ABSTRACT
When South Africa’s apartheid regime toppled 10 years ago, it captured the imagination of the world. No other country had plunged so deep into the twentieth century governed by laws that brutally divided, by skin color, all of its cities, towns, and villages. A decade into a new era, Johannesburg, South Africa’s largest city, still has a long way to go to overcome this history. Sandton, its prime northern suburb, is a vision in concrete, chrome, and glass—its skyline punctuated by gleaming five-star hotels, office complexes, and upscale shopping malls. Soweto, the best known of the townships erected by blacks not permitted in the “official” city, remains for the most part dusty and ramshackle. All of Johannesburg’s white population had a toilet in their home in 1995; only half of the black population did. And as of 1998, only 13 percent of households in Johannesburg’s black township of Alexandra had one. This disparity in neighborhoods is echoed in grossly inadequate access to education and health care for the black majority. 1
