Cape Town among Religious Superdiversity, Social Inequalities, and Experiences of Dialogue

Within sub-Saharan Africa, few cities are as cosmopolitan and multicultural as Cape Town, with its diverse blend of African, European, and Asian cultural traditions (Chidester 1991 and 2000) and its contradictions due by discrimination, globalization, and ambiguities of colonialism, apartheid, and post-apartheid democratization (Chidester 2000: 7-8; Ukah 2012). This essay aims at exploring quantitative religious affiliation and characteristitcs of South Africa and Cape Town—the Mother City—through a comparison with different sources, with the attempt to interpret them in the framework of the category of ‘religious superdiversity’ (Becci and Burchardt 2016; Becci, Burchardt and Giorda 2017). The purpose is to use religious belonging and adherence to plot the religious South African and Capetonian landscape in connection with other indicators emerging from census data, such as population groups, migration patterns, average annual household income, and level of education. It is consistent with the wide use of the category of superdiversity. Despite it was introduced in the anthropological context 15 years ago (Vertovec 2007), it has been applied through different disciplinary perspectives (Vertovec 2014 and 2019; Vertovec and Meissner 2015). In this chapter, my ambition is to show that religious superdiversity can encompass diverse methods of analysis—such as qualitative and quantitative ones—that consider the interaction among religious characters and other demographic indicators, through official statistics, charts, parameters, and inquiries.