Being British in South Africa
Privilege etches the landscape of South Africa. Racialized advantage is produced through multiple social mechanisms of South African life, but it is the materiality of space that makes their daily operations starkly visible. Exploring such questions as who owns what, who goes where, how this or that person travels and why, helps to expose the texture of privilege and its corollaries: inequality and discrimination. In South Africa, the geographical lens is particularly significant because the management of the spatial has long been the key means by which racialized positions have been constructed and privilege secured. From the early days of colonialism, and particularly since the introduction of the apartheid regime in 1948, whiteness has sought to construct superiority through the establishment of partitioned and privileged white spaces. However, it is now nearly twenty years since the post-apartheid government in South Africa came into office with a mandate of universal democracy and racial equality. It is therefore important to explore the extent to which the landscape of South Africa, and the position of bodies within it, has changed in accordance with the new ideological climate of egalitarianism and multiracialism. In short, what does the transition away from apartheid tell us about privilege, its positions and its possibilities?
Colonial settler elites of Dutch and British immigrants first introduced a racialized inscription onto the spatial landscape of South Africa in the mid-seventeenth century. However, it was the system of white minority rule known as apartheid which particularly consolidated racially exclusive places of work, residence, and leisure as policy (Murray 2011). Indeed, the racial demarcation and management of space was a fundamental tenet of apartheid, and Johannesburg, one of the nation's largest and most powerful cities, was a quintessential example of how the urban environment was used as a resource to segregate people by race and establish white privilege. For most of the twentieth century, land management philosophy was to eliminate racial diversity and construct racially distinct and single-use zones in the city landscape. The fundamental ideology behind the design of its commercial districts and residential neighborhoods was to prevent any possibility of racial mixing: “to keep apart rather than bring together” (Murray 2011, 177). As a result, everyday life was conducted within luxurious and cocooned enclaves for the whites, whilst for the blacks, this life took place “in ramshackle townships on the urban fringe, blighted inner-city ghettoes or featureless squatter settlements” (Murray 2011, 148).
However, as the twentieth century came to an end, a progressive breach in and disintegration of a racially exclusive metropolitan area started to emerge in cities such as Johannesburg. Certain groups of people: a few liberal whites as well as blacks, started to challenge the racialized exclusivity of certain spaces within the city, constituting a profound crisis for apartheid governance (Conway 2009). Yet since the eventual abolition of apartheid in 1994, this early promise of changing the positions and identities of people/space has only been very partially delivered. Many white people have resisted the full democratization of space in a number of ways (e.g. Ballard 2005; Lemanski 2007), such that, in short, space continues to be a key resource by which privilege is constructed and maintained (Leonard 2010).
In this chapter, I draw on new ethnographic and biographical research to explore this issue further. I examine how one particular group of South African residents, white British expatriates in South Africa, draw on the spatial landscape to negotiate their identities and social relations in this changing political context. “The British” or, as they are now more commonly known in South Africa, “English-speaking whites”1 (Lambert 2009, 601) are a group that has clearly lost much of its political power in contemporary South Africa, but by and large they continue to enjoy a privileged lifestyle economically, socially, and geographically (Conway and Leonard forthcoming). Space, in the material ways in which it is managed and lived, as well as through its cultural imaginings, is a key resource in the making and maintaining of this privilege (Hughes 2010). The ways in which this process is further marked by nationality is explored here by examining the everyday lives of British residents living in Johannesburg. Not only does Johannesburg have a significant history of segregated white presence, but it has also maintained transnational connections with Western Europe. The ways in which British residents locate themselves within this dynamic context reveals a diversity of positions but, for all, the geographies of privilege are a continuing accomplishment, forged both locally and through transnational connections. This chapter argues that landscape undoubtedly still provides a powerful means by which whiteness sustains its privileges in the new South Africa. It also hints that other possibilities may exist (Merleau-Ponty 2002).
South Africa has a unique history of raced relations, produced through periods of colonization, racial segregation, and democratization. Between 1948 and 1994, the system of racial discrimination known as “apartheid” was established. The word comes from the Dutch word “apartness” or “separateness,” by which the country was framed both politically and materially (Butler 2009). Yet even before this time, the country was far from integrated. There had been continuous skirmishing for power, since the first European migrants arrived in the mid-seventeenth century. In the period from the 1870s onwards, three groups of people emerged as particularly significant in the battles over resources and power: the African farmers known as the Xhosa and Zulu, the Dutch immigrants, known as Afrikaners or Boers, and the British imperialists. The Boers, the descendants of the early Dutch colonists from the Cape, had supplied the Dutch East India Company and had later spread north and east into African land. They had grasped seemingly “empty” stretches of land resulting from the divisions between different African peoples (Butler 2009). Meanwhile the British, who had acquired the Dutch East India Company in 1802, took control of the Cape Colony and started to take possession of the coastal regions. They did this by force and without the consent of its indigenous peoples.
The two white communities were divided. The period after 1870 was marked by a particularly dramatic disintegration of their relationships. Diamonds, and then gold, were discovered in the Transvaal region, which is now known as Johannesburg, “City of Gold.” This fueled the British desire to gain control of the whole of South Africa, culminating in the Boer War of 1899 to 1902. After the “defeat” of the Afrikaners, the country was unified as a British colony through the 1910 Act of Union and became a leading place of settlement for British migrants. As a British Dominion, it shared the racial and governmental features of the British Empire; namely that whiteness and a British nationality delivered substantial social mobility, power, and privilege. Indeed, it was the racialized political machinery developed at this time which laid the economic, political, and institutional foundations of the later apartheid system (Butler 2009).
After 1910, emerging systems of racial segregation deepened the need for migrant labor in the British owned mines and farms. A flexible migrant labor system required mobility, and to this end the Natives Land Act 1913 squeezed African access to land by allocating 87 percent of land to Whites and prohibiting land purchase and non-labor-based tenure by Africans. Although there were some successful pockets of resistance, with some successfully buying land and establishing “black spots” in “white” South Africa (Sparks 1997), this Act, combined with a complex set of pass laws which prevented blacks from moving around the countryside to sell their labor, meant that many had little choice but to migrate toward cities. However, at this time, the 1923 Urban Areas Act entrenched spatial segregation practices as well as acting to control the “influxes” of the black and coloured2 population. Through a complex system of “pass laws” the movement of Africans and coloureds in the urban areas was highly regulated, preventing their entry into designated “white” spaces.
