The AWOL Outtasight Blind Art Tour makes the streets, history, and culture of Salt River accessible to locals and tourists alike, collaborating with the South African Institute for the Blind, Baz-Art, and Cape Town Tourism to conduct tours of the large-scale murals and artwork that decorates the suburb. This makes Salt River part of a walkable city, part of tourism while maintaining its own culture. A blind tour guide leads you through the streets of Salt River, showcasing the public street art murals and local art studios. Cape Town oozes contradiction: streets of trendy restaurants and boutique stores quickly shift into tented communities and make-shift shacks, the illusion of a bustling cosmopolitan city is broken by scenes of grinding poverty.

The rich are welcomed, and the poor are restricted to designated areas, conveniently forgotten. To access the aesthetic, fashionable, alternative, artsy-ness that Cape Town is so well-known for, you pay to get in. The very fabric of the city maps out its jarring history. These distinct areas of prosperity or dereliction, as defined by the aftermath of the Group Areas Act, showcase the complexity of creating a cohesive city, a community of all. So, what is the role of urbanisation and the duty of tourism in a place that fosters such opposing lifestyles, that breeds inequality and feeds off a wealth gap? 

Salt River is at the centre of Cape Town’s paradox. Historicising this bustling suburb showcases the complexity that its landscape brings, epitomizing the layered South African past of melting cultures, conflict, and endurance. Salt River is the site of Cape Town’s oldest battle between Europeans and Indigenous peoples: the local Khoi’s Khoekhoen tribe, the Goringhaiquas, battled the Portuguese in 1510 and won. 150 years later, the Dutch East India Company set up a refreshment station here, making Salt River one of the first frontiers of European settlement. The river was well-fished and acted as a defence barrier against attacks, such as the slavery uprising of 1808.

 With the railway being built in 1883, Salt River and Woodstock joined as one municipality. The manufacturing of textiles and clothing and the Salt River power station initiated mass industrialization. With this came a need for housing workers, and small Victorian-style houses were built in single-story rows, complete with a stoep that faced roads with British names. In the early 1960s, many District 6 residents relocated to Salt River due to the 1951 Group Areas Act’s forced removals: Coloured and Indian people could buy houses and Indian residents could buy or rent a corner grocery shop. During the tumultuous 1970s and 80s, the culture of the Soweto Uprising instigated hundreds of Salt River students to march to the CBD, joined by factory workers and singing, “We Shall Overcome”. They were met with police brutality.

Today, there is still a sense of generational community in Salt River, but the rise of gentrification is quickly changing the landscape of the suburb. Being located between the CBD, Woodstock and the Southern Suburbs, its property is becoming sought after, but many of the buildings are run down, and call for restructuring. So, how can urbanization protect the history of Salt River, while allowing for some development?

Our tour guide, Winston Fani, describes himself as a blind tour guide who can illuminate people. “There has to be a pattern to what the blind do every day”, Winston says, as we exit the meeting point, Soete Studio, and enter the streets of Salt River. He’s a snappy dresser, wearing dark John Lennon glasses and a bright red waistcoat over his white collared shirt. The tap-tapping of his stick brings our attention to the details of the city: cracks in the sidewalk, unexpected potholes, and the curve of the street. These things are both obstacles and clues for Winston: they are landmarks for him to follow, guiding him along the street, and leading him toward the artwork.

Witnessing Winston navigating the textured streets of Salt River urges a consideration of how a city is perceived. I close my eyes and try to experience the world as Winston does. I don’t last 2 meters without opening them again.

We arrive at Riaan Pretorius’s mural of Amy Winehouse, painted on a wooden board that leans against a derelict building. Winston has memorized a description of the portrait: a striking blue backdrop, red lips, thick eyeliner, big hair: an icon belting into a microphone. He explains to us that as an able-bodied tour group, we use our eyes to send a message to our brain, which interprets the piece. With a glance, we can bring personal experience and creativity to understand the piece. This makes art a powerful tool of communication. Winston’s experience is different but adds another layer of interpretation to the art. Perhaps it is not all visual. Perhaps language is just as powerful as paint.

The now familiar tap-tapping of the walking stick continues, and Winston leisurely strolls around the corner toward a series of murals painted on the walls of warehouses and storerooms. Towering over me is the front page of the Sunday Times with the headline “Here he is!”, a mural of the newspaper printed the day that Nelson Mandela walked out of prison. AWOL described Salt River as “pulsating with creativity and history”. Arriving at the large-scale mural highlights this: history is literally painted into the fabric of the city.

Facing the Sunday Times is a painted black and yellow bee, perched on top of a button with a nuclear sign on it. Winston says that the wings are painted away from the body of the bee, meaning the creature has either just landed, or is about to take off. At the bottom right of the artwork, there is a small sign written both in English and Braille, complete with a QR code, which, when scanned with a phone, plays a recording of a description and analysis of the artwork in Winston’s voice. The art is accessible to both sighted individuals and those with visual impairments.

Winston explains the temporality of these pieces: they are not protected by the city and won’t last forever. The Warehouses have agreed to have murals painted on their walls, but as the city changes with gentrification, the buildings are knocked down, and many of the murals have been destroyed and forgotten. So far, Salt River has lost 10 of its murals, ¾ of all the artwork in the area. Photographs are encouraged as a way of preserving the artworks.

The tour led us past building site after building site: development was happening all around us. In the group, there was an architect. I asked her what she thought the building would be turned into. “A call centre or apartment blocks”, she replied, after examining the hundreds of boxes being built on top of each other. 

A mural by artist Jakes Mbele features the old metro rails of Salt River, adorned with children of different races in one playground. He has used the colours of the rainbow nation to depict the rails, which break out through large cracks in the pavement. Hope and solidarity break out through the dysfunction. Winston explains that the message is that the rainbow nation is limitless. Limitless not as a project but as a movement.

Winston was leading us toward the South African Institute for the Blind using Braille paths: a series of ridges in the road that give texture to the pavement, allowing his stick to find traction against the pavement. Blindness is embedded in the city structure. We arrived at the Community House building: the headquarters of the South African Communist Party, and home to over 20 organizations that focus on development and unions. It is, as AWOL says: “an invaluable institution offering profound insights into the tapestry of South African history”.  Winston explains that the building used to be a home for white women from farms looking for jobs in the 17th and 18th centuries.

We had reached the last mural. It read: “Forward not forgetting our Solidarity”. Next to the text, there are workers of all races and ages collaborating, working on a common cause. Winston points out the woman in the wheelchair who is working: “She is possible, like me.” he says.  “I am possible”. 

When I was in Brooklyn, New York, in 2017, I did a walking tour of the graffiti work of the up-and-coming suburb of Williamsburg. Like Salt River, Williamsburg was in the process of being gentrified, inviting hipsters to live just outside the in-accessible Manhattan Island. I distinctly remember a man walking past our tour group and shouting, “Gentrification!”. I realized that we were invading their space in some way, that this tourism blight was taking advantage of the city’s rising costs, making a spectacle out of local culture.

But tourism can also lead to cultural preservation, the sharing of the city, and expanding the reach and impact of histories. This didn’t feel like an invasion, but a sharing experience.  Cape Town Tourism stands for the urbanization of Cape Town’s neglected and derelict areas being refurbished into spaces for its citizens and tourists to enjoy. They believe that “a city is its people” and want to give all Capetonians the opportunity to create a life for themselves. For them, “this is just the start”.

Making art accessible, making it public, making it available to the visually impaired, breaks the exclusivity of Cape Town and works toward creating a cohesive city, a community of all.