Elsevier

Political Geography

Volume 21, Issue 5, June 2002, Pages 711-716
Political Geography

A divided city: Cape Town

https://doi.org/10.1016/S0962-6298(02)00016-1 Get rights and content

Abstract

A sketch of Cape Town’s history since its 1652 foundation is offered. A mixed Afro–euro–asian people, the Coloureds, evolved during the era of Dutch and then British colonialism. By the time of apartheid’s imposition from 1948 onwards they had become Cape Town’s majority population group. Now, half a century later, the defeat of apartheid has brought a great influx of Black African poor from distant parts of South Africa, persons whom White rule’s infamous Pass Laws had formerly prohibited from Cape Town. The results: the metropolis has in the last twenty years doubled in population and has not only seen an immense growth in self-built shantytowns and in basic low-income housing, but also a change in complexion. An African majority is now in view, with attendant social tensions and social possibilities.

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Afterword

At the end of June 2000 the NP amalgamated itself out of existence. Imagine: apartheid’s instigator was (or so it then appeared), simply no longer around. Casting my mind back only a dozen years, I could recall all those London or New York news editorials predictably castigating a South Africa in which five-sixths of the people found their life-chances so evilly and systematically limited. Yet take a contemporary editorial; things are now in some ways worse. Speak not of life-chances…but rather

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