At the same time, however, conflict within the white community intensified. Compared to the Afrikaners, many of whom were unskilled and poor, the British were prosperous, and an emerging middle class soon developed which scorned its neighbors, whilst the Afrikaners in turn still resented the outcome of the Boer War which had been unfavourable to them. In the 1930’s, an Afrikaner National Party emerged which developed ideologies of racial purity and even more racial segregation. These ideas became increasingly popular amongst the white population, which associated black urbanization with fears of being “swamped” (Butler 2009). In 1948, the Afrikaner National Party (NP) won an election victory under the mandate of apartheid, a system of governance that remained in place until the first universally democratic elections of 1994.
Whilst the NP immediately introduced the Population Registration Act, which enforced the classification of people into four strict racial categories: White, Coloured, Indian/Asiatic, and Native (later Bantu or African), it wasn't until the 1960s that apartheid really reached its zenith. The 1950s were marked by a series of acts which consolidated the ways in which space was drawn upon to underpin the apartheid regime. The Group Areas Act of 1950 enforced residential segregation by race across the country, whilst the Registration of Separate Amenities Act of 1953 segregated transport, cinemas, restaurants, sporting facilities, and, later, all educational institutions. In the “European” cities such as Johannesburg, black squatter camps were destroyed and replaced by segregated satellite “townships” adjacent to the main urban conurbations. The Native Laws Amendment Act of 1952 limited permanent residency in urban areas to blacks who had lived there for fifteen years and who had worked for the same employer for ten years (Sparks 1997). Residential details like these were stamped into a pass book which black people had to carry with them at all times on pain of instant arrest. It was through such ratcheting up of the pass law system that white areas were increasingly “purified.” This was not without substantial costs, however, as within a few years pass law arrests were amounting to two thousand a day (Sparks 1997).
Up until the 1960s, however, the racial segregation in South Africa was not so different from other parts of colonial Africa, or indeed the world.3 After South Africa declared itself a Republic in 1961, apartheid entered a second phase, and a period began in which space was drawn upon still more invidiously as a fundamental resource for racism and discrimination. The new policy of “separate development,” engineered system of “retribalization” under which black people were forcibly removed from “incorrect locations” to the ethnic-based developments of newly created Homelands or Bantustans.4
In 1970, homeland citizenship was forced upon all Africans, who had to be assigned to an ethnic group according to rules of descent. By 1989, 3.5 million black Africans, Coloureds, and Indians had been forcibly removed after being judged to be of the incorrect ethnicity for their location (Thompson 2001; Butler 2009). The primary aim of the homeland policy was to remove Black African access to any area other than their homelands, unless they were needed by white employers to work. In 1967, the Government strengthened this position by prohibiting Africans from visiting any urban area for more than 72 hours without a special permit. Under this law the number of African arrests rose still further, peaking in 1975 and 1976 at nearly 400,000 (Thompson 2001).
The system was unsustainable. In the decade between 1960 and 1970, the black population in white urban areas fell by over 200,000, but it grew in the reserves by almost a million, resulting in substantial overcrowding and impoverishment (Butler 2009). As the black population rose, so did their political power, making it increasingly difficult to maintain spatial control. This, together with the rising power of the predominantly, but not exclusively, black African National Congress (ANC), as well as the growing global antagonism to the South African regime, started the gradual erosion of the NP.
The 1970s and 1980s witnessed a series of anti-apartheid resistance efforts including the boycotting of commuter buses, strikes, and demonstrations against the school system. These incidents, which included the renowned Soweto Uprising in 1976, were met by the militarized Afrikaner regime with increasing levels of brutality. Ordinary black people, including school children, were injured or killed in the riots. These eventd provoked international condemnation and strong disapproval by Afrikaner intellectuals. With the eyes of the world upon them, the government realized that changes would have to be made.
By the mid-1980s, some segregation laws had been eliminated and black people had limited access to public facilities and transport. The government was also “turning a blind eye” (Thompson 2001, 221) to black occupation of some of the white residential areas of Johannesburg, such as Hillbrow. However, the reform process had its limits: the Land and the Group Areas Acts still excluded Africans from land ownership outside the homelands, and African communities were still being forcibly relocated. Consequently, anti-apartheid resistance was escalating. In a desperate attempt to maintain control over the black population, the government declared a national state of emergency in 1986. These attempts at control proved to be unsuccessful. The writing was on the wall: things had to change. With the presidential appointment of F. W. de Klerk in 1989, dialogue was at last opened with the ANC, culminating in the cancelation of the state of emergency, the repeal of the remaining apartheid laws, and eventually, the release of Nelson Mandela in 1990. On April 27, 1994 the country held its first universal franchise democratic elections (Sparks 1997; Thompson 2001; Butler 2009).
Since 1994, however, land reform has been slow. Although white farmers agree land ownership patterns are unequal, little has been done to change them in any systematic way. There have been some “heart-warming cases of land restored to communities from which it had, effectively been stolen” (Johnson 2009, 585–86) but in practice, this has almost invariably meant a return to subsistence agriculture. The landscape has changed little in urban areas as well: the blacks still live predominantly in the townships and squatter camps on the urban fringe, and the whites remain nestled in luxurious accommodation behind high walls and barbed wire fences. However, the rise of a black middle class has started a slow process of change in the residential and commercial spaces of Johannesburg. As I will show, multiracial environments are increasing, offering new spatial resources to their residents.
What of the white British residents in South Africa over this time? How do we understand their position during this long period of racial and spatial segregation which has so blighted South African history? It can be argued that during the period when the country was governed by the (Afrikaner) National Party, British immigrants and the wider English-speaking white community (who are largely of British and Irish descent) occupied a politically marginalized and socially ambivalent position (Conway and Leonard, forthcoming). Indeed, as the central political relationship was between Afrikaans-speaking whites and black Africans, British migrants have been described as playing a “curious role in a drama cast for two” (Sparks 1997, 46).
