Life as the reworking of a destiny by a freedom. She senses that freedom not at all, and knows all too well the pull, the sluggish gravity, of the first.
And yet, through dreams—by way of art, of illusion, of fiction—we do, or can reinvent ourselves.
He had hoped they would become to one another not substantial, but transparent, subjective life offered up completely, completely given, alongside the objective one they shared. That was one of his dreams.
To change someone, he knew from the first, you must love that person very much. Perhaps the reverse is true as well, he thinks now.¹

My complicated relationship to this place, Cape Town, can be read in this elegy. This city, Kaapstad, that I love so dammed much is hurtling towards a fucked-up destiny in which it is incapable of holding the threads together; all that remains is a relentless disintegration of the soul. As in all love affairs, wanting to help is often the worst idea, and even worse act to undertake. Staying in the shadows; maintaining a safe travelling distance is most apt; love expressed through ‘stalking’…

As of late, a lot of people have a lot of things to say about this particularly stubborn love of my life. The list of wannabe do-gooders is seemingly endless: politicians, planners, journalists, artists, writers, developmentalists, architects, urban designers, big capitalists, small capitalists, consultants to capitalists (i.e. middle-sized capitalists), environmentalists, full-time Marxists, and so on, and so on… In the shadows I lurk, arrogantly smirking at their naivety for they know not what I know about the imperviousness to change of this place, Kaapstad. However, in that moment of inflated cynicism I also catch a glimpse of my own irrepressible desire to find a chink in the armour of the city’s invulnerability to change and imagine a life and new love in alternative times where freedom is indeed a practice that takes multiple forms through the radicalisation of space.

I’m often impatient with utopias because it feels to me as if it is an escape from the messy work of the present. Yet, every now and again when I manage to lift my head out of the anarchic storyline ofTransmetropolitan² – which offers the most delectable imagery and insights into the truly fucked-up urban futures we can expect if places like Cape Town (or Rio or Mumbai or Lagos or New York) pursue their present destinies – I’m seduced by the simply pleasures of dreaming. And if Sallis is right, dwelling in the realm of dreams may be the one route to imagining, and possibly even bringing to life, alternative futures for Kaapstad. So, how does one best slip into a dreamworld?

In this instance, re-dreaming Kaapstad is done with the help of a visual essay titled, “Meditations on a New Jerusalem” by architect Lebbeus Woods³. In this essay Woods accompanies each of his haunting abstract architectural sketches – set in sombre shades of dark grey dissected by white and red form-giving lines – with incite-full aphorisms. Thus, my dream is set in train as a riff on the dictums of Woods …

“The importance of two things is the distinction, not the distance between them.”

Kaapstad has become less obsessed with dualities and polar opposites but rather take multiplicity for granted as simply the inevitable and necessary ordinariness of life and pleasure. However, this is subtle multiplicity; it is not about being a mélange but rather about the beauty that lies in recognising the prismatic tapestry of seeing the distinctions that give plurality its propulsive force. In fact, thinking and speaking as if life can be understood through any kind of binary has become an offence in terms of a municipal by-law of 2012, which outlawed binaries after the opposition political party in the Unicity played the race card yet again!

“The emptiness of space increases the more fanatically it is filled.”

The very large inner-city heart of Kaapstad is teeming with a multiplicity of life, lust, movement, vitality, wheeling and dealing and the unmistakable scent of a city on the edge of its own possibilities. Yet, despite the density of sweating bodies and kaleidoscopic styles, there is also an impossible quiet that can only arise from vigorous agonistic contentions as differences rub each other, mostly the wrong way. In other words, the oppressive silence that stem from consensus and shared visions are no longer all the political rage. Thank God.

“A city may be drawn anew in a language that has always been used, but not yet understood”

Kaapstad has finally settled on a vernacular. It is an incomprehensible “mixed-bredie” of politically incorrect words drawn from all eleven official languages in South Africa. The “language” is compulsory fare from Grade 0 – 3 by which time it is totally naturalised. In the run-up to the 2015 World Expo held at the Convention Centre II⁴, a massive artist-driven movement decided that the only way Kapenaars will learn to speak honestly about what they really think is if they are taxed every time they uttered a platitude to someone from another ethnic, class or race group. The extensive spaghetti of CCTV cameras all over the city was fitted with audio capability and linked to an open-source piece of software that could pick up politically correct speech, identify the individual in breach via the national database of Home Affairs, which had been upgraded to biometric standards. In other words, the recognition capability was beyond dispute. The result of this exercise in “non-racialism” was a total system overload to the extent that the entire liberal establishment in the city had to concede that we were irredeemably and irrevocably racist, sexist, xenophobic, homophobic, contemptuous of the disabled and cognitively wedded to the image of a white messiah. However, it is rumoured that the real reason for the capitulation is the fact that generations of savings and trust fund accounts were being eroded by the burden of the tax. And so it came to be that Kapenaars realised that it mattered less what your vocabulary was but rather how you acted as a generous human being that made (the) difference.

