Coloured and black are navigating each other’s spaces in Cape Town while deeply suspicious of the other. In one moment, the consequences of this mistrust can be horrific and gruesome, as illustrated by the murder of cab driver Abongile Mafalala last week, writes Gasant Abarder in a new #SliceofGasant.
Abarder, who recently launched his book, Hack with a Grenade, is among the country’s most influential media voices. Catch his weekly column here, exclusive to Cape {town} Etc.
I drove home on a very dark route from Kuils River on Friday night via the R300 and onto the N2. It was pitch black in the many suburbs I passed on the way – Delft, Wesbank, Khayelitsha, Heideveld, Bonteheuwel, Langa and Athlone.
It made me think about the alarming crime stats that were released just last week. Cape Town always features amongst the places with the highest violent crime stats in the country. Is the darkness not an invitation for criminals? I thought about how, despite complaining, the lights in my own street have been out for two weeks in a suburb where I pay market-related rates.
I am lucky and keenly aware that many do not have a house to go home to.
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Amid the grim crime statistics, one heinous act stood out. Now we South Africans have become desensitised to some of the most horrific acts of violence thanks to our outrageous rape, kidnapping, murder and assault figures. This one particular crime stood and made me wonder … hope … that it was isolated.
Abongile Mafalala was lynched in a brutal murder in Parkwood last week. The e-hailing cab driver had been wrongfully accused of child abduction, robbed and torched inside his car.
His girlfriend Zandile Maweza told an IOL reporter: “He was killed like a dog. On top of it, he died in a coloured community where there was no one who could listen to him because he was black. Why did they not call the police after catching him?”
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When I read this report on Saturday her comment struck me. It was perhaps the most disturbing part of her interview: the suggestion it had something to do with race. Between coloured people and a black man.
Hours before reading it, I had experienced a wonderful start to a new soccer journey with an over-35 side. I played the first half of a league match in a key position for a new club on Friday night. We won the match 1-3 away in Kuils River. On Saturday morning, we played a friendly against a social Cape Town City Football Club side and I again got game time.
It was fantastic to get a run out on a football field again. But the way I was welcomed by my new teammates in the dressing room really made my weekend.
In the meeting before the Friday night match, we spoke in English. Before it was exclusively isiXhosa. But they would not exclude me, their newest player – the only coloured player in a team of black players – through language. I was so humbled by this gesture and felt rather uncomfortable about it.
The teammates trusted their new player with the ball even though we hadn’t practised or played together before. I had never been made to feel more welcome in a team since I started playing organised sports at the age of 10.
It made me think that in South Africa, black people were in the majority. In this instance, isiXhosa speakers were in the majority in the dressing room. Yet the 99.9% majority switched to English to accommodate the 0.1% minority. I was humbled.
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It made me want to play my heart out for my new team. Should I have been surprised by the gesture? It feels like black people in this city are constantly making concessions.
Zandile’s comments about her black boyfriend’s murder in a coloured neighbourhood worried me. It should worry all of us. Nowhere in South Africa, except in Cape Town, are you likely to encounter phrases like “white suburb”, “coloured suburb”, “black suburb”. Or more accurately, a black township, because the majority of black people in this city are still worse off than other races.
Structural apartheid never left Cape Town. And more frequently these days the unstructured, bloody kind is never far behind.
We are navigating spaces deeply suspicious of each other. There hasn’t been a real, sincere effort to integrate communities in Cape Town since 1994. It serves political parties well when people vote in blocks along with their racial anxieties.
Langa and Bonteheuwel are separated by a road. The two areas share a postal code and residents of both get the sharp end of the stick in terms of service delivery. But the political allegiances are so starkly different when it comes to voting.
In Cape Town, the apartheid government kept us in the darkness of oppression. The darkness is still there – cynically for political expedience. We must no longer walk in their darkness and allow them to divide and conquer us. Let’s step into the light, let’s live in each other’s spaces and let’s look our brothers and sisters in the eyes.
Cape Town, we want our lights on now!
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Picture: Gasant Abarder
