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Silvana Dantu, Product Owner
 


The Green Point Stadium Visitor Centre

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Tears well up in the eyes of an elderly man sitting in the front row.

On stage, Apollo Ntshoko has had the audience in stitches as he performs the Greensman, a 35-minute one-man show of dialogue, song and dance celebrating the history of Cape Town’s Green Point Common.

Whether they’re in stitches or, like the man in the front row, quietly weeping,  three audiences a day are kept enthralled by the Greensman.

Apollo’s skills rendering a variety of accents are astonishing; he does coloured as well as he does Indian, Dutch, French, English and Portuguese. Over 350 years, all of these people have left their imprint on the sprawling common land just outside the centre of Cape Town.
Here, for thousands of years, Khoisan hunter-gatherers gathered herbs. In the 1650s the Dutch settlers tried unsuccessfully to grow vegetables there. Later the British staged horseracing meetings and football matches on the flat expanse between the Atlantic Ocean and the growing town.

In the 20th Century people of all colours came to the 85ha common to play soccer. On weekends, dozens of games would be going on at any one time. Football clubs, including the Sea Point Swifts, flourished. Then, in 1948, apartheid cast its dark shadow across the commonage. From the 1960s the communities who used the common as their backyard and their playing fields were forcibly removed from their homes and scattered across the barren Cape Flats; teams like Sea Point Swifts being exiled to places Bonteheuwel and Athlone. Green Point to this day is a place of haunting, bittersweet memories for many, including the man in the front row.

Silvana Dantu, director of the visitor centre, lived with her family across the road from the common until they were forced out of their home in 1972. She remembers that her parents’ home was an informal, bustling meeting place for dozens of family and friends before and after they played soccer. It’s simply a happy coincidence, she says, that she now has a role to play in Green Point Common’s remarkable renaissance.

The centrepiece of that renaissance is Cape Town’s 2010 football stadium, an architectural marvel costing R4.5-billion that will host eight FIFA World Cup matches, including a semifinal, and seat 68 000 fans.

A team of up to 2 600 workers (they’re called “players” at Green Point) are busy completing the stadium, which is comfortably ahead of schedule. The stadium is set to dazzle TV viewers all over the world, particularly because of its 26 000m2 glass roof which will house the floodlights – and because of its incomparable location. As the sun sets over Cape Town, the stadium will literally glow.

After 2010 the stadium will continue to host football and rugby matches and will be the centrepiece of a sprawling urban park, a place where Capetonians and visitors will be able to play and practise a variety of sports - including football, athletics, cricket, rugby and golf - or to simply unwind in a green landscaped oasis.

The visitor centre features a museum celebrating the rich local soccer heritage and visitors (there have already been more than 30 000) are able to watch progress on the stadium, which Silvana describes as “an architectural icon in one of the world’s most beautiful settings”. Whether visitors have a personal link with Green Point or had never heard of the area before arriving in South Africa, Apollo’s Greensman show wows them three times a day, often bringing the audience to their feet at the end of the performance.

The aim of the centre (which is sponsored by the two main contractors and actively supported by the City of Cape Town, the provincial government and FIFA, is to get South Africans, particularly Capetonians, to “take ownership” of the stadium and its development. Foreign tourists, from Japan to the United States, Silvana says, have been “blown away” by the stadium. “They say it’s not what they expected at all, and they say that, after what they’ve seen and experienced here, they will return to Green Point.”

“The cluster programme introduced by TEP is certainly playing a phenomenal role in preparing us for 2010,” says Silvana. The Hidden Treasures project, she adds, helps visitors experience many of the lesser known aspects of Cape Town’s remarkable tourist offering, particularly those off the beaten track. “TEP,” she adds, “has created a great opportunity for us to network and ensure that tourists get a truly memorable experience.”
 
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