“First come the forms of what has been most desired, then of what has been most feared”

In 2005, one of Sea Point property barons spotted a massive gap in the market: despite there being 25000 tertiary students in the inner-city they did not have a place to live that was within walking distance of campus! Thus he planned and built two tower blocks on the Foreshore that settled 8 000 students by 2009 and had architectural drawing ready for a further five by 2012. A decade later he became a grand father and realised his own hand in the process because his daughter got knocked-up by a Congolese stud known for his crazy parties in room 1256 of the first tower block he built. The day his grandson was baptised he sold his company to the last BEE company that was registered on the eve of the sunset of black economic empowerment in 2019.

“The geometry of division is a mathematics of denial”

In 2011, Kaapstad won the Manchu Award for the most convincing performance of non-racialism.

“Conflict clarifies distinctions, but violence effaces them”

Kaapstad’s Unicity made a decisive shift, through the impact of people’s budgeting process, when in 2015 (after the Millennium Development Targets were hopeless botched) it decided to shift 40% of the annual budget of R40bn into a school- and community-based programme of emotional literacy⁵. The purpose of these programmes was to invest the psychic interiors of Kapenaars as opposed to the consumerist exteriors of the city. Within a few years the beauty of discernment that arises from freedom’s multiplicities insinuated itself back into the psyche of the city. It proved to be contagious.

“There is a line of constant energy connecting the obvious with the obscure.”

In 2009 the retired Athlone Power Station was turned over to a secret society of artists and urban designers with a mandate to create a wellspring of innovation on the site. By 2011, every weekend, public holiday and school holiday, the place was buzzing with thousands of horny adolescents getting their grove on through dance, painting, climbing, running, music, the word, chilling, riding, contemplating, and especially, laughing at themselves… A few years after that Lentegeur Hospital in Mitchell’s Plain was reporting under-enrolment and 2000 cops had to be on early retirement… go figure…

“Despair assumes the language of problems that desire no solution”

Prof. Barney Pityana, a retired academic luminary of Kaapstad finally wins a running battle over that other academic luminary, Prof. Kader Asmal, when a new Higher Education Law moves to institutionally break-up all universities in South Africa whilst linking them via second-hand, low-orbit satellites made in Bangalore. Shortly thereafter Pityana delivers the definite lecture on: “the African aesthetic of patience in politics of the long duree”. Asmal fails to show as the discussant. Prof. Pityana is immediately awarded an honorary doctorate in anticipation by the soon to be re-established Peninsula Technikon.

“All things do not exist in the same present”

Kaapstad remains a throbbing tourism mecca on the back of achieving the status of being the number one Pink Capital in the world by 2016 and the number two city for Muslim pilgrims, after Mecca of course. Significantly, market research by competitor cities show that this feat is beyond replication because the genius of Kaapstad as a place is that it offers multiple zones of overlap for seemingly irreconcilable identities; a trait that the city draws from its audaciously transgressive citizens freed from the despotism of performative political correctness as elaborated before. Thus, history and the future runs both horizontal and vertically in Kaapstad and locked in a willing embrace by its people.

“Architecture is a political act”

A splinter group broke away from the secret society that got the commission for the Athlone Power State because they couldn’t accept the seemingly shallow politics of the leadership. After a few years of roaming the outer edges of the world wide web, they coagulated their potent blend of jealousy, radicalism, anarchism, penchant for Kangol caps, and creativity into a programme of “creative destruction”. Within the space of just six months they managed to eviscerate the Castle, the V&A Hotel, Teazers, a wing of the Pan-African Market on the edge of District 6, the elevators of the Strand Street Holiday Inn, and of course the metal soup bowl ensconced on top of the Council Chambers of the Unicity. These sites were not targeted for their uses or forms (except for the soup bowl), but rather for points they represented in a larger geometry of meaning that stemmed from the burial sites of slaves in the city. The insurgents believed that acts of erasure could clear a space for a new spatiality of remembrance that was rooted in pain and not some cheap, “how-brave-were-the-natives”, sentimentality…

Waking from this admittedly warped dream, I am left with the following sensibility in my bone dry mouth:

The modern city is […] so full of unexpected interactions and so continuously in movement that all kinds of small and large spatialities continue to provide resources for political invention as they generate new improvisations and force new forms of ingenuity.⁶

¹ Sallis, James. (1995) Renderings. Seattle: Black Heron Press, p.47.
²Transmetropolitan is an indispensable graphic novel created by Warren Ellis and Darick Robertson (DC Comics).
³Woods, L. (2002) “Meditations on a New Jerusalem”, in Sorkin, M. (ed.) The Next Jerusalem: Sharing a Divided City. New York: The Monacelli Press, pp. 354-367. (All of the quotes that follow are from this essay.)
⁴The original Cape Town Convention Centre was (accidentally) gutted after the largest ever graffiti penis sprayed in green, black and gold was draped over the four domes of the building in an inerasable paint that was the product of experimental nano-technology developed at UWC.
⁵This notion is derived from the politically charged and insightful work of Susan Orbach (1996) “Couching Anxieties”, in S. Dunant and R. Porter, (eds.) The Age of Anxiety. London: Virago.
⁶Amin, A. and N. Thrift (2002). Cities: Reimagining the Urban. Cambridge: Polity Press, p.157.