Rewriting apartheid South Africa: race and space in Miriam Tlali and Lauretta Ngcobo’s novels*

This article employs oppositional black geography as a lens to examine spatiality in the novels of two black South African women writing during apartheid, Miriam Tlali and Lauretta Ngcobo. In analyzing Tlali’s Muriel at Metropolitan and Ngcobo’s And They Didn’t Die, it argues that the authors used a critical spatial analysis of the nation to critique apartheid and its oppressive policies. It holds that by insisting on authoring their own worlds in a country that sought to deny them creative agency, Tlali and Ngcobo carved out intellectual space that enabled them to critique dominant ideologies of Afrikaner nationalism and white supremacy, while imagining and writing alternatives to a nation to which their relationships were primarily ones of disavowal and subjugation. Both Tlali and Ngcobo render visible the fissures within the seemingly naturalized apartheid sites they construct in their fiction, revealing the inherent contradictions and injustices of apartheid spatiality. Through their fiction, they were thus engaged in situated knowledge production and a reconfiguration of apartheid space into a more socially just place. In narrating subaltern discourses in their novels from the standpoint of those most oppressed by apartheid law and ideology and by creatively engaging the spatiality of apartheid, Tlali and Ngcobo offer new modes for reading the nation, valuable for elucidating the ways in which the national space genders black women, and how black women, in turn shape and reshape that space.     

The long shadow of apartheid: a critical assessment of heritage transformation in South Africa 25 years on

ABSTRACT

Based on insights gained from two decades of research on South African heritage and monuments, this paper critically reflects on the status quo of heritage transformation in South Africa 25 years after the end of apartheid. It assesses new directions in national heritage policy and government strategy in relation to recent developments around post-apartheid heritage and the popular demand for a removal of ‘colonial statues’, which gained impetus from the #Rhodes Must Fall campaign. It is argued that the government’s approach to heritage transformation and most notably its treatment of white minority heritage, dominated by the ‘juxtaposition model’, has had limited success. The paper illustrates how heritage and the memory of the past are entangled with socio-political and economic realities in the present, which in turn is overshadowed by the long-term effects of apartheid and impacted by global or transnational considerations, such as foreign investment and tourism.     

What Happened to the “Promised Land”? A Fanonian Perspective on Post‐Apartheid South Africa

Abstract: This paper reviews post‐apartheid South Africa through Fanon's critical analysis of decolonization. Since, for Fanon, apartheid represented the purest form of the Manichean politics of space that characterizes colonialism, a Fanonian perspective on South Africa asks to what extent has the geographical layout of apartheid been remapped? Addressing this question necessitates shifting the “geography of reason” from technical discourses of policy‐makers to the lived reality of the “damned of the earth”. From this perspective, Fanon's critique becomes relevant in two ways, first as a prism to understand the rise of xenophobic violence as a symptom of the degeneration of the idea of South Africa's “promised land” and second as a way to listen to a new grassroots shack dweller movement, Abahlali baseMjondolo, that is challenging both neoliberal and progressive assumptions by advocating a quite different geographic layout for a “truly democratic” society.     

Reforming Land and Water Rights in South Africa

Redress of historical injustice in access to land provided a mobilizing force for the overthrow of the apartheid government in South Africa. Inequality of access to water resources marks South Africa's history even more profoundly than inequality of access to land. Yet in South Africa, post‐apartheid legislative reform relating to land and water has followed largely separate, if parallel, paths. This article traces the development and current status of water reforms in the Inkomati Water Management Area, where water use is dominated by established commercial agriculture and forestry, by important environmental interests, including the Kruger National Park, and by demands for improved access to water from a black population of around 1.5 million living in former Bantustan areas. It indicates that in practice water and land reform are interdependent, but, although both have become more closely linked within local political and economic arenas, they remain largely disconnected and disabled by unresolved tensions within their separate policy processes. The article argues that the commoditized nature of land and water use within the established patterns of commercial agriculture sets constraints on what redistributive land and water reform can deliver to those historically dispossessed. In particular, increasing recourse to ‘strategic partnerships’ between African community landowners and commercial agribusiness as a means of maintaining the productivity of commercial farmland poses questions about the control and beneficial use of new forms of communal property.     

