Cape Town: A divided city

Cape Town is a city of huge contrasts

By Jane Standley, the BBC's Africa Correspondent

The highway stretches out into the distance - smooth and rippling with heat haze. On the horizon, shimmering, green-grey craggy mountains are pasted like a Hollywood set onto a faultless turquoise sky.

Table Mountain is a popular tourist destination

This is the astounding view from Cape Town's shiny, modern International Airport. Waiting are the beaches, the vibrant café society of fine food and wines, and of course that famous flat mountain with its tablecloth of soft mist.

Many visitors, the lucky ones, only see this side of the city. The majority arrive by air - Cape Town perches on the very tip of Africa - so it is a long way from most other places on the standard itinerary. Then they drive down this beautiful route.

Cape Town's pariahs

But, if you look carefully on either side of the highway, you can still see what remains of the walls built by the apartheid authorities. These walls were constructed to keep the people it didn't want out of the way, hidden from view.

You can just glimpse the squat concrete box houses the government built for them, and in parts, the tin shack squatter camps of the migrants who have come more recently in search of work on the cape of good hope.

The Chinese Triads are here, the Russian and Italian Mafias, and the Colombian and Nigerian drug smuggling cartels

It is from behind these walls that some of the dispossessed, the bitter and the angry have been emerging of late - stoning cars from the footbridges over the highway, waiting for motorists who are forced to stop, break down, or pull over to look at a map.

Then the guns and the knives have come out, and the robbery - and in some cases the killings - have taken place.

Hidden violence

You have probably not heard of this. The government does not want you to - there has been a controversial "keep quiet" campaign.

Cape Town gets nearly 60% of South Africa's tourist trade from outside Africa - more than 800,000 people every year. It would not do to scare them away.

For the same reason, a few months ago, the government banned the release of any crime statistics, from anywhere in the country.

It is only fair to add that the vast majority of visitors never have any problems - mainly because they never encounter the other side of life.

Many shanty towns are only a short distance from tourist attractions

South African President Thabo Mbeki says there are two nations in this country - one rich and one poor. And in Cape Town, it is even more extreme - it 's a tale of two cities, nothing less, edge to edge.

As a journalist, I have to see the other side - in fact I have spent more time in Cape Town's poor black townships, in its gang-ridden estates on the desolate Cape Flats.

And I must say, when I have overseas visitors - who of course come to Cape Town as a must - it drives me mad that they insist on mentioning how lucky I am to be working there all the time. They see only one face of this city.

Rape

They have never met Sharon Jacobs - a pregnant schoolgirl in one of the most gang-infested and violent parts of the Cape Flats.

Her school in Mannenburg is now encircled by an electric fence. But it wasn't when a gang came into the classroom and raped her.

The police have failed to get the case heard yet - but the conviction rate anyway is less than 10%. This is a city where there are so many sexual attacks that it is called the rape capital of the world by many researchers.

My visitors have also never met Olivia Milner. She had her leg blown off in a bomb attack on her first night of a school holiday waitressing job.

There is still a large racial divide in Cape Town

No one has been arrested. Muslim radicals are blamed by some people, others blame a protection racket - from one of the dozens of organised crime syndicates which have moved into Cape Town to exploit its poverty and its wealth.

The Chinese Triads are here, as well as the Russian and Italian Mafias, and the Colombian and Nigerian drug smuggling cartels.

Gang attacks

My tourist friends have also not felt terrified as I have, trying to work in the most violent areas - where only last week a gang member in his twenties was killed outside the front door of a police station.

Pitifully, I have always tried to con myself that I would be able to make it there - and across the steps - if things went horribly wrong while interviewing the gangs for a story.

And it has come close. Once, when drugged and drunken gang members turned on each other in a spat, one called Haroun took pity on me - and helped me get away.

He's now "reforming", he says. But he still bears the tattooed flag of the infamous Americans gang on his arm and their jewelled red, white and blue studs fixed into his teeth.

Pagad, a Muslim vigilante group, have been blamed for recent bomb attacks

No, none of my visitors have seen this part of the fair Cape. And somehow, however much you try to describe it, the resonance of the violence, the fear, the deprivation, the poverty, never quite comes over.

Maybe it is just too hard to believe when you do not have to see it for yourself, and you do not have to deal with it right next to you.

Then it is easier to brush away the guilt at being able to enjoy the other side of Cape Town - the beautiful one. But this - like the ugly half - is the product of apartheid too.