Stellenbosch is a bubble

So let's make champagne

Visitors to Stellenbosch would often remark that it’s a bubble. The implication, I assume, is that the town and its people are removed from the realities of South Africa, that ‘Stellenbosch is more like Europe than it is like Africa’.

There are several issues with such a view: It not only hints at an outdated African stereotype, but it is also profoundly ahistorical, neglecting the fact that much of the town’s prosperity is a creation of the twenty-first rather than the twentieth or earlier centuries. Most importantly, it implies that South Africa cannot learn from Stellenbosch’s success, casting the town as an isolated oasis of success in a broader sea of poverty. Such generalisations are both inaccurate and unhelpful.

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