Cape Town

• 1. Introduction

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  Cape Town greets its visitors with one of the most dramatic natural settings of any city on earth. Table Mountain, with near-vertical cliffs and a flat-topped summit rising more than 1,000 metres above the ocean, frames a city that has been continuously inhabited, traded through, fought over, and rebuilt for more than five centuries. Beneath that summit, a thin strip of cloud known colloquially as the "tablecloth" drifts across the rock on certain mornings, and far below, ships navigate Table Bay on routes that changed the world.

  What makes Cape Town worth examining closely is the distance between its surface beauty and its buried contradictions. It is South Africa's legislative capital and oldest city, the seat of parliament, and also a place where 60% of the population lives in townships and informal settlements far from the gleaming waterfront. It has been named the best city in the world for travellers multiple times over, and in the same breath it recorded the highest number of murders of any city in the world between 2022 and 2023.

  How did a way-station built by a trading company in 1652 become the complex metropolis it is today? What is the relationship between the Cape Floristic Region, the most biodiverse urban environment on the planet, and the city that surrounds it? And what does the legacy of apartheid's spatial engineering still mean for the people living on the Cape Flats? Those are the questions this documentary will try to answer.

• 2. Deep Time and First Arrivals

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  The earliest known evidence of human occupation near Cape Town was found at Peers Cave in Fish Hoek, discovered in the late 1920s. Researchers D.D. Stynder and colleagues radiocarbon-dated one specimen, designated SAM-AP 4692, to the mid-Holocene, placing it somewhere between 5136 and 5448 BCE.

  The first European to reach the Cape arrived long after those ancient inhabitants had established themselves. In 1488, the Portuguese navigator Bartolomeu Dias came ashore and named the place "Cape of Storms" - Cabo das Tormentas - an honest assessment of its treacherous weather. King John II of Portugal later changed the name to "Cape of Good Hope", reflecting the enormous optimism that came with the opening of a sea route to the Indian subcontinent and East Indies.

  Nine years after Dias, in 1497, Vasco da Gama recorded a sighting of the Cape of Good Hope on his own voyage east. By the 16th century, French, Danish, Dutch, English, and Portuguese ships were regularly stopping in Table Bay, trading tobacco, copper, and iron with the Khoikhoi clans in exchange for fresh meat and travel provisions.

  One violent episode marked the limits of European confidence in the region. At the Battle of Salt River in 1510, Portuguese admiral Francisco de Almeida was killed along with sixty-four of his men. They were defeated by the Goringhaiqua, one of the Khoikhoi clans, whose fighters used cattle trained specifically to respond to whistles and shouts as a weapon. The sea route to Asia was commercially irresistible, but the Cape was not yet Europe's to take.

• 3. A Company Town

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  In 1652, Jan van Riebeeck arrived at the Cape with a mandate from the VOC - the Dutch United East India Company - to build a supply station for ships travelling to the East Indies. His crew established the Fort de Goede Hoop, later replaced by the Castle of Good Hope, and planted the first crops in what would become South Africa's oldest permanent European settlement.

  Growth was slow and labour was scarce. To solve the shortage, colonial authorities imported enslaved people from Indonesia and Madagascar. The descendants of those people are among the ancestors of modern Cape Coloured and Cape Malay communities - communities whose culture, cuisine, and faith still shape the character of Cape Town today. The Auwal Mosque, South Africa's first mosque, stands as a direct trace of that history.

  Van Riebeeck and the VOC governors who followed him also transformed the landscape. They introduced grapes, cereals, groundnuts, potatoes, apples, and citrus - crops that took permanent hold in the region's soils and economies. Later, British authorities added Australian plant species during the 1850s and 1860s, including rooikrans, which was planted to stabilise the sand of the Cape Flats to allow for a road connecting the peninsula with the rest of the continent.

  By the time the Dutch Republic was absorbed by Napoleonic France's Batavian Republic, the Cape Colony had become strategically valuable enough for Britain to act. British forces took Cape Town in 1795, returned it by treaty in 1803, then re-occupied it in 1806 following the Battle of Blaauwberg. The Anglo-Dutch Treaty of 1814 made the transfer permanent.

