Liliya YS Production

On the Top of The Table Mountain 

Today we’re sharing with you the view from the top of Table Mountain that the team hiked up to. So close to the edge of the world, all you see beyond is the boundless ocean and the infinite sky, the fresh air rushing through your head you can easily forget about the worries of the day, the over-exaggerated stresses of busy rush hour in the city, the constant chasing up of deadlines and the nettling feeling of discontent we’re bound to have in our everyday life. 

Looking at this photo, which Dong Hee shared with me, I was still filled up with thoughts from last weekend when my video production team and I were at a rather exquisite event in London, which was focused around putting more high-class events and conferences and creating the organisers’ and delegates’ experience. Everyone was dressed up so elegantly, well-spoken with a definite idea how to get a message across and also enjoying some excellently presented food. “Top notch”, one would say. To add to this story, which I realise has little to do with the story we are here to tell, to get to the venue in Central London in time, we had to wake up at 4 am, pack up our car with a wide range of fancy filming and lighting gear, and get on the road, recklessly driving along the narrow even roads of the beautiful peaceful countryside of Oxfordshire, occasionally in passing another speedy vehicle, their lights dazzling us. There were a couple of times my heart jumped and turned upside down in my chest on some of the sharp bends on the road, but we eventually got into Central London where the morning traffic was getting heavier and now we started stressing out around fighting up against the minutes to make it on time, nervously exchanging some slightly irritated lines at each other. Why am I taking a lyric moment to share all this? Because this experience I had and I have come across many times before actually tells me so much about the world I’ve been trying to understand by its completely opposite ways.

The story we’re here to share with you, is the story of a life tucked away in the skirts of Table Mountain where you can find a buzzing neighbourhood, buzzing in a way so different to what one might have been used to. Walking along the dirty alleyways between makeshift ship containers turned into homes, the air filled up with the aromas of the home cooking, the goods sold at the market and the pungent smell of fermenting grain, resounded by the cheerful voices of the dwellers in the neighbourhood. If you come from one of these buzzing elegant worlds that London could offer or even the quiet tidy, well-organised, idealistically peaceful worlds of the British countryside where the locals hold a high sense of true aristocracy, discussing how horse rugs are measured or the types of stirrups over blended scotch and refine syrah wine (which world, trust me, I love imagining I can one day belong to), then you might not quite understand Langa. It is possible that coming from this world, one can sense at a glance garnering fear and even pity for the locals dwelling in the shadow of Table Mountain. Thinking about those houses quickly put together in the 1920s for the shipyard workers to protect the bottom line. At the time the first inhabitants of the area were only looked at as labor and when building the houses the only thing that was considered was maximum occupancy and optimising sleeping space. So men had left the rural village life and come here at the docks in search of a paycheck separated from their wives and children. Later on, the family values took prevail and wives relocated to retain the normalcy of their family life. This is how population grew rapidly at the cost of sleeping space and resulted in what we still see these days - 4 families sharing a room and a kitchen. Coming from a place in middle-class England or most of Europe, or even more from some areas in the States, one can see this kind of life as misery, but of course there is a flipside - nowhere else but in a tiny little home like this, one can learn a lot about sharing space and building up a community. And this is something that is apparent in every aspect of daily life which can be experienced during a town stroll or in the rituals the locals have.