Last week, a leading Sunday newspaper published a ‘study' on race in Cape Town. It drew on the opinions of some politicians to convey the impression that our city was the most racist and unequal in South Africa.

It seems that this has been a recurrent theme with some commentators, certainly in the past few weeks but also in the past few years, or at least since 2006. Given the centrality of race to our history, there is perhaps a yearning to explore this issue even more than we already do in our lived experiences.

Those lived experiences have shaped many of us. I started my political career and life's work fighting the racial injustices of Apartheid. I have known many people who have made the ultimate sacrifice fighting racial oppression and I know many more who still live with the scars of that fight.

As someone who has been dealing with issues of reconciliation and identity in the democratic era, I feel that I can perhaps bring some perspective to this strand of an existent debate and note a few key features of this most recent discussion.

Race is an important part of our identity as South Africans. While we work for substantive equality and a country where we are not identified solely by our racial heritage, as in the past, we know that there are still many inter-connected social issues with which we must deal. Cape Town is like the rest of South Africa; it faces the historical legacy of inequality.

These are issues of class, race, gender; a veritable range of categories. In many ways since 1994, we have been having a conversation about our identity as individuals and as a country. Many of us keep the dream alive of working for a society where we are valued for our innate worth as individuals and afforded opportunities because of that.

So it is perhaps somewhat unedifying that an important historical discourse about our present is becoming derailed for motives that are perhaps less based on legitimate conversations about who we are and more rooted in an unconscious process of reaction.

Those reactions are the result of un-interrogated prejudices, biases and misunderstandings of our national challenges.

Racial issues and racism are global in the South African context. They exist from border to border, up and down. We are only now seeing the maturation of a generation for whom race is not generally paramount.

They have been around for at least three centuries, were refined to structural form in a uniquely codified manner in the last century, and abandoned. The structures in our mind, however, and life chances have lingered.

This is common to Cape Town, Johannesburg, Durban, East London; everywhere. We all face the same challenges of service provision, especially with accelerated urbanisation, where moving targets make many people feel excluded.

But we are all one country and we largely move our healing forward at the same pace.

So it is surprising to me that Cape Town has been singled out. What this suggests is that other major metros have perhaps moved on, in which case I ask that all commentators quickly share the secrets of those miracles with us so that we can join them in the future.

But I fear that this is in fact not the case.

So I have to dismiss that cause and look for answers elsewhere; answers to be found in broader context. That means I have to ask: what is so different about Cape Town than other places in the country?

There is of course a fundamental difference. Cape Town is the only major urban centre not governed by the ANC.

For reasons of the way history is written, reconciliation is largely tied to the legacy of the ANC. This is in certain ways legitimate, given the leading role that the organisation played in the struggle for our freedom.

But the mistake that commentators make is to assume that that relationship gives the ANC an exclusive monopoly on reconciliation and dealing with issues of racial politics head-on.

This has consequences. It means that, if these good values are exclusive to the ANC, and the ANC does not govern somewhere, these good values are not present.

Therefore, as the ANC does not govern in Cape Town, Cape Town must be racist.

We know that there is a flaw of lazy logic in this assumption. We should also then realise that the conclusion I have just described is the product of an erroneous thought process. And this conclusion unfairly doubly incriminates the reputation of millions of people.

It is unfair to the people of Cape Town. It is unfair to our history. And it is unfair to our collective efforts to heal as one country.

An interrogation of this assumption leads to other, deeper revelations.

We see that it has only really got under way since 2006. Before then, the accepted wisdom was that Cape Town was like the rest of South Africa in this way.

Suddenly, when the ANC lost power, racism somehow became much more acute. This has cheapened racial discourse even further.

But there is another deeper flaw in all of this: the assumption that governments are the sole agents of reconciliation and if it is the wrong government, then there is no reconciliation.

Government is a leader but in terms of social change it is one of many partners. Until we realise this, commentators' easy associations between false qualities in their minds will deceive them into thinking that reconciliation has already occurred.

It is this deception that makes them think that racial issues that exist in the rest of the country are not the failing of the national government, because of those assumptions.

And this is not paranoia. Race ‘studies' of Cape Town are focused on particular political leaders, political parties and governments. So let us at least be honest about this phenomenon.

Of course, in truth, we have problems in Cape Town, as the rest of the country does. We try and deal with our history, as the rest of the country does.

We condemn racism wherever it occurs; the pain and anguish of very personal experiences that cannot always be measured but are no less real to the individual because of that.

But we also know that we are a partner in social change. We are doing our part to live up to our end of the bargain through the innovative programmes of redress to build a more inclusive and caring city. In fact, unique in the sphere of local government, we have been the only metro that has explicitly made our programme of government one that is rooted in the principles of redress and reconciliation.

Our programme includes building a world-class transportation network, providing services for backyarders, cross-subsidising the poor more than anywhere else in the country, providing basic services to informal settlements, providing economic relief as part of a special jobs project, renaming certain public spaces, and a whole host of other measures.

There is still much to be done but we know that if everyone works together, we can build a better city.

In our mission, however, the last thing we need are cheap accusations founded on faulty logic, unexplored assumptions and the resentment of political losses.

This article by Patricia de Lille first appeared in Cape Town This Week, a weekly newsletter by the Executive Mayor of Cape Town.

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