Boogying amidst the Mist
Homes #6 Part 2: More Muizenberg Echoes
I'm currently travelling, but you can hear a podcast version of Unwrapping the Present on your podcast app, or via the Ravings from the Lucid Fringe website. Meanwhile here's more reflections on my home, which I look forward to returning to soon!
These days in Muizenberg, there are plenty of eclectic eating out options, and even a few chains, which we used to have precisely none of. When I first moved here, Gaylord’s was our favourite eating out spot: good Durban-style curry on the main road, one of the few staples in Muizenberg during the quiet years. When the owner passed away, we had to wait awhile before the next Indian restaurant arrived, Bombay Chilli, aiming at a more authentically subcontinental approach with plenty of the requisite antique wood and illustrations from epics. That was still kind of it, apart from Kosie’s Place near Youth With A Mission, a café “where Jesus is Lord”, and then the curiously named ‘Lagerchinos’ which continues to thrive, apparently, against all marketing gurus’ odds. But in 2001 the Empire Café appeared: in retrospect it was one sign of things to come. A spin-off from the Olympia in Kalk Bay, (whose extraordinary brand is recognized by all copycat guide books around the world); at last we had decent cappuccinos and croissants available for a slightly upmarket price. Some metres away there was the Olive Station, holding strong while a restaurant (and salsa dance hall) upstairs in the Victorian railway station came and went. The Olive Station had Lebanese mezze offerings and an open courtyard, and was buzzing on a weekday evening when the first organic box scheme started in the hood (the entrepreneur behind that would eventually open his own grocery, Organic Zone, still operating in Lakeside up the road).
And near the Empire Cafe there was Carla’s of course: a Muizenberg staple offering giant prawns from Mozambique, Portuguese-style. York Street began to revive, with a second-hand bookshop that we often took our small children to. Nearby, the Empire building itself was still a massive and derelict art deco affair on the front, a former cinema which was on the market for the princely sum of R800 000, which these days would buy you a 1-bedroom flat round here, but only on the wrong side of the M5. Inevitably somebody made a fortune on what has since become pretty exclusive waterfront apartments; currently there’s another block on the Main Road that has finally been developed, the protracted process of tracking down slumlord owners moving forward over the years. But amidst this unstoppable gentrifying, Palmer Road has remained more of a local phenomenon. The heart of the village, though cut off from the beach by the busy and curiously named Atlantic Road. (Somebody with a bee in their bonnet, perhaps? Officially the Atlantic and Indian oceans only meet some hours further east at Cape Agulhas, Africa’s southern tip, giving the lie to Cape Town names like the Two Oceans Aquarium and Marathon. But our False Bay water is usually much warmer than the ‘Atlantic’ side of town, because ocean currents don’t necessarily respect map points!)
On the far side of the vlei, there’s another street of period houses looking to be admired: a friend lived in an extraordinary art deco mansion with too much crystal and other original fittings; another building there has a great round mezzanine and stage, built by a 1930s opera singer for home concerts and recently revived. We heard the legendary Zulu guitarist Madala Kunene there, amidst a packed crowd. More recent constructions are the waterslides and the putt-putt course, and the open air swimming pool where our kids could have parties and practice their swimming out of the waves. And as the community found its spirit again in the 2000s and 2010s, gardens popped up on street corners (and even a proper coastal fynbos nursery, one of many vlei-side initiatives over the years). The salt of the southeaster means that any steel in the village behaves like it’s at sea (and car bonnets wither at pace), and that's not great for vegetation either, so it’s not easy to garden here, but it is possible. The Norfolk pines on certain corners are generally not as enormous as in other less windblown and salty parts of the city; but they’re there, still reminding us of this hidden spot, halfway between the two old Dutch ports, in Table Bay and down at Simonstad.
