The Lost City

I went to Tafelsig yesterday. Never been there before. If you take a Golden Arrow bus there, you'd get on the one going to 'Lost City'. The suburb borders a nature reserve and has phenomenal views over False Bay and all the way across the Cape Flats to the sloping rises of Devil's Peak and the back of Table Mountain. It's a five minute walk away from the most tourist blue ocean you ever saw and a stretch of white sand bookended by either end of the crescent-shaped peninsula. It's kind of upside down in your mind, this natural beauty bubble that hides the Lost City. Tafelsig is the home of two major housing projects; one pre-94 with houses that have industrial-looking windows and a couple of steps up to the front door, and one post-94; identified by the lightning bolt design of the house where each half is the same width but sort of misaligned in the middle, giving it a stepped or jagged outline.

"I knew this Dutch family who moved to Cape Town," my community partner tells my students as we stand huddled like penguins against the wind on top of the viewing hill in Mitchell's Plain, "ya, they came to Mitchell's Plain and to Tafelsig accidentally." I'm confused for a moment and then the possibility of the mistake dawns on me. He explains to my students: "In Afrikaans, 'tafel' is 'table' and 'sig' is 'view'. They thought they were moving to Tableview, which is a totally different suburb."

"It's where those postcard pictures of the mountain are taken," I chip in. 

"Ya," he agrees. "So they moved here thinking it was somewhere else. But then they stayed. For the two years they lived in Cape Town they lived in Tafelsig even though it wasn't what they were expecting. The kid went to one of the worst primary schools in Mitchell's Plain, but didn't want to leave so they just stayed here."

Finding the Lost City accidentally. I suppose that's the only way it's found.