South Africa’s Road Out of Colonialism

South Africa’s Road Out of Colonialism

Eshe Lewis: What makes us human?

Anahí Ruderman: Truly beautiful landscapes.

Nicole van Zyl:  The roads that I used every day.

Thayer Hastings:  Campus encampments.

T. Yejoo Kim:  Eerie sounds in the sky.

Eshe: What makes us human?

Cecilia Padilla-Iglesias: Division of labor.

Charlotte Williams: Colonialism.

Giselle Figueroa de la Ossa: The value of gold.

Dozandri Mendoza: Fun. Dance.

Justin Lee Haruyama: Cultural and social interactions.

Luis Alfredo Briceño González: Hopes for a better future.

Eshe: Let’s find out! SAPIENS: A Podcast for Everything Human.

[INTRO ENDS]

Eshe Lewis: Have you ever thought about the roads you drive on every day—how they were built, the people who built them and why?

This episode is reported by lawyer and anthropologist Nicole van Zyl, and she asks these questions about a road in her home country of South Africa.

Nicole researches the origins and present-day practice of paroling people from incarceration. This work led her to a surprising discovery on the origins of the N2 highway—a road she drove on every day from the suburbs of Cape Town out to the notorious Pollsmoor Prison. In learning about the road, she uncovered how infrastructure built during British colonial occupation impacts present-day South Africa.

Here’s Nicole.

Nicole van Zyl (field recording): OK. So this is just a quick note off of my very first interaction in my fieldwork process.

Nicole:  That’s me recording my field notes as I drive back home in 2021. I just started my in-person fieldwork doing research with people who are on parole in South Africa. At that point, I was 18 months into a project that stretched back to the very first laws allowing people to leave incarceration early. These laws would eventually become South Africa’s modern legal practices.

While in the field, I wanted to see everything. I wanted to understand the perspective of people who are out on parole. I wanted to sit in on the parole board hearings, and I wanted to ride along on the activities of community corrections, who work with those people on parole.

This was in Cape Town in South Africa’s Western Cape—a city I’d lived in for about eight years at that point. I got my law degree there, and I had started my Ph.D. there. But I also wanted to see these practices happen somewhere I’d never been before. The Eastern Cape, which is as poor as the Western Cape is rich, is where I chose to go. So I drove over 1,000 kilometers away to East London, a place I didn’t know at all.

During my research, I spent a lot of time driving around to different parts of the city and then the country. I would go from Cape Town to the suburbs of Westlake and back again, and then I went all the way to East London, shuttling between the coastal city, the prison in Mdantsane, and inland to Qonce, which is formerly King Williams Town. Along the way, I drove highways and the winding streets and dirt roads to towns in between these cities.

All that driving actually came to infect my research and my perspective of what I was doing and seeing. Ultimately, I spent more time on the N2 highway than I did inside any correctional center. And this made me curious. It made me want to understand how this road that connects so much of the country came to be.

What did it mean for my research, for the country, and for our future?

The N2 is the longest road in South Africa at 2,255 kilometers. It runs from the West to the East Coast of the country, originating in the very heart of Cape Town. It connects the city to the Stellenbosch winelands and the farmlands and the Ceres and Overburg regions. And it connects Western Cape to Eastern Cape via the Bloukrans Bridge.

The N2 is the artery that keeps cities along the coast alive. It joins the affluent white suburbs to the surrounding Black and “Coloured” townships—the road brings laborers who can’t afford to live in the wealthy cities of East London or Cape Town or Durban to those places to work.

And I’ll say that when driving along the N2, it feels like you’re lifted out of the reality of spatial racism that we still deal with in South Africa. You might catch a glimpse of the borders of townships like Khayelitsha or Mitchell’s Plein as you go from Cape Town to the airport. But you’re not there. You’re just driving past.

As I started researching the N2, I came to learn that this road that connects so much of the South African coast has a controversial past that echoes into the present.

Like most things, this modern controversy had its roots in the colonial origins of the road. And I came across some of the road’s beginnings while researching when early release from prison was first introduced in South Africa in the Cape archive.

It starts in the 1840s. At that time, the Cape Colony was broke and in massive debt. The plan to get out of debt was to expand—to grow into the Eastern Cape to unlock more agriculture and settle more people. But to do this, they needed infrastructure. They needed roads to cut through the mountains and run across the Cape Flats.

But remember, they really had no money to do this, and a few years earlier, slavery had been abolished, which eradicated the colony’s means of exploiting people for free, forced labor.

