SPICING UP THE MULTICULTURAL (POST-)APARTHEID CITY

SPICING UP THE MULTICULTURAL (POST-) APARTHEID CITYAuthor(s): STEVEN ROBINSReviewed work(s):Source: Kronos, No. 25, Pre-millennium issue (1998/1999), pp. 280-293Published by: University of Western CapeStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/41056438 .Accessed: 15/04/2012 16:06

Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at .http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp

JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range ofcontent in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new formsof scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact [email protected].

University of Western Cape is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to Kronos.

http://www.jstor.org

SPICING UP THE MULTICULTURAL (POST-)APARTHEID CITY

STEVEN ROBINS University of the Western Cape

The commodification of Otherness has been so successful because it is offered as a new delight, more intense, more satisfying than normal ways of doing and feeling. Within commodity culture, ethnicity becomes spice, seasoning that can liven up the dull dish that is mainstream white [United States] culture.1

The "Malay Quarter" of Cape Town's Bokaap, a key tourist site situated in the historically white city centre, survived the apartheid years precisely because it was officially declared a Malay Group Area (Jeppe, 1998).2 By contrast, only a few kilometres from the Bokaap, the multi-cultural neighbourhood of District Six was entirely demolished in the 1970s. All that remains are the handful of Mosques and Churches that stand out in the otherwise empty void of what was once a thriving multi-cultural District Six. Whereas the tenants and landowners of District Six have instituted legal proceedings through the Land Claims Court, the Bokaap is caught up in an expanding tourist industry that packages Malay identity in terms of the history of Cape slavery and exotic Oriental spice.

While the Malay Quarter is a particularly graphic example of the new "rainbow" tourism in action, the District Six Museum, and the nearby piece of vacant land where District Six once stood, are also on the tourist map. Unlike the Malay Quarter, however, District Six does not conjure up popular imaginings of "ethnic spice". Instead, the District Six Museum exhibit draws attention to the mundane banality of apartheid's devastating Group Areas removals. What this highly successful exhibit does is reveal that there are indeed opportunities to include these more mundane, politically significant sites of remembrance on the tourist's itinerary. Although township tours are drawing some interest from international tourists, it is nonetheless unlikely that large numbers will make the journey to the Cape Flats where many of District Six's evictees now live in low- income housing estates characterised by violence, poverty and gangsterism. It is precisely this legacy of racialised poverty resulting from apartheid-era forced removals that continues to plague Cape Town's city planners' visions of creating an integrated, multicultural post-apartheid tourist-friendly city.

1. bell hooks, in J. Nederveen Pieterse, ... (1996), 35. Citing di Leonardo, Nederveen Pieterse writes "This is the familiar situation [in the United States] of a stable core of WASP hegemony with a sprinkling of ethnic neighbourhoods available for slumming for spicy variety. Thus, Little Italy can be consumed as a tourist commodity, complete with local colour and ethnic atmosphere".

2. S. Jeppie, 'Re-classifications: Coloured Malay , in E. Pieterse and Z. Erasmus, eds, Coloured by History, òhaped by Place (Cape Town, forthcoming).

280

Writing about cultural diversity in Sydney, Sophia Watson draws attention to the homogenising impulse of the modernist legacy of a predominantly British planning tradition. It is a tradition which, she argues, disavows difference. Despite occasional contestations of public spaces in Sydney by Aboriginal groups and non-Anglo migrants, Watson argues that contemporary Australian planning discourses and practices seem to have been only marginally affected by multicultural debates.3

South Africa, as a former British colony, has also inherited this homogenising modernist planning and architectural tradition. However, in the 1990s we have witnessed the arrival on our shores of a global discourse of multiculturalism alongside calls for Africanization in all spheres of South African culture. Architects, for instance, have sought out vernacular African architectural styles and aesthetics, while heritage professionals have been called upon to identify and conserve African "sacred spaces" such as initiation sites. In 1996 I was commissioned by the Cape Town City Planning Department to identify precisely such places of African cultural significance. Although the urban landscape has been profoundly shaped by the more mundane and banal apartheid spatial legacies of racialised segregation and poverty, there seems to be an extraordinary degree of interest in more "exotic" urban spaces. While this exotic notion of African culture does not by any means reflect the perspective of the entire Cape Town City Planning Department, it is nonetheless foregrounded in debates by culture and heritage policy makers and planners at both national and city levels. It is also within this multiculturalist milieu that ethnic tourist villages and township tours are flourishing in various parts of the country.