On their side, the British were accused by the Afrikaners of being uncommitted to the nation, as “soutpiel”: having one foot in South Africa, one foot in Britain, and a penis dangling in the Atlantic. However, the declaration of a Republic in 1961, and the expulsion of South Africa from the Commonwealth because of its apartheid regime, marked the beginning of a rapprochement between the National Party government and English-speaking whites. The Afrikaners now needed all the white support they could muster. South Africa's rapid economic growth in the 1960s and 1970s coincided with the reintroduction of the assisted passage scheme for skilled white migrants and the active recruitment by the South African government of British people belonging to certain professions and having certain skills. British citizens who settled in the country did not have any significant political power, but they were rewarded significantly in terms of lifestyle and social status. Between 1946 and 1961, 115,394 British emigrants settled in the country and at the height of white immigration (1961–77), 243,000 British-born citizens settled in the country (Republic of South Africa [RSA] 1989, 101). Between the 1960s and 1975, South Africa gained between 20,000 and 35,000 immigrants a year, which accounted for no less than 46% of white population growth (RSA 1989, 85).
Of all white immigrant nationalities, British immigrants are consistently and by far the largest community, comprising between 45.6% and 30.2% of annual immigrant arrivals between 1946 and 1987 (Conway and Leonard forthcoming). Similarly, the UK was also the leading destination for emigration between these years (RSA 1989, 101). However, unpalatable political events such as the 1976 Soweto Uprising and the declaration of the national state of emergency in 1986 contributed to further net white emigration in 1977 and from 1986 onwards (RSA 1989, 98; Conway and Leonard forthcoming).
Since 1994, and the shift from an authoritarian white minority regime to a multiracial democracy, South Africa has come to be viewed more positively by the outside world more generally and British migrants in particular. Its full readmittance to international flows of trade, finance, and cultural exchange has been accompanied by significant increases in British tourism, second home ownership, and retirement migration to the country, along with continued professional and other forms of labor migration. Between 2005 and 2009, South Africa was the seventh most popular destination for British emigrating retirees and now has the eighth largest British-born community in permanent residence: 219,000 people in 2008 (Finch, Andrew, and Latorre 2010, 29, 37). However, divisions within the country remain, not only between blacks and whites, but also amongst whites. In particular, the different position of English speakers continued to be revealed after 1994, where, interestingly, “both conservative and liberal English-speaking South Africans seem wary of accepting the new dispensation and are accused by Africans of being less prepared to adapt than are Afrikaners” (Lambert 2009, 611). This differentiation within the white community occurs amidst the wider crisis in white identity after apartheid, as there is now “an acute sense of loss of the familiar, loss of certainty, loss of comfort, loss of privilege, loss of well-known roles … a delusional home now collapsed” (Steyn 2001, 150). Although the crisis of whiteness has led to significant white emigration from South Africa, it is not necessarily accompanied by a loss of discursive confidence or insistence that South African whites have no right to live in and define the country (Conway and Leonard forthcoming). Indeed, Steyn and Foster argue that “In this new context, the central question for whiteness, as the orientation which takes its privilege as normal and appropriate, can be put simply: how to maintain its advantages in a situation in which black people have legally and legitimately achieved political power?” (Steyn and Foster 2008, 26, italics added). As this chapter aims to show, the use of space and the construction of place provide key answers to this question.
The most popular places of British settlement remain as they have been since the nineteenth century: Johannesburg, Cape Town and the Western Cape, and Durban and Pietermaritzburg in Kwazulu-Natal. Yet Johannesburg is a very different sort of place from Cape Town or Durban. It lacks the dramatic beauty of Cape Town or the cosy Britishness of Kwazulu-Natal, which is often called “the last outpost of the British Empire” (Lambert 2010, 150), but it is certainly not constructed by British residents as in any way a poor relation. On the contrary, it too is seen to offer very specific and even attractive resources for identity construction and, in the process, race making.
Two competing discourses currently dominate the representation of Johannesburg's space (Lefebvre 1991). The first of these is national and global: this is often how the city of Johannesburg and often South Africa as a nation (and sometimes the whole nation) tend to be represented in much of the (Western) world. This is asa an infamous “arena for violence, crime and shocking inequality” (Holland and Roberts 2002, 1); summed up through the discourse of “Jo'burg.” Jo'burg is constructed as a deeply segregated city, where everyday lives are organized into racially distinct spaces and places, and white and black residents in the main live and work in very different representations of space. As such, Jo'burg is a city of deep contrasts: downtown, central Johannesburg was deserted in the 1980s by industry, business and finance, entertainment and leisure, and is now physically deteriorating and tarnished by white people as a tense, dangerous, and litter-ridden place of crime, drugs, violence, homelessness, and fear (Murray 2011). However it is, simultaneously, a vibrant and cosmopolitan African space (Simone 2004; Tomlinson, Beauregard, Bremner, & Mangcu, 2003).
To the south, southeast, and southwest lie the townships and informal settlements, often described as “squatter camps” stretching out toward Soweto, where the bulk of black residents were forced to live under apartheid and still remain to this day. Many of these areas lack social amenities and in certain cases even the most rudimentary of services (Murray 2011). To the north, white South Africans, British and Afrikaners intermingle in the white dominated and luxurious suburbs. The standard of living here is high, with large houses in extensive grounds, often in residential gated communities or (due to intense security) quiet, tree-lined streets.
The contrast between the suburbs and the townships is vast, and this fuels the dominant subdiscourse which frames the landscapes of privilege: “safety and security.” This is a key white fear into which British migrants are quickly socialized, such that the norm is that houses are surrounded by heavy duty fortification: high concrete walls topped by curling barbed wire, with security cameras and electric gates. Everyone has a big dog, and (black) security guards oversee comings and goings. Sadly, the large and beautiful parks with which these suburbs were historically landscaped are often completely deserted.
In contrast to the Jo'burg discourse, however, a new and competing discourse is emerging. This is Jozi, the “cool cousin” of Cape Town, which has grown up since 1994. Jozi is a city of “urban vibe”, an “infused mixture of Africa and the west” with a “cultural and cosmopolitan buzz, a youthful energy and edge” (Holland and Roberts 2002, 4). As such it draws new arrivals from across the continent and beyond; a far cry from the Johannesburg of old, with its history as an exploitative white mining city or even the more recent crime-ridden Jo'burg. For some, as the seat of the attack against apartheid, chiefly by black residents, but also by some whites, Jozi is now seen by some to be making a real attempt to be a city representative of the “Rainbow Nation.” Its representations of space reveal how town planners and property developers are attempting at one level to construct a modern multicultural and egalitarian city through vast new shopping malls, cosmopolitan entertainment and eating areas, all of which attempt to give a substantial nod to black African inclusion. Chief cultural attractions such as the Apartheid Museum, the Hector Peiterson Museum, and Mandela House in Soweto, and Soccer City in Nasrec (between Soweto and Johannesburg) forward Jozi's struggle history in movingly uncompromising ways.
