Violence and Memory in the Reconstruction of South Africa's Cato Manor

Abstract

Among the most destructive legacies of apartheid in South Africa is the violent history of division, discrimination, and control through which the everyday injustices of racial order were experienced. This violence of ‘separate development’ was inscribed within particular spaces, as the apartheid state attempted to define and control where racially‐defined citizens could live, work, and travel. This paper examines the geography of violence and reconstruction in one such space, that of Cato Manor near Durban. The area is known for the large‐scale forced removals which took place there in the 1950s, destroying a multi‐racial community of Indian and African residents. Although zoned for white residence, Cato Manor remained vacant until the 1980s, when it became a safe haven for refugees fleeing violence in the Natal countryside. In the early 1990s, the area became the focus of a non‐racial development effort, which sought to overcome the violent social divisions of the apartheid era. This redevelopment, however, became a site of contestation when former residents of Cato Manor petitioned to reclaim land they once owned there, claims that the city of Durban attempted to nullify in court. The outcome of the land claims trial highlights the tensions between the present dictates of development and the process of negotiating the violence of the past, and suggests that the democratization of planning can be a means of ‘working through’ the legacies of displacement and dispossession that are so much a part of South Africa's present.