In Helen Zille’s Western Cape province of South Africa, MTV is currently filming, “Clifton Shores,” a reality TV series about a group of white, young people: four Americans and three South Africans.  The show PR explains that the South African contestants “… serve as their guides to life in a new country.” That’s an actual sentence. This is in a country where eight or nine out of ten people are black.

Clifton of the title is one of the wealthiest and exclusive districts of Cape Town. To orient yourself, think where Table Mountain is. The one side of Table Mountain looks out over the Cape Flats, where the majority of the cities mostly working class and black (including those who also identify as coloured) population live and from where most of them commute daily to work in the suburbs, industrial areas and central Cape Town along the southern edge of the Table Mountain range.  Clifton is on the other side of the mountain. Except for some working class black (and coloured) communities in Houtbaai and Vishoek further down, that side of the mountain is lily white. There’s not much public transport to the Clifton area, except to ferry the area’s black domestic and retail population in and out of the area. Black people who find themselves in Clifton and the neighborhoods of Camps Bay, Bantry Bay, Bakoven and Llandudno and who are not servants or car guards regularly complain of feeling unwelcome there. (There are one or two beaches in the area reserved for blacks and coloureds during Apartheid, that still serve the same purpose even now long after the laws were scrapped.)

The actors (there is nothing real about these kinds of shows) in Clifton Shores predictably work for an “events company.” They will be “having fun” in Clifton.  The show also plans to “… showcase the glamorous lifestyle of Cape Town’s rich and fabulous.”

The producers promise that Cape Town will be “… a new and exotic location for US audiences.” That the city features “European style and African spirit in equal abundance.”

If you were checking the line on young white South Africans – the majority of whom still vote for political parties that hardly want to change South Africa’s racial political economy – serving as guides to life in South Africa, the deliberate contrast between “European style” and “African spirit” should have pushed you over the edge.

We can’t predict whether the show will be a hit (who would have explained the runaway success of something like “Keeping up with the Kardashians or the Big Brother franchise?), but what we do know is “Clifton Shores,” will, without trying, probably expose the ugly reality of racism and inequality in the city.