Lost dreams? Tales of the South African city twenty years after apartheid

Abstract

When Phindile (this is not her real name) left rural Kwa Zulu in 1989 for Johannesburg, she had every hope of building a better life in the city. She dreamed of a place where she was free from the trauma of virginity testing, where she could move freely as a black woman, and where she could own her own home and have children that she could bequeath a better life than the one she had had. A few years later, the incoming government of the African National Congress (ANC) had a similar dream for its citizens – the right of all South Africans, regardless of race, creed or gender, to dream of a better future. In its Reconstruction and Development Programme (RDP), the new ANC government promised to create ‘an integrated programme, based on the people, that provides peace and security for all and builds the nation, links reconstruction and development and deepens democracy’ (ANC, 1994, p. 7, emphasis in original). What has happened to both the state's and Phindile's dream 20 years later? Through Phindile's life, a single mother of two, this article explores the extent to which 20 years of democracy has changed the urban landscape and realized the state's vision for a non-racial, integrated and prosperous city for all. We follow Phindile through Gauteng, the country's most urbanized province, as she migrates to the city, looks for work, rents a shack in an informal settlement and eventually gets her own state-provided RDP home in the province's East Rand. Phindile's life becomes a window through which we examine how public policies, policy statements and programmes affect individual lives. We follow the evolution of key policies on local government housing policies, the constitution, integrated development plans, the National Development Plan and other official statements and legal statutes that relate to cities. Through Phindile's experience we move beyond discourses of policy ‘failure’ or ‘success’, allowing us to understand how policy deeply impacts personal lives – for better or worse. By juxtaposing Phindile's everyday life with official declarations, visions and statements, we see the progress, setbacks and stagnation of South Africa's dream to create a rainbow nation with cities that are racially, economically and socially integrated.