Our reflection on past treatment of urban segregation begins with the assertion that the implicit acceptance of ‘race’ as a legitimate and primary category of inquiry has impoverished the understanding of residential segregation in the South African city. The first section of the paper illustrates the prevalence of racially defined empirical urban studies and tries to explain why this categorisation remains unchallenged. In the second section of the paper we demonstrate that where efforts are made to explain the emergence of a racialised urban structure, inappropriate or inadequate points of reference are involved. Particular attention is given to the use of the race/class debate, feminist perspectives on urban policy, the literature on white supremacy and the city, and in the work on ‘race’. The final section of the paper suggests an alternative approach to exploring urban segregation. Specifically, we pose the questions: what were urban administrators in the early part of the twentieth century to do and...

Rethinking urban South Africa

The theme of urban segregation/apartheid has generated a considerable body of scholarly writing in the past 20 years. This urban research has been highly interdisciplinary, mainly involving geographers and historians and has tended to be afrocentric in focus. Numerous case studies have been produced, but few works that have synthesised or theorised. Much attention has been given to the process of urban segregation, as scholars have traced its origins and tried to explain the imperatives and mechanisms that governed the process. The overall picture to emerge shows urban segregation evolving over a long period of time in a rather haphazard, piecemeal way. The continuities before and after both the 1923 Natives (Urban Areas) Act and the 1950 Group Areas Act are more striking than the discontinuities. South African urban historical research has also provided a clearer understanding of such themes as housing policy, urban ‘native administration’ and influx control, but has generally not succeeded in elucidatin...

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Explaining the apartheid city: 20 years of South African urban historiography

The Roots of Rural Poverty in Central and Southern Africa

In this work of synthesis and reinterpretation, Timothy Keegan looks anew at the relatively neglected period of South African history before the mineral age - in particular the years of British rule up to the 1850s. For whereas a previous generation of historians saw the twentieth-century racial state emerging from the forces unleashed by the mineral revolution, Keegan argues that the roots lie in an earlier period, when the Cape was first integrated into the British empire of free trade of the early nineteenth century. Keegan's canvas is wide, his grasp of the historical literature magisterial, and his narrative is both eminently readable and skilful in handling a story that is complex and many-stranded. It is a story too that is strong in notable events - slave emancipation, the arrival of the 1820 British settlers, a series of frontier wars, the Great Trek of Boer emigrants - as well as in striking personalities, among them Dr John Philip, Andries Stockenstrom, John Fairbairn, Moshoeshoe and Sir Harry Smith. In Keegan's pages these familiar historical landmarks and characters emerge in entirely novel ways, the subject of fresh interpretation and original insights.

Colonial South Africa and the Origins of the Racial Order

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The Pneuma Network: Transnational Pentecostal Print Culture In The United States And South Africa, 1906-1948

The Ambiguities of Dependence in South Africa: class, nationalism and the state in twentieth century Natal

Christian A. Williams, National Liberation in Postcolonial Southern Africa. A Historical Ethnography of SWAPO's Exile Camps:

Studies in the History of Cape Town

The Zuma Years: South Africa's changing face of power

(1976). The Transkeian Rebellion of 1880–81: A Case-Study of Transkeian Resistance to White Control. South African Historical Journal: Vol. 8, No. 1, pp. 32-39.

Christopher Saunders

Papers

The Ambiguities of Dependence in South Africa: class, nationalism and the state in twentieth century Natal

Christian A. Williams, National Liberation in Postcolonial Southern Africa. A Historical Ethnography of SWAPO's Exile Camps:

Studies in the History of Cape Town

The Zuma Years: South Africa's changing face of power

The Transkeian Rebellion of 1880–81: A Case-Study of Transkeian Resistance to White Control