Geography is never neutral. In South Africa, this truth is written into the landscape with particular violence. Apartheid was, at its core, a spatial project — a systematic reorganisation of land, movement, and proximity designed to control who could be where, and under what conditions. Townships were placed far from economic centres. Highways were routed to separate communities. Natural features — rivers, hills, buffer zones of open land — were weaponised as racial boundaries.
Three decades into democracy, these spatial legacies persist. Understanding South African culture without understanding South African geography is impossible.
Apartheid’s Spatial Architecture
The Group Areas Act of 1950 was perhaps apartheid’s most consequential piece of legislation. It designated specific areas for specific racial groups, forcing the mass relocation of communities and creating the urban geography that still defines South African cities today. District Six in Cape Town, Sophiatown in Johannesburg, Cato Manor in Durban — these forced removals are well documented. Less often discussed is how profoundly they reshaped the cultural identities of the communities they displaced.
“Place is not a backdrop to culture. Place is culture. When you destroy a neighbourhood, you destroy a way of being in the world.”
The buffer zones between apartheid’s racial zones were designed to be empty — spaces of nothing. But nothing is ever truly empty. These interstitial spaces have become some of the most culturally productive landscapes in post-apartheid South Africa, occupied by informal settlements, markets, and creative communities that exist precisely because they were never planned for.
The Coast as Cultural Boundary
Durban’s relationship with the Indian Ocean has produced a cultural identity distinct from anywhere else in South Africa. Growing up on the east coast means growing up between cultures — Zulu, Indian, coloured, and white communities shaped by centuries of oceanic trade, indentured labour, and coastal geography. The ocean is not a boundary; it is a connector, linking KwaZulu-Natal to the broader Indian Ocean world: Madagascar, Mozambique, India, Southeast Asia.
This geographic position produces a particular kind of cultural fluidity. Durban’s food culture — bunny chow, gatsby, samoosas alongside phutu and achar — is a material expression of Indian Ocean cosmopolitanism. Its music scenes (from maskandi to gqom) draw on rhythmic traditions that travel along oceanic routes. Its fashion mixes African, Indian, and Western aesthetics in ways that inland cities cannot replicate.
Johannesburg: The Vertical City
If Durban is shaped by the ocean, Johannesburg is shaped by the mine. Built on gold, the city’s landscape is literally constructed from extraction. Mine dumps — those yellow-grey hills of processed earth — are the city’s most visible geographical features, monuments to the labour and capital that built modern South Africa.
The mine created Johannesburg’s defining cultural pattern: migration. Workers came from across Southern Africa to work underground, bringing languages, traditions, and aspirations that mixed in the hostels, shebeens, and streets of the city. This migration produced Johannesburg’s extraordinary cultural density — and its extraordinary inequality. The geography of the mine is a geography of power, and it continues to shape who lives where, who has access to what, and who gets to imagine a future.
Rural Landscapes and Knowledge Systems
Beyond the cities, South Africa’s rural landscapes carry knowledge systems that urban-centred research often overlooks. The communal lands of the Eastern Cape, the agricultural landscapes of Limpopo, the semi-arid Karoo — each produces distinct cultural practices intimately tied to ecological conditions.
These are not “traditional” communities frozen in time. They are dynamic cultures actively negotiating the pressures of urbanisation, climate change, and economic marginalisation. Their knowledge of land — how to read weather patterns, manage grazing rotations, maintain soil fertility, and sustain water systems — represents centuries of accumulated ecological intelligence that formal research institutions are only now beginning to recognise.
Geography as Method
For us, geography is where the observation starts. We approach every project by first understanding the landscape — physical, political, cultural — in which it sits. Walking the ground. Learning the spatial histories. Paying attention to the ways that identity in South Africa is shaped by, and inseparable from, the land on which it plays out.