Voortrekker Road palimpsest: A study in social, spatial and temporal flux in the city

Abstract

With its Afrikaner Nationalist past and its current status as an Afropolitan hub, Voortrekker Road simultaneously constitutes a place of separation and transgression, resulting in a quotidian tableau of urban life that could in some ways be read as a microcosm of social dynamics in contemporary South Africa. This thesis is a study on the intersecting microhistories at play in Voortrekker Road as a site of fractured negotiation within South Africa as a transitional society, and a place where multiple historical narratives intersect and become rewritten. In interpreting and portraying the layered, entangled histories, attention will be paid to microhistories and the fragment in order to steer away from totalising perspectives. Furthermore, the study draws heavily on the theories of Walter Benjamin in order to position a montage approach to history at the center of interpreting the historical layers enveloped along the road. A montage approach to historical thinking aims to deviate from the deterministic method of Hegelianism. Gyanendra Pandey emphasises how ‘part of the importance of the “fragmentary” point of view lies in that it resists the drive for a shallow homogenization and for other, potentially richer definitions of the “nation” and the future political community.’

Particular attention is paid to the microhistories and intimate business praxis amongst migrant entrepreneurs and informal businesses in order to consider the explosive creative refunctioning of Voortrekker Road in relation to its socially engineered segregationist history. In consideration of Voortrekker Road as a startling respite from xenophobic violence, the study considers the infusions of affect into the cityscape. As AbdouMaliq Simone aptly prompts ‘What are some of the ways in which urban residents are building a particular emotional field in the city, trying to restore a very physical sense of connection to one another?’