Urbanities,
Vol. 4
·
No 2
·
November 2014
© 2014
Urbanities
79
the outside world, through which Xolewa might have the possibility to be part of the
heterogeneous group which was filling Long Street.
Xolewa watched the match along with many of her friends, all black and all township
dwellers. In the course of the evening Xolewa saw a coloured guy with whom she had been
very good friends when she was at school. She had decided to disregard that he was coloured
and had become really close to him. She recounted:
‘After school each of us went our own way and people lost touch with each other.
That evening, as often happens, there were a lot of people, both coloureds and
blacks, in The Dubliner, but the coloureds were keeping to one side of the bar and
the blacks to the other. It was like there was an invisible line across the floor, a
barrier and unwritten borders which divided the bar in two. My friend came into
the bar with a group of his friends; I found he’d changed, above all in the way he
behaved. He looked like a white who was dressed in a certain way and behaved
like someone posh. Our eyes met, I’m sure he recognised me, but he pretended
not to have and turned in the opposite direction. This was a great disappointment
for me, because we used to be friends and I’d placed my trust in him, but now he
didn’t want his friends to see that he was friends with a black girl.’
Xolewa described the distance between her and her friend and between the racial groups
as an ‘invisible line’, an intangible barrier which continues to divide groups of humans in
post-Apartheid Cape Town. But the space in itself is unable to explain the significance, which
Xolewa attributes to this distance. It is the combination of her life experience with this space,
which gives it meaning. The conjunction of time and space gives meaning to the distance; it is
represented as an invisible line, which cannot be crossed.
Desmond’s Angel
On the evening of the final Desmond wasn’t supporting either of the teams. He had parked his
taxi outside the Long Street Café and was waiting for a potential fare to come out so he could
take them home. Desmond is a 45-year-old man. I met him in Long Street while he was
waiting for customers in his taxi. He had migrated to South Africa from Zimbabwe, trying to
escape from the economic crisis and the dictatorship of Robert Mugabe, arriving in Cape
Town in 2008. At first he worked for a wholesaler company which delivered fruit to various
businesses in the city, but in 2010 he started working as a taxi driver. Desmond told me about
his life in South Africa and his difficult relationship with the local population, ‘particularly
with the blacks’.
He explained to me that immigrants ‘are viewed as a threat by black South Africans
because we work hard and employers prefer us to the local population. The blacks here are
lazy and expect to be paid even when they don’t do anything’. Although Desmond has never
been a victim of violence he lives in a state of constant fear. An incident in a township when
he was forced to buy drinks for all the regulars and attacks on his fellow taxi drivers have
convinced him to keep himself to himself and to avoid opening up to the local population.
Desmond is waiting until he has enough money to go back to his own country, because
