ABSTRACT
Houses in black urban townships are invariably written of disparagingly as ‘matchboxes’ by journalists and academics alike, ostensibly the wreckage of an indifferent apartheid state. This chapter explores the politics and practicalities of making home as an ethnographer in a context of extreme inequality and urban spatial segregation. It is about movement – about moving house, and moving through space; about who has the power to move, and who is powerless in being moved; about how people come together in movement (and in movements), and about what remains fixed, what persists, amidst that movement. The history of township development in Cape Town is a history of overcrowding and excess, of the municipality allocating too little space to black residents confined therein and residents inevitably spilling out into the surrounding land. Though conventionally associated with the apartheid era, many of the key policies effecting racial segregation and dispossession in South Africa predate the Afrikaner Nationalist Party’s rise to power in 1948.