• 4. Growth, Diamonds, and Electrification

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  Under British rule, Cape Town developed rapidly and uneasily. Slavery was abolished in 1833, freeing more than 5,500 enslaved people in the city - at that moment almost a third of the entire population. The Convict Crisis of 1849, which brought substantial civil unrest, pushed demands for self-governance. The Cape attained its own parliament in 1854 and a locally accountable prime minister in 1872. Suffrage in the colony was established under the non-racial Cape Qualified Franchise, an arrangement that would later be systematically dismantled.

  The discovery of diamonds in Griqualand West in 1867, followed by the Witwatersrand Gold Rush of 1886, sent a flood of immigration across South Africa. Cape Town grew at a pace that its earlier settlement had never seen: from a population of 67,000 in 1891 to 171,000 by 1901 - more than doubling in a single decade.

  Infrastructure followed. The first railway line was built by the Cape Government Railways in 1859 and expanded rapidly through the 1870s. In 1895, the city's first public power station, the Graaff Electric Lighting Works, opened. Cape Town was modernising, but its position in South Africa's political economy was already shifting. As the 19th century closed, economic and political dominance was moving inland toward Johannesburg and Pretoria.

  The Second Boer War of 1899-1902, fought between Britain and the Boer republics of the interior, ended with British victory and the formation of the Union of South Africa in 1910. Cape Town became the legislative capital of that Union, and later of the Republic of South Africa. The city that had once been the undisputed centre of power in southern Africa had become one capital among several.

• 5. Apartheid and Its Spatial Wounds

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  Before the middle of the twentieth century, Cape Town was among the most racially integrated cities in South Africa. That changed decisively after the 1948 national elections, when the National Party won on a platform of apartheid under the slogan "swart gevaar" - Afrikaans for "black danger."

  The Group Areas Act of 1950 classified and segregated urban areas by race. Formerly mixed-race suburbs were purged or demolished. The most infamous case was District Six. After it was declared a whites-only area in 1965, all housing was demolished and more than 60,000 residents were forcibly removed. Many were relocated to the Cape Flats, the low-lying sandy plain extending to the east of the peninsula. Earlier removals had already sent Black South Africans to Langa, Cape Town's first and oldest township, under the 1923 Native Urban Areas Act.

  The Cape was also designated a "Coloured labour preference area," excluding Black Africans from the city's formal economy. That policy was opposed by trade unions, civil society, and opposition parties. It is notable that no Coloured political group advocated for it; the apartheid government imposed it unilaterally.

  Resistance emerged throughout the city. During the student-led Soweto Uprising of June 1976, school students from Langa, Gugulethu, and Nyanga in Cape Town organised their own marches and gatherings against Bantu Education. Police met them with force and several school buildings were burnt down.

  Ten kilometres from the City Bowl in Table Bay, Robben Island held the apartheid state's most prominent political prisoners. Nelson Mandela served 18 of his 27 years of imprisonment there, alongside two future presidents, Kgalema Motlanthe and Jacob Zuma. On the 11th of February 1990, hours after his release, Mandela delivered his first public speech since his imprisonment from the balcony of Cape Town City Hall. The first democratic election followed on the 27th of April 1994. UNESCO declared Robben Island a World Heritage Site in 1999.

• 6. The City After Apartheid

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  Since 1994, Cape Town has been both a story of genuine recovery and a testament to how slowly spatial injustice repairs itself. The Democratic Alliance took power in the city in 2006 and has been credited with improving bureaucratic efficiency, public safety, and economic development. In 2025, Cape Town was, for the third consecutive year, the only metropolitan municipality in South Africa to receive a clean audit outcome from Auditor-General Tsakani Maluleke.

  The economy has diversified. The city's tech sector was growing at an annual rate of 8.5% as of the mid-2020s, and Cape Town has the highest number of successful information technology companies in Africa. Robertson and Caine, one of the world's largest producers of luxury catamarans, is headquartered here, as is media giant Naspers. In 2024, more than 2.4 million tourists visited, spending around R25 billion and supporting more than 106,000 jobs.

