Assimilation, emigration, semigration, and integration: "white" peoples' strategies for finding a comfort zone in post-apartheid South Africa

Richard Ballard

Abstract

Assimilation, emigration, semigration, and integration: "white" peoples' strategies for finding a comfort zone in post-apartheid South Africa¹

I was part of the system, I was hooked into it … [We] continued with our privileged existence knowing that there were all those millions … out in the cold as it were, knowing that there had to be change somewhere somehow; sort of wanting it, but in the secret of your heart thinking gosh away goes my nice comfortable feeling … However much you can want a situation to change, you're giving up your comfort zone (Interview, July 1996).

If we are lucky, home transcends the literal building we live in and becomes metaphorically extended to the neighbourhood, city, even country or continent. To freely say that South Africa is my home requires me to be sufficiently comfortable with the values, practices, and words spoken within its boundaries. It must be a source of safety and security both physically and metaphorically.

In the following discussion I wish to consider ways in which "white" South Africans attempt to find comfort zones.

In the past, comfort zones were created through formal segregation. In order to create living environments which would facilitate their modern, European, sense of themselves minority governments removed those people, values, behaviours, languages which were seen to contradict this identity. However, from the 1970s formal segregation became increasingly untenable. Minority governments began to promote the idea of assimilation in which a "black" middle class would be allowed into the comfort zones of "white" people in exchange for the sanctity of private property and a property market that would continue to filter out more "undesirable" people. However, as squatters and street traders have demonstrated, it is possible to usurp land in the city with little regard for the property market. The implication for some is that the living environment no longer functions to affirm a Western, "modern" sense of self and is no longer a source of security and safety.

The extreme response to this dislocation is relocation to another country which accords better with the identity to which individuals aspire. Short of emigration, however, there are local responses which reflect a similar desire to shift the boundaries of one's comfort zone. Borrowing a word used in the media, semigration, or partial emigration without leaving the borders of South Africa, is a useful notion to encapsulate the alternative path to full emigration. If the market fails to keep away undesirable people, then certain steps can be taken to avoid them. Semigration has been used to classify the migration of many "white" people to Cape Town, for example, as they believe Cape Town to be a more congenial environment.

However, the word can also be used to understand withdrawal from democratic South Africa to achieve some of the effects of emigration without actually leaving the borders of the country. Spatial practices such as gated communities and enclosed neighbourhoods are examples of this.

Finally, some "white" South Africans do not depend on sanitised space for a secure positive sense of themselves. Integration, therefore, is a spatial strategy which reflects an identity not founded on the sharp othering that was the basis for apartheid. Urban apartheid was an attempt to ensure that, in a country with a majority indigenous population, boundaries could be redrawn so that "we" rather than "they" were in the majority within its perimeter. Strategies since apartheid have followed the same logic but have had to adapt to the absence of a state programme with the same objectives. It may involve emigrating to Europe, Canada or New Zealand. It may involve a heavily-policed small-scale permitter, as in a gated community. It may involve changing definitions of "we" to include, for example, middle-class members of previously included races, the strategy of assimilation. It may include expanding the definition of "we" to include all who are resident in South Africa, intergration.

Using interview and newspaper material, this discussion traces the evolution of "white strategies" to find comfort zones and suggests that assimilation, emigration, semigration, and integration have come to dominate the repertoire since the demise of formal segregation. The primary objective is to offer definitions of what might be seen as ideal types of these strategies and to examine how they relate to one another. The secondary objective is to consider the category of semigration in more detail. This study adds to a growing body of work on gated communities in South Africa by explicitly locating the semigration strategy in relation to "racialised" performances of identity.

1    Traditional strategies for creating comfort zones
Explanations regarding the reasons why racism is useful to "white" people are varied. It has been well established that segregation allowed for massive economic gain for "white" people (Johnstone 1982; Wolpe 1972) and also served to shore up control and power (Crush 1994; Robinson 1990, 1996). A less developed theme flagged by contributors such as Melissa Steyn (2001) and Aletta Norval (1990) is that racism helped "white" people shore up their identity as "white".

