IRISHTIMES.com: IRISHTIMES.com

ASK ANY tourist how they rate Cape Town compared with other international urban destinations, and most will tell you it’s one of the most attractive cities in the world.

From the majestic Table Mountain that rises up from the heart of the city to the two oceans that collide around the Cape of Good Hope, from its picturesque winelands to the golden sandy beaches, the reasons Cape Town is such a draw are obvious.

Only last May the Western Cape Province and its capital city took top honours in the World Travel Awards Africa 2009. As ringing endorsements go, that’s not to be sniffed at.

However, all is not as rosy as it seems at the southern tip of the continent, especially when it comes to race relations, according to a new employment equity survey reported in the Cape Times newspaper.

Released by the Employment Equity Programme last month, the study indicates that the only South Africans who really like the “Mother City” are whites and coloureds – the two groups which historically have dominated the area.

Even with the demise of apartheid, the majority of black South Africans, it suggests, would prefer to live and work somewhere else.

The study, which examined 13 provincial businesses that together employ around 60,000 people in management positions, suggested workplace racial discrimination was more prevalent in Cape Town than in any other urban centre in the country.

The city is seen as being hostile to black people to the point that whites are promoted at rates that indicate “positive discrimination” in their favour.

Such observations make you wonder whether the apartheid system that was driven from the halls of political power 15 years ago really has been consigned to the scrapheap. Or has it just been downsized and harnessed by the individual, who now applies it within his or her own sphere of influence?

Indeed, the researchers suggest that workplace discrimination is so deeply rooted within the local psyche that businesses – the companies surveyed were in the retail, financial services and petrochemicals sectors – fail to see how they are harming themselves.

“Bluntly put,” wrote the researchers, “It is difficult to see how the participating companies . . . can survive as national businesses if they continue to increase their reliance on white people, who themselves constitute less than 10 per cent of the South African population.”

One of those interviewed for the survey, a black professional, expressed his frustration thus: “It’s like I have moved 10 or 20 years back. Joburg [Johannesburg] is like so far [ahead], and Cape Town is so very backward.

“What I always ask myself – where do the black people work in the Western Cape? I don’t see them. You walk in the malls, you walk in the store. It’s either coloured or white people. Where are the black people?”

But to claim that racial discrimination in Cape Town is purely a black and white issue would be to ignore the bigotry that exists in and between the black and coloured communities.

Although this is not commonly known outside South Africa, the fact is that large swathes of the black and coloured communities view each other with suspicion and contempt.

This was aptly reflected in the survey, which found that “rather than finding common cause with those who were also victims of discrimination [during apartheid] . . . many African people interviewed feel that coloured people are their competitors by virtue of race”.

Not surprisingly, the report has caused a bit of a stir among South Africans, with people supporting and knocking the research in equal measure.

In defence of the city, Democratic Alliance leader Helen Zille rubbished the study, saying it was not representative of any sector and used qualitative interviews with only black employees.

And in a good example of attack being the best form of defence, she has also rounded on the Cape Times for printing the study and using the inflammatory headline “Cape Town is a racist city”.

“According to the Cape Times ’s own flawed analysis, this makes them a ‘racist newspaper’,” the opposition leader said in relation to the newspaper’s own lack of black staff at senior editorial level.

So, is Cape Town a racist city? To generalise too much would do a disservice to the many Captonians striving to build a genuine rainbow nation.

But one blogger in the Mail and Guardian newspaper seemed to sum up rather well the main gripe of people upset by the report and the manner in which it entered the public domain.

While he understood why such studies were necessary, he insisted the Cape Times headline was effectively saying Cape Town people are racist, “which does not serve anyone’s purpose other than to sell more newspapers”.

From my own experience, I have found Cape Town to be one of the least integrated cities in South Africa, as the main racial groups generally tend to stick to their own, showing little inclination to interact positively with each other.

It is a perception that has always cast a dark shadow over an otherwise beautiful place.