  But the legacy of apartheid's spatial planning has not dissolved. Around 60% of the city's population lives in townships and informal settlements far from the city centre. The unemployment rate stood at 23% as of 2024, though nearly 10 percentage points below the national average. Between 2022 and 2023, Cape Town recorded 2,998 murders - the highest single-year figure for any city in the world. That figure is heavily shaped by gang violence concentrated in specific Cape Flats suburbs.

  The city also faced a severe water shortage between 2015 and 2018. According to Oxfam, Cape Town reduced its water use from 1.2 billion litres per day in February 2015 to 516 million litres per day by 2018. A 2021 turf war between rival minibus taxi firms led to 83 deaths; a 2023 taxi strike resulted in 5 more. The Cape Town that appears on global "best city" lists is real. So is the Cape Town that these numbers describe.

• 7. A Living Natural System

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  Table Mountain alone contains an estimated 2,200 plant species - more than exist in the entire United Kingdom, which has roughly 1,200. Many of those species, including a great many types of proteas, are endemic to the mountain and found nowhere else on earth. Cape Town sits within the Cape Floristic Region, one of Conservation International's biodiversity hotspots, and its vegetation encompasses 19 different types, several of which are unique to the city.

  The scale of that uniqueness carries a cost. Cape Town now has more than 300 threatened plant species, and 13 have already become extinct. A worldwide survey estimated that the extinction rate of endemic plants within the city's boundaries runs at roughly three species per year since 1900, partly because the habitats are so small and so localised. Tiny remnant populations of critically endangered plants sometimes survive only on roadsides and sports fields.

  In 2019, Cape Town entered the iNaturalist City Nature Challenge for the first time and placed first in two of three categories: Most Observations and Most Species. The timing was striking: the competition takes place over a four-day weekend considered among the worst periods of the year for local observations.

  In 2025, the city enacted the Cape Town Biodiversity Spatial Plan, a framework that categorises land into Protected Areas, Critical Biodiversity Areas, Ecological Support Areas, and Other Natural Areas. As of that plan's adoption, 22.72% of Cape Town's municipal land, totaling 55,697 hectares, was under conservation. The Kirstenbosch National Botanical Garden, within the city boundaries, contains five of South Africa's six biomes. The management of that living system alongside a rapidly expanding urban population is among the most consequential decisions Cape Town's planners face.

• 8. Climate and Future Risk

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  Cape Town's Mediterranean climate brings mild, moderately wet winters from June to September and dry, hot summers from December to March. The city receives around 3,100 hours of sunshine per year. A local wind known as the Cape Doctor, blowing from the south-east in spring and summer, clears air pollution from the city. It is driven by a persistent high-pressure system over the South Atlantic, known as the South Atlantic High.

  The two sides of the peninsula experience dramatically different ocean temperatures. The Atlantic Seaboard averages annual sea surface temperatures between 10 and 15 degrees Celsius, kept cold by upwellings that feed into the Benguela Current. False Bay, on the eastern side, averages between 16 and 22 degrees Celsius and can occasionally reach 22 degrees at the surface in summer. The difference can be as large as 10 degrees between the two coasts on the same summer day.

  A 2019 paper in PLOS One estimated that under a moderate climate-change scenario, the climate of Cape Town in 2050 would most closely resemble the current climate of Perth in Australia, with the warmest month rising by 2.3 degrees Celsius. The 2022 IPCC Sixth Assessment Report identified Cape Town as one of 12 major African cities most severely threatened by future sea-level rise. Those 12 cities together could sustain cumulative damages of US$65 billion under a moderate emissions scenario and US$86.5 billion under a high-emissions scenario by 2050. Under the most severe projections, accounting for marine ice-sheet instability and low-probability high-damage events, aggregate risks could reach US$397 billion. Since sea-level rise continues for roughly 10,000 years under any emissions scenario, the city's response to that threat over the coming decades will shape Cape Town long after any of its current residents are gone.