Haunting Streets or Street Hond

Kloof Street, Julia Sullivan, watercolour on paper, 2016

Take a walk up Long street, towards the mountain, over Orange st and onto Kloof, passing the Wellness centre, Checkers and Kloof Street Antiques, and you’ll see an impossible world. Impossible if not for the fact it exists. Cape Town, particularly the Long/Kloof street seems to have rejected the dichotomy of small town and bustling city.  Sidestepping convention and common decency, it has decided to become both.

Along Long street, you are likely pass exemplars of the people of Cape Town in one form or another; workers, business peopl, cashiers, retail assistants, students, bouncers, bar tenders, pickpockets and robbers – they are all there. There is even Church and ‘Oldest Mosque in Cape Town’, so you may even spy some holy men and women, despite their seeming strangeness among the various dens of ill repute. If you are paying attention, you will see lush coffee shops, another vintage shop that has popped up out of nowhere, a tattoo parlour, and that vintage book shop next to Marvel that you can’t quite believe is still in business.

During the daylight hours, Long Street is almost respectable, consisting mostly of clothes shops interrupted only occasionally by a spaza or a lunchtime restaurant. At night, however, the mild-mannered façade is torn away and the beast of Long Street is revealed. Neon lights and distant rhythmic thumps fill the night. Street walkers and party-goers appear on the street seemingly out of nowhere, although the truth is that they were there all along, visible only in the dark. Long street becomes a seething, vibrating mess of a party, contracting and expanding to the beats of the clubs flanking the street. From Waiting Room to Joburg and from Neighbourhood to Dubliner, there is a world of festivities waiting for anyone willing to look.

At the head of Long Street, the Overbeek apartment building stands guard, sporadically changing its face, and thus, the entire mood of Long. At present, it houses a large South African flag, replacing the aggressive and ultimately misguided, Zuma Must Fall predecessor. The new poster is generally agreed to be a better fit than its divisive ancestor. The flag is one of the few things in the country not hugely contested. Even if we have failed in fully achieving all the goals that, as a young optimistic nation, we set ourselves, we can still see our flag and say, ‘Yes, it is beautiful isn’t it? And designed by a child I heard. A symbol of unification and all that we will one-day be.’

As you leave Long Street, and make your way over to Kloof, you may start to see a shift in aesthetic and mood occur. The electricity of Long is replaced with something slightly more… homely. In many ways, Kloof is a self-contained little village. It has a butcher, a baker and, if you don’t mind ‘up-cycled antiques’, a candle-stick maker. If you are clever, you could live a full life without ever having to leave the street.

At ten to eleven in the morning, Yours Truly is a house of production. I see an up-and-coming model –a fairly permanent fixture at the shop – having a meeting with scrappily-dressed young professionals. She seems to be perpetually in the middle of rolling a cigarette. Across from them, a young man in a flat cap and khaki shorts reads a statistics manual and a man in a suit talks to a hobo-hemian model.

The street itself is busy. The rumble, grumble, revving and screeching of the street creates an acoustic backdrop – contrasted by the staccato hiss of the cappuccino machine. When listened to with purpose, the sound of the street, of life around you, can be more melodic than the deep house leaking from the speakers of the coffee shop – but then the school across the road has break-time and the acoustic calm is nuked by the shrieks of delight and fear from the children. While this is not altogether unpleasant, it is anything but restful.

At the top of Kloof, a tiny blonde waitress effortlessly lifts three enormous umbrellas and carry them around the corner. The physics of it don’t quite add up, but thats Cape Town. She makes me think of reality versus truth, and about never judging a book by its cover – an idiom I find applies to almost everything except books – but mostly, she gives me a nostalgia for now. Somehow I look back on the present from the future, remembering a time of honest work and small-time values, that seem somewhat impossible to find in the present. These are qualities one can only ever find in the rosy-glow rearview mirror of one’s past.

In her, now seminal, essay Street Haunting: A London Adventure, Virginia Woolf argues that stepping into the street and exploring the city around you is a form of liberation, as it releases you from your identity. In the city, no one knows you are you can adopt any persona wished. Woolf’s argument may have held up in London, but live around city bowl long enough and every step down the road reinforced who you are, not detracts from. With every encounter, you embed yourself deeper into the locale of of the street, the essence of it. But, where Woolf’s home was a solidification identity, and the street a release from constraint, your experience is one of identity being confirmed and of a merging into the greater scope of those around you.

Here on Kloof, the world is still relaxed enough to feel busy, still quiet enough to feel loud and still small enough to feel big.

By Rafael Powell

Rafael Powell is a freelance writer and editor with experience in the art industry. He works and lives in Cape Town, South Africa. He is the creator and editor of AmpersandOnline