Yet in spite of the emergence of this more optimistic discourse, Johannesburg remains substantially a racially excluding and divided city, just as it was in the apartheid era. Clearly this claim is nothing new, and as such the purpose of looking at this nearly twenty years after the fall of apartheid must be to explore critically whether there has been any change in the context by which space is conceptualized and drawn upon in the making of privilege. This paper begins answering this question by focusing on the everyday lives of Johannesburg residents.
The identity of a place is formed out of social interrelations, and a proportion of those interrelations—larger or smaller, depending on the time and on the place—will stretch beyond that “place” itself. (Massey 1994, 115)
Contemporary geographical understandings of place stress how the grounded locales of everyday life are continuously produced by a range of social, economic, and cultural processes which range from the very local to the global (Lefebvre 1991; Massey 1994; Cresswell 2004). Identities of places are far from fixed, but are continuously constructed by social interactions and relations which intersect at that particular location. I have argued elsewhere that places are where encounters happen, and through these encounters, important connections are made between the identity of place and constructions of personal subjectivities (Leonard 2010). As we are “always multiple and contradictory subjects, inhabitants of a diversity of communities … constructed by a variety of discourses, and precariously and temporarily sutured at the intersection of those positions” (Mouffe 1988, 44), we bring multiplicity to places and with this help in turn to produce the multiplicity of place (Massey 1994). These processes cannot be understood therefore by considering the local context in isolation. As Massey (1994) argues, the diversity of people's biographies and transnational connections mean that the global world is always constituted in and through the local, and as such a local place is made distinctive by its particular set of interrelationships with the global.
This conceptualization of space as active and alive has its legacy in Lefebvre's (1991) influential geography, which views space as simultaneously socially producing and socially produced. Lefebvre constructs space as mutually created by and creating social actors, through both discourse and the senses, and as necessarily involving issues of identity, politics, and power (Merrifield 2000). These notions are brought together by Lefebvre into an analytical framework which I suggest can offer a particularly useful point of access to exploring the relationships between space, race, and (privileged) migration.
Migration involves multiple processes: at one end is the packing up of homes and lives and the leaving of the familiar. Then, after traveling to a new country and landscape, there is, at the other end, the choosing of a place to live and the establishing of a new home and life. In most situations this involves, at the very least, a multiplicity of emotional, sensory, social, and political processes. In the case of British migrants to South Africa, with its diverse and complex history of race/national relations, this has also always involved decision making on how to position oneself within these relations. Lefebvre's attempt to capture the complexity of space, and its connections with everyday life, offers a conceptual framework by which to understand the multiple processes involved here.
Lefebvre conceptualizes space through three key aspects. The first of these, spatial practice, makes clear links with Merleau-Ponty (1962) and Bourdieu (1984) by recognizing that space is a phenomenological experience, taken for granted through the habits or practical knowhow of the body. This describes how we develop everyday routines through and in space, doing so in regular, habitual, and even prereflective ways. The paths and journeys we make, whether short or long, whether walking, jogging, cycling, or driving, require a combination of sensory and spatialized activities which not only constitute the phenomenological ground of “doing everyday life” but are also useful in revealing the embodied ways in which this is accomplished, both individually and collectively, within specific social structures and relations (Hockey and Allen-Collinson 2009).
The conceptualization of the second aspect, representations of space, is particularly useful in capturing the planned nature of space, and how this may be strategically redesigned in the management of cultural change. Since 1994, much of urban South Africa has been subject to a new generation of property developers, town planning professionals, and land speculators who, as I have discussed above, have set their sights on constructing world-class cities and residential developments (Murray 2011). The energy marshaled by these professionals in redesigning the material conditions of work, consumption, leisure, and home bear witness to the fact that space is viewed as an integral means by which to represent relations and practices not only materially, but also socially, politically, culturally, and psychologically. However, Lefebvre's triadic framework challenges us to develop a more heterogeneous or even heterotopian perspective; one that complicates the relations of power between planners, developers, and citizens, and represents space as simultaneously controlling and enabling (Foucault 1980).
What people do with and in space is not always what was intended. Pertinent here, is the third aspect, the notion of representational space, which enables the conceptualization of space as something imagined and discursively constructed by everyone through symbols and language. It is thus not only planners and architects who have the power to interpret space; we all do, whether this be through decorating our homes, managing our plots of land (or “stands” as these are called in South Africa), or selecting our neighbors. Further, this aspect makes important connections with recent geographical work which explores the relationships between space, place, and emotion (Sibley 1995; Davidson, Bondi, and Smith 2005; Smith, Cameron, and Bondi 2009). This perspective highlights how different environments can evoke complex emotions, and that attending to such feelings as fear, anxiety, longing, anger, envy, and hatred may be essential if we are to understand fully how space is integral to processes of racialized inclusion and exclusion.
We must be consistently aware of how space can be made to hide consequences from us, how relations of power and discipline are inscribed into the apparently innocent spatiality of social life. (Soja 1989, 6)
Taking a multiple analytic approach, which incorporates embodied and emotional responses as well as social and political action and imagination, is thus particularly important in contexts where space is highly racially segregated and emotionally charged, such as South Africa. Space and place are integral to the production and performance of white privilege here, and the Lefebvrian framework helps to reveal how this is concatenated through embodied activity, the management of space as well as language and symbols. Part of learning to be white in South Africa is to learn the specific places of whites, where these are and what these look like, as well as how to perform within these in ways that produce and maintain power, distance, and authority over other people in other places (Frankenberg 1993; Kothari 2006).