South Africa's embrace of the rainbow nation metaphor is perhaps the most visible sign of the significance of multiculturalist discourse in the post/apartheid era. However, as many cultural critics have pointed out, multiculturalism tends to become a homogenizing strategy that defines and demarcates the limits within which difference is permitted.4 Watson points out that multiculturalism is generally regarded as benign by Anglo-Australians as long as the exotic 'Other' can be packaged and transformed into folkloric spectacle and tourist dollars. However, cultural difference is viewed with less appreciation if it threatens homogenizing notions of national identity. For instance, there tends to be tolerance for cultural diversity as long as the uniform built environment of suburbia is not compromised or 'polluted', for instance by mixed land-use such as the running of informal businesses from suburban homes. It is interesting that in South Africa, despite stringent planning by-laws prohibiting this, a white working class couple recently won a court application enabling them to run an informal business from their suburban home. Meanwhile, for many decades, black working class people have managed to

3. S. Watson, 'Spaces of the Other: planning for cultural diversity in Western Sydney', in K. L. Darien-Smith, L. Gunnar and S. Nuttall, Text, Theory, Space: land, literature and history in South Africa and Australia (London & New York, 1996).

4. Referring to Australia, Watson writes "Multiculturalism was a reaction to an earlier homogenizing strategy - that of assimmilation - which attempted to minimize difference through defining the dominant Anglo culture as the norm which would envelop and embrace other cultures under its umbrella. Within this discourse migrants would, after a certain period of time, become Australianized and part of the mainstream", 208.

281

evade all such regulations as long as these activities have taken place in the townships. Nonetheless, it would appear that, like Australia, South African planning discourses have not been seriously affected by multicultural discourses and continue to homogenise a highly differentiated population produced through centuries of racialised privilege and oppression.

Planning interventions tend to elide difference in the name of a homogenised "target population".5 This is evident in black working class housing upgrading schemes, such as the Joe Slovo Park low-income housing scheme in Cape Town's historicaly white suburb of Milnerton, where planners and administrators continue to wage a losing battle to enforce regulations that prevent people from running informal businesses (e.g. spaza shops and shebeens) from their homes. Such housing schemes tend to be designed and implemented with a range of homogenising assumptions based on the suburban property model. It was assumed at the Slovo Park project, for instance, that the "target population" of shanty town squatters who qualified for the government housing subsidy would in fact want to settle in small low-income houses. Planners were shocked when home-owners began selling their houses and moving back into shanty settlements where they could continue living in shacks and running informal businesses without having to pay taxes, licences, rates and levies.

Given the hyper-mobility of the majority of these people, along with their limited access to steady wage income, it made little sense to live in the match-box subsidy houses. As a result, many people who could not afford to build extensions to the tiny core structures at the formal housing scheme of Slovo Park, retained their shacks at the informal settlement where they were able to accommodate all the members of their large households. Instead of having to pay large sums of money to build brick extensions to the core houses, they could simply extend their shacks with limited costs using cheap building materials such as corrugated iron. In addition, many ran shebeens and spaza shops from their homes and some were involved in illegal activities such as gun smuggling and dagga (marijuana) dealing.

In comparison to shanty towns, formal townships such as Slovo Park are tightly regulated and policed environments that render residents under constant administrative surveillance. While some beneficiaries of the housing subsidy certainly wanted the security of tenure and administrative order of a formal suburban housing scheme, many others rejected this particular way of living. This paper will focus less on these homogenising planning impulses than on the ways in which multiculturalist discourses - especially in tourism and advertising - often end up reifying the "exotic" and obscuring the more banal and mundane social realities of the urban landscape. However, as will be discussed later, the relatively new phenomenon of township tours seems to complicate the exotic/banal dichotomy by taking tourists to shebeens, spaza shops, Mandela's Soweto home and numerous other places of political and cultural significance in poor coloured and black neighbourhoods. These tours both cover and reveal some of the more everyday spatialised legacies of apartheid planning.

5. J. Ferguson, The Anti-Politics Machine: Development, depoliticization and bureaucratic power in Lesotho (Cambridge, 1990).

282

The Cape of Fear: A Fortress City?

