FIRST PUBLISHED IN THE MAIL & GUARDIAN ON 2018-12-14 | TRAVEL

Roughly three years ago, I joined a group of friends for a road-trip to the Western Cape town of Mcgregor.

Friends and acquaintances who would not be joining praised the ‘small-town charms’ and ‘idyllic setting’ of the place: sending us off on our two-hour drive with envy and recommendations.

By that point I’d lived in Cape Town for almost eight years and had gone on enough weekends away to know that ‘small-town charms’ also meant ‘segregated hospitality’, whilst the ‘idyllic setting’ would also be ‘pretty spatial apartheid’. Some part of me hoped that, in some small Black-owned-business-kind-of-way, this place might be different.

Rhodes had fallen. Fees were falling. That was the year people ‘woke’ up. 

My hopes took a backseat as we drove through the town in search of the dirt road to the farmhouse we’d be staying at. Mcgregor’s layout is almost a copy-paste of central Cape Town, both in street name and social intent. Down Long Street was the town’s commercial spine of café’s, artisanal stores, boutique hotels, and pilates studios. From Keerom Street onto Loop Street were colonial-styled homes and manicured gardens—all ornately gated. Moving out of the centre onto Buitenkant Street, we were greeted with dimmer street lighting and perceptibly poorer homes: both fitting for Buitenkant—which translates to ‘the outer edge’—and revealing of urban planning tendencies to push the less desirable to the fringes.

The next morning, we missioned out in search of a key weekend away ingredient: wine. The only store open at our group’s unchristian shopping hour was on the lower, and poorer, end of Long Street. If the town’s dichotomy could be distilled into a single image, it would be at the intersection where that liquor store began and “upper” Long Street ended: a diptych of barbed wires and bougainvilleas. A group of men greeted us jovially from a nearby pavement in the shade. One walked over. Holding a baby on his hip, he pointed to each member of our group and introduced us to the child.

“Say ‘Hello’ to Madam…and Mister…and Mister,” he said, gesturing to three of our party. “And say hello to ‘Cousin’,” he said, ending on me.

I was the only person of colour in our group.

We returned the greetings, laughed along as if we were all laughing at the same things, and continued our weekend-awaying. I do not think I will forget that singling out and the particular sense of shame that followed it anytime soon.

CUE NOLA

Fast-forward to 2018. Fees have stagnated. Trump has risen.

This was the year of living our best lives. I am in New Orleans, Louisiana, for a weekend away. New friends and new acquaintances had implored me to visit ‘NOLA’—to get a taste of ‘the real America’.

I’m not too sure what makes one city a realer representative of its country than the next, but I booked my flight anyway, arriving in New Orleans on a muggy, spring morning.

Unlike the American cities dominating the Hollywood-shaped part of my imagination—my sense of familiarity with New Orleans was limited to three broad categories: jazz, Hurricane Katrina, and “Creole Lady Marmalade” as crooned by Lil’ Kim in the remake of Labelle’s Lady Marmalade.

As far as first dates go, my first encounter with New Orleans would leave my skin prickling with nostalgia and my liver irate with neglect. It started sweetly, diabetically so, with a breakfast of beignets and café au laits (sweet vetkoek and milky Ricoffy) at Café Du Monde in New Orlean’s French Quarter. We had arrived in town early enough to watch life set up around Jackson Square: salespeople stocked tables with novelties and voodoo offers, horses and carriages pulled into the tree-shade with their sleepy guides in tow, early-bird tourists with cups of hotel Starbucks in hand consulted maps, and post-Mardi Gras goers were either beginning, or continuing, to drink through what could have been another day’s hangover.

A large sign on the neighbouring Mississippi River waterfront told us that we had arrived in time for the city’s Tricentennial: its 300th anniversary of Spanish (and later, French) conquest, or “influence,” as the signs stated. What little I knew of American history added a new, though unsurprising, category to my mental picture of New Orleans: colonial nostalgia. 

We stayed in the Bywater: an area described by local urbanist Richard Campanella as the “Williamsburg of the South”. This is also code for ‘Gentrification Central.’ Breakfasting at a place with a flying pig for a sign, getting lost inside the double-storey Euclid Records, stocking up on sage sticks at a local apothecary to keep the ghoul in my attic at bay (really), embracing local tipsiness over a mean local cocktail called a “sazerac”, refuelling with chip-and-shrimp-filled “po’boy sandwiches” (jazzed up gatsbys), and soaking up wine and jazz at the outdoor bar-restaurant, Bacchanal: these were some of the the activities injuring our livers and saturating our sense of place. 

A city with holes

Amid these small-town revelries were also glaring question marks. Some homes bore black, spray-painted crosses: a 13-year-old remnant of Hurricane Katrina’s search-and-rescue protocol. Why are these homes still empty? Where did those displaced by Katrina resettle? How exactly does a city rebuild itself after such an unprecedented disaster? Newer spray-paint told “Yuppies and AirBnB” to “f*ck off”, begging the question of:

‘Who benefits most after disaster strikes?’

Moving between the cosier neighbourhoods of The Bayou, the insomnia of the French Quarter, and the grand, tree-lined avenues of Mid-City’s Charleston Avenue, differences in wealth and demographics became harder and harder to un-see. I learned that, since Hurricane Katrina, home prices and rent have gone up by about 50%, AirBnB is making a killing, liquor sales are doing fine while performers’ fees have declined, and the State of Louisiana still incarcerates (mostly black) citizens at two times the national average. These matters of race, class and economics do not fit neatly on mugs or t-shirts. I sensed a familiarity I did not want to feel, described in my journal in a single line: “New Orleans: Swamp-side Stellenbosch.” 

Here was another place seemingly invested in its legacy of structural inequality in order to survive economically—another place built on a different kind of TRC: Transplantation, Repackaging, and Commodification.

What should it matter? I’m just a visitor, right? Except I’m not just a visitor.

There too, I am that “Cousin.”