The social category of whiteness, as well as the individual, inscribes race further by making material and imagined connections between spaces and places, such that, for example, Britain becomes an important symbol to British expatriates. For example, to represent their transnational connections, I have often seen living rooms belonging to British families in South Africa decorated in “the English style”: paintings of English landscapes, chintz-covered sofas, Victorian antiques, with English magazines on the footstool. In this way whiteness and nationality (as well as class) are constituted materially and imaginatively in the ways particular spaces and places, and the things within them, are conceived. In addition, through the performance of daily routines and habits, these places and spaces are further constructed as white: cups of tea are made, dogs are cuddled, and British soap operas are watched. As Tuan describes, “what begins as an undifferentiated space becomes place as we get to know it better and endow it with value” (1977, 6). The inscription of meaning in places is therefore intertwined with the embodied performances which take place there, the people who are making these, as well as the connections these people make with other spaces, both local and global.
Place and space do not therefore merely provide a backdrop for the negotiation of raced and national identities, but are central resources in the construction of these (Halford and Leonard 2006). Further, and perhaps more critically, space is also implicated in the construction and structuring of our relations with others, and, as Gregory and Urry put it: “Spatial structure is now seen not merely as an arena in which social life unfolds, but rather as a medium through which social relations are produced and reproduced” (1985, 3). Space is thus central to the production, organization, and distribution of identity, race, and also power (Foucault 1980; Shome 2003).
It was to explore the relationships between identity, race, and place that research was conducted in South Africa between 2009 and 2011.5 The research aimed to look at the lives and experiences of a broad variety of British residents and to investigate the extent and manner to which they were accommodating themselves to the changing political and social regime. The research was primarily based in Johannesburg, Cape Town, and Pietermaritzburg near Durban, three key sites of British dwelling, and a multimethod, ethnographic, and biographical approach was taken. This included visual methods and unstructured interviews, but also, crucially, mobile methods. As a key aim was to explore the spatial, attachment to place, and how people draw on space and place in the production of their identities, everyday practices, and senses of social networks, the “mobile interview” was chosen in addition to more conventional, static, typically room-based interviews conducted in my hotel as well as people's homes and workplaces (Clark and Emmel 2010). I thus accompanied participants as they went about their daily lives, and joined them on drives around the city, walks through gated communities, horseback rides, and even safaris through privately owned game parks (Conway and Leonard forthcoming).6
In the remaining sections of this chapter, I draw on the Lefebvrian analysis discussed above to return to explore the two competing discourses that I identified as framing contemporary Johannesburg. These discourses by no means encapsulated the total diversity of lifestyles amongst my research participants, but it was clear that they were powerful in framing experience and understandings, and as such were actively drawn and used in different ways by participants to situate themselves in relation to white privilege in the changing political context.
Many of my participants represented Johannesburg as an inescapably divided city, but this view was then drawn upon in diverse ways. Stephen, a wealthy professional in his fifties, drew on difference—race, class, and nationality—as a desirable resource to produce and maintain his extremely privileged lifestyle. Having lived in the city for thirty years, coming out in the early 1980s via the assisted passage route, he describes himself as “not a great Johannesburg fan.” However, Stephen was very keen to pick me up from my hotel and spend several hours driving me in his large and luxurious car around the greater Johannesburg area in order to give me his guided tour. As we drove, it was clear that what animated Stephen were indeed the landscapes of privilege. His language was shot through with social structure, so as I was invited to look at this house or that township, I was able to see the representations of Johannesburg's space, as well as to gain an insight into Stephen's own representational space and spatial practices. Leaving Sandton behind, we drove over The Ridge toward
the old town, which is where we're going; when the mine bosses, you call them Randlords, chose to build a house they picked the best location, and at that time it was outside of the city. So there's some marvellous houses that I can point out as we travel along here.
Passing the mine dumps which punctuate Johannesburg's landscape as a living reminder of its gold mining past, our ultimate destination was The Rand Club in the old central district. Once the thriving haven of Johannesburg's business and finance community, this is now for many whites a completely “no-go” area. As such, the Club is on its last legs, struggling for membership. However, Stephen still comes here often, loving its colonial past, what this represented, and what this can still deliver:
The Rand Club is very interesting, it was started in about 1890 by Cecil Rhodes. And he began the club to my knowledge really as a bit of one upmanship. The club was intended to appeal to people like me. White, male, Anglo Saxons. The people that we don't want would effectively be blacks, Jews, women. Anybody nonwhite. You'll be pleased to know that the club voted to admit women members only just before I arrived! And I can now use my reciprocal membership to get into a club that wouldn't have me as a member in the UK. That's the joy of colonialism, a bit of class hopping!
Stephen tells me that he has indeed class hopped—he has made a great deal of money by setting up his own business in Johannesburg, and is very pleased he came to South Africa because of this:
This to me is one of the things that you can do in a place like this that you cannot do in a place like London. So occasionally I ask why am I still here, I know the answer, it's because my kids go to fantastic schools and it's because I'm now fifty something, and it'd be very difficult to adjust back to working in London.
However, in spite of this, and the fact that he has a white South African wife and his children have been born and brought up here, nationality remains very important to him as a marker of his difference. He remains resolutely British:
I am British, and I will always be British. And the reason for that is that people like to identify you, to each part of the community, the racial group, the economic group. And so you're pigeon holed without even being asked. And I'm pigeon holed into British South African, and there's an element of me in there obviously I don't want to let go. I quite like being seen as the English fellow. I think when I was doing my business that was an asset. Because I like to think I'm very straight. So when you get an insurance deal it's done right and if somebody expects to get their finger in the pie, well, sorry, that isn't going to work here. So I sort of styled myself and quite enjoyed the concept of the Rand Club. I'm a member of the Rolls Royce and Bentley club. I have ten cars, I have three Bentleys, so I can choose which one I want to use. You can't do that in England. So what's happened here is that for me I've enjoyed moving into a space that is clearly the space that I fit into. (emphasis added).
It is clear that this is very much a “white space” and Stephen is unabashed at the continued segregated nature of his life:
I can't relate to these people. So, the gardener is from Zimbabwe, the maid is from Lesotho. Lovely people, but they're in completely different space to where I'm at. So I'm in the privileged white, you know, monied [space], my kids go to the best schools.
Stephen's wealth clearly enables him to occupy only the spaces of privilege. He connects these with his car journeys around the city, sweeping through, observing the landscape and lives of his fellow citizens but remaining spatially distanced from them, both materially and imaginatively. However, for other, less well-remunerated British, Johannesburg's divisions require less comfortable negotiation. Neil, a computer programmer in his late twenties, has been in the city for six years. Married to an Afrikaner woman, they have just had their first child, and this, and the fact that they position themselves within the Jo'burg subdiscourse of crime and security, is prompting them to think about returning to the UK.
