MALAIKA WA AZANIA | Name changes mean little if poverty and squalid living conditions persist

There is a term in geography known as the socio-spatial dialectic, which is used to explain how social relations are not merely contained in space, but that they produce space, and that space in turn shapes future social interactions. This means that space is not a neutral and passive container, but an active, political and historical product. Rural areas as we know them emerged from the colonial decision to create “native reserves” where black people would be located so that they were removed from more industrial and agricultural lands.

When the Native Land Act was adopted in 1913, its aim was not only to dispossess black people of their land and relocate them to what would be known as homelands or bantustans, it was also to reshape the economic life of black people. This reality, combined with the imposition of poll and hut taxes which were made compulsory, compelled black men to seek work in the white economy — as labourers in the mines, railways, factories and other industries that were owned and controlled by white people. This not only produced poverty within the black community, but it also fractured the structure of the black family as the migrant labour system separated men from their families and hurled them into single-sex hostels in Gauteng and other industrial parts of the country.

Even townships as we know them today are the result of apartheid spatial planning, and were designed to house a reserve army of labour needed in white industries. This history has continued to shape South African spatiality as we know it. For this reason, it is only logical that one of the ways in which historical injustices can be addressed is by reclaiming the land and cultures that were destroyed by centuries of colonialism and apartheid.

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The renaming of towns and monuments is one such instrument. When we rename local monuments to reflect their original history, one that is untainted by colonial and apartheid imposition, we are effectively pursuing spatial justice.

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