Geo-Political Climates

Geography is never neutral. This domain studies how political systems, borders, migration, and climate shape identity and cultural production across Africa and the Global South. The Group Areas Act (Act No. 41 of 1950), signed into law on 7 July 1950, divided the country into racial zones and resulted in approximately 860,400 people being forcibly relocated before its repeal in 1991 (South African History Online, n.d.). The spatial architecture of apartheid still defines South African cities. Place is not a backdrop to culture. Place is culture.

District Six in Cape Town was declared a whites-only area on 11 February 1966. Over 60,000 residents — 94% of them coloured — were forcibly removed to townships on the Cape Flats, roughly 25 kilometres away. The old houses were bulldozed; only places of worship were left standing. The District Six Museum, established in 1994, preserves this memory (District Six Museum, n.d.). In Johannesburg, the destruction of Sophiatown began on 9 February 1955, when two thousand armed police descended on the neighbourhood. Some 60,000 residents were relocated to Meadowlands in what is now Soweto, and the area was rebuilt as a whites-only suburb named Triomf — “Triumph” — before being officially renamed Sophiatown in 2006 (South African History Online, n.d.).

In Durban, Cato Manor saw an estimated 150,000 people evicted and 6,062 shacks demolished between 1958 and 1964, with Africans relocated to KwaMashu, Lamontville, and Umlazi, and Indians primarily to Chatsworth (South African History Online, n.d.). These are not historical footnotes. They are the spatial conditions within which contemporary identity is still being formed.

Key Questions

“Growing up on the east coast of South Africa means growing up between cultures. Coastal geography shapes identity differently from inland cities.”

Who gets to tell South Africa’s creative story, and from where? As Mbembe and Nuttall (2008) argue in Johannesburg: The Elusive Metropolis, understanding South African cities requires moving beyond purely economic or segregation-focused readings to incorporate aesthetics, subjectivity, and imagination. How do physical environments — from townships to coastlines — actively shape identity and behaviour?

What does the Indian Ocean teach us about belonging that the nation-state cannot? Archaeological evidence of Indian Ocean trade reaching KwaZulu-Natal dates back centuries — glass beads from Asia found in the Thukela valley have been dated to the ninth century, and others near Durban to the eighth century (PNAS, 2025). In the modern period, emigration of Indian indentured labourers to Natal was approved on 7 August 1860, with the first ship arriving in Durban on 16 November 1860. Approximately 152,184 Indians arrived on 384 ships before immigration ceased on 21 July 1911 (South African History Online, n.d.). Durban today has one of the largest concentrations of Indian-descended people outside of India.

Our Approach

We start with the ground. Every AnthroWorks project begins by understanding the landscape — physical, political, cultural — in which it is embedded. This means walking the terrain, mapping spatial histories, and recognising that the forces shaping identity in South Africa are inseparable from the land on which they play out. We draw on research from WISER (the Wits Institute for Social and Economic Research) at the University of the Witwatersrand, home to scholars like Achille Mbembe and Sarah Nuttall whose work on African urbanism, postcolonial thought, and cultural geography shapes our analytical frameworks.

We are based in Durban and Cape Town — two cities shaped by radically different geographies and political histories. Durban’s Indian Ocean cosmopolitanism produces a cultural fluidity that Cape Town’s mountain-and-peninsula geography does not. Gold was discovered on the Witwatersrand in 1886, and by 1899 the industry had attracted £75 million in investment and employed more than 100,000 people — the overwhelming majority Black migrant workers earning roughly one-ninth the wage of white miners (Britannica, n.d.). Today, nearly 2 million people live on or near Johannesburg’s 6 billion tons of mine tailings. These spatial conditions are not incidental; they are constitutive. Understanding them is central to our work.

Who This Is For

Urban planners and spatial researchers. Post-colonial scholars. Migration researchers. Cultural geographers. Artists and writers working with landscape. Anyone interested in how the physical world shapes the cultural one — and how cultural practice, in turn, reshapes the physical world.