It was back in Palmer Road though that Muizenbergers got our first organic grocer in the 2000s, Organics Alive, up the road from the dance studio, and with a lekker little café attached. Suddenly Palmer was not just a home for a grungy pub, the Village Inn, but a hub with a recording studio and live gigs popping up and arty little shops; Artapart was a curious venue where I first offered up my poetry to an audience, which later became an oddball indoor plant shop. In the area there were suddenly Sufis, including an Australian immigrant called Hassan who set up a French bakery; still running today though no longer with a French name. One of said Sufis turned out to have gone to my high school in Norwich, England, as we discovered over coffee at Organics Alive, where unbeknownst to me (when I was a teenager) there was actually quite a large, and largely pale-skinned, Sufi community, moving between Scotland, southern Spain, and now Cape Town. Spirit moving in many ways again; and it kept on moving. Somebody once spoke to me about the energy of Muizenberg being very watery, which was pretty obvious; in practice that meant a desire to connect, to create, to flow, but little to ground it all. Back to the ocean we went. But community initiatives were bubbling in the 2000s.
The one problem, perhaps, being that diamond-shaped atrocity, the Pavilion, supposedly a ship-shaped community-focused building with a terrible acoustic that is kind of used when it has to be (like for voting!); or used for weddings and functions by those who pull in to the area once in a blue moon, when the beach remembers that it is part of greater Cape Town. Hopefully not too many drunk student drivers like in my day but who knows. (Just last year a swimmer I was with found a car key in the water belonging to early morning drunk revelers... who were much relieved, but definitely needing to wait on the shore and sober up). National events have also intruded from time to time into our artistic reverie. The South African navy decided a few years ago to launch grand demonstrations of military tech and scare the local pets for a couple of nights; rather more grandiose than the annual fireworks exploded on the beach on festive occasions, which to be honest are a lot more subtle than in certain countries I could mention (Germany at new year, please stand up). Still, the fact that all roads lead to Muizenberg (a truth that you’ll quickly realize once you look at road signs in Cape Town or even the Winelands) does give us a higher prominence than we might like sometimes (or deserve, perhaps), but also some advantages when my kids were small. It was great to be able to walk to the international kite festival in the vlei park; stopping on the foot bridge to look at all the visiting waterbirds. Though I think the organizers have subsequently found an even windier venue on the west coast side of things.
But where would local community initiatives be driven from? The Lookout, as it’s currently called, has long been a space for more intimate community events than the vast and drafty pavilion, on the edge of the vlei and near a former bowling green. It was here that I attended meetings of dramatic societies which would later take the stage at the Masque, the amateur dramatic hub for the whole city. I also first took part in workshops for Jungle Theatre at the Lookout, Vincent Meyburgh’s group producing issue-based children’s theatre, who I acted with for a while. But The Lookout is a little out of the heart of things in terms of drawing ‘community’ together. We rehearsed at Vincent’s home too, and also in another boomy, empty ‘community centre’, the Zandvlei one on the Main Road. The dangers of using council buildings in such a big city were soon brought home forcefully: Cape Town City Council decided it wanted the building for a traffic police base, without prior warning. Muizenbergers wanted something more ground-up than having our ‘community centres’ imposed on us. A first attempt at a community centre in the heart of the village was on Beach Road, but it wasn’t the most inviting space. The Alive Creative Café was an early co-working zone but also much more than that; moving on from, and definitely more promising for audience gathering than the occasional events at The Lookout; close to Bridget (Muizenberg’s infamous lorry-munching railway bridge), with a stage, a yoga space, a whole series of community gathering initiatives. It was a cosy space where I performed and ran workshops a decade ago. But it fizzled, like other Muizenberg spaces, when the owners upped the rent drastically.
Meanwhile another wonderful event, driven by Fergus Turner originally, was the Muizenberg Festival (following on from earlier initiatives driven by the likes of Claire Homewood and Kat Whaling). Acknowledging what we all knew – that this was a village for Artists of all kinds – and based at a newly created Hub in Palmer Road, it ran for a number of years before the great covid economic contraction, launching with a great gig from the marvellous Steve Newman as I recall, and including a late-night boogie with a local band doing reggae covers of Wham songs, which was a wild artistic moment all by itself. Music continues to pop up in Muizenberg in unlikely places, though quite often in York Road, where I stumbled a couple of years ago upon a top-notch international jazz quartet performing in yet another shortlived venue I’d never heard of. No doubt the instagram afficionados might have heard of it before me. For a while there was live music too at the Bluebird Market, part of a new wave of ‘community markets’ in the 2010s, but today still going very strong on Thursdays and Fridays (as well as offering thrift clothing sales on first Wednesdays!). The Bluebird is based in the old hangar, from the days when the air mail service ran from central Cape Town to then-posh Muizies, a hundred years ago. For many visitors, entering it is the surprising moment when you see that there’s rather more than you were expecting going on in this little suburban village, even if it’s mostly craft and books and food, but it’s also human. It’s still a place where you see people talking a lot more than staring at phones, and that has to be a good thing.