Moral Panic and Cultural Mobilization: Responses to Transition,Crime and HIV/AIDS in KwaZulu‐Natal

This article discusses the micropolitics behind the murder of an ANC councillor in a KwaZulu‐Natal slum area in 1999, and the forms of violence which have continued in the aftermath of apartheid. The history of violence is traced back to struggles between the IFP and the ANC in the 1980s which interacted with differences in generational, moral and cultural outlook, as well as with conflicts between Zulu‐speaking residents and immigrants from the Transkei. Since apartheid was dismantled, similar patterns of conflict have persisted, but now within a local context in which one political party holds almost total sway. Post‐apartheid violence is related to rivalries around local state resources in a situation of continued poverty, and to moral and ideological disagreements which, since 1994, have been intensified by the HIV/AIDS epidemic as well as by an escalation of local crime. Strategies for the moral rehabilitation of local society, such as virginity testing, are discussed, as is the controversy around them, rooted in oppositions between youth and elders, and between different cultural styles. Finally, the mismatch between the concentration of political power at municipal ward level and the diversity of positions expressed in local civil society is raised as a reason why disagreements have continued to involve violent conflict.     

COLLECTIVE CONSUMPTION AND URBAN SEGREGATION IN SOUTH AFRICA: THE CASE OF TWO COLORED SUBURBS IN THE JOHANNESBURG REGION

In South Africa, the provision of collective consumption and urban racial segregation have always been closely connected. This article examines changes in apartheid urban policy with specific reference to two predominantly working-class colored suburbs on the periphery of Johannesburg: Eldorado Park, begun in the mid-1960s during a period of relative growth and stability, is largely an expression of socialized housing produced by an interventionist state and construction of this suburb, despite its racially exclusive character, appears to fit all too well within the theory which sees collective consumption in terms of the reproduction of labor power. However the apartheid regime, confronted by a deepening economic and political crisis, later withdrew from the provision of collective consumption, and appears to be abandoning its racist urban policies and ideology. Thus construction of Ennerdale, beginning in the mid-1970s occurred within a context of privatization and austerity. Analysis of the apparent “deracialized” and market-oriented provision of urban goods and services in Ennerdale reveals, at a local level, contradictions of South African crisis policies.     

Private Cooking,Public Eating: Women street vendors in South Durban

The diverse cultural spaces of eThekwini (Durban), South Africa, reflect the accommodations and daily cultural negotiations made by the residents of a city whose demographies represent the complex inheritances of interactions between a long history of colonial segregation, nearly 50 years of formal apartheid policies, rapid modernisation, and global networks of migration, production and exchange. This article explores the heavily gendered spaces in which the street food which is characteristic of many areas of the city is produced. ‘Kitchens’, whether a paraffin stove on the street or in an ‘informal’ settlement shack, or dedicated space in a modern flat or house, locate and position borrowings, appropriations and imitations in ingredients, techniques and recipes, between diverse cultural traditions. The cultural performance of identity links the private and the public, the kitchen and the spaces of consumption. Food, and the making of food, are inscribed with ethnicity, with understandings of what is ‘real’, of authenticity and tradition.     

Coexistence and Separation of Two Residential Groups—An Interactional Spatial Dynamic Approach

This paper is concerned with the spatial and temporal distribution of residents in an urban area. The residents are classified into two groups, that is, black and white, according to their characteristics. A dynamic model is built to explain how the residents are distributed over time and space. The model consisting of a set of partial differential equations is similar to competition-diffusion equations in biology. We investigate conditions of coexistence and separation of the two groups.     

Citizenship and Belonging in the Rural Fringe: A Case Study of a Hindu Temple in Sydney,Australia

Despite Australian multicultural policy that asserts the right of all citizens to maintain and practice their religion, formal citizenship has not guaranteed the welcome or belonging of migrant religious groups at the neighbourhood scale. This is most starkly reflected in contests over the inclusion of minority religious spaces in the Australian landscape, which increasingly take place in the rural–urban fringe of metropolitan areas. This work examines the controversy over a proposed Hindu temple in metropolitan Sydney and reveals insights into the way that rural–urban fringe space is imagined, understood and experienced by land use planners, residents and temple members. Critical discourse analysis of policy documentation along with interviews reveals that land use planners circumscribe belonging in the landscape through the use of zoning ordinances and design controls, local residents mark the boundaries of white privilege through narratives of heritage and cultural difference and temple members claim rights to citizenship based on assertions of sameness.     