The racialised divide between Cape Town's historically white inner city and Southern Suburbs, and the black and coloured townships remains firmly intact in the new South Africa. By removing blacks and coloureds from multiracial working class neighbourhoods such as District Six and Sophiatown in the 1960s, apartheid spatial planning created the racialised grids upon which the template of the "postmodern", post/apartheid city could seamlessly settle. In contemporary Cape Town these signs of "postmodernity" are evident in the massive expansion of gentrification, mega-developments, heritage and tourist sites and spectacles of consumption such as the Victoria & Alfred Waterfront and the Cavendish Shopping Mall. These relatively new spaces of capital investment in the historically white parts of the city contrast starkly with the poverty, wastelands and desolation of the racially segregated black townships, of the Cape Flats. These racialised geographies of post/apartheid Cape Town reproduce the spatial logic of capital under apartheid despite the dramatic political reforms of the 1990s. Black and coloured working classes remain trapped in places of extreme poverty located at a considerable distance from middle class (mostly white) centres of tourism and consumption. This racialised divide is reproduced through investment strategies that tend to steer clear of the dangerous and desolate spaces of the Cape Flats ghettoes.6 A multi-million rand surveillance and security sector ensures that (mostly white) middle class neighbourhoods and shopping malls are defended against what is perceived to be a dangerous underclass "Other".

An article in the Cape Times on 5 March 1998 entitled "Cameras to watch over you: Huge Waterfront security shake-up", described the multi-million rand security up-grading initiative following at shoot-out between two shoplifters and security guards at Cape Town's Waterfront shopping mall. The article reported that, with already 120 closed-curcuit video cameras, an additional R8 million was earmarked to be spent annually to improve security at the mall.

South Africa's premier tourist destination, the Victoria and Alfred Waterfront, is fast becoming a criminal's nightmare with Big Brother monitoring every square metre with surveillance cameras - and millions of rands more set to be spent on improving security there... The cameras are able to zoom into shops while operators in the control room use radios to guide security guards to a situation which may be suspicious. ... Security guards can even lip read what people are saying using the built-in zoom lenses.7

Directly opposite this frontpage story on the Waterfront was a large colour photograph of a grieving coloured woman, her eyes blood red from crying. Her

6. In the bid to become more competitive as an urban centre of consumption, culture and tourism, Cape Town's city government and business community have also been forced to invest in safe and secure down-town consumer paradises such as the V&A Waterfront. The 1997 Olympic Bid was part of this effort to launch Cape Town as an attractive consumer, tourist and cultural centre.

7. Cape Times, 5 March 1998.

283

teenager son had been killed in a triple assassination at Clarke's Estate, a coloured neighbourhood in the Cape Flats. The caption read: "Violent death is nothing new in this gang-ridden area, but the triple killing has shocked the community... The police say they died in Americans gang territory".8 Two weeks later four young men were killed at the entrance to the Waterfront in what police described as yet another gang assassination. More surveillance cameras were immediately installed at the Waterfront entrance and security was stepped up. The fear of the spill-over of gang violence from the Cape Flats into the Waterfront prompted immediate action. The presence of these surveillance cameras was not , however, able to prevent two recent urban terror bombings in the Waterfront complex.

Since the April 1994 democratic elections these extraordinarily high levels of gang-related violence in working class neighbourhoods in the Cape Flats have escalated on an unprecedented scale. The dramatic growth in the mid- 1990s of the Islamic-led vigilante group, People Against Gangsterism and Drugs (Pagad) has no doubt contributed to the "tit for tat" killings on the Cape Flats. During the first half of 1998 over 60 drug and gang-related killings took place on the Cape Flats, contributing towards an undeclared war between gangs, Pagad and the police.

This violence has over the past few decades become naturalised and normalised through essentialist discourses on a purported coloured predisposition towards violence and gangsterism. Pagad and representatives of Community Police Forums sought to displace this normalising discourse by drawing public attention to police corruption, inefficiency, inadequate resources and the state's alleged indifference to the bloodbath on the Cape Flats. Meanwhile the "City Fathers" (sic) and tourist entrepreneurs panic every time gang and vigilante violence spills over into "white spaces" of tourism and consumption. The militarization of city life through an architectural semiotics of "defensible space" is increasingly transforming Cape Town into a smaller version of "Fortress L.A".9 In this process of fortification control over defensible space becomes the major concern for both rich and poor.