Maybe that’s also why so many protests have been launched here in recent years, here at the liminal zone between land and sea. Puppetry and sculpture put to good use, drumming and chants to lead calls for the ocean or for the people who live beside it. There’s a social conscience here that’s still pretty quick to ignite, even if there are newcomers here who know little of that – yet. I think some of it is held in the kind of houses that hold memories, that keep history alive, in many of the people I know and love here. We stand here with awareness of what came before so that we may create what comes next.
The Muizenberg Festival did its best to be truly diverse, to include the poorer communities from across the M5, in Capricorn and Vrygrond and even up the road in violence-plagued Lavender Hill. In terms of drama and dance, my daughters got to mix much more with those parts of the ‘greater’ Muizenberg community thanks to the festival, and the drive, particularly, of Julia Nowicki from Alive dance studio. Which brings me I guess to the present state of the ‘community’, buzzing more monthly than annually now, with first Thursdays, open studios and street performances. Palmer Road has erupted into day-time festivals for years, including one or two fabulous ones where everything was free, led by some of the anarchists that ran a vegan café there for a while. Capitalism has re-intruded these days, but still the vibe is strong, street food and street music and a little taste of something more. You can tell this too because of what else was going on in 2020. While other communities were closing down, Muizenberg pulled together, launched a community garden which runs workshops and still offers discounted meals for the poor, and eventually the Muiz Kitchen too as a new fundraiser and gathering venue (though that seems to be struggling as I write with the usual fight against excessively capitalist landlords). There are plenty of digital nomads popping up in the many, many coffee spots, and I guess, thinking back to the days of Breakers, there have always been open-minded foreigners passing through here during the decades it’s been my home; it’s definitely part of the creative spark, and hasn’t destroyed the South African quintessence of the place. Or the ‘do it anyway’ vibe of this place. Although there are a number of Waldorf schools not too far away, for example, the original Muizenberg Waldorf kindergarten, Rosy Cave, started by a fellow graduate of ours in the early 2000s, has evolved over the years into the Starseed Community School, operating at times with different classes in different houses across the village, though it currently has a centre of its own it seems.
In 2020, when we were allowed not just out for three hours a day of ‘exercise’ but to actually gather with each other again, The Commons opened. Venues in the rest of the country were closing down: instead a multi-ethnic vinyl-vegan restaurant-gathering-workshop-nightclub-space on the beachfront became the new space to meet and spark, and is at the time of writing, among other things, one of the top jazz venues in the country. Surfers had angrily protested the bizarre ban on their entering the water, just a month or two earlier. But now Muizenberg found its dancing feet again, faster than other places. I think the spirits on the mountain had heard us; the spirits in the waves; the pulse on the sand.
To love Muizenberg in its totality, you have to also acknowledge the fact that we live on the edge of great material inequality, that we don’t have the resources of shiny folks in the CBD or Camps Bay. But it feels real, and that’s what brings creators here, again and again. The Egyptian geese honk for us too, as do the hadedas and the sunbirds. When I open the box of stories that has been my time in this hood, I feel overwhelmed with the journey that I’ve been taken on just by being here. It’s the kind of elation felt by the kids tobogganing down the impromptu mudslides in the park, free of charge, after the great storm of 2023. The best things in Muizenberg are, of course, free, and the best of all is the love between the people. Jamming at a new year street party a couple of years ago, cheering our kids on at their performances, or years ago dressing up with all the adults as we sauntered round on Halloween/Samhain nights to largely sugar-free treat locations. I’m sure other communities have their own stories to tell, but this is mine, from this place, that’s still very much a home for me, and for which I will forever be grateful, even as I keep planting my feet in other places.