Imagining Communities

Abstract

The South African city of Cape Town was forged through conflicts that reverberate in the memories and representations of its past in the present. The city center is squeezed geographically between Table Mountain on the south and the shoreline of Table Bay on the north. As a port it has been a place of arrival, interaction, and departure for travelers from across Africa and the Atlantic and Indian oceans. Dutch colonial settlement began in 1652 and was characterized by the displacement of local Khoi and San inhabitants.² English colonial occupation replaced the Dutch in 1806, and continued until 1910. During the twentieth century, Cape Town evolved from a small colonial outpost to South Africa’s second-largest city with more than three million inhabitants. Although colonial influences are widespread—evident in architecture, language and culture—the contemporary landscape of Cape Town is profoundly scarred by apartheid government policies of 1948 to 1994, which sys-temically legalized white domination through the racial registration, separation, and control of all South Africans. These scars are visible in the sites of forced removals and racist reengineering of the entire city. Drawing upon oral history interviews, this chapter focuses on how residents of two Cape Town communities remember apartheid and how their memories are shaped by both loss and resilience.

See the Benedict Anderson (1983) account of the nation-state as an ‘imagined community.’