The following is the original "10 Reasons Cape Town can Fuck Off" piece. I wrote it under my pseudonym Haai van der Schyff in 1998 for Skyf!! magazine, a Port Elizabeth scene 'zine I published for a while.

The piece was meant to satirise the whole trend of leaving your home town for the big(ger) city because, well, it's a bigger city, so it must be better.

It was later carried in SA Citylife magazine, then ended up on the global email circuit, where it has been steadily orbiting the planet ever since. It also spawned television interviews, radio appearances and other magazine articles. It was generally taken out of context - and stripped of irony - as a full-on attack on the city of Cape Town.

For better or worse, it remains my most well-known contribution to English literature.
 

10 Reasons why Cape Town can Fuck Off!

By Haai van der Skyf

1. It Exists.
   If it wasn’t for Cape Town, PE would look a whole lot better. Tourists would love us if they hadn’t first had a dose of first-world sophistication before embarking on the garden route.
   And anyway, if it’s first-world sophistication they’re looking for, why don’t they just stay in Europe or Japan or wherever it is tourists come from.
   Cape Town better wake up. This is Africa, not blimming Salzburg or something. Cape Town fuck off.
2. Capetonians are too hip.
   They’re a bunch of namby-pamby poncey glamour queens who think they live in a magazine.
   Prancing around in all their hip designer wear and looking all cool and unflustered like they’re in a fashion spread when they could be wearing perfectly good five-year-old jeans and T-shirts. What do they think this is? Marie bloody Claire or something? Magazines are for wankers. Cape Town fuckoff!
3. They’ve got a mountain.
   What is it with their precious mountain? If that was in PE we would have built condos all over its ass, and a freeway across the top of it. For good measure we would put a Playland on Devil’s Peak and a fuel depot on Lion’s Head. And ore dumps on Chapman’s Peak. Exploit the bastard.
   Instead the bunch of sanctimonious pricks treat it like it’s some kind of national treasure, some gift from the almighty.
   Every time some poor fool tries to built a little timeshare block on the mountain there’s a hundred fuckin’ protesters chaining themselves to the trees screaming “save the mountain, hey”.
   It’s not as if they built the damn mountain themselves or anything.
   So horse bollocks to them. Cape Town fuck off!
4. Their roads are too damn narrow.
   Ninety-five per cent of the roads in Cape Town are too narrow for two cars to pass each other.
   How do you figure a town of four million can have a road system built to sustain a seaside village of sixteen-odd and then try to host the Olympic Games.
   A case of the little boy whose eyes were bigger than his stomach, or what?
   Maybe try host a traffic-jam-free December holiday and move on from there. Baby steps, guys. Baby steps.
5. Their sea is not usable.
   Eleven degrees? That’s a geometry angle, not a fuckin’ ocean temperature.
   What’s the point of beaches if the sea’s too cold to go swimming in?
   More proof that the only reason people go on holiday to Cape Town is to get into traffic jams on the way to the beach and then to pose around with their cellphones on the sand, not to go for a ghoef. Cape Town fuck off!
6. They’ve got a Waterfront.
   The best thing Jo’burg ever did was build the Randburg waterfront. A crap hodgepodge of pubs, stores and restaurants to be sure, but one which well and truly called the V&A’s bluff, proving that Cape Town’s waterfront is nothing more than a shopping mall with some water near it.
   It’s just another consumer temple geared to getting you to buy garments with price tags at the child buggery level of obscenity and to be served Labels by waiters more condescending than the whole of America and the ex-smoking community put together. Cape Town fuck off!
7. Everyone’s off their tits from drugs.
   IT’s common knowledge that the only people in Cape Town who aren’t alcoholics, smackies, E-freaks, charlie-junkies, goofballs, acid-heads or nexus-fiends are Archbishop Desmond Tutu and the Tunisian high commissioner.
   For this reason, everyone you speak to in Cape Town is mad, either because they’re high, or because they spent the whole of the 90s eating pills and now they’ve had to stop because they weigh 12kg and they can’t even remember what high school they went to any more.
   Compare that to PE, that haven of temperance, propriety and good clean fun, and you begin to see all to clearly why Cape Town can fuck right off.
8. All the best international bands and DJs go and play in Cape Town and none of them come to PE
   So if you wanna check U2 or Skunk Anansie or Tsuyoshi Suzuki you’ve gotta mission to Cape Town and deal with the skinny roads and the toxic psychotics and poncey fashion-mag E-freaks and a mountain that makes it rain all the time.
   Pricks. Fuck them.
9. It’s turning into another Hollywood.
   Every person you speak to from Cape Town is working on a movie set.
   Either they’re doing the catering or making props or being unit manager or merting zol to the film crew or being an extra in a French cellphone ad.
   And getting paid 20 gorillas a month tax-free in Francs.
   Why don’t they just get it over with? Build a Spago at the Waterfront and a Betty Ford clinic in Rondebosch, and put up a 20-metre sign on the slopes of the mountain that says “Zollywood”.
   And while they’re at it they can just fuck off.
10. It’s the new Riviera
    Skaapies is so dirt-cheap for Euros and Americans that they’ve all bought property there.
    But it’s so incredibly dirt cheap that you don’t even have to be an A-league jet-setter to afford a farm-size house in Bishop’s Court.
    Consequently, all the prices skyrocket because of all the rich bastards around, and you can’t even do any star-spotting because the rich bastards are only Belgian record executives or the earl of Derbyshire — crew that you’ve never heard of.
    Waste of time, really, Cape Town. Glad I don’t live there.