The urban poor of the Cape Flats lack the means to command and defend space, and generally find themselves trapped in dangerous spaces. For some of my University of the Western Cape (UWC) students who live in black and coloured townships of the Flats, the safe spaces of recreation are mostly the malls in formerly white parts of the city; however, they often cannot afford the transport costs of a taxi to the Waterfront or Cavendish Square. The UWC students I interviewed10, who live in conflict-prone townships on the Cape Flats, expressed powerful feelings of isolation, claustrophobia and incarceration in dangerous and bleak spaces. This was especially the case for women for whom the township streets can be hostile and threatening places dominated by aggressive males and dangerous gangsters. For many male students, for whom

8. Cape Times, 5 March 1998. 9. M. Davis, City of Quartz: Excavating the tuture in Los Angeles (London ana New YorK, iyyu>. 10. Interviews with UWC students, 1997 and 1998.

284

the streets and shebeens were also seen to be dangerous spaces, the only viable alternative places of recreation to the malls were sports venues and staying home to watch television and socialise with friends and family.

These neighbourhoods are dangerous precisely because the need to continuously appropriate and defend space tends to result in the violent expulsion of unwanted elements e.g., enemy gang members and outsiders. As Harvey reminds us, "fine-tuned ethnic, religious, racial and status discriminations" are frequently called into play with such a process of community construction:

Since ownership of even the basic means of reproduction (such as housing) is restricted, the main way to dominate space is through continuous appropriation. Exchange values are scarce, and so the pursuit of use values for daily survival is central to social action. This means frequent material and interpersonal transactions and the formation of very small scale communities. With [the formation of] community space, use values get shared through some mix of mutual aid and mutual prédation, creating tight but often highly conflictual interpersonal social bonding in both private and public spaces. The result is an often intense attachment to place and "turf" and to an exact sense of boundaries because it is only through active appropriation that control over space is assured.11

These low-income townships are also spaces in which the state perceives an urgent need to intervene, both to contain contagious social ills (from sex work to tuberculosis), and to passify and control what are often seen to be violent, dangerous and unruly populations. According to Harvey within this spatialised scenario, the state tends to be seen by the underclasses to be a repressive external agency rather than a resource that is controllable and beneficial.

By contrast, the more affluent middle class can command space through spatial mobility and ownership of the basic means of reproduction, for instance houses and cars.12 In addition, the (mostly white) middle classes have the means to fortify their suburban homes with vicious dogs, high walls, the latest alarm systems and a proliferation of private security firms. Since the affluent are generally economically self-sufficient they do not need to command space through continuous appropriation and neither do they need street-level interpersonal relations and neighbourhood networks in order to meet their basic needs. Instead, their common interests and concerns generally revolve around a need to maintain the standards and property value of the built environment through a shared commitment to common conceptions of taste, tone, aesthetic appreciation, and symbolic and cultural capital.13 Since money provides access to the communities and necessary resources, these are less exclusionary communities (in terms of ethnicity and race) and tend to have diffuse and fluid boundaries. Given this scenario it is not surprising that the state is seen to be both beneficial and controllable, providing security and assisting in keeping undesirables out.

11. D Harvey, The Condition of Postmoderity (Oxford, 1989), 261 . 12. Harvey, The Condition, 261. 13. Harvey, The Condition, 262.

285

In this contemporary scenario of class warfare and the militarization of everyday life, public space is destroyed in order to spatially and socially insulate the middle classes from undesirable Others. For instance, in new megastructures and supermalls street frontage is designed in ways that exclude the underclasses and street persons. Similarly, black and coloured hawkers, strollers and street people are often evicted from shopping malls by private security guards always on the look for non-consumers who might disrupt public consumption. Meanwhile those who live in South Africa's urban ghettoes find themselves socially and spatially imprisoned in repressive and bloody war zones where their security and safety can no longer be guaranteed by a state financially constrained by neo-liberal policies. Given this privatization of the policing of public places, it is only the wealthy that are able to secure the services of private security firms. Meanwhile the poor become prey to gang violence.

Planning for the future of the post/apartheid city

In attempting to explain to me why Cape Town's Urban Conservation Unit was interested in the cultural landscape, I was told by urban planners, on a number of occasions, that it would be important to identify "sacred spaces" such as Xhosa circumcision initiation sites. This would help planners avoid disrupting local cultural practices. The focus on African "sacred spaces" raised a number of questions for me. For instance, why, in explaining to me their interest in the cultural landscape, did these urban planners focus on Xhosa initiation sites rather than identifying the more mundane and banal socio-economic realities of racialised poverty and the spatial legacies of the post/apartheid city? Why did the recent government White Paper on Heritage also specifically single out African initiation sites to illustrate the need to transform the heritage sector in the new South Africa? Is the globalization of multicultural discourses in any way responsible for this privileging of exoticised notions of African culture, and will this, along with an emerging discourse on the African Renaissance, serve to deflect attention away from the banality of racialised poverty and class differentiation? In an age of structural adjustment and IMF austerity measures, will notions of African culture be deployed to obscure class differentiation and poverty, and disguise the absence of fundamental social transformation in the new South Africa?

