White, middle-class South Africans moving through Cape Town: mobile encounters with strangers

Abstract

Drawing on photo-elicitation interviews with 60 middle-class, white residents of two privileged suburbs of Cape Town, this paper focuses on the particularities and the potential effects of mobile encounters with strangers. Starting from discourses about different means of transportation, it is demonstrated, first, that middle-class, white South Africans prefer cars over public transit not only for safety reasons or matters of practicality but also to circumvent interactions with those whom they consider to be strangers. Yet, based on the ambiguous and ambivalent sensations of fear, shame, guilt, sympathy, apathy and anxiety provoked by glances and glimpses of strangers on drives through the city, it is clarified that particular forms of visual encounter which develop on-the-go can stimulate privileged residents of a very unequal city to develop new engagements with strangers. By analyzing how unfocused interactions through the windshield add up to focused interactions at home and at work, it is shown, more specifically, how different types of encounters at different places complement each other to encourage middle-class, white residents to see the humanity of those whom they had considered to be strange or dangerous before.