Race, Security, and Spatial Anxieties in the Postapartheid City

Abstract

The apartheid city perfected colonial forms of governance by converting race to space. Each of the country’s four race groups (Africans, whites, coloureds, and Indians) inhabited separate neighborhoods, shopped in separate shopping areas, and schools, religious institutions, and leisure were almost completely separated. The only points of contact were workplaces and the urban transport corridors that enabled populations of color to commute from townships to industrial parks and city centers for work. According to the dominant ideology, this spatial organization reflected different temporalities. One would travel from the city centers of (white) modernity towards the African townships that often were administered directly under the “Native administration” of the African “Homelands,” the pseudostates governed by traditional chiefs and under customary law. In the apartheid city, one became an “Indian,” an “African,” and a “white,” not merely by virtue of one’s color of skin, but because one lived an everyday life that was highly structured by determinate spaces and institutions.