I have never felt unsafe in Cape Town.
Before coming here, every time I had mentioned that I would be spending six weeks in Cape Town, I was met with the same response: “Be careful.”
When my plane first descended into the city, I smiled widely at the beautiful beach and sprawling mountains, both accompanied by an orange and pink sunset. My smile quickly faded as we passed over a township, with houses made of iron, wood, and various scrap materials. I had heard about these before, neighborhoods built by Black and Coloured South Africans when apartheid forced them out of designated “white-only” cities. My displeasure deepened as the setting quickly changed from the large township to a bustling city. They lay only minutes away from each other. The contrast was impossible to ignore.
That night, some classmates and I walked from our hotel to a nearby market. Along the way, I noticed many who sat or stood along the sidewalk, holding trash bags, which I could only assume contained their belongings, tightly. I expected the interactions I had grown accustomed to in the United States, both at Yale and in my home city, but they never came. No one approached us. No one asked us for money. No one spoke to us.
And that’s what was so jarring, what unsettled me. It all felt too casual. And it was on this first night in Cape Town that I realized…that’s because it is.
In the span of just a few hours, I had witnessed extraordinary wealth and extreme poverty side by side, but life continued as if nothing were unusual. The inequality was so visible everywhere, yet simultaneously seemed invisible, “unseen in the city’s margins,” as Gerard Sekoto put it in his exhibition from our class trip to the Zeitz MOCAA.
It was on this same class trip that a certain gallery stuck out to me, its title stopping me in my tracks. “The Privilege of Choice,” it read in bold letters. And what a privilege it is. For many Black and Coloured South Africans, choice is denied by long-standing systems of discrimination rooted in apartheid. Poverty is forced onto them and extremely difficult to escape.
Searching through garbage cans, leaving trash on sidewalks, pickpocketing—what else are low-income South Africans expected to do when they have no other choice? When those who have the privilege of choice choose to accept economic disparity as normal?
With the lessons from the museum still in my mind, I was again overcome with sadness as we walked through Cape Town’s city center. I passed people sitting in the Grand Parade plaza with their belongings in plastic bags, hours spent in the same spot as crowds of tourists hurried past them. Why should I get to enjoy their city when they cannot enjoy it for themselves?
From every corner of Cape Town I have ventured to (the markets, the city center, the beach), I can’t help but think about the people I have passed who never asked me for anything. The people everyone warned me about before I arrived.
The reality is that the greatest thing Cape Town has forced me to confront is not danger, but guilt in the face of persistent inequality.
And that is how I know I am in the right place.
I am grateful to have the privilege of choice, and I am sitting here, choosing to spend six weeks filming and telling the stories of South Africans who have been overlooked for decades.
I have never felt unsafe in Cape Town. What I have felt is a responsibility to pay attention and a calling to translate that attention into action.