ABSTRACT
This chapter gives attention to local government restructuring in order to highlight the impact of transition on locality. In the case of South Africa, local government played a significant role in the administration of apartheid. The transformation of local government is highly contentious in urban areas, not least because towns and cities in South Africa were a bastion of white power. The post-apartheid efforts to restructure the state in South Africa are not without precedent on the continent, because similar efforts were made by other states after bloody wars in Angola and Mozambique, or negotiated deals in Zimbabwe and Namibia. Such efforts, represent the quest by the new states to infuse new meanings to the territorial organization in line with the policies and visions of those states. In the case of South Africa, territorial restructuring aimed to break racial and ethnic 'spatial containers' that characterized the apartheid state, to promote non-racialism and the sharing of hitherto racially distributed resources.
