Berkley Center

The spring semester at the University of Cape Town is over and, with classes and exams done, I figured it was time to do a little more exploring. A couple weeks ago, with the weather finally cooperating, I went to the Cape Town suburb of Somerset West for hiking, kloofing, and abseiling. The experience itself was unreal. I've spent plenty of time outdoors, but the sheer untamed beauty of the waterfalls, rivers, caves, and rock faces I saw was awe-inspiring. The most striking of all of it was that these trails were only 45 minutes or so outside of Cape Town.

On the (short) drive back on the N2 highway I was struck yet again by the city of Cape Town. This time it was a product of my temporary home's three great identities: developed city, nature paradise, and third world slum. I had begun my day with breakfast at a cafe on Long Street in the Cape Town city center, surrounded by bistros, shops, markets, and grocery stores. Driving east on the N2 across the ‘Cape Flats’ our van past through Khayleitsha, officially a suburb of Cape Town but, in reality, one of the most squalid and overcrowded informal settlements in all of Africa. Khayleitsha is home to approximately two million Capetonians, two-thirds of the city's entire population. Half an hour past Khayleitsha, we reached the start of an outdoorsman's paradise. Hiking across mountain passes, wading through rivers, and swimming below waterfalls with an Irish adventure magazine editor, three British tourists, and a couple of South African guides, the landscape gave no indication to its proximity to the modern Cape Town city center or the impoverished Khayleitsha township.

My enduring impression of Cape Town will likely be the irreconcilability of the three Cape Towns. My time on Long Street, the V&A Waterfront, city center restaurants, and the University of Cape Town (UCT) feels worlds apart from my walks through the Company's Gardens, trails near the Rhodes Memorial, the Kirstenbosch Gardens, and various national parks and protected areas. I'm not alone either: South Africans, and Capetonians specifically, are unbelievably proud of their dichotomy of city and nature. More problematic are the overcrowded and impoverished townships of Khayleitsha, Nyanga, Langa, and Gugulethu (among many others) located so near geographically to the wealth of the Central Business District and wealthy white suburbs, yet so isolated from cultures of wealth. These informal settlements, packed full of shacks and hostels, house the vast majority of Cape Town's residents but, economically and socially, might as well be in an entirely different country. Many of my classes at UCT—and American-style coffee shop study sessions—have primarily focused on how to address the hunger, public health, housing, and security in these informal settlements.

It's easy to study slum poverty in South Africa, India, Southeast Asia, Ethiopia, etc. from cushy student dorms in the United States or Western Europe. It's even easy to talk about poverty, inequality, and crime in townships over a picnic lunch in the Kirstenbosch Gardens or over a late afternoon drink at the Rhodes Memorial restaurant. While I may never be able to fully reconcile or understand the tripartite identity of my study abroad city, my experiences here have redoubled my commitment to economic development and poverty reduction in emerging market locations.