Transforming Cape Town (review)

The gerund in the title suggests that this book is both about the transformations Cape Town has undergone since 1990 and about people who have been laboring to transform it. This underlines one of the qualities of the narrative put together by Catherine Besteman: it allows the reader to feel how people inhabiting a particular place relate to that place and how they change in a transforming place.

A professor of anthropology at Colby College, Besteman started working in Cape Town in 1999 and visited there regularly until 2004. At first, engaged in other duties, she did not intend to do formal "fieldwork," but her experiences made her change her mind; this may be responsible for the particular tone of the book she finally wrote: a collection of stories and chronicles—interspersed with interviews and quotations from the press—examined from an anthropological point of view.

The book begins by underlining the contradictions of postapartheid South Africa. Political change has not produced social redress, and interactions among people belonging to different categories, as defined under apartheid, remain minimal; inequalities are widening in many domains—economic, educational, cultural. To be sure, efforts have been made to cross or even erase inherited borders, but these have not always been success stories. Many Capetonians who refused to see the realities of the past remain blind to the realities of the present. Besteman provides some interesting material on whites' attitudes toward the "New South Africa." Ignorance characterizes most of them: ignorance of the past as well as ignorance of the present; tainted by racism, blatant or clumsily disguised in jokes; or shadowed by guilt. Even the few who are intent on combating ignorance do not really know how to overcome it. The idea that the standards according to which they have organized their lives and on which they have based their vision of society should not suffer any alteration underpins their attitudes and behaviors. Although these "standards" come directly from the old South Africa, they are considered universal—which makes other norms and values necessarily secondary to them. They are frequently shared by many who are happy to be part of the "New South Africa" and condemn apartheid but do not seem to realize that "transformation" implies an evolution in what is meant by "standards" and possibly a reconsideration of the relevance of the very notion of a common, fixed, cultural "standard." (On this question, Crain Soudien's study Youth Identity in Contemporary South Africa: Race, Culture and Schooling [New Africa Books, 2009] offers a very stimulating counterpoint).

There are, however, white Capetonians who have broken with these conceptions, and who have involved themselves in various endeavors aimed at addressing the contradictory combination of persistent legacies of apartheid with the changes that have taken place since 1990. In a chapter dedicated to "the transformers," Besteman describes various projects implemented by "visionary leaders" and teams of educators from all backgrounds. Transformers "have chosen to embark on transformative agendas that demand lifestyle changes, ideological investment, and the creation of new social worlds" (192). They personify the emergence of "experimental identities [which] allow creative Capetonians to redefine themselves and to transcend race." (14) The question of "identities," indeed, traverses the whole volume. However, the chapter titled "Identity Issues" deals only with those who were categorized as coloureds and is underpinned by a disturbing contradiction: "coloureds" are treated as a uniform group whose members have partaken in the desirability of a world "characterized by Euro-American culture and norms" (164); teenagers, for instance, are described as exclusively interested in U.S. musical styles. While this fascination does represent one aspect of youth coloured culture (and adult as well), it by by no means excludes an active interest in creole forms that developed from the second half of the nineteenth century—Klopse Carnival, Singkore ("Malay Choirs") competitions, Christmas Choir competitions, langarm dance parties, to name but a few. People who participate in these practices belong mostly to the working class and...