So, in 1845, the colonial secretary, John Montague, created a new law to solve this problem. He collected together all of the men incarcerated in the colony, and he put them to work in convict road camps.

Who were these incarcerated men I met in the archive? It was Montague’s idea that men of all races and stations should work alongside each other. There were a few European sailors, who, usually while drunk, had misbehaved while docked. Most of the men, though, had been enslaved only 10 years before. They were the descendants of Indonesian people brought to the Cape by the Dutch settlers and Khoi people who had to work on farms that replaced their traditional territory. There were African men—some who had been free Blacks in the city, but many of them foot soldiers and cattle farmers from kwaXhosa who were essentially prisoners of war, men from the eastern Cape who were fighting the colonies eastward expansion.

This law that forced incarcerated people to become roadworkers also created the first systematized form of early release from prison in South Africa. For those who worked hard and obeyed all prison discipline, they could be released after completing four-fifths of their sentence.

It was here I learned that the roads I used every day had been constructed by men at the Tiger Valley convict road camp. And another convict road camp called Craddock’s Kloof blasted a pass through the Outeniqua Mountains to create easier access out to the east on roads like the ones I now drove to East London.

So, although I was researching one particular small area of law, the larger history of our country kept pushing in. And it could do that because of these roads. These roads started to connect the big port cities that the British had either taken over or established to the diamond and gold mines in the interior. The roads carried rural men away from their homes to work on these mines because the taxes the British imposed on them were too high. And this began a long history of migrant labor that would be the backbone of the union of four colonies into South Africa in 1910.

One hundred years after the mountain pass was completed, the apartheid government came to power in South Africa and used this network of migrant labor, Native reserves, and roads to further deepen racist segregation between white and Black and Coloured for the benefit of whites only. Roads, which could have been used to make the country more open by being connected, were instead used to move Black and Brown people to where the whites wanted them. They were also used to keep people in place: Roads became borders and barricades.

I spoke to my friend, Dr. Sal Muthayan, who I had met while she worked for the national government in Pretoria.

Sal Muthayan: My name is Sal Muthayan, and I was born in Port Elizabeth in the Eastern Cape. And I lived in East London for a long time, and I worked for the national government in Pretoria.

Nicole: She was my guide to the Eastern Cape. Sal was born in Port Elizabeth, had lived in King Williams town during the height of apartheid, and later moved to East London.

Because Sal and her husband were Indian, they were strictly controlled in where they could live and what they could do. Her life was shaped by two very important pieces of apartheid legislation: one was the Bantu Authorities Act, which created two independent homelands for amaXhosa people—the Ciskei and the Transkei. Her husband, an advocate, had tried to practice law in the white courts in Port Elizabeth, but no one had briefed him on any cases. So he moved his family to King William’s town, a white city in the middle of the Ciskei homeland.

The second piece of legislation was the Group Areas Act, which controlled where people could live and go to school in the rest of South Africa. Sal’s family had to have special permission to live in King William’s town, which was designated for whites only. Because of this, the N2 would come to play a huge role in her daily life during the 1980s.

Sal: My son was 6 years old and starting school, and he could not attend a school in King Williams town. They were designated for white students only, and so at his age, we had to transport him to East London, which is what, 60 kilometers away. Daily, you know, he had to be ready early so he could make it to school, and then be collected and driven back home. And so that became my daily job was to drive him to school, wait for him, and then bring him back home, which it’s long, two hours on the road, you know. So it was a long, long day for a little child of that age.

Nicole: Referring to it as the white corridor, this is how she describes the road at that time.

Sal: King William’s town was the end of the white South Africa. And as soon as you exited King William’s town, you were in Ciskei, the homeland, which then had its own government, a puppet government, of course, but it had its own government, its own traffic, and everything. So the highway was across this homeland. And then as you entered East London, you were back in South Africa again.

So that is why that was the white highway, and it was kept in good condition because it was looked after by the South African government. And then all around it was the Ciskei, which was a homeland that was underdeveloped and, you know, where Black people lived so that they could be a resource for employment in King William’s town and East London, you know, for white business and farmers and so on and so forth.

Nicole: Migrant labor became the dominant feature of life for Black and Brown people in South Africa under white government. Everyone had to travel from home to get to work in the white city or on the white farm. Some people had to travel hundreds of kilometers from Bantustans to Johannesburg or Cape Town. Some only had to travel 20 or 60 kilometers from the townships in the former Group Areas.

