After decades of enforced segregation, the feeling of division is permanently carved into the city's urban form, the physical legacy of a plan that was calculatedly designed to separate poor blacks from rich whites. Guests admire how the bath tub is carved from a solid block of marble, while security guards keep watch in front of a defensive ha-ha down below, ringed by an electric fence.Īpartheid may have ended 20 years ago, but here in Cape Town the sense of apartness remains as strong as ever. An infinity pool projects out towards the Atlantic horizon, as the setting sun casts a golden glow across the villa's seamless planes, their surfaces sparkling with Namibian diamond dust mixed into the white concrete. “I'm worried that the children are always getting sick.” Twenty minutes' drive to the west, the seventh course is being served at a banquet of assembled journalists, here to celebrate Cape Town's title of World Design Capital 2014 on the terrace of a cliff-top villa. “We can't sleep at night because of the smell,” she says, speaking in Xhosa, a language peppered with clicks that echo the droplets beginning to drum on the corrugated metal roof. Panyaza shares this tiny cabin with her two daughters and four grandchildren, a family of seven with two beds between them. Outside her makeshift home in the sprawling township of Khayelitsha, on the eastern edge of Cape Town, barefoot children play on the banks of an open sewer, while cows roam next to an overflowing rubbish heap. “Water comes in through the ceiling and the electricity stops working.” “When it rains, the public toilets overflow into my living room,” she says. Sitting on a salvaged sofa in the centre of her small tin shack, Nomfusi Panyaza looks increasingly worried, as heavy clouds gather in the sky outside.
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