Richard Pithouse, SACSIS
Urban land is acutely contested in contemporary South
Africa. There are regular land occupations, some taking the form of quiet
encroachment and some taking the form of overtly political acts. At the same
time most municipalities have armed units that, often acting violently, and
more or less invariably acting illegally, try to sustain the duopoly of the
state and the market over the allocation and zoning of urban land. When land
occupations are presented as simple acts of criminality, popular protest as
about nothing but ‘service delivery’ and evictions as a simple matter of
enforcing the rule of law, the curtain is drawn on this on-going drama.
With occasional exceptions, like the magnificent public
space that is the new Durban beachfront, the urban order under construction by
the state and the market is actively reinscribing organised forms of inequality
and class segregation, both profoundly inflected by race, into the concrete
materiality of our cities. In the zones of exclusion and social dishonour,
usually out on the urban peripheries, we have new townships made up of rows of
tiny and poorly constructed RDP houses, not to mention the even more horrific
transit camps. In the zones of inclusion and social honour we have gated
communities, schools and hospitals and shopping malls pass for public space.
Perhaps one of the most gross examples of the spatial inequalities that
characterise our cities are the gated collections of McMansions set on bright
green and constantly watered golf courses on well-located land while the poor,
whether housed by the state or via their own initiative, are frequently locked
out on dreary wastelands where water has to be queued for and carried home in a
bucket.
We are accustomed to seeing our social fractures in terms of
race, class and gender. Sexuality is also taken seriously in some circles.
Ethnicity is generally a more subterranean presence but it too is often
acknowledged as a potential marker of division as is, of course, the division
between citizens and non-citizens whether this is conceived in legal or other
terms. And, largely as a result of effective campaigning, there is a slow but
steadily increasing awareness in some circles of the widening split in our
politics between people, mostly residents of the former bantustans, who are
governed by forms of authority legitimated in the name of tradition and the
rest of us, who are governed, in principle if not always in practice, by the
law and forms of authority legitimated by elections.
But there are also a number of fractures running through our
society that are not always adequately recognised in elite publics. For
instance the urban poor, often living and working outside of a legal system
that does not make adequate provision for people who do not have much money,
are governed through a mixture of patronage and repression that is markedly
different to the way in which people with more money are governed through the law
and able to organise in support of their interests through civil society. The
forms of popular politics that do emerge to contest this, or to maneuverer
within it, are frequently dismissed as criminal, irrational, violent or
politically insufficient because they don’t conform to the modes of politics
available to elites.
Generation is another example. Generation has clearly become
a line of fracture in the ANC and a number of other organisations, and popular
protest is often largely organised by young people seeking to stake their claim
to a presence in society. But, in and out of the ruling party, the struggles of
the young are sometimes seen as a matter of ill-discipline to be contained by
adult authority mobilised in the name of culture or bureaucratic processes
rather than a serious attempt to take a viable place in society.
One of the lines of fracture running through our society
that is often not adequately recognised is that of space. All societies across
space and time tend to organise themselves in a manner that demonstrates and
enforces hierarchy and vectors of inclusion and exclusion. Social relations
like gender and class are frequently spatialised. Since the days of Homer women
have been told that their proper place is in the home rather than the political
sphere. Workers are usually expected to live, socialise and organise at a clear
remove from bourgeoisie society. But space has often taken on a particular kind
of political intensity in the colonial world.
From the seventeenth century, liberalism was the primary
political ideology mobilised to legitimate the enslavement, genocide and
colonial occupation organised from Western Europe. Its key intellectuals,
figures like John Locke and John Stuart Mill, were personally involved in the
colonial project and offered explicit justifications for colonialism. For Mill,
who is still taught uncritically in some South African universities as a
philosopher of freedom, “Despotism is a legitimate mode of government in
dealing with barbarians”. The Italian philosopher Domenico Losurdo has shown
that in its early days liberalism, a philosophy of the English bourgeoisie
asserting itself against the aristocracy, asserted the metropole as the sacred
zone of liberty and the colony as the profane zone of barbarism where a
completely different set of rules applied. In other words the legitimation of
liberty for some was fundamentally linked to the legitimation of despotism for
others and this was fundamentally spatialised. In its early days liberalism
included people, like the Irish, who would later become white among those it
countered as barbarians. But as European settlers in the America colonies
started to demand their own presence in the sphere of liberty the line that
separated the sacred and the profane, the civilised and the barbarian, could no
longer be spatialised in the same way and was increasingly racialised.
In Frantz Fanon’s first book, Black Skin, White Masks,
written in France in 1952 there is a very powerful evocation of the skin as
marker of exclusion that remains constant as a person moves through space. But
in his last book, the Damned of the Earth, written in Tunis in 1961, Fanon,
writing about his experiences in colonial Algeria, gives an equally powerful
evocation of how race is spatially contained in the settler colony – ‘a world
of compartments’, a ‘world cut into two’, a world fundamentally divided into
‘opposed zones’. One zone is well lit, clean, and a site of a certain kind of
freedom for those authorised to inhabit it. The other is dark, dirty and a site
of constant physical containment and intimidation.
Today in cities like Paris and London the places where
immigrants from the colonies and their descendants live are often treated as
separate zones where different rules, especially as regard to surveillance and
policing, apply. The ‘world of compartments’, once imposed on a city like
Algiers from Paris, is now part of Paris. And in the former colonies elites
have often struggled to undo the stigmatisation of the skin while actively
reinscribing the production of space constituted by fundamentally opposed
zones, a division of space that reproduces both material inequality and the
dangerous social fantasy that different kinds of spaces are inhabited by
different kinds of people.
The ‘opposed zones’ of the postcolony are a continuation of
colonial practices in so far as they are spaces of profound material, symbolic
and political difference. But they have also been updated in certain respects.
In the colony the perimeters of the zones of power were broad and often
constructed and patrolled by the state. In the postcolony the perimeters are
much more tightly drawn, and are often constructed and patrolled by private
power operating with state sanction. The white suburb contracts to the gated
community.
With opportunities for education, livelihoods and access to
sport and some forms of culture, along with basic security as well as prospects
for actualising political freedom being fundamentally spatialised where one
lives is not only a matter of the aesthetic. It is also not solely a matter of
social status. On the contrary where we find ourselves in the spatial economy
of inequality has a profound effect on how our lives unfold.
When injustice is solely conceptualised along the lines of
race the deracialisation of elite spaces can occur simultaneously with the
reinscription of spaces of exclusion and subordination. When class is
conceptualised largely in terms of the relation to the wage, or gender is
imagined largely as a matter for professionals dealing with questions of law
and policy, the spatial aspects of inequality can be masked. When the land
question is reduced to a question of the countryside, or to agrarian questions,
the urban land question can also be occluded. And when the urban question is
reduced to the housing question, which in turn is reduced to a matter of the
number of houses that have been built, without regard for where they have been
built, or what form they take, the urban land question is also silenced.
Contemporary forms of segregation, including those in our
cities, are fundamental to the contemporary production and maintenance of
inequality. They need to be acknowledged and seriously addressed. We need to
see the land question as a matter of democratisation that is as urgent in the
cities as it is in the countryside.