THE OWL OF MINERVA AND THE IRONIC FATE OF THE PROGRESSIVE PRAXIS OF RADICAL HISTORIOGRAPHY IN POST‐APARTHEID SOUTH AFRICA

Despite its title and stated objectives this edited volume does not provide a broad and inclusive survey of post‐apartheid South African historiographical developments. Its main topic is the unexpected demise in the post‐apartheid context of the radical or revisionist approach that had invigorated and transformed the humanities and social studies during the 1970s and 1980s. In the context of the anti‐apartheid struggle the radical historians had developed a plausible model of praxis for progressive scholarship, yet in the new post‐apartheid democratic South Africa radical historical scholarship itself encountered a crisis of survival. This should not be confused with a general “crisis” of historical scholarship in South Africa, as some of the uneven contributions to this volume contend, as that remains an active and diversely productive field due also to substantial contributions by historians not based in South Africa. If the dramatic and ironic fate of radical historical scholarship in the context of the transition to a post‐apartheid democracy is the volume's primary topic, then it unfortunately fails to provide serious and sustained critical reflection on the origins and possible explanations for that crisis. A marked feature of the accounts of “history making” provided in this volume is the (former) radical historians' lack of self‐reflexivity and the scant interest shown in the underlying history of their own intellectual trajectories.     

The house gun: White writing,white fears and black justice (Respond to this article at http://www.therai.org.uk/at/debate)

One way of understanding the Pistorius case is through the powerful writings of white South African authors such as Nobel Prize laureate Nadine Gordimer's anticipatory post‐apartheid novel, The house gun, in which she imagined a scenario similar to the one played out in the Pistorius trial where white fears and black justice met in the courtroom. South Africa is not unique. The mobilization of white peoples' fear of black or brown ‘intruders’ has infected other divided nations, like the United States and Israel. Here the social and architectural construction of ‘white’ settler or settler‐like special enclosures fortified by the legal right to self‐defence with private weapons has reproduced a colonial ‘paranoid ethos’ and a dangerous denial of the violence that is nested like a coiled rattlesnake from within their own segregated and hypervigilant enclosures.     

Gender,Traditional Authority,and the Politics of Rural Reform in South Africa

The new South African Constitution, together with later policies and legislation, affirm a commitment to gender rights that is incompatible with the formal recognition afforded to unelected traditional authorities. This contradiction is particularly evident in the case of land reform in many rural areas, where women’s right of access to land is denied through the practice of customary law. This article illustrates the ways in which these constitutional contradictions play out with particular intensity in the ‘former homelands’ through the example of a conflict over land use in Buffelspruit, Mpumalanga province. There, a number of women who had been granted informal access to communal land for the purposes of subsistence cultivation had their rights revoked by the traditional authority. Despite desperate protests, they continue to be marginalized in terms of access to land, while their male counterparts appropriate communal land for commercial farming and cattle grazing. Drawing on this protest, we argue that current South African practice in relation to the pressing issue of gender equity in land reform represents a politics of accommodation and evasion that tends to reinforce gender biases in rural development, and in so doing, undermines the prospects for genuinely radical transformation of the instituted geographies and institutionalized practices bequeathed by the apartheid regime.     

The stubborn persistence of local land use powers: a comment on Morrill

Contrary to Professor Morrill's thesis, land use powers in the United States are not centralizing in the hands of regional and national elites favoring metropolitan consumption interests. Indeed, the article cites evidence that land use powers have decentralized since the 1970s. The white middle and upper classes, concentrated in suburban residential enclaves, are well-served by decentralized land-use controls. Morrill is right to be concerned about threats to local democracy in the United States. But his suggested solution, leaving local governments alone to set land use policies, is flawed. Regional land use planning, does not necessarily reduce local liberty but could enhance it by dampening the beggar-thy-neighbor chase for tax ratables and enhancing the residential choices of low-income, as well as minority, households.     

Rethinking Land Struggle in the Postindustrial City

The racial and cultural politics of land and property are central to urban struggle, but have received relatively little attention in geography. This paper analyzes land struggles in Detroit where over 100,000 parcels of land are classified as “vacant”. Since 2010, planners and government officials have been developing controversial plans to ruralize Detroit's “vacant” neighborhoods as part of a program of fiscal austerity, reigniting old questions of racialized dispossession, sovereignty, and struggles for liberation. This paper analyzes these contentious politics by examining disputes over a white businessman's proposal to build the world's largest urban forest in the center of a Black majority city. I focus on how residents, urban farmers, and community activists resisted the project by making counterclaims to vacant land as an urban commons. They argued that the land is inhabited not empty and that it belonged to those who labored upon and suffered for it. Combining community‐based ethnography with insights from critical property theory, critical race studies, and postcolonial theory, I argue that land struggles in Detroit are more than distributional conflicts over resources. They are inextricable from debates over notions of race, property, and citizenship that undergird modern liberal democracies and ongoing struggles for decolonization.     