They live in a smallish flat in a middle-income white neighborhood, on the corners of which cluster groups of black men waiting for offers of work or chances to sell things through car windows. Driving past them on a daily basis makes Neil nervous: his representational space is full of danger and crime, and as such he positions himself as ever on the brink of victimhood. This defines his spatial practice: he has never been to Soweto, for example, and his pathways around the city are confined to car journeys between his house, his workplace, the shop, and a British style pub where we meet for lunch. As he explains: “normally the most you would walk is from your car to the shop, or car to work, or car to the garage. That's all you do. Nothing else, don't do walking—I can't even think of a place you would walk without worrying about it.”
At home, Neil enjoys the “luxuries you have behind the barbed wire fence—swimming pool, greenery, somewhere to park my truck…” and he is willing to defend these privileges:
No-one's going to get in my house. I mean I have weapons as well and I'll use them if anyone does get in the house, I mean not a gun and stuff but I've got an axe and I've got a knife, and they're strategically placed. Because all the horror stories that I hear, it's unbelievable.
Yet, whilst his daily life is largely produced in some comfort behind these defenses, he resents what this does to the representation of space as well as his own representational space:
There's no freedom, where do the children play? Well she can go round the corner there, but it's all within security fences, it's all electrified you know. Then you'll worry about them, you know. We've got a sliding door to the back garden and there's a gate that anyone can get through and I just keep saying “keep the door shut!” and my wife's like “yeah but it's not dangerous,” and I say “it just takes once. It just takes once, that's all, then it's very, very unpleasant.…”
As we talked, it was clear that Neil is not happy with the confined nature of his life in South Africa. He recognizes his privileges, but the ways in which these are achieved sit uneasily with him. He worries that he is being changed personally by the raced representations of space in the city, and the ways these play out in spatial practice at a range of scales. This not only affects his relationship with the geography of the city, but also he can see how it affects the embodied, microspatial interactions of everyday life:
It turns you into a racial thing … for example: service. This is another reason I want to go to the UK, we're so spoilt in this country, you know, just snap your fingers and you've got a beer on the table, and I see the worse side of it as well. I've seen a bloke come in, he'll sit down and he won't say his please, thank you and he'll complain that his glass is slightly warm and then “can you take my beer back” and “don't you bother us.” I mean that's not me, that's not my lifestyle.
Albeit in contrasting ways, Stephen and Neil both demonstrate in their constant references to the UK how the grounded locales of everyday life are continuously produced by a range of social, economic, cultural, and embodied processes that draw on both the local and the global (Lefebvre 1994; Massey 1994; Cresswell 2004). Thus as they both position themselves within the Jo'burg discourse, this plays out differently for each of them. Stephen's sense of belonging to/longing for both South Africa and the UK is produced through stereotypical constructions of what it means to be white/male/middle-class/British. He has no desire to return to Britain, however, enjoying its imaginative reach but fearing a substantial material impact on the privileged lifestyle he so enjoys in South Africa. But of course he can if, at any time, he finds he wants to; and this may explain why, in spite of the political changes he has witnessed in the past thirty years, he remains “soutpiel” and largely untouched by these, and untroubled by the social costs involved in the production of his everyday life.
In contrast, Neil's occupation of spatial privilege is more complex. Whilst he feels trapped and confined, and lives in fear for himself and his family, he is troubled by the continued racial divisions which mark life in the city and his engagement with it. At the same time he is rendered immobile by his fears, and these prevent him from taking up alternative positions within South Africa. For Neil, escaping back to what he sees are the privileges of the UK is the only answer; and for him these are primarily a life which lacks the constant fear of crime and, consequently for Neil, a less anxious relationship with the black Other.
For other participants, however, Johannesburg represents the “real South Africa,” offering new and exciting opportunities for social relationships and the performance of everyday lives. Although these too are seen as “privileges,” these advantages are not so much understood in material terms as in cultural ones. Jozi is the name given by some to represent Johannesburg as a city of hope, and some British prefer to position themselves by this metaphor. To illustrate, Lauren and Matt are a young couple in their thirties who have lived in the city for six years, having come from Britain so that Matt could take up a position as a Christian minister. In fact, Matt had been offered two positions—one in Cape Town and one in Johannesburg. Lauren explained how they made their choice:
| Lauren: | They're very different, yes. So, at one level, everything in me wanted to go to Cape Town, because it's like, “I don't really want to emigrate, I don't really want to go to South Africa (laughter).” |
| P: | Oh, you had mixed feelings? |
| L: | Yeah, I had very mixed feelings because I'm quite English really (laughter). Cape Town just feels like, “I could do that.” But at the same time I also felt it was almost too English. If you're actually going to make a difference, really engage in South Africa, Jo'burg is—it feels much more—so I guess there was that tension of—Cape Town's nicer, but Jo'burg feels more, this is where South Africa is really changing. And in the same way in terms of the demographics of the college where my husband teaches, it's 75% black and 25% white. Whereas the college in Cape Town would be much more the other way round. So, that ability to be transformed can happen much quicker up in Jo'burg whereas I think Cape Town is much more pedestrian in its change. |
For Lauren and Matt, Johannesburg's attraction was its racial dynamic, and the ways in which they felt they would be able to engage with this. They live close to a religious college, where Matt trains black ministers as well as preaching in the church. The college is based in the south west of the city which, as Lauren explains is: “a nice area but it's not normal suburbs.” By this she means several things. First, in terms of the representations of space, it is a racially mixed community, unusual in Johannesburg:
Down the road is Sophiatown which was the classic place in the ’50s where all the black people were thrown out of the township. Sophia-town is definitely multicultural whereas Auckland Park would still be more white than that. But it still feels very mixed.
Second, in terms of spatial practice, Lauren and Matt walk and cycle around the suburb. As I have shown above, this is also unusual in any space other than inside a whites-only gated community. Yet Lauren pushes their young baby in her stroller to the shops or to see friends and Matt cycles to the college. Third, in terms of representational space, it feels safer than Lauren had expected: “the security didn't feel as anxious as I thought it would and part of that's where we live it's not such a big issue—you could walk round the area and get out and exercise.”
