Freedom of the city
Rounding hospital bend into Cape Town, I always look out for a pair of jackal buzzards that patrol the sky above. Their domain is the slope where Rhodes has fallen, their prey the timorous beasts that scurry in the green skirts of Devilʼs Peak. They perch on lamp posts along the highway which they sometimes cross to gaze down on the old graves of Groote Schuur Hospital, the urban melee and the sky rats beneath.
This is pigeon domain: concrete and brick near-indistinguishable from the cliffs on which their
