Western Cape Culture & Language

The Western Cape’s culture layers indigenous, Asian, African and European strands, often within the same family history.

San rock art

The Cederberg holds thousands of painted sites, some many thousands of years old, depicting eland, therianthropic figures and trance imagery. Interpretation has shifted from seeing them as hunting scenes to understanding them as records of shamanic experience, and they are among the most significant rock art anywhere.

Cape Dutch

The white-gabled, thatched, H-plan farmhouse with a central ornamental gable is a genuinely local architecture, developed in the eighteenth century and found on wine estates throughout the valleys. The gable designs evolved through baroque and neoclassical fashions and can be dated by eye.

Cape Malay

The Bo-Kaap’s painted houses, the kramats of exiled Muslim holy men around the peninsula, and a cuisine and vocabulary that entered Afrikaans. Some of the earliest Afrikaans texts were written in Arabic script for madrasa teaching.

Kaapse Klopse

The minstrel carnival on 2 January, when thousands march through Cape Town in satin and face paint, playing banjo and ghoema drum — descended from the one day of the year on which enslaved people were given leave.

Music

The Cape has its own jazz lineage — Abdullah Ibrahim, Basil Coetzee, the Goema rhythm that carries the carnival — formed partly in exile during apartheid and central to the province’s musical identity. Kwaito and hip hop from the Cape Flats, much of it in Afrikaans, have since produced some of South Africa’s most distinctive popular music.

Writing

The province has produced a disproportionate share of South African literature, and Cape Town has a strong book and design culture.

South Africa has twelve official languages, and three matter most here.

Afrikaans is the largest home language in the province, spoken by a majority of the Coloured population as well as by white Afrikaners. It developed from Dutch with Malay, Khoi and Portuguese influence.

English is universally understood in cities, tourism and business, and is what visitors will use throughout.

Xhosa is widely spoken, particularly in the townships and among people with roots in the Eastern Cape, and uses click consonants.

Useful Afrikaans: dankie for thank you, lekker for good or nice — which everyone uses in English too — and braai.

Useful Xhosa: molo for hello and enkosi for thank you.