Seeing Johannesburg as a contemporary and multicultural space is important to the couple. They were keen to avoid the cosy easiness of Cape Town which just felt:
[A]lmost too English. If you're actually going to make a difference, really engage in South Africa! Cape Town is nicer but Jo'burg feels more real—this is where South Africa is really changing. Our word for it is intense—Cape Town is like second gear—whereas in Jo'burg you're in fourth gear!
In contrast, Lauren and Matt are excited by the possibilities which Jozi offers:
In Jo'burg the walls are high but the thresholds are low, whereas in Cape Town, the walls are lower but the thresholds are higher. Jo'burg's this place where everybody's looking for a network, every-body's looking to know people and there's less of an old boy's network and that sort of thing going on. There's just this high energy to everybody that's willing to engage and connect … that's the fun thing about it—the first year we were here, there's just an advert in the paper saying it's Helen Suzman's memorial service, the public are invited. So we go along and Nelson Mandela's wife's there and the old president's there, the great and the good are there. We wouldn't be able to go to this in the UK—but here there's a sense that everybody's invited to join in the history—you're very close to history being made here because it's in the making. When Jacob Zuma won the election, our church was meeting in a big shopping mall in Soweto and so Zuma was doing a rally going along to the city thanking people for voting for him. So he comes into the shopping mall, he goes up the escalator so we know he's going to come down at some point, so my husband stands at the bottom of the escalator, sticks his hand out, and shakes hands with the president and we'd never—no, actually, I did meet John Major when I was very little (laughter) but there's that whole—you can taste it in your—that edge of meeting people. Everybody's making an effort and moving forwards—it's an opportunity—everyone says the opportunity is here to be grabbed and you're quite close to the people who are trying to grab the opportunities.
Lauren and Matt's production of space in Johannesburg is quite different to Stephen's and Neil's. For them Jozi is a space of quite differently imagined opportunities, social and cultural rather than material. Their landscapes of privilege are those that enable them to mix freely in a black community and make new friends. Lauren says: “I'm grateful that a lot of our friends are different to us and I feel really enriched by that.” Having actively chosen the neighborhoods and social circles which most white people in South Africa avoid, Lauren and Matt thus position themselves as “other” to what are perceived as normative white attitudes and behavior. However, whilst they are keen to put a moral distance between themselves and the white majority, Lauren's narratives reveal that the couple is still enmeshed in a colonial sense of entitlement to what Johannesburg has to offer (Reay et al. 2007, 1043).
In this chapter I have drawn on a spatial analysis to explore the everyday lives of a small selection of the British community in Johannesburg. I argue that the different ways in which Stephen, Neil, and Lauren draw on space in the production of their identities and everyday lives, and their talk to me about these, are highly revealing: showing both how they make themselves and their social relationships. The minutiae of their spatial practices, and their language to describe these, offer a point of access to understanding how this very small group of people is positioning themselves in the post-1994 regime, as well as how privilege itself may be changing. The complexity and multiplicity of their narratives reflect that there is by no means a unilinear response within the British community to the social and political changes: some still cling to the wreckage of separated existences, others are consumed by fear of the Other, while still others look forward to the opening up of opportunities which new metaphors of Johannesburg attempt to encapsulate in built and symbolic form.
In its various interpretations, however, it is clear that for the British participants featured in this chapter race is still central to their South African existence. It is deeply embedded in representations of space, in spatial practice, and in representations of space. The point at issue here is that: “Space is not the setting in which things are arranged, but the means whereby the position of things becomes possible” (Merleau-Ponty 2002, 284). Whilst for some Johannesburg space offers the possibility to arrange differently raced people in very different spaces, and, in the process, to use geography to produce and maintain the privileges whiteness has always enjoyed in South Africa, others, like Lauren, articulate a changing relationship to and imagination of space.
Clearly this is a complex amalgam: on the one hand, space offers Lauren an important resource for the construction of the liberal identity she desires, and in her ability to negotiate this to her own ends, it can be argued that, albeit in a different form, her position is still undoubtedly one of privilege. On the other hand, however, it must be acknowledged that Lauren recognizes this. And, in the making of such identities, there is a hint that the position of things may also be changing, and perhaps in positive ways. Whilst the Jozi discourse can be critiqued for offering no more than a superficial nod to multiculturalism, it is a small step toward imagining a more twenty-first century sense of citizenship in which British and Afrikaner, black and white South Africans practice a cospatial existence. It is in the recognition that it is this very cospatiality itself which is now the privilege for its white peoples that the South African landscape is so revealing.
The project “The British in South Africa: Continuity or Change?” was funded by The British Academy and my Coinvestigator is Daniel Conway, University of Loughborough, UK. I am very grateful to Daniel for all our inspiring discussions, and to France Winddance Twine and Bradley Gardener for their helpful and insightful advice and support.
1. I will call this group British in this paper to emphasize that the research includes both long- and short-term expatriates.
2. South Africa developed a rigid set of racial classifications. People who did not fit into a precisely definable ethnic group were lumped together into a hold-all category, “coloured.” According to the Population Registration Act 1950 this included people from the Cape, Malays, Griqua, Chinese, Indian, Other Asiatic, and Other Coloured (Sparks 1997, 85).
3. In the United States, for example, this period was also marked by substantial racial and spatial segregation. In the Jim Crow era (1877–1960s), a series of laws and customs were introduced in the Southern states of the former Confederacy designed to segregate public facilities such as schools, public places (e.g., toilets), transport, restaurants, and drinking fountains, albeit with a supposed “separate but equal” ideology. This legalized racial discrimination took place in the South, but in the North segregatory practices were more covertly institutionalized through, for example, job and housing discrimination (Hoelscher 2003).
4. In the United States, reservations were also introduced for American Indians from the 1860s onwards, after tensions over land possession between white settlers and Native Americans. These still exist to this day, and some reservations have different laws from the surrounding areas. Not all tribes have reservations, and some tribes were forcibly relocated to areas to which they had no connection (Castle and Bee 1992).
5. This research was conducted with Daniel Conway and was funded by the British Academy.
6. More than twenty interviews were conducted in the Johannesburg area. These included a mixture of long-term residents, who had lived in the country since the 1960s and 1970s as beneficiaries of assisted passages, as well as others who had arrived since 1994, and some who had only been in residence for a year or so. Interviewees were a mixture of self-selected people who had responded to newspaper articles about the research as well as participants identified through personal contacts and the snowball method. As the concept of space was of particular interest, variety was sought in the places in which people lived and worked, as well as their connections with the United Kingdom.
