'Representing Difficult Pasts within Complex Presents ... - T2M

sand-dunes and other difficult terrain (Pirie 2008) for their elite white owners. Under apartheid, access to
driving motor vehicles was also racially segregated, as well as driving occupations (Horrell et al 1946-
present). South Africa’s large urban, and often notorious, taxi industry arose as a result of forced
removals as a result of the Group Areas Act (1950) during apartheid requiring people to travel greater
distances, transport being now required beyond the feeder limits of bus services, which too benefited from
forced removals (Khosa 1991). The impact of longer and more expensive travel distances to work, along
with racial segregation imposed on public transport services, led to bus and train boycotts throughout
Cape Town’s transport history (Pirie 2009, 2008, 1992, 1989, Sey 2008, Horrell et al 1946-present).
6
Likewise, ‘buffer’ zones were created through the construction of highways and railway lines in
apartheid Cape Town, to separate white, black and coloured residential areas (See Sey 2008; Morris 1969;
Watson 1998). Part of the argument for forced removals in Cape Town in the 1960s and 1970s was the
need for highways to create a new city architecture that favoured white privilege (Morris 1969; Bank and
Minkley 1999). Even access to train tickets under apartheid was controlled and restricted, in which
special permission was required to obtain a ticket, for example, to work in Cape Town, as a means of
monitoring and preventing the mobility of black South Africans (Horrell et al 1946-present). It is not
surprising then, that transport in South Africa has been argued not as mobility, but as ‘immobility’ (Pirie
2009); blockages, restrictions, barriers and boundaries not only in relation to physical mobility but which
also even today continue, economically and socially, to have impact.
In recent years, cities as a whole have been argued to be fluid creative spaces shaped through
praxis, narrative and social imaginaries (Cinar and Bender 2007; Bridge and Watson 2004; Appadurai
1991; Field 2007; Pile 2005; Taylor 1996; Biron 2009). Pile (2005) for example writes that the city does
not only consist of a static urban infrastructure, but is infused with other meanings – myths, fantasies,
desires, narratives, imaginaries, or what he terms ‘phantasmagorias’ – the more metaphorical, emotional,
desires, fantasies and haunting sides of the city, in that ‘what is real about cities is the sheer
expressiveness and passion of its life’ (1-2). Although Pile progresses to exploring vampire and ghost
stories in the city, it is possible to extricate such an approach to transport histories in South Africa – what
are the ‘ghosts’ of the past, the memories and associations, that haunt the present, through the presence of
transport vehicles and a transport infrastructure? What are the ‘hidden’ problematic aspects of transport,
the negative elements that, arguably, suck the life-blood out of the concept of a motile, mobile city of
Cape Town?