Today started with a great breakfast and then a short walk over to the Bo-Kaap area where we met our guide for a fascinating walking tour of this Indonesian Malay area. Their ancestors were brought to South Africa they from Indonesia and else where as slaves. These are primarily Muslim people with a rich and interesting history.
As is often are good luck, we were the only two people who signed up for this public tour, and so again got a very private, very personal tour led by our host, Faldela. She is a prominent grandmother in the community, both leading personal, and very high-level opinion tours of the neighborhood. But, also a superb cook and part of our time together was cooking in her kitchen.
The tour was filled with lots of stories and facts and the view of the homes and building buildings was just exquisite. This was another one of those beautiful places where everything was so painted with such high color. Bo-Kop is a traditional Muslim area of Cape Town. During Apartheid the state designated this area as the only area where Muslims could live. They made it their own.
And we got to hear of the problems with gentrification happening. Out of town developers wanted to buy up the picturesque us homes and make them into Airbnb apartments. Our host had personally been offered over US$500,000, a huge sum for here, for her home which she turned down. She told us there was no price that would replace the community that she valued.
Because we were going to have a cooking class, we stopped by one of the local markets and she talked us through the various food that is available with an emphasis on the specific spices. Very fun just to go shopping with a local.
And we stopped at a little shop in the alley where we bought a couple of gifts. It was so clear that this community was very much filled with friendship and so many people greeting each other in this beautiful morning.
At the end of the time we were invited into a for a cooking class to learn a little bit more about some of the food in the area, which ended up having lunch. Her business name is cooking with love, and that clearly was how she operated.
The cooking was so personal, including at one point Patti being in charge of her baby, which was making a beautiful chicken curry. Dick also had a dish he was in charge of that. She termed it his “girlfriend.” She had many funny and clever ways of teaching of cooking, probably five different traditional dishes. Plus, giving us all kinds of education about the spices the ways that things are cooked and the importance of various dishes in her culture. We ate the food which was delicious even more so having contributed to cooking it. When Dick inquired did her family eat a lot of leftovers, she shared now once we were done eating some of the less fortunate, homeless people in the neighborhood knew they could stop by and she would share the leftover food with them. No need for good food to go in the trash. Very very lovely. We would recommend this anytime.
Well, we quickly walked down the street for our next tour of the day: part tied to freedom. This was another trip where it was just the two of us and another couple from the Netherlands. This was a walking tour of the downtown area of Cape Town that focused on the impact of an apartheid and what happened following an apartheid being ended in 1994.
Our tour guide for this was Cedric, 49-year-old white South African. He was 14 years old when a apartheid ended. He was able to share some very personal stories of what it was like to go from an all white high school to one that included colored and black students in his final years of high school. He maintained one of the most useful ways of integration was with the sporting teams. He played high school rugby and said by the end of that year when the white and non-white athletes work together, there was a deep bond.
He gave us a very interesting perspective as somebody from a family, who was not very political, but his father always maintained the right thing is everyone should have the opportunity to develop their talents and gifts.
We stopped at the Anglican Church, where Archbishop Desmond Tutu was the leader at the end of the apartheid time. This was an entirely white church, and it was a really radical act for them to choose a prominent black man to be their leader.
We walked around and saw a number of other interesting things in the downtown area. One of them was the museum for district 6. In the middle 60s suddenly the government declared a section of town with 60,000 people living to now be a white-only area. This was primarily a "colored" area. (The term here did not have the same meaning as the term in the US. Here it was for people who were neither white or black but from other areas of the world.) People came home from work with their homes bulldozed and their belongings in trucks, taking them far away. The government worked very, very hard to keep groups, very separated, and there are still scars from this today.
And, then we saw the balcony where Nelson Mandela addressed the country having just been released from prison in 1990. People waited for 12 hours for him to address the nation from the balcony of City Hall. We are imagining this was a phenomenal experience.
We appreciated the tour and Cedric's perspective. Then we walked back to our hotel and had a brief nap before we headed out for our final event of the evening.
We went to an iconic tourist destination: the Gold restaurant. This was a fancy restaurant that included African drumming, including audience participation, as well as singing and dancing. And then there was a 14 course meal providing a chance to taste so many traditional African foods. It was all so much fun and we appreciated being able to try some things that we might not otherwise have checked out.
However, we had stuffed our self with our own good cooking at lunch and we couldn’t even finish. We passed on trying the dessert. Both of us just realized there is only so much food one can eat, even if it’s delicious. So we wrapped up before the show was entirely done, caught a cab back to our hotel and dropped into bed. Another fine day in Cape Town.
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