Ballard, R. 2005. “When in Rome: Claiming the Right to Define Neighbourhood Character in South Africa's Suburbs.” Transformation 57: 64–87.
Bourdieu, Pierre. 1984. Distinction. London: Routledge, Kegan & Paul.
Butler, Anthony. 2009. Contemporary South Africa (2nd ed.) Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave Macmillan.
Castle, George, and Robert Bee, eds. 1992. State and Reservation: New Perspectives on Federal Indian Policy. Tucson: University of Arizona Press.
Clark, A., & N. Emmel. 2010. “Using Walking Interviews.” Realities 13: 1–6.
Conway, Daniel. 2009. “Queering Apartheid: The National Party's 1987 ‘Gay Rights’ Election Campaign in Hillbrow.” Journal of Southern African Studies 35 (4): 849–63.
———, and Pauline Leonard. (Forthcoming). Migration, Space and Transnational Identities: The British in South Africa. Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave.
Creswell, Tim. 2004. Place: A Short Introduction. Oxford, UK: Blackwell.
Davidson Joyce, Liz Bondi, and Mick Smith. 2005. Emotional Geographies. Aldershot, UK: Ashgate.
Finch, Tim, Holly Andrew, and Maria Latorre. 2010. Global Brit: Making the Most of the British Diaspora. London: IPPR.
Foucault, Michel. 1980. Power/Knowledge. Brighton, UK: Harvester Press.
Frankenberg, Ruth. 1993. White Women, Race Matters: The Social Construction of Whiteness. London: Routledge.
Gregory, Derek, and John Urry. 1985. Social Relations and Spatial Structures. New York: St. Martin's Press.
Halford Susan, and Pauline Leonard. 2006. Negotiating Gendered Identities at Work: Place, Space and Time. Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave.
Hockey, John, and Jacqui Allen-Collinson. 2009. “The Sensorium at Work: The Sensory Phenomenology of the Working Body.” The Sociological Review 2: 217–39.
Hoelscher, Steven. 2003. “Making Place, Making Race: Performances of Whiteness in the Jim Crow South.” Annals of the Association of American Geographers 93(3): 657–86.
Holland, Heidi, and Adam Roberts, eds. 2002. From Jo'burg to Jozi: Stories about Africa's Infamous City Johannesburg. Johannesburg, South Africa: Penguin.
Hughes, David. 2010. Whiteness in Zimbabwe: Race, Landscape and the Problem of Belonging. New York: Palgrave.
Johnson, R. W. (2009). South Africa's Brave New World: The Beloved Country Since the End of Apartheid. London: Penguin.
Kothari, Uma. 2006. “Spatial Practices and Imaginaries: Experiences of Colonial Officers and Development Professionals.” Singapore Journal of Tropical Geography 27: 235–53.
Kriel, Kallie. 2004. “The Revival of Racial Classification in Post-Apartheid South Africa.” Business Day August 10, 2.
Lambert, John. 2009. “An Unknown People: Reconstructing British South African Identity.” Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History 37 (4): 599–617.
———. 2010 “The Last Outpost”: The Natalians, South Africa, and the British Empire.” In Settlers and Expatriates, edited by R. Bickers, 167–182. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press.
Lefebvre, Henri. 1991. The Production of Space. Oxford, UK: Blackwell.
Lemanski, Charlotte. 2007. “Global Cities in the South: Deepening Social and Spatial Polarisation in Cape Town.” Cities 24 (6): 448–61.
Leonard, Pauline. 2010. Expatriate Identities in Postcolonial Organizations. Farnham, UK: Ashgate.
Massey, Doreen. 1994. “Double Articulation: A Place in the World.” In Displacements: Cultural Identities in Question, edited by Angelika Bammer, 110–122. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.
Merleau-Ponty, Maurice. 1962. Phenomenology of Perception. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul.
Merrifield, A. 2000. “Henri Lefebvre: A Socialist in Space.” In Thinking Space, edited by Mike Crang and Nigel Thrift, 167–182. London: Routledge.
Mouffe, Chantal. 1988. “Radical Democracy: Modern or Post Modern?” In Universal Abandon? The Politics of Postmodernism, edited by A. Ross. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minneapolis Press.
Murray, Martin. 2011. City of Extremes: The Spatial Politics of Johannesburg. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.
Reay, Diane, Sumi Hollingworth, Katya Williams, Gill Crozier, Fiona Jameson, David James, and Phoebe Bedell. 2007. “‘A Darker Shade of Pale?’ Whiteness, the Middle Classes and Multi-Ethnic Inner City Schooling.” Sociology, 41(6): 1041–60.
Republic of South Africa Bureau for Information (RSA). 1989. South Africa 1988–89: Official Yearbook. Pretoria: Government Printer.
Shome, Raka. 2003. “Space Matters: The Power and Practice of Space.” Communication Theory 13 (1): 39–56.
Sibley, David. 1995. Geographies of Exclusion. New York: Routledge.
Simone, Abdoumaliq. 2004. People as Infrastructure: Intersecting Fragments in Johannesburg. Public Culture 16 (3): 407–429.
Smith, Mick, Joyce Davidson, Laura Cameron, and Liz Bondi. 2009. Emotion, Place and Culture. Farnham, UK: Ashgate.
Soja, Edward. 1989. Post-Modern Geographies: The Reassertion of Space in Critical Social Theory. London: Verso.
Sparks, Allister. 1997. The Mind of South Africa: The Story of the Rise and Fall of Apartheid. London: Arrow Books.
Steyn, Melissa. 2001. Whiteness Just Isn't What it Used to Be: White Identity in a Changing South Africa. Albany, NY: SUNY Press.
———, and Don Foster. 2008. “Repertoires for Talking White: Resistant Whiteness in Post-Apartheid South Africa.” Ethnic and Racial Studies 31(1): 25–51.
Thompson, Leonard. 2001. A History of South Africa. Jeppestown, South Africa: Jonathan Ball.
Tomlinson, R., R. Beauregard, L. Bremner, and X. Mangcu. (Eds.). 2003. Emerging Johannesburg: Perspectives on the postapartheid city. New York Routledge.
Tuan, Yi-fu. 1977. Space and Place: The Perspectives of Experience. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press.