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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 09 February 2009
This article attempts a detailed social portrait of Cape Town on the eve of apartheid. In the process it provides a rare cross-racial study of a twentieth-century South African city. The first section reveals a complex place already distinguished by considerable segregation and predictable social inequalities, both between and within racial and ethnic categories. Yet such findings are at odds with popular memories of a golden age – marked by tolerance, greater cohesion and security. So the second section explores and explains the differences. It finds that memories cannot simply be dismissed as myths.
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3 By using terms such as ‘African’, ‘Coloured’, ‘Malay’, ‘White’, ‘Black’, or ‘Asian’, I do not wish to imply that they are anything other than ethnic labels or racialized categories. I am using ‘African’ in preference to the 1940s term ‘Native’ as the latter is offensive to many South Africans today. Similarly ‘Black’ is used as a synonym for ‘Non-White’ or ‘Non-European’. Coloured has been used both as an imposed categorization and self-description referring to people of ‘mixed race’, largely descended from slaves, KhoiKhoi, Whites and Africans. ‘Malay’ was (and occasionally still is) used as a synonym for Coloured adherents of Islam. ‘Asian’ was more or less a synonym for ‘Indian’.
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