There exist places where your heart is unsure if it should revel in joy or choke in a sea of tears. Tears of sadness.

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Cape Town is one such place.

Let me write the Lonely Planet pitch so you and I are aligned: As the plane begins its descent, you are already overcome by the natural beauty you see. Mountains, valleys, an endless ocean. A cascade of greens and blues. A tango of never-ending clouds dances above it all, fragmenting the shy rays of sun into diamonds that sprinkle over the city. You land and the air is moist. A true Southern Hemisphere autumn in the peak age of climate collapse. Humidity in your nostrils, droplets on your skin. It does not take long for any traveler-tourist to find Cape Town seductive. Like a mantra, this was sung to me by every individual I knew who had come to Cape Town.

As soon as you hop in the car that will take you to the city centre, you see Table Mountain standing like an old stoic, as if guarding centuries of memory.

Because you know the bare minimum about south African history, you get a haunting sense that this beauty is either a reflection of the monumental reconciliation work undertaken since '94, or a God-given wondrous disguise.

Beyond its natural beauty, the city throws in your face an iconic understated luxury, so perfectly fitting with the kind of coastal living it offers. Add to that luxurious wine estates, rich hippie beach-living, art galleries and concept stores that would make Europe blush, and a food offering on par with New York, Sydney or London - but honestly, even more interesting and flavourful. I was not sure if I were stuck in the past and therefore unable to see things for what they were or if this was all a facade. It took a few hours in the city to get some clarity: it was all a facade, and the ghosts of apartheid and colonialism were everywhere, not even pretending to hide.

This will make those in denial angry.

To walk the streets of CT is akin to navigating a landscape shaped by centuries of conquest and racial capitalism. If it were a tagline: CT, the cityscape that performs modernity while rehearsing segregation. One quickly understands that here, power is in fact being exercised through control over the spatial, economic, and psychic horizons of the have-nots (learned from the great Achille Mbembe). I’ve experienced my fair share of cities where power is mapped into geography (isn’t that the essence of the urban construct? you may ask). Cape Town took it all to a new level: it is as segregrated as its beauty is tentalizing. There is a precision to the exclusion, a choreography of inequality, in between the mountains and oceans juxtaposed with fences and highways that cordon off entire communities.

Tourism, in this context, is a spectacle for the privileged eye. The curated charm is meant to put any sense of (social) conscience to sleep. A masterclass in curating for global (white) consumption, resulting in an astonishingly beautiful sterilized narrative. It says: here, suffering is non-existant, because beauty protects you from suffering.

The mechanisms of global capital, at play in so many cities of the Global South, sanitize the wounds of the past into Airbnb lofts and Instagrammable murals. The violence of gentrification is recoded as neighborhood revival. There is no mention of who was removed or who still walks miles to clean homes they are never allowed to inhabit. Healing you said?

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As my stay goes on, I keep wondering if I’m just too "in my head". No.

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We are still talking about a city in what is considered to be the most unequal country on earth. Cape Town has twice the country average of Whites. More wealth is concentrated here than anywhere else in the country. The short drive between the CBD and Clifton’s pristine beaches materialize the statistics I have read countless times. They become imprinted on your pupils. Or should we speak of Khayelitsha? In my life, in my work, I have learned that inequality is seldom accidental; it is a design and an afterimage of colonial extraction retooled for neoliberal accumulation - throughout the Global South.

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In this postcolony, the past is not a ghost but still very much a landlord we all pay rent to.

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If you ask me: it still reeks of apartheid.

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It is in the architecture of daily life, in the streets that feel like a palimpsest where past and present bleed into each other. It is in its spacial construction as much as in its soil: the wine farms, a short 60 minute drive from the CBD,aremonuments to coerced labor and Black servitude. And yet, they still stand untouched, proudly exhibiting their year of creation, by Dutch or English settlers. Today the labor is not coerced by the white land owners, but by the crushing economic system inherited from the past. It does not make it any less coerced.

Land does indeed bear memory.

What, then, does it mean to arrive as a visitor? To inhabit such a place, even momentarily? We need to be able to dissect this question both in ethical and structural terms. In being a tourist in such a place, I become an agent in an economy built on asymetry: of wealth, of movement, and of voice. The pleasures I get to experience are subsidized by the exclusions of the many. I am not from the Global North and yet, it all feels built to recreate the "imperialist nostalgia" bell hooks wrote about: allowing the dominant (classes, nationalities) to consume the very cultures and peoples they have oppressed. A visit to Stellenbosh and you understand the brutality of this nostalgia. For a moment, you are unsure if you are in the streets of Maastricht or Liverpool on a hot summer evening. I’ve seen it in my own home country and I see it here: the formerly colonized world is rendered a theme park for liberal indulgence.

And here, I find myself unwillingly on the wrong side of the fence, on the side of the White Man.

I feel myself often dragged forcibly by my inner voice to speak of Whiteness when I am in Africa. It’s odd as they are the minority. Yet, the White Man is everywhere. Whiteness, in the African context is not just a phenotype, or ancestry, but above all a mode of entitlement. There are also black/colored people that have integrated Whiteness, through a colonized mind - a whole different topic, and something I am accutely familiar with. In a city where Whites represent only 20% of the population, it feels as though they are the majority. I have drowned myself in research papers to try and understand this phenomenon. White comfort, security, and aesthetics take center stage, while Black pain is rendered invisible. Whiteness is embedded in the infrastructure, in the beachside cafés and boutique wine farms, in the presumption that land, beauty, and leisure belong to some and not others. In Cape Town, whiteness maintains these colonial lines by reasserting control over narratives, space, and memory - like in the rezoning of Woodstock, or the sanitized storytelling in curated heritage tours. It resists redistribution through the bureaucracies of zoning laws and property markets. The colonial project is well and operational.

Did I offend the reader?

A couple weeks before traveling to CPT, I read a book that has transformed the prism through which I approach the space between inherited identities and the colonial past: Neither Settler nor Native, by Mahmood Mamdani. I was not expecting to also learn in great detail about South Africa’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC). With an entire section dedicated to it, Mamdani uses it to illustrate the possibilities of a re-imagined national, inclusive identity, that has truly moved away from the inherited rigid boxes of colonial identities.

The TRC, explains Mamdani, created a path to symbolic healing without altering the material conditions that sustained white supremacy. He argues that true reconciliation demands political re-imagination, a move beyond the politics of guilt toward dismantling the very institutions that naturalized exclusion. In his words, reconciliation without justice is not peace, but pacification. And that is what I have been feeling since getting here: Pacified ethnic groups living side by side, tolerating one another because there are no alternatives.

To walk through Cape Town with integrity is to understand that discomfort is a compass to the city. It demands a radical form of attention, in order to not be an accomplice.

Cape Town is becoming, to me, the ache of its unresolved history. All those who travelled here clamore at the mention of its name, but no one spoke to me of the brutality on display.

So if the clouds above do shimmer like diamonds, I do not think they exist to merely refract beauty. They're heavy with memory. Beneath the beauty, the city is asking for your reckoning.

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