Throughout the apartheid years Africans were the object of exoticising and essentialising tribal discourses that were clothed in the language of apartheid multiculturalism. The following quote is a typical sample of apartheid's rationale for Separate Development Policy of the so-called homelands (bantustans):

For an objective picture of the life-style and problems of the peoples of the RS A it is essential to have a clear understanding of the diversity of cultures, ethnic patterns, languages and norms as well as the differing levels of socio-economic and political development which confers on the Republic's human mosaic its unique heterogeneous and multinational character.14

14. Homelands Bantu Investment Corporation Report, 1975.

286

In the post-apartheid era it would appear that multi-culturalism and the celebration of the cultural diversity of the "rainbow nation" have replaced, and at the same time reproduced, these "tribal" discourses. Ethnic villages such as Shakaland and Kagga Kamma, where international tourists flock to photograph semi-clad Zulu and "bushmen", are two of the more obvious manifestations of the new South African multi-cultural tourism.15 In the 1990s tourist films and brochures reproduce imagery of the imagined rainbow nation by drawing on the larger than life figures of President Nelson Mandela and Archbishop Desmond Tutu. Selling the new South Africa to tourists and investors seems to require recasting and obscuring entrenched racialised inequality in the name of Madiba Magic, Tutu's rainbow children of God and an euphoric celebration of cultural tolerance and diversity. It could be argued, however, that like apartheid, the new multiculturalist discourse draws on ahistorical and exoticised notions of authentic traditional African cultures that obscure both the hybridity and fluidity of African cultural identities, as well as the more mundane social realities of racialised poverty. The following anecdote challenges these reifications of African culture and reveals the constantly changing, contested and situational character of cultural practices in the city.

A student of mine recently told me that Xhosa-speaking squatters (shanty town dwellers) at his place of residence in Langa township had been told by some of the more established African residents of a nearby middle-income housing scheme that they would have to leave the area because they had encroached upon land reserved for initiation ceremonies for Langa youth. According to my student, the real reason for wanting to move the squatters was that they were seen to be bringing down the value of property in Langa's formal housing areas. The Langa shack dwellers were unimpressed with the "sacred space" argument and countered that their children also needed to be initiated but that shelter took precedence; an alternative site would have to be found for circumcision, they argued. I tried to convey this anecdote to the city planners to convince them that the cultural landscapes of the Cape Flats are both contested sites as well as spaces of mundane everyday violence and poverty; the reification of African culture would simply feed a depoliticised multiculturalism not all that different from the Volkekunde (Ethnological) thinking of apartheid ideologues. It would also deflect attention away from the urgent need to transform this landscape in ways that go beyond simply waiting for the "invisible hand of the market" to desegregate these inherited racial divides.

One of the lessons from this brief encounter with multicultural planning discourse in the New South Africa is that rather than simply celebrating expressions of urban cultural diversity, we should also focus attention on the ways in which racialised poverty and social polarisation is reproduced within the context of globalization. This polarisation is fuelled by the fact that globalization tends to manufacture difference in the service of its own consuming passions for accumulation. So it is not surprising that millions of

15. H. White, In the tradition of the forefathers: Bushman traditionality at Kagga Kamma (Cape Town, 1996); C. Rassool and L. Witz, 'A world in one country', Cahiers D'Etudes de Africain, (1996).

287

rands are pumped into beefing up security at the Waterfront in order to safeguard tourist dollars and sell Cape Town as the premier tourist destination in Africa; by contrast, despite a few small ventures into township tourism, there continues to be considerably less tourist value to the harsh realities of poverty and gang violence in the Cape Flats.

Township tours and new selling strategies in the new South Africa

Despite being one of the homocide and rape capitals of the world, Cape Town has managed to represent itself as one of Africa's most popular tourist cities. The tourist industry in the Western and Northern Cape have elaborated new place- selling strategies that include ethnic tourist sites such as the Malay Quarter in the Bokaap, the Kagga Kamma "Bushman" village in the Cederberg, the Kalk Bay coloured fishing village and so on. Other place-selling strategies include the township tours, ferry trips to Mandela's cell at Robben Island, the natural beauty of Table Mountain, the Indian and Atlantic Ocean coastline, and the winelands of Paarl and Stellenbosch and so on.

