Cape Town, Africa’s southernmost metropolis, is a city adrift. The seat of South Africa’s parliament, it is also an opposition party stronghold, the only political constituency not dominated by the ruling ANC government. Blame it on demographics: the Western Cape province has a minority black population, the mixed-race community constituting more than half the demographic. Cape Town’s history is bound up in race, its distinctive colonial architecture the ideation of white colonists who first settled the subcontinent in 1652.

‘Nothing about it feels African,’ wrote A.A. Gill of the domesticated garden republic. This inauthenticity masks more fragile relations. A sprawling, horizontal city, Cape Town inhabits a shrubland ecosystem reliant on fire for renewal. Fire is also the scourge of the city’s mushrooming shack settlements, interstitial zones that are the outcome of post-apartheid migrations by rural poor. Economic desperation here does not easily accommodate difference; last year, the city’s poorest suburbs were drawn into the xenophobic violence that blazed across the country. All of which lends to Cape 09’s claim to being a showcase of ‘contemporary African culture’ an air of aspiration and defiance, rather than fact.

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