Brittany Gregerson

Approaching Cape Town from the airport, one is struck first by an aggressively Mediterranean landscape—very Cádiz in the summertime—and a grand bay vista that evokes San Diego, California more than anywhere else.  A small collection of neatly packed plate-glass skyscrapers; impatiently blue waters filled with all manner of boats; chain stores and cheeseburger joints.  It wouldn’t mesh with the common American preconception of Africa.  Few things about Cape Town do.  Upon further inspection, however, cracks in the generic sunny façade emerge: there’s Table Mountain to one’s left, a singular sight to be sure, with its rolling, tempestuous tablecloth of thick, beckoning cloud cover; the rainbow ruins and contemporary ghost-town of District Six to one’s right, cruelly stripped of its former glory by an oppressive and unrepentant act of cultural disregard during the height of Apartheid; and all around, visible evidence of the dichotomies of power, luck, health, and resources that so characterize the great African cities of the modern age.  Still, it’s more London than Lagos; more cosmopolitan than it is cut-off; more a story of the knowing wisdom of old cities than of the follies and chaos of the prevailing African stereotype.  Cape Town lives in the omnipresent shadow of its own history, as old cities and new democracies inescapably do. 

On my last trip to Zanzibar, the sky was aflame; the water was lavender silk. In Zanzibar, one wants to believe that beauty begets beauty—that the overwhelming loveliness of everything around could not but lead to peace, love, and contentment; to those things and to nothing else. Truly great beauty is breathtaking and improbable. Zanzibar has this beauty. It also, however, has neighborhoods reduced to rubble and reminiscent of the post-war Balkans; stifling, overt oppression of women by the male Islamic majority; extreme poverty, and scores of other problems. The ugliness that exists in Zanzibar is a human creation, a supreme triumph of violence over natural beauty. Zanzibar as paradox is nothing if not beguiling, and I cannot say with any confidence that my fascination with Africa as a whole is not rooted in this fundamental tension. How can a place so beautiful be so inextricably entrenched in despair and conflict? The exemplar beauty present across Africa—in the landscape, the people, and the simplicity of life—exists alongside and perhaps inextricably with unnecessary hatred and ungodly strife. Zanzibar pushes this juxtaposition to the unavoidable forefront.