One sometimes stumbles onto interesting stories of local suburbs by accident — other times they are offered to us by those in the know.
My father used to be an advocate (lawyer) in South Africa, and he’d often relay interesting tales to us before he passed. One such story concerns two suburbs in Cape Town called Plattekloof and Panorama respectively.
Our English readers will of course know that Panorama infers a vista — an area with magnificent views to behold. Plattekloof, however, is an Afrikaans (local South African language) compound word which combines the two words ‘plat’ which means flat, and ‘kloof’ which means gorge or ravine.
Nothing strange about this, right?
Well, there’s nothing strange about this until you realise that, of the two adjoining suburbs in the north of Cape Town, Panorama has no view at all (it is located in a low lying area) whereas Plattekloof sits atop a hillside with magnificent views of Cape Town and Table Mountain.
As the story was retold to me, it goes that the solicitor — a junior who mainly performed administrative duties — had mistakenly switched the zoning deeds around when submitting them to the provincial deeds/zoning offices resulting in the two suburbs eternally bearing these counterintuitive names.
An interesting anecdote of my local community