Liminal Landscapes and Segregated Spaces

Abstract

In The World That Was Ours (1967), Hilda Bernstein alludes to the strangeness that characterized South African urban space under apartheid law, most notably because of the Group Areas Act (1950), when she defines the term “the location” in a South African context.¹ The location or township “is a place attached to a town where Africans live. It is not a town on its own, but a sort of fungus-growth that lives clinging to the outside and cannot survive without the place itself” (Bernstein, [1967]2004, p. 29). The image of fungus is striking and, recalling Mary Douglas’s idea of dirt as matter out of place in Purity and Danger, highlights the extreme abnormal configuration of urban spaces during apartheid. It also registers, as the epigraph to this chapter states, how “the locations turn the people into outcasts” (p. 30). Echoing Gordimer’s sentiments in “Living in the Interregnum,” Bernstein continues by observing how the townships rendered black South Africa invisible to white South Africa: “African lives,” she writes, “had to be concealed by apartheid so they would not be revealed as people” (p. 32).

The locations turn the people into outcasts.

—Hilda Bernstein, The World That Was Ours