ABSTRACT
Privilege etches the landscape of South Africa. Racialized advantage is produced through multiple social mechanisms of South African life, but it is the materiality of space that makes their daily operations starkly visible. Exploring such questions as who owns what, who goes where, how this or that person travels and why, helps to expose the texture of privilege and its corollaries: inequality and discrimination. In South Africa, the geographical lens is particularly significant because the management of the spatial has long been the key means by which racialized positions have been constructed and privilege secured. From the early days of colonialism, and particularly since the introduction of the apartheid regime in 1948, whiteness has sought to construct superiority through the establishment of partitioned and privileged white spaces. However, it is now nearly twenty years since the post-apartheid government in South Africa came into office with a mandate of universal democracy and racial equality. It is therefore important to explore the extent to which the landscape of South Africa, and the position of bodies within it, has changed in accordance with the new ideological climate of egalitarianism and multiracialism. In short, what does the transition away from apartheid tell us about privilege, its positions and its possibilities?
