ABSTRACT
This chapter deals with the really existing domestic space of Cape Town as represented through the imaginings of the agents of Empire. It looks at newspaper articles and official reports often described places like District Six as rabbit warrens filled with animal-like humans. The chapter concerns that the fact that the dense, heterogeneous character of the slums permitted miscegenation and the breaking down of both literal and figurative barriers between the Self and the other. In the broad brushstrokes of sensationalist journalism and the finer details of official reports, District Six and Old Cape Town were depicted ascribed as the location of Otherness. But ascribing Otherness worked in dual ways, locking the inhabitants inside the tainting walls of derelict buildings, or alternatively, the 'animalistic' inhabitants tainting the walls of the housing stock by miasmic association. The Housing Act of 1920 required that municipalities begin a major survey of the housing stock, which involved mapping out the interior space of homes.
