As we see and experience it, the Victoria & Alfred Waterfront is a kind of modernized legacy of its colonial history.
A yellow frame that identifies the table mountain covered in fog and a few buildings in the CBD (Central Business District), it also includes a dock, shipyard and marina extended along an inland stretch of sea, where the Atlantic comes closest to Table Mountain, in the area of the oldest port in South Africa. South.
A few workers deal with the repair and maintenance of vessels that have been beaten and worn out by the rough waters offshore.
This coastal area is dotted with restaurants, bars, hotels, cinemas, souvenir and knick-knack stores, and others that provide different types of entertainment.
We are two of more than twenty million outsiders who, in normal tourist years, travel the V&A Waterfront.
On a daily basis, they explore its corners and have fun while countless fishing boats and cargo ships enter and set sail, part of the nautical frenzy that makes Cape Town the third economic center of the vast continent. African.
With the afternoon surrendering and the sun almost disappearing in the western distance, the atmospheric pressure on the foot of the mountain decreases. Little by little, the fog slides off the plateau.
It is also made for that seaside colored by the twilight and artificial lighting with a predominance of gold. One ferris wheels giant swirls above the houses, against the sky, soon, starry.
Gradually, visitors, guests and night diners settled in their favorite establishments.
The Victoria & Alfred Waterfront was named in honor of Prince Alfred, who visited it in 1860, and, of course, his mother Victoria, queen of the already vast British Empire.
The fame of scale, of oceanic warehouse, of Taverna dos Mares almost obligatory, had it for a long time.
After the passages of Bartolomeu Dias and Vasco da Gama through Cape of Storms, the Portuguese sought to establish a presence and position that they knew had great strategic value. However, they faced resistance from the natives.
In 1510, Francisco de Almeida and his 64 men suffered the hardships of the first confrontation between Europeans and indigenous people in present-day South Africa. All perished in what became known as the Battle of Rio Salgado.
Despite the tragedy, in the years that followed, ships from Portugal, and later from rival colonial nations, continued to anchor at the base of Table Mountain.
In a first phase, they repaired the damaged ships there and stocked up on water and supplies which, as soon as contacts with the natives were pacified, they exchanged for tobacco, silver, iron and others.
The Portuguese eventually settled and maintained fortifications in other parts of southern and southeastern Africa. Similar to what happened in different colonial contexts, the Dutch, who almost always followed in their footsteps, set up camp on the Cape.
Served by the Dutch East India Company, they ensured, in their Kaapcolonie, a warehouse for ships heading to the Dutch East Indies, islands in present-day Indonesia.
Castle of Good Hope and Cape Town's Dutch Origins
There, between 1666 and 1679, they built the first military structure in what is now Cape Town, the Fort of Good Hope, later replaced by the Castle of Good Hope.
This last fortification constitutes the civilizational core of the colony and the city.
The oldest colonial building in South Africa remains beautifully preserved and grand. It's another one of the places in the Mother City that we're in a hurry to discover.
The castle preserves its pentagonal configuration.
The stone and mortar walls contrast with the lightness and yellow beauty of the buildings inside, separated by a lawn that, based on a historical reenactment, soldiers in secular uniforms and in formation, cross with a rifle with a bayonet on their shoulder.
At one of the still grassy ends of the pentagon, we find the South African flag waving in the wind.
We admire it, almost from the base, standing out above the sharp peak of Lion Mountain, a hill to the west of Table Mountain that sailors used as a complementary nautical reference.
The Castelo da Boa Esperança proved to be so central that it is accompanied by an imposing ex-City Hall, set amongst palm trees, built by the British in 1905, in honey-coloured limestone imported from Bath.
The CBD, above Old Town Historic Center by the City Bowl
Cape Town's financial and business center and downtown area spread across the flat, flat lands that surround it.
Over there, a recent colony of steel and glass corporate buildings, headquarters of the most powerful South African banks and the like, rises above the Castle of Good Hope, challenging the quartz supremacy of the Table Mountain cliffs.
In obvious temporal and architectural disparity, they form the other section of the Downtown from Cape Town, streets like Long Street and Kloof Street.
There are many buildings with adapted Dutch architecture, extended, with simplified pediments and arcades at the base.
They are supplanted by others, more modern, in inhabited times, today, due to an almost inevitable dynamic of gentrification, occupied by an assortment of lucrative businesses.
On these sides of the so-called City Bowl, dusk generates a play of shadows, shapes and colors that, along with the people and figures that roam the streets, make it above all enigmatic.
Among the buildings with a Dutch origin and influence, there are others, secular and religious, in the Edwardian and Victorian styles that the flow of history imposed on the city.
From Dutch and British Colonies to an Intricate Independence
Cape Town was Dutch and Boer from 1652 to 1795.
In this year, with Holland aligned with Napoleonic France that the British and allies subdued, the British took the opportunity to capture most of the boer territory in south africa.
After a period of comings and goings, Cape Town became, in 1814, British for good.
The colony's capital, meanwhile, renamed Cape Colony, was expanded along the vacant space between the foothills of Table Mountain and the shores of the even more immense Table Bay.
The discovery of diamonds and gold, at the end of the XNUMXth century, generated a migratory flow to South Africa that greatly increased the number of inhabitants and the ethnic diversity of the city.
The Multicolor Neighborhood of Bo-Kaap and the Multi-Ethnicity of Cape Town
As we wander around Cape Town, we find ourselves in the multicolored Bo-Kaap, the Malay neighborhood of Cape Town.
It was generated by descendants of slaves brought by the Dutch from Malaysia, Indonesia and parts of Africa, almost entirely Muslim.
For several centuries, long before the institutionalization of Apartheid, the Bo-Kaap neighborhood was segregated.
Upon their social liberation, the owners of the houses painted them in happy colors.
Cape Town's multiculturalism never ceased to become more complex.
Bo-Kaap and other less garish neighborhoods welcomed Indian, Filipino, Italian immigrants from the most different parts of Africa and, as is known, Portuguese, especially Madeiran.
We admire a mural that shows a smiling face of the Madiba Nelson Rolihlala Mandela, father of the modern South African nation, which triumphed over the despised segregationist regime Apartheid imposed, from 1948 to 1994, by governments Afrikaners of the National Party.
South Africans of different ethnicities and skin tones who pass between the mural and our lenses either don't react or smile a little.
This is how their postures succeed until a woman with very dark skin and short hair curled in braids raises her right fist, tightly clenched.
We prove, at that moment, how, despite their complexity, four centuries later, South Africa and Cape Town are, by history and by right, theirs.