基于面板模型的城市居民国内旅游消费实证分析

本文通过整理面板数据并构建面板模型,分别以出游率、人均旅游花费与旅游购买力衡量旅游消费,引入虚拟变量区分收入水平与SARS危机的影响,从而揭示了收入对城市居民国内旅游消费的决定作用。模型估计结果表明：第一、对不同的旅游消费指标,收入的决定作用存在差异,其中,旅游购买力与出游率的收入弹性远大于人均旅游花费的收入弹性;第二、与低收入城市居民相比较,高收入城市居民国内旅游的出游率收入弹性减小,人均旅游花费收入弹性增大;第三、SARS对高收入城市居民国内旅游消费的负面影响更大。最后,根据面板数据的描述性统计结果与模型估计结果,从供给角度,建议在全国层次注重发展观光旅游,在旅游目的地层次注重细分目标市场。     

中国城乡居民国内旅游消费水平和消费结构比较研究

国内旅游一直是中国旅游的主要构成部分,对拉动内需、促进全国经济增长的作用日益凸显,因此,研究中国国内旅游消费意义重大。本文依据2001-2008年《中国旅游统计年鉴》和《中国国内旅游抽样调查资料》,比较分析了中国城乡居民的国内旅游消费水平和消费结构,发现两者之间存在诸多差异,并对其原因进行了分析。在此基础上,提出了中国城乡居民国内旅游消费水平提升和消费结构优化的路径:提高城乡居民可自由支配收入、合理制定景区门票价格、优化旅游产品结构、加强旅游消费引导。     

Passports,Citizenship, Residency and Asylum: The Meanings of Decolonisation in Lesotho

In late colonial Basutoland and early independence Lesotho, the issue of who could access citizenship rights and passports became increasingly important. Political refugees fleeing apartheid South Africa took up passports on offer in the territory to further their political work. Basotho residents also took up passports in increasing numbers as a way of safeguarding their economic, social and political rights on both sides of the border. The lure of a Citizens of the United Kingdom and Colonies (CUKC) passport drew refugees to Basutoland in the early 1960s, but it was South Africa’s decision to leave the Commonwealth in 1961 that spurred many in Lesotho to formalise their imperial citizenship as well, even as independence for Lesotho became increasingly likely. The stories of those taking up papers illuminate how citizenship became a space for contestation between individuals and governments. The stories also show how the concept of the transfer of power does not accurately reflect the ways in which the sovereignty of newly independent African states, apartheid South Africa and the United Kingdom were all limited by a series of decisions made in the late colonial period. Tracing these stories helps us better understand the limitations of the term ‘decolonisation’ for reflecting the understandings and complications of citizenship in 1960s and 1970s southern Africa.     

20世纪90年代中国城市居民的文化消费——以北京为例

文化消费的比重较大是小康型消费结构的一个重要标志,20世纪90年代北京城市居民的生活水平率先实现了小康,在居民文化消费支出不断增加的基础上,文化消费的内容日渐丰富,其中最为突出的是教育消费比重增长迅速、书报杂志消费异军突起、文娱消费浪潮不断高涨、旅游消费持续升温、休闲消费成为时尚。随着人们的视野开阔和思想解放,文化消费的领域仍在扩展之中。与乡村居民和其他城市居民相比较,北京城市居民的文化消费水平处于一个较高的位置。     

Dynamics and patterns of the shrinking of Arab lands in Palestine

This paper seeks to sketch a number of geographical patterns pertaining to the ongoing process of confiscation of Palestinian-Arab land in Israel and the 1967 occupied territories. It points out a geographical pattern and process of “enclaving” and “exclaving”, a form of spatial apartheid and exclusionary zoning which was adopted during the pre-state period of Jewish settlement and has continued down to the present day. The centrality of land possession and its transfer to Jewish national and state ownership is shared by almost all political classes in Israel. Even during key points in peace negotiations over the past several years, land confiscation never ceased nor was interrupted. The present paper employs the term “shrinking” to underscore that land confiscation is a continuous process in Palestine/Israel. This of course has both political and social ramifications for the type of state Israel seeks to be, declaring its desire to live in peace and harmony with its own Palestinian citizens and Palestinians elsewhere once a peace deal has been reached. Seen from the perspective of land, its control and use, this paper argues that there is no other alternative in achieving peaceful resolution between Jews in Israel and Palestinians except a return to square one: redefining a new geography for Palestinian villages and towns in Israel and for those many hundreds of villages which were demolished and have since been obliterated.