were beach bums who probably smoked more weed than was good for them; and the remaining third were taken, living in back-country Hout Bay or upper Constantia with a sort of earth mother Wendy Oldfield look-alike and two snotty babies.

Oh, the clichés. Sorry. (Ten years passed before I found a Joburg man who was untamed and loved dogs. I’ve spent the intervening decade or so trying to tame him. Don’t think I ever will…)

Since then, of course, Cape Town has acquired a great deal of vim, as half of Joburg abandons Mein Dumpf for the beauties of the mountain and the sea.

And now the ex-Joburgers are as passionate about Cape Town as ex-smokers about tobacco, defending Cape Town and dissing Joburg with startling vigour.

But Cape Town is still very much a tourism-driven town, as witness the incredibly professional tourism marketing that plops into my in-box routinely. Ja, back in the day I also bought a button to wear in December which read: “I am not a tourist: I live here”.

But even then I knew that slagging off the soppie-koppies was something that should not be done in public (we called them that because the men always had a child on their shoulders and would say, as they walked through doors: “Pasoppie koppie, hoor?”): those soppie-koppies kept the rest of us in boom and beer for the rest of the year.

Subsequent to the Tom Eaton grumble, I’ve seen a few grumbly threads on Facebook – forget that much-vaunted work ethic, people in Joburg are soooo unprofessional, and so on – and I want to ask: why is this necessary?

Why the constant dissing back and forth, the moaning about coastal fever, the insinuations that Joburgers are lacking in culture, and all that jazz? I’m sick of it, and the stereotypes are unfair to the majority of people in both cities.

The clichés, who make up the minuscule chattering classes who create and consciously live out the clichés, reside in the most desired, expensive real estate in each city, from Clifton to Sandton.  The oh-so-cultured versus the bling-and-booze conspicuous consumers.

I don’t live there; I live in a quiet little suburb on the edge of the West Rand that dates back to the 1930s, pressed ceilings and Oregon pine floors and all.

It’s really rather pretty, with well-established trees everywhere, possibly even prettier than some of Cape Town’s more ordinary ‘burbs. But I’ll bet most of us Joburgers live a lot like people in those ‘burbs: day to day, sweating a commute, hardly ever going up the mountain or visiting Sandton City.

But just as likely to have an interesting internal life as any Hout Bay resident: I’ve met eccentrics here with fascinating obsessions, like the man living in a tiny house in Soweto who is completely soaked in Italian – just Italian, mind – opera.

So we can we just stop? The two cities need each other. We’re not in competition, we’re two necessary poles. So stop it. It’s childish and tired.

 - Fin24

*Mandi Smallhorne is a versatile journalist and editor. Views expressed are her own.



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