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Sparkling Cape Town with a sour finish

A message from Cape Town

Rotterdam native Fred de Vries studied Social Geography of Developing Nations at Utrecht ľ¹Ï¸£ÀûÓ°ÊÓ in the 1980s. He has lived in South Africa since 2003, working as a writer and journalist.

Fred: "At the end of 2014, after eleven years in Johannesburg, my South African girlfriend and I moved to Cape Town. She is from Port Elizabeth and I am from Rotterdam. We both missed the water. She longed for the ocean, and I missed the river, the Maas with its bridges and their unobstructed views of wild cloud formations and sleek high-rises. Johannesburg is dry. Ok, there’s a dirty little river, the Juskei – more of a ditch really –,and there are a few artificial lakes. But shopping malls and discarded yellow mine dumps are the indisputable dominating features.

I never learned to love Jo’burg. Too English, too harsh, too focused on money, too suburban – Africa’s Los Angeles. So now it’s Cape Town: Simon’s Town to be exact, with a view of Valsbaai. As the alternative Afrikaner troubadour Koos Kombuis once sang: ‘Almal wil ‘n huisie by die see hê’ (everyone wants to have a house by the sea).

But my longing for the Cape ran deeper than the sheer joy of staring out at the Indian Ocean from our bedroom window in the morning, or strolling to the penguins at Boulders Beach at sunset. It was also a yearning for that familiar but confusing Dutch heritage you find in and around Cape Town. The glorious and dark past that was hardly ever mentioned in history class when I was young, even though Rotterdam is home to an Afrikaanderwijk (Afrikaner quarter) complete with streets named after general De la Rey and general Christiaan de Wet, heroes from the Anglo-Boer War, in which the Dutch actively supported the Afrikaners.

The impact of colonialism, slavery and apartheid - the dark trinity, partly the product of Dutch interference.

Here in Cape Town you’ll stumble upon Dutch street names such as Keizersgracht and Buitengracht, and neighbourhoods called Oranjezicht and Tamboerskloof. Farther afield in the wine lands you’ll find luxury wine estates called Vergelegen and Allesverloren. And Simon’s Town, where I live, is named after Dutchman Simon van der Stel, who was appointed as the first Dutch East India Company governor of the Cape colony in 1691.

And then there’s the flip side, its significance increasingly fortified by the current black student protests: the impact of colonialism, slavery and apartheid - the dark trinity, partly the product of Dutch interference. So if you bring your Dutch visitors for some wine tasting to the enchanting Groot Constantia estate, they can also marvel at the humid, dank slave dungeons there. Or if to take them for a stroll along the historic Compagnie Gardens, they’ll inevitably encounter a building called Slave House with a permanent slavery exhibit, extensively detailing the role of the Dutch as slave traders and owners.

The myth that the slaves in the Cape were treated better by the Dutch than by their American masters is put to bed by Solms-Delta wine estate historian Tracey Randle: disobedient or escapee slaves routinely faced the lash, mutilation or branding. Masters employed the breaking wheel, ripped out flesh with red-hot tongs, burned slaves alive and used slow strangulation. Don’t mess with those Dutch. It turns out that slavery also featured in my sleepy Simon’s Town. And that’s not all. Less than fifty years ago, all of the area’s black and mixed-race residents and their belongings were forcibly moved to desolate townships dozens of kilometres away. Sometimes you can taste it: a hint of sour in a festive Cape Town vonkelwyn."