Depending on which side you view it from, Cape Town can either be the most beautiful and friendly place, or the opposite of beauty and friendliness.

It can be the most hospitable place, filled with caring and loving people. It can be a place that most wouldn’t wish to die without seeing, filled with beautiful mountainous areas and the most beautiful beaches and the beautifully built houses. It’s a place filled with beautiful tourist attractions that my friends from all over the country would come here especially for. They are the ones that have the city filled with millions of warm bodies gracing its presence during the holidays. This is the Cape Town I came to know as “White Cape Town.”

“White Cape Town” is the one that accepted me, to a certain extent, as one of its own, although I’m black. It is the one that accepted me only if I rid myself of my blackness; only if I were to learn to become another body that makes up distinguished “White Cape Town”. It was the one that accepted me only if I were to talk like it, use its language, use its accent. It was the one that accepted me only if I were to accept its lifestyle, understand its way of life, accept its religion.

This “White Cape Town” is the one I knew for a better part of my life, the one I knew as the only Cape Town there was – until recently.

Cape Town can also be the most disgusting place for human habitation, a place that no human being should live in, a ragged and ransacked environment. Dirty, filthy, and definitely not a good sight to behold. It can be a place filled with hopelessness, with no prospects of a better life, no hope to hope for. It can be a place with poverty written all over it. This is the Cape Town I came to know as “Black Cape Town”, the Cape Town I never knew existed, the one that the White Cape Town made sure I never get to experience.

I grew up in the suburbs of Lilly View. This is the only place I knew as my home. Despite my parents telling me that originally we hail from rural Eastern Cape, I only know Lilly View as my home. It is the place that has my most memorable experiences: my birthday parties, the bashes my friends and I held when my parents were away…

I live with my mom, dad and my brother, who are always out with either business or work in the case of my brother. You see, unlike my parents, who own a chain of restaurants in Cape Town, my brother is a lawyer.

When they are all away, I normally invite my friends over to play games and sometimes we go to the mall and check girls out. We called ourselves the “four blood bothers”. Those were the fun times – until I met the other side of Cape Town.

Before I met the other side of Cape Town, I never questioned why I was the only black person in my group. I never questioned why I was the only black guy in my class. And I never questioned why I’d be one of the only few blacks in restaurants we went to.

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Tell us: What do you think of Sipho’s struggle?