Post-apartheid Cape Town Research Articles

Muslim Public Claiming Heritage in Post-Apartheid Cape Town

On November 29, 1929, only a month after the stock market crash of 1929, a “great-great-grandson (of Tuan Guru, the then) the Imaum, or Priest, of the Chiappini-Street Mosque,” told a journalist of the Cape Times that: The Circle of Islam around Cape Town and suburbs, prophesied by a holy man of Islam 260 years ago, is now complete. Sketching the circle, the report continued: From Signal Hill, round ZandVleit, Constantia, Bakoven and Robben Island, stretches a long line of kramats, the tomb of Tuans, or holy men of Islam, completing a vast circle within which, if the prophecy of Khardi Abdusalam 260 years ago is correct, all followers of the Prophet Mohammed will henceforth be safe from fire, famine, plague, earthquake and tidal wave.1 Journal for Islamic Studies Vol. 24&25 2004/5: pp. 78-104

At the limits of spatial governmentality: A message from the tip of Africa

Urban studies scholars drawing on Foucault's analysis of governmentality have investigated how urban social orders are increasingly more concerned with the management of space rather than on the discipline of offenders or the punishment of offences (Merry, 2001). This paper examines the 'rationality' and efficacy of spatial governmentality in post-apartheid Cape Town, and shows how the city has increasingly become a 'fortress city' (Davis, 1990), much like cities such as Los Angeles, Sao Paolo and Rio de Janeiro. These 'global cities' are increasingly characterised by privatised security systems in middle class suburbs, shopping malls and gated communities (Caldeira, 1999). These spatial forms of governmentality draw on sophisticated security systems comprising razor wire and electrified walls, burglar alarms and safe rooms, as well as vicious guard dogs, neighbourhood watches, private security companies, and automated surveillance cameras. On the other side of the race and class divide are urban ghettoes characterised by growing poverty and everyday violence. These socio-spatial inequalities continue to be reproduced despite urban planning initiatives aimed at desegregating the apartheid city. Although the media and the middle classes highlight the dangers of crime and violence, they tend to ignore the structures of inequality that fuel the growth of crime syndicates and violent drug economies that are reproducing these urban governance crises. Given the diminished resources of the neo-liberal state, the policing of middle class residential and business districts is increasingly being 'outsourced' to private security companies. In working class neighbourhoods of Cape Town such as Manenberg, the state has attempted to re-establish governance by resorting to new forms of spatial governmentality. The paper draws attention to the limits of these attempts to assert state control through the management of space. Spatial governance in places like Manenberg will continue to be relatively ineffectual given existing levels of social inequality and racial polarization. Such processes are reproduced by massive unemployment and racialised poverty resulting from socio-spatial legacies of apartheid and Cape Town's shift from a manufacturing to a tourist, IT and financial services economy. Although this paper focuses on attempts at re-establishing governance in a crime and gangster-ridden working class neighbourhood of Cape Town, it addresses these issues in relation to city-wide shifts to new forms of spatial governmentality after apartheid.

Local state restructuring and urban transformation in post-apartheid Cape Town

This paper analyzes processes of state restructuring at the scale of the local state and the city, exploring the social and political relationships generated through processes of reconstruction specifically in Elsies River, a formerly segregated `coloured' neighborhood in Cape Town. While the relationship between Elsies River residents and the local state has been characterized by an obsessive focus on housing debt, I examine the ways in which antagonism over housing problems overlie a broader relational disjuncture between neighborhood and state political and social networks. The specificity of this case provides a lens onto the ways in which processes of state restructuring both contest and reinforce racial, economic, and place-based inequalities in South African cities. The paper concludes by using the complexities of local state-neighborhood relationships in the South African case to reflect on geographical theories of state-society relations on a conceptual level.

POST-APARTHEID SOCIAL POLARISATIONS: THE CREATION OF SUB-URBAN IDENTITIES IN CAPE TOWN

ABSTRACT The intersections between post-apartheid state policy and the expressed experiences of residents of an ex-coloured area (Retreat) and a predominantly African informal settlement (Imizamo Yethu) in Cape Town are presented. Three conclusions about post-apartheid Cape Town emerge. The impact of state policy is uneven, both between and within the individual communities. Although social divisions are created by past and present housing policies, the real threat to the urban populations of Imizamo Yethu and Retreat is economic. Finally, government's intentions of integrating racially divided South African cities seem likely to fail, at least in the less affluent quarters of Cape Town. Thus a racialised legacy, which post-apartheid state interventions barely ameliorate, underscores the significance of cultural networks as mediating mechanisms for survival among the urban disadvantaged. Post-apartheid polarizations are generating new sub-urban identities.