The Paradoxical Utopias of Urbanites – Martyrs of Apartheid

Abstract

International audience ; Cape Town, the first capital of South Africa, was built on spatial injustice. First a Dutch trading post on the Route to India, then a British colony and the seat of Parliament under apartheid, the Mother City has been deeply marked by racism. In 1994, Nelson Mandela's election symbolised the abolition of State racism, but the political declarations concerning the break with the past were far from meaning the eradication of prejudices and memories of spatially engraved violence. Based on video interviews presenting the life trajectories of three township residents, this article exposes the escape routes along which the urban identities of Capetonians removed by force under apartheid are shaped. Their personal memories take on the form of a founding myth marked by a highlighted martyred experience, while trying to make sense of their daily lives through symbolic places and socio-religious imagination challenging " the order of things ". As such, the notion of heterotopia can describe the parallel worlds in which urbanites take refuge, in order to invent an alternative order enabling them to overcome the marks of domination on a day to day basis.