Who Gets to Tell South Africa’s Creative Story?

South Africa’s creative economy is experiencing what many call a renaissance. Fashion designers from Johannesburg show at international weeks. Musicians from Cape Town and Durban dominate streaming platforms across the continent. Visual artists command global gallery attention. The country’s creative output is prolific, diverse, and increasingly visible on the world stage. And yet, beneath this narrative of creative flourishing lies an older, more stubborn question: who controls the story? Who decides which creative expressions are amplified and which remain invisible? Who profits from South Africa’s creative labour, and who is left with the cultural capital but not the economic returns?

These are not new questions. They are, in fact, the defining questions of South African cultural politics — and to understand why they persist, we must reckon with the spatial legacy of apartheid that continues to shape who gets to tell stories and from where.

The Geography of Erasure

On 11 February 1966, District Six in Cape Town was declared a whites-only area under the Group Areas Act. Over the following years, more than 60,000 people were forcibly removed from their homes. An entire neighbourhood — one of the most culturally vibrant, racially mixed communities in the country — was demolished. The bulldozers did not just destroy buildings; they destroyed a storytelling infrastructure. The jazz clubs, the street markets, the mosques and churches and shebeens where people gathered and made meaning together — all of it was razed. The District Six Museum, established in 1994, has worked to recover and preserve these stories, but the spatial destruction was also a narrative destruction. When you displace a community, you displace its capacity to tell its own story.

The pattern was not unique to Cape Town. On 9 February 1955, two thousand police arrived in Sophiatown, Johannesburg, to begin the forced removal of approximately 60,000 residents. Sophiatown — the neighbourhood that had produced some of South Africa’s most significant cultural output, from the journalism of Drum magazine to the music of Miriam Makeba and Hugh Masekela — was systematically destroyed and rebuilt as a whites-only suburb cynically named Triomf (“Triumph”). The name was changed back to Sophiatown in 2006, but the community that made it a cultural powerhouse had been scattered decades earlier.

“You cannot separate the question of who tells the story from the question of who was allowed to stay. Every forced removal was also an act of narrative dispossession.”

The Numbers Behind Displacement

The Group Areas Act, enacted on 7 July 1950, was the legislative machinery behind these destructions. Under its provisions, an estimated 860,400 people were forcibly relocated based on racial classification. Each removal was an act of spatial violence, but it was also an act of cultural violence — severing people from the places, networks, and institutions through which they produced and shared creative work. The creative economies of District Six, Sophiatown, Cato Manor in Durban, and dozens of other communities were not simply disrupted; they were deliberately dismantled.

The spatial legacy of this dismantlement persists. South Africa’s creative industries remain concentrated in a small number of urban centres, and within those centres, access to galleries, publishing houses, studios, and performance venues is still largely determined by geography — which is to say, by the spatial arrangements that apartheid created and that post-apartheid urban planning has been slow to undo.

The Elusive Metropolis

Mbembe and Nuttall’s (2008) Johannesburg: The Elusive Metropolis offers a framework for understanding how the city’s spatial politics shape its cultural production. Their work, developed through the Wits Institute for Social and Economic Research (WISER) at the University of the Witwatersrand, examines Johannesburg not as a fixed entity but as a constantly shifting field of movement, encounter, and improvisation. The city’s creative energy, they argue, emerges precisely from its instability — from the ways in which people navigate, subvert, and reimagine spatial boundaries that were designed to keep them apart.

But Mbembe and Nuttall also make clear that this creative energy is not equally distributed. The infrastructure of storytelling — the galleries, the publishers, the broadcasters, the funding bodies, the international networks — remains concentrated in ways that reproduce older patterns of exclusion. A musician in Khayelitsha may have as much talent as one in Braamfontein, but they do not have the same access to recording studios, managers, distributors, or international festival circuits. The geography of creative opportunity is still, in many ways, the geography of apartheid.

Toward Distributed Storytelling

What would a more distributed storytelling infrastructure look like? It would require, at minimum, the decentralisation of cultural funding away from a small number of urban institutions. It would require investment in community-based creative spaces — not as extensions of existing institutions, but as autonomous sites of cultural production with their own governance, their own curatorial visions, and their own relationships to local communities. It would require digital infrastructure that enables creative practitioners in rural and peri-urban areas to produce, distribute, and monetise their work without passing through urban gatekeepers.

Most fundamentally, it would require a reckoning with the fact that South Africa’s creative story has always been told by its people — in every township, every rural homestead, every informal settlement. The infrastructure already exists. It is woven into the fabric of daily life: in the songs sung at funerals, the murals painted on spaza shop walls, the fashion innovations emerging from taxi ranks and street corners. The question is not whether these stories are being told. They are. The question is whether the formal creative economy is structured to hear them, amplify them, and ensure that the people who tell them benefit from their telling.