Despite the growth of township tours to shebeens, spaza shops, flagship development projects and the Winnie Mandela Mansion in Soweto, the extreme poverty and violence of the townships continues to slip out of the mainstream tourist frame. For instance, the tourism promotional video, "Discover Cape Town", includes reference to Mandela's cell on Robben Island, and glimpses of kramats (Islamic burial shrines) and the KhoiSan. While also claiming to give glimpses into apartheid and what it meant, the video concentrates on wild flowers, animals, "the soaring mountain scenery, brilliant beaches and tranquil countryside." It is silent about the racialised poverty and violence of the Cape of Fear:

Romantic, beautiful, mysterious, Cape Town is a never-ending source of wonder and fascination to both visitor and resident... We see glimpses of museums and art galleries; apartheid and what it meant. We track down penguins, wild animals and the Cape's unique variety of wildflowers. Kramats, curios and Khoisan people, antiques and ostrich farms, mansions and hovels, the World of Birds, Kirstenbosch and secluded wine farms. We walk up Table Mountain, take a boat to Seal Island, ride around the coast by train and much more.16

Township tours, by contrast, seem to straddle the divide between tourist desires for unique and authentic African experiences and natural beauty, and the more mundane realities of township poverty. However, these tours differ significantly in their geographical routes and contextual commentary. They usually begin with a visit to the Malay Quarter in the Bokaap, and the District Six Museum. After driving past the empty land and scattered mosques and churches that remain where once there was a thriving multi-cultural inner city working class neighbourhood, the tours generally leave the city centre and head for the coloured and black townships on the Cape Flats where District Six residents and thousands of other evictees were forcibly relocated in the 1960s and 1970s.

16. Discover Cape Town, Promotional Video, 1996

288

Dawid, an Afrikaner in his mid-thirties, took me and small group of overseas tourists on a tour that focused on what his leaflet described as a "cultural tour [of] the ethnic character of the city."17 The tour began in the District Six Museum before it made its way to the African townships of the Cape Flats. While driving through Nyanga township, Dawid provided detailed information on the informal economy of meat, fruit and vegetables, shebeens and spaza shops that thrives in the townships. Having once been a butcher in Phillipi he knew for example that over 6000 sheep heads pass through the hands of informal meat traders on any given day. He was also able to produce figures on the average earnings of vendors, shebeen owners, meat sellers, taxi operators and so on. The tour concluded with a visit to a spaza shop and shebeen owner in Brown's Farm squatter camp whom he had assisted when he worked for a state- run small business development agency. We drank beer with a group of township youths playing pool and listening to juke box music.

Dawid has recognised that the poverty of informal settlements can be transformed into a narrative of African resiliance, vitality and creativity that appeals to international tourists. He stages encounters with the African children that delight tourists who follow his example by picking up these eager children. Dawid handed over sweets to the children in what appeared to the tourists to be a spontaneous display of innocent friendly playfulness. His tour of the open-air meat markets of Nyanga revealed to the foreign tourists the extraordinary sight of women "braaing" sheep heads and entrails (derms) alongside dusty roads. In Cape Town's townships such sights and statistics come to stand in for an archetypical, authentic Third World encounter. Dawid's Township Tour leaflet in fact promises the tourist a cultural tour that will enrich one's understanding of the "Rainbow Nation" and provide insight into "the ethnic character of the city,":

Cape Town's population the "Rainbow Nation" was drawn from countries all over the world. Apartheid destroyed the ethnic solidarity which prevailed in earlier years. Africans were the first to be forcibly removed. In the following years the powerful legal machinery of the Group Areas Act came into effect resulting in a death warrant for many areas ... We will visit the most devastating example of forced removals in Cape Town (District Six) and move on to the townships of the Cape Flats where we will meet the children of the areas, enjoy refreshments at a spaza shop (township shop), visit a shebeen (tavern), photograph the "khayas" (township houses) and visit the open-air meat market of Nyanga.18

The tour with Michael, a part-time, twenty- something history student at the University of the Western Cape, offered a far more didactic and politically engaged account than Dawid's list of interesting facts and figures. The group in the minibus was made up of two British visitors, two African-American tour operators, a visiting Canadian anthropologist and myself. The tour included a detailed and systematic history of apartheid, urban forced removals, as well as a

