SHORT ESSAYS ON COMMUNITY, DIVERSITY, INCLUSION, AND THE PERFORMING ARTS
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Cape Town, 2000
When, on the evening of February 11, 1990, the newly liberated Nelson Mandela stepped onto the balcony of Cape Town’s City Hall to address a throng of fifty-thousand jubilant supporters, South Africa and Cape Town changed forever. Beyond the political transformations that lay ahead, Cape Town was about to enter a world where cities were being tossed into a global competition for investments, resources and advantage. It became a “world city” dominated by a burgeoning service sector. A neoliberal economic paradigm known as the “Washington Consensus” dictated that cities sink or swim on their own, unprotected by national social and economic policies. Little during the apartheid period prepared Capetonians for this rapacious world of late-twentieth-century and early-twentyfirst-century global urban capitalism. Today’s Cape Town — a sprawling metropolitan region containing nearly 4 million people — is much larger, more complex and diverse than in its previous incarnations. Administratively, it is larger, because the post-apartheid settlement merged two dozen racially segregated
municipalities together with nearly seventy decision-making authorities to form a single unit. Eventually, in December 2000, the Cape Town “Unicity” came into being, unifying the metropolitan region for the first time. As elsewhere around the world, municipal services were increasingly privatized, leading to marked inequality in their distribution. Simultaneously, others came to see the possibility of a future that might be more progressive than the city’s past. From this perspective, the seeds of a more hopeful future can be found in Cape Town’s embrace of diversity—albeit an uneasy one. Such trends are evident in various efforts to reinvigorate the local jazz scene. Many prominent South African musicians in exile required time to overcome skepticism about the changes taking place at home. Such decisions about whether and when to return were personal. A number of prominent jazz musicians began returning to South Africa in the months immediately surrounding Mandela’s release. Hugh Masekela, in contrast, took some time before he was willing to commit to the new South Africa. Others, including the drummer Louis Moholo, who
