SAFELY BEHIND BARS, INTRUDING

Colonial Patterns and Territorial Rites
in white South African middle class suburbs

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CONCLUSION

We are constantly living between boundaries, appropriating, naming and claiming space.  To return to the first chapter: a space is a field of heightened perception.  It is personal to us, and private, but it is not always tangible to others.  Therefore we seek to fortify our spaces.  “A territory cannot exist in nature; it exists in the mind of the animal.”  (Malmberg 1980:7)  Similarly,  Mofokeng writes:

• Home is an appropriated space; it does not exist objectively in reality.  The notion of ‘home’ is a fiction we create out of a need to belong.  . . . Home serves a similar function to zero in mathematics.  It provides us with a beginning or a basis from which to evaluate other spaces: how they fulfil functional and aesthetic needs as we relate to or move through them in the business of living.  (Mofokeng 2001:67)

• South Africa, for centuries the province of white dominance, now presents itself as an 'unhomely' space, a country rapidly becoming inhospitable to, if not uninhabitable by, its white occupants.  The 'unhomeliness' derives ... from postapartheid South Africa's inability to provide physical and mental sanctuary for a community accustomed to such protections by virtue of its race  (Farred 1997:73).

When such a home territory is called into existence, it is always done in a shared cultural space. Jennifer Robinson eloquently sums up the white culture of security:

• White South Africans have enormous resources of repression at their disposal.  These are no longer the armoured vehicles, administrative sanctions and legal exclusions of apartheid.  Rather they are the private security arrangements around every home, the constant search for exclusive, safe, white neighborhoods, the retreat to the shopping mall with its security guards and sanitized aisles, the rising fear of driving around town, the no-go areas (downtown, townships, ‘white’ areas that have become ‘black’, roads past new shack settlements, certain freeways at certain times of day or night, the street outside after dark), the reluctance to walk anywhere at all, the anxious looking around as they get out of their cars.  Keeping (black) danger out has become an obsession, and spaces are made and used in ways which reflect these fears (Robinson 2001:168).

Patterns are human inventions.