17. Cape Town 'Cultural and Ethnic Township Tour' Brochure, 1998. 18. Ibid.

289

local history of the anti-apartheid struggle in the Cape. The township leg of the tour began in Langa, the earliest African township established in Cape Town. Michael took us to meet the principal and pupils at an informal school in Langa, where we were told that the children came from extremely poor homes and their parents would not have been able to afford to send them to school had it not been for the principal's efforts to secure donor funding for school fees, books and uniforms. Michael explained how he had gone to great lengths to avoid turning the Langa visit into a voyeuristic spectacle of poverty and paternalistic charity. For instance, he had entered into an arrangement with representatives of community organizations whereby some of the proceedings from the tour would be channelled into local education and development projects.

Michael provided a politically sophisticated narrative of apartheid and "the struggle" as well as contemporary conditions on the Cape Flats. The sophisticated political and pedagogical tone of the tour is present in his advertisement leaflet entitled, "Walk to Freedom":

"No easy road to freedom" was the central theme in most of the Mass Democratic Movement's campaigns, from the early days through to the late 1980s. Any understanding of the present conditions in South Africa is greatly enhanced by looking at past injustice, the legacy of the struggle and the promise of reconstruction and development initiatives under way at present. Freedom has not come easy.19

Michael's tour begins in the Bokaap, described in the leaflet as "the picturesque Malay Quarter where we discover the unique culture, lifestyle and personality of the Cape Muslim community". The tour then proceeds to District Six, where Michael provided a detailed account of impact of the Group Areas Act in Cape Town. Finally, the tour moves to the townships of the Cape Flats. In contrast to Dawid's focus on "ethnic character" and the exotic features of shebeens and spaza shops, the central theme of Michael's commentary is a story of the self-reliance and resilience of the victims of apartheid. He focuses on political analysis of the formation of racialised poverty as well as post-apartheid development interventions. This socio- political narrative is evident in the "Walk to Freedom" leaflet:

Sprawling satellite camps of seemingly endless shanties - makeshift structures of corrugated iron and other materials - provide little more than a roof and some shelter. Today, as we shall see, squatter settlements are seeking their own solutions as an economic necessity. Against all odds, township life prevails, in all its nuances... We drive through the well-known areas of Gugulethu, Nyanga and Crossroads. The sheer scale of the informal housing problem becomes evident... The Samora Machel Housing Development Scheme offers a first hand view of the government's Reconstruction and Development Programme (RDP). We witness the work in progress as hundreds of squatters, with the help of state grants, are setting about building their own brick homes. We also visit the scheme's "contain school."20

19. 'Walk to Freedom', Cape Town City 'Township Tour' Brochure, 1998. 20. Ibid.

290

During the tour, Michael provided a complex and nuanced sociological and historical account of the making of the apartheid city. He combined this historical commentary with his perspective on development interventions on the Cape Flats. He also drew upon his own intimate personal knowledge of the cultural and socio-economic conditions in coloured and Muslim parts of Cape Flats. Unlike Dawid, Michael was able to present an insider's perspective on social life in the coloured areas we visited. Although he was less aware of conditions in the African townships, he nonetheless was able to provide a detailed account of socio-political processes responsible for shaping the racialised poverty seen by the tourists. He was also able to comment on race tensions between coloureds and Africans, on youth culture and gangsterism and so on. Unlike the rather limited "ethnic" perspective of Dawid, Michael had at his disposal powerful sociological and historical narratives within which to frame what tourists saw through the minibus windows.

Both tours, to differing degrees and with varying degrees of success, sought to make the visit to the townships both interesting and informative. Dawid's township tour seemed to conform to a multicultural discourse that uncritically celebrates the "Rainbow Nation" and timeless and "exotic" Malay or African cultures. By contrast, rather than titilating tourists' fantasies, Michael focused on the political analysis of apartheid and explanations of local development initiatives; he catered for the more politically-engaged tourist with a 'highly developed social conscience.' The Canadian anthropologist and two African-American tour operators were particularly interested in the overtly political content of Michael's commentary. This political orientation was also evident in Michael's Legend Tours brochure entitled "Walk to Freedom". The brochure context included photographs of Robben Island, food vendors in Langa as well as a remembrance plaque which reads: "ALL WHO PASS: Remember the thousands of people lived for generations in District Six and were forced by law to leave their homes because of the colour of their skins. Remember St. Mark's Church and the community who resisted the destruction of District Six".21 The photographs and content of the brochure reinforced the political content of Michael's commentary. The tour seemed to be specifically designed to cater for a niche market of politically-inclined tourists.

