Ladies of the night, angry dogs and rooms for rent in Ysterplaat

COSMOPOLITAN

Ladies of the night, angry dogs and rooms for rent in Ysterplaat

There are two Cinderella suburbs in Cape Town, with Koeberg Road as their pulsating main artery. Ysterplaat and Brooklyn have always held a fascination for the journalist HERMAN LATEGAN because of their outsider status. It wasn't the air force base that interested him, but the residents. After many years, he returned for a visit.

IN the old days, when I was still a kid, I used to hear grown-ups talking disparagingly about Ysterplaat and Brooklyn. “Poor whites," Aunt Elfie used to say, with her nose in the air. “As poor as church mice."

When Aunt Elfie and her friends left, I asked my mother what was wrong with being poor. “Nothing, my child, nothing. These are people who moved from the countryside to the Cape and now think they are fancy." It was during the early 1970s.

“Take me there, I want to have a look,” I asked. But my single-parent mother didn't have a car and none of her friends wanted to take me there. “Ria, what's going on with this child?" they asked. “Something is wrong."..

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