ABSTRACT
The global and the local, the stubborn reminders of South Africa’s apartheid past and the seductive promise of a postmodern future meet each other at Cape Town International Airport. Since South Africa emerged from apartheid, the city has become a popular tourist destination for travellers forming part of what Appadurai (1996) has called the “ethnoscape” of globalisation. But not all mobility is voluntary or leisurely – South Africa also receives thousands of refugee applications per year as a result of forced migration (South Africa Yearbook, 2006, p. 345). This city has always been a place where histories meet, and often clash violently. The legacy of colonialism and apartheid in South Africa can still be seen in the city’s urban geography. Tourists making their way past the glitzy, modernised airport to the lush vineyards of the grand wine farms, originally planted there by Dutch settlers and French Huguenots and from where wine is now exported to the corners of the globe, are confronted with a sea of corrugated iron shacks crouching close to the road. In parts of this sprawling township, there is no electricity, not a single tree in sight, people use communal taps and live an hour’s walk from the nearest toilet ( Joubert, 2007). This is the South African landscape that John Pilger (1998, p. 597) has referred to as “beauty out of one eye, a slum out of the other”. In this landscape, people’s basic struggle for food, shelter, health and safety is a struggle to be counted as humans. It is a struggle for human dignity.
