Nobel Square and Coca-Cola Dude?

The V&A Waterfront in the centre of Cape Town is the scene of significant gentrification around a working harbour. Upscale shops and apartments and restaurants sit right on top of a stinking fishing fleet and the whine and clatter of ship repair in the dry docks just outside my hotel window. Think London Docklands but with the actual docks still there.

Into this insert a site to honour four South African winners of the Nobel Peace prize – Chief Albert Luthuli (who could not get to Norway to accept due to travel restrictions in 1960 because of the Sharpeville Massacre), Archbishop Desmond Tutu (who ran the Truth and Reconciliation effort after the end of apartheid), and former presidents Nelson Mandela and FW de Klerk (who worked together across the race divide to scrap apartheid and move on without the bloodbath that accompanied so many other revolutions)

Both this testament and the waterfront are both beautifully done with Table Mountain as the essential Cape Town back drop.

But then WHY, for goodness sake, build a statue of a dude out of Coca-Cola cases right in the middle? What on earth were they thinking?