Both tours have to compete with mainstream tours that avoid the Cape Flats townships and focus instead on the Malay Quarter, the Waterfront, Table Mountain, the Cape winelands and the spectacular natural beauty of the Cape of Storms. While the Robben Island Museum is the most significant project that commemorates the anti-apartheid struggle, it does not address the more mundane spatialised legacies of apartheid that continue to shape everyday life on the Cape Flats.

21. Ibid.

291

Conclusion

"One Nation One Soul, One Beer One Goal" (an advert for South African Breweries)

My work in 1995 with the City Planning Department's Urban Conservation Unit22 alerted me to the problematic ways in which African culture is being exoticised through multi-cultural discourses that fetishise and homogenise cultural difference and vernacular aesthetics. Perhaps the most glaring and bizarre example of the new South African brand of multiculturalism is the widespread belief amongst planners about the cultural incompatibility of low- income, high-rise rental flats for Africans. The argument goes something like this: "Black don't like flats because they need to slaughter goats for rituals". Yes, some blacks may prefer an individual plot, but this has not deterred tens of thousands of blacks from living in high-rise flats in Hillbrow, Cape Town's City Bowl and elsewhere in the country. How do we deconstruct such essentialing versions of multiculturalism without bending the rod too far in the direction of denial of cultural difference? In other words, is there a "third space" between cultural essentialism and crude forms of anti-essentialism that deny difference altogether? What should planning for a "multiple public" look like in a "multicultural", post/apartheid urban landscape? How can planning visions creatively accommodate different, alternative and mariginal identities and imaginations? In other words, how can planners begin to break open the homogenising straitjacket of modernist planning to allow for the expression of difference, without succumbing to the temptation to exotise cultural difference in ways that obscure the more mundane spatial legacies of apartheid?

Putting the everyday violence and racialised poverty centre-stage is perhaps one possible way of decentering exoticised readings of the cultural landscape and exposing the socio-spatial continuities of the post/apartheid city. But how do planners begin to create open, flexible public spaces within apartheid's partitioned cities and "cities of walls". After all, racialised grids and barriers (buffer strips, highways, railway lines) continue to channel and contain white, coloured and black social interaction. How is urban desegregation and the transformation of public spaces to take place given this straitjacket of racialised segregation and poverty that is being reproduced through capital flows to sites of tourist and middle class consumption, rather than projects of urban renewal and development in working class neighbourhoods?

Northern cities such as Copenhagen have in recent years been able to democratise public spaces by expanding outdoor cafe seating at the expense of motor vehicle parking and street area. Yet, what would this planning strategy mean in South African cities such as Johannesburg where crime has emptied out the inner city of recreation and consumption centres such as cinemas, theatres, cafes and restaurants? The systematic privatization of public space in shopping malls provides a sobering indication of some of the obstacles in the path of democratising public places in South African cities.

22. L. le Grange and S. Robins, 'Wetton/Lansdowne Road Corridor Area: Identification of Places of Cultural Significance', City Planners Department, October 1996.

292

Not all is grim and bleak in the urban landscape of the new South Africa. Driving through the African townships it becomes clear that there is some activity in terms of road upgrading, low income housing schemes, community centres and so on. However, since all these developments are taking place within the black townships they reinforce racialised residential segregation. There are also class tensions within these areas; middle income black residents in the formal houses of Nyanga township, for instance, are determined that shack squatters be removed to distant low-income state housing projects. They want formal housing, schools, and shopping malls to be built on the land currently occupied by the squatters. These competing claims for land and state resources are part of an ongoing scenario of conflict that is likely to be with us for many years to come.

It is becoming increasingly clear that urban desegregation is being left to the "invisible hand of the market". However, the vagaries of the market are unlikely to produce a situation whereby substantial investment will take place in the run-down, dangerous townships of the Cape Flats. In the mean time, despite a few innovative township tours, media and tourist representations of the city are likely to continue to obscure the legacy of racialised inequality in the name of an imagined rainbow city and exotic African tourist destination. Clearly, Cape Town is not simply a rainbow city of cultural diversity and exotic spice. It is also a space of social polarisation, ghettoisation and fortified shopping malls and suburban homes - "Fortress L. A." at the tip of Africa?

293