ABSTRACT
In the spring of 1998 I made my first visit to South Africa: a country which for me, and for many in my generation, has taken up a large space in our awareness, but which for many years, until recent changes, we mostly did not go to. 1 On a Sunday morning, during a stay in Johannesburg, I joined a half-day tour of Soweto, the enormous combine of Black townships which during the apartheid era acquired a world-wide reputation as the preeminent urban form of that social and ideological system: a concentration in space of separation, oppression, and impoverishment.