In 1994, the white government ended with the first democratic election, and the first time Black and Brown people were properly elected to government. It was a moment when things were supposed to change.

Thami Malusi: My name is Thami Malusi. I’m South African, and I’m based in Johannesburg.

Nicole: Thami is training to be an advocate after several years working as an attorney. He’s clerked for the Constitutional Court, and he studied in the United States. He was born a few years before the 1994 election, and, like me, grew up in the changing South Africa. He lived in Mandalay, a suburb in the Mitchell’s Plein township 25 kilometers on the N2 out of the city. In high school, he debated for the provincial team, often taking him to the suburbs around the University of Cape Town.

Thami:  I was born in Cape Town, but my parents and my family are originally from the Eastern Cape. My parents moved more or less when they were about to have me.

Nicole: Thami says his story is similar to a lot of families who moved for better opportunities.

Thami: Anyone that works in, say, Johannesburg or Cape Town, they’re not really from there if they moved from another place in South Africa, particularly in the former homelands, which is where the Eastern Cape is.  So growing up, even though I lived in Cape Town, I never really considered myself being from Cape Town.

Nicole: But then there’s also the story of people living in townships being locked out of the city, expected to live close by but not benefit from the life happening in Cape Town or East London.

Here’s Sal, again, on what it was like under apartheid.

Sal:  There would be a white city—East London, Jo’burg, whatever. And then there’d always be a township that supplied the labor, but the township, there was normally the one road to enter a township, and it was done in this way so that in times of protest or political unrest, the government could simply close off that road, you know, they’d put barbed wire across. They’d roll it across. They’d park these big tankers next to the road. And that way, you know, they cut off the whole township. And so, people protesting could not threaten the lives and the well-being and the lifestyle of the whites on the other side of that road.

Nicole: So Thami’s experience growing up just outside of the city is missing those barbed wire and tankers, but it is still one of the people around him being locked out.

Thami: If people know anything about Cape Town, it’s that, that’s where you see the inequities of South Africa in their most pronounced form. Because foreigners and, I mean, people in South Africa as well, actually, view Cape Town as this very beautiful place with a lot of opportunities and a lot of things to do, et cetera. But if you drive 10 kilometers outside of the city bowl, it is a stark contrast to what the city bowl is. It’s plagued with poverty, inequality, and all sort of ills that you can possibly think about. And also, the racialized nature of those inequities, right, which is a legacy of apartheid, obviously.

And so, moving between the two worlds on a regular basis, like I did, was quite something because it put everything in perspective—the contrast of it all—because I genuinely think, especially in Cape Town, I think a lot of people don’t actually exist in the two worlds like that.

Nicole: After I heard the stories from Sal and Thami, it was clear to me that the colonial structures that began with these incarcerated workers of the past were carried through to apartheid and also are still there now. There are still highly racialized neighborhoods, a limited economy outside of the major cities, and large swaths of unemployment.

The N2 is one physical part of a long history that touches major decisions to favor a white economy, and this was something we believed we had left in the past. But the story of the N2 reveals that it’s more than that. It’s not just history. A new development project is about to repeat the colonial past.

Eshe: We’ll be right back with more from Nicole.

[BREAK]

Eshe: Let’s get back to Nicole’s story.

Nicole: In 1894, the last independent Xhosa tribe, the amaPondo, were brought into the Cape Colony. They were moved to the northern corner of the Eastern Cape, what would later become the Transkei Bantustan. And they are still there today, living in an area commonly referred to as Xolobeni. They form the Umgungundlovu community. It is on the coast of the Indian Ocean, about halfway between East London and Durban.

This is a community that’s long been known for resisting threats to their way of life. They fought against the colonial government until the very end, and even then, they burned down magistrates offices built to “govern” their tribe. They refused the chief that the apartheid government attempted to put in place in the 1960s. And more recently, they took large mining companies to court to prevent seismic blasting off the coast where they live.

But all of this is to defend the life they have in the region.

Zanele Malindi: There’s such a sense of community there. They feel safe. It’s a real, you know, “neighbor helping neighbor.” Everybody knows each other.

Nicole: This is Zanele Malindi. Zanele is a lawyer currently working with the community in Xolobeni to defend themselves against a new threat. Now there is a proposal to expand the N2 to cut right through the region to shorten the distance between Gqeberha, formerly Port Elizabeth, and Durban. The existing construction plan would have massive consequences for the people living there.

