Between 19, 3.5 million people were forcibly removed by police officers from city centers to rural townships. Officially beginning in 1948, black South Africans were stripped of their land and relocated to racially segregated developments far outside the city, where homeownership was practically impossible. The core of apartheid policy and power revolved around land. This blog is a summary of my learning and thinking, and is offered as a means of engaging urban analysis in student learning. Studying poverty and development within the context of post-apartheid South Africa while in Cape Town was a very powerful experience that piqued my interest in housing justice and inequality overall. Last summer as a UW student I studied abroad in Cape Town, South Africa and was struck by the inequality I witnessed between most black and white South Africans. It is broadly recognized that apartheid was the ultimate form of structural violence that forced hundreds of thousands of black South Africans into informal housing on land that they had no legal claim to. While the policies of deeply institutionalized racism were overturned 25 years ago, the economic and social impacts of apartheid are still very much present in South African society, and have contributed to ever-widening gaps between black and white South Africans in multiple ways. On April 27, 1994, Nelson Mandela and the African National Congress (ANC) won the first multiracial democratic election in South Africa’s history, bringing an official end to 46 years of apartheid. “Ten percent of all South Africans - the majority white - owns more than 90 percent of national wealth… Some 80 percent of the population - overwhelmingly black - owns nothing at all.” - New York Times Right: Between rows of government-funded housing in Langa. Published on JLeft: View from inside a home in Langa, the largest township in Cape Town.
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