After moving into our University of Cape Town dorm, my new roommate and I set out to find a grocery store, heading down a main road just after dusk. All of the sudden, two middle-aged women stopped us on the sidewalk, frenetically asking what we were doing.
“You must be very careful,” one said, tugging at the purse draped loosely across my chest. “Don’t walk after 4 p.m.” The other added, “To stay safe, watch out for anyone with skin darker than ours.”
Then they hailed us a taxi — a rickety, overstuffed minibus that served as cheap public transport — and bid us farewell. Before we could process what had happened, we found ourselves at a shopping center that could have very well been in New Jersey.
I had just experienced my first package of so-called Cape Town experiences — confronting overt discussion of race, feeling the weight of high crime rates and witnessing a clash of developing and developed worlds in the same space.
In my study abroad application essay, I said I wanted a “new lens” and “hands-on approach” to what I’m studying because I thought it sounded good. But it turns out I couldn’t ask for a more eye-opening, in-your-face dimension to my education. At first, it was a tough balance between studying here and simply being a student, always rushing to chronicle and analyze what I encountered.
Now, well into the semester, I’ve gotten the knack of learning while living all of the city’s and school’s ups and downs, from grading curves to safety concerns.
We learned on one of our first days here that Cape Town’s nickname is the Mother City because “everything takes nine months to materialize.” It definitely lives up to its relaxed reputation. I’ve had to adapt to “African time,” which means not checking my watch and fretting about being a few minutes late. Power-walking skills cultivated on Locust are out of place among casual strollers. Terms like “just now” mean it could happen in 10 minutes, eventually, or perhaps not at all.
People are much more inclined to let things roll off their shoulders — a lesson Penn students could definitely benefit from — but that laid-back flair often translates into bureaucracy, which can be frustrating.
The registration process left me longing for when I sat in bed at 3 a.m. peacefully dropping courses into my Penn InTouch bucket. Here, we spent two days scampering to different departments so they can approve our courses, then another five hours camped in a sluggish line to get an advisor’s signature and then another queue to actually register for them.
Answering an academic question or joining the wireless network often might involve four different offices, all saying another one is in charge. Then again, UCT’s online resources put Blackboard to shame, providing a sophisticated portal for class materials as well as student groups.
There is also definitely a sense of limits — lines for computers in the labs, lines for treadmills in the gym, which then have a 15-minute time limit anyway. And we have to pay per megabyte for Internet usage. This should in theory force me to work more efficiently, but I nonetheless catch myself procrastinating online and wasting my precious credits.
The school day starts at 8 a.m., with 45-minute class periods. My earliest one, at 9 a.m., is especially painful because iced coffee hasn’t caught on here. Thus far I’ve only received two grades, so can’t speak much to the comparative academic rigor. It definitely feels like there are more consistent assignments. A course might have four essays, a midterm, final paper and final exam. And even though an “A” here is 70-100 percent, students rarely ever get them. Bs and Cs are the standard.
Perhaps most frustrating is the sense of disempowerment stemming from safety concerns. I don’t walk alone at night, try to not use my phone or iPod on the street and call private cabs for long distances.
On one hand, this is a city, and requires the common sense precautions we should take anywhere. On the other, this particular city is plagued by one of the highest rates of crime in the world, in a country with one of the highest rates of inequality in the world. Most of the time things feel completely calm. Then you’ll wake up to a story that friends got mugged outside a popular nightclub on a busy street, or open an e-mail to find that a student walking home with friends after a school party was fatally stabbed.
But these concerns are countered by South Africa’s inspiring vibrancy and vitality. For a nation that underwent — and continues to experience — so much suffering and inequality since ending apartheid and moving to democratic elections in 1994, people are remarkably spirited about the future. Political debate is refreshing because everyone has an opinion and is passionate about debate over the direction of their country.
I’d heard South Africa described as a mix of first- and third-world nations, with miles of shantytowns greeting tourists off the side of the highway and then posh malls and condos just a few minutes away. I always feel a bit queasy about how easily we international students are able to float from one world to the other. We move from afternoons volunteering in townships — segregated minority settlements formed under the apartheid regime — to evenings jaunting through the city’s lively nightlife scene.
The disparity of abandoned lots only stems from an Ivy-clad campus that reminds me a bit of Penn — students with textbooks and designer bags cheerily chatting on sidewalks that the homeless call home.
And there’s a similar tension about the contrast between communities, but it is tempered by student groups' strong emphasis on outreach. This fuels my sense that it is the younger generations leading the way toward reconciliation, recognizing the strain between coping with the pain of the recent past and the importance of progressing forward.
While there are undoubtedly trade-offs — being more vigilant about safety, dealing with slow response times, never seeing an “A” on an essay again — I’m in love with the city and certainly plan to return again, hopefully for even longer. I’m not-so-secretly hoping bureaucracy will pull through and indefinitely delay my plane ticket home. But if that doesn’t happen, I’m sure I’ll find my way back.