Zanele: Cutting through it would obviously include resettlement of people, the movement of people. It’s not just that you are losing the place you live, it’s losing the place you live off. People have graves around there. There’s really strong cultural practices around there. Really strong cultural practices being close to the water. They believe ancestors live in the water, which is why, you know, the Shell seismic blasting people were so against, and, obviously, resettlement. They’re really the connection to history and to ancestry is so strong there.

Nicole: So now they’re heading to court again. The major legal issue is that the minister of transport signed off on the proposed extension without a detailed relocation action plan for the people living where the road would run. The larger issue is why the route was planned to go straight through the community, when there was another option that would be less detrimental.

Zanele: One we call the “inland route,” and one is the “coastal route.”

The “inland route” would go the same and then instead of just cutting across the coast, would go up into the community into the inland villages and then come back and join. And then there’s obviously the coastal one, which just cuts straight across and joins the Eastern Cape and Durban.

So, those ideas have been around for a very, very long time.

Nicole: That longer inland route would also connect more communities to the Wild Coast traffic, and bring them economic opportunities, while still leaving Xolobeni intact.

The South African National Roads Agency, referred to as SANRAL, who created the plan, is a parastatal company in charge of major infrastructure and development construction projects, but ultimately requires government approval for its actions. There are communities south of Xolobeni that have already been displaced when construction started; to date, they haven’t been offered any form of resettlement.

I asked Zanele how she thought the project would play out in the coming years.

Zanele: My dream is that they realize that legally, they are actually going to be pretty, for lack of a better term, screwed, like they can’t do it.

Because I don’t think they’re ever going to say, we’re going to be happy for you to cut through this community. So in my dream world, there’s an acceptance that legislation exists. Common law exists that protects this community. And there’s a real engagement with the alternative route. But I think, yeah, my ideal, first of all, we get that alternative route, because that’s what they want, you know, it is not against the road, they’re just against the road where it exists.

The reality of it, they’ve already approved this road, you know? They’ve already, SANRAL’s already got approval for the road where it is, which is also really problematic because how are they going to build it?

Nicole: For me, this case raises a bigger question about building a road and who it’s for in 2025.

Without any justification, the shorter route by one hour was chosen, even though it has a potentially larger human cost—something that the planners of this infrastructure project have failed to properly account for. And sadly, this is just something we’ve come to expect from government.

Dr. Sal Muthayan, the former government employee who we heard from earlier in the episode, told me that it’s the history of the country that really creates this decision making without discourse with communities.

Sal: I went into government to transform government in South Africa. My role was to design curricula for changing public servants to understand what role they would play under a new constitution and a democratic kind of country. But the remnants of apartheid in terms of the bureaucracy, even though policies changed and legislation changed, the hierarchical nature of government remained and bureaucracy remained. And I think that that has been one of the biggest stumbling blocks in effecting change in South Africa.

And so this, I think, is going to be an ongoing struggle and the need to decolonize the government of South Africa. And it’s not just about pulling apart structures, but it’s about forging more participatory ways of doing things, more consultative ways of doing things, and the government doesn’t do that.

[Traditional Xolobeni singing begins]

Nicole: This is a crucial moment in the history of South Africa. Even before 1845 when infrastructure projects began, the lives, traditions, and homes of Native people have been disregarded so that the country could “develop.” But development that ends the Xolobeni way of life is not development for South Africans. It is another moment in a long history of marginalizing and exploiting Black South Africans for economic gains—gains that have never trickled down for the good of us all.

There is a choice of a road to follow, where the future is a seamless continuation of the past. Or there is a chance to listen to the voices of a community and secure the future they have chosen. The kind of future we could all stand to benefit from.

Eshe: This episode was written and reported by Nicole van Zyl. Nicole is a Ph.D. candidate at the University of the Western Cape, and assistant director of graduate studies at the UCLA School of Law. She is grateful to Dr. Sal Muthayan for sharing her history, and to Thami Malusi and Zanele Malindi for the work they are doing with the amaPondo community in Xolobeni.

SAPIENS is hosted by me, Eshe Lewis. The show is a Written In Air production. Dennis Funk is our program teacher and editor. Mixing and sound design are provided by Dennis Funk and Rebecca Nolan. Christine Weeber is our copy editor. Our executive producers are Dennis Funk and Chip Colwell. Some recordings in this story come from insightshare.org.

This episode is part of the SAPIENS Public Scholars Training Fellowship program, which provides in-depth training for anthropologists in the craft of science communication and public scholarship, and is funded by the John Templeton Foundation.