Following the logic frequently deployed in cultural studies, I understand othering as a key conceptual process in which inferior qualities were projected on to, and seen as, the property of racialised others. Such others were seen as lazy, licentious, criminal, dirty, and so on. The effect of such classifications was to produce a positive self-image for Europe / the West / "white" people as hardworking, moral, clean - broadly, as civilised. The identity of "white" people became cast as white supremacism, where a secure self-image came from one's "whiteness" or at least Europeanness to which the virtues of civilisation were automatically attached. The dominant strategy for managing this social hierarchy was to ensure that others were far away. This was a generic colonial strategy. Boundaries were drawn between civilisation and various uncivilised deviant "others" … The world map, with civilisation in the centre and the grotesque adorning the periphery, then expressed this desire for a literal distancing from the "other". More generally, space was used to establish a hierarchy which distinguished the civilised European from uncivilised native peoples (Sibley 1995:50-51).

The problem for European people living in colonies is that if they choose for themselves a "civilised and Western" identity, it is at odds with the identity they have given the colonised region (Ballard 2003). "Uncivilised" others are not voyeuristically experienced as by temporary Western tourists, but are an ever-present threat, or an "intimate enemy" (Werbner 1996:20) that has to be controlled and managed. By logical extension it was feared that contact with this unreformed otherness posed a terminal threat to the civilisation of Europeans attempting to live outside Europe. When relocating from the region that they considered the origin of their superiority to a region they believed to be the antithesis of this superiority, settlers in colonies had to find new strategies for managing their relations with this intimate other. Colonialists had to neutralise the effects of "uncivilised" and "barbaric" people that populated the land in order to secure the viability of their own identities there.

In South Africa, there were two dominant responses.

On one side, liberals hoped that the problematic otherness of those considered racially inferior could be overcome through education. Possessed by the "civilising mission", these settlers sought to assimilate others into their (putatively superior) society. In 1902, Sir Gordon Sprig, the Cape prime minister, argued that there was no longer any "reason for refusing to allow the natives to associate with the white population". In doing so, natives would emerge from barbarism "so that they might no longer be a source of danger" (Swanson 1977:399).

However, by the start of the 20th century, a growing "black" middle class produced precisely by this civilising mission prompted growing unease amongst more conservative quarters, particularly since the stakes had become much higher with the advent of mining. WEB du Bois, as paraphrased by Bernard Magubane, argued that as "beneficiaries of imperialism, the white could not share a common destiny with the black proletariat" (1996:9).

With assimilation now losing popularity as a mechanism for managing otherness, segregationism became the core strategy. Rather than create civilised places by civilising the uncivilised, all problematic people would ideally be excluded or managed. In trying to reinforce "white" identities as "modern" and "Western", identities which depend on the rejection of "traditionalism" and "Africanness", it was imperative to try and create living environments which were also modern and Western with firm, defensible boundaries. Cities were posited as the centres of civilisation and progress, a claim that was made possible not only by virtue of the presence of the supposedly civilised ("white") people that lived there, but also by the exclusion of "uncivilised" people. From 1913, the physical relocation of "surplus" "blacks" represented a new drive to create Europe in Africa by removing all (unnecessary) non-Europeans. The segregationist drive culminated in the ideology of apartheid, which sought to achieve what Bauman, speaking generically, describes as the close correlation of social space and physical space typical in many "modern" Western countries (Bauman 1993:150). When it was useful to allow non-Europeans into cities, this was done under strictly controlled conditions in which they were regulated, tracked, and made to leave once they became redundant. Contact between "races" was minimised and parts of the city were zoned as "race" specific areas.

Inter-"racial" contact was, of course, frequent, but under these conditions, people of other "races" were denied "normative influence" (Bauman 1991:66) over "white" spaces, thereby securing these spaces as civilised, modern and Western. Spaces zoned for "white" use were the ultimate comfort zones. In Bauman's words, they "stood out from the rest of social space for the absence of strangers, and hence the satisfying, secure fullness of normative regulation" (Bauman 1993:151). It was through exclusion that "whites" felt they could contend that they lived in civilised, modern, first-world cities. The effect of apartheid, in the words of HF Verwoerd, had been to create "a piece of Europe on the tip of the African Continent" (quoted in Magubane 1996:xvii). It was within this piece of Europe that white people could feel secure in their self-conceptions as modern, Western, first world and civilised.

Rian Malan identifies this sentiment in the following:

Looking back the strangest thing about my African childhood is that it wasn't really African at all. It was a more or less generically Western childhood, unfolding in generic white suburbs where almost everyone subscribed to Life and Reader's Digest, and to the generic Western verities they upheld. Our heads turned to the north like flowers to the sun, towards where the great white mother culture lay. Our imaginary lives were rooted there, not in this strange place, where Zionists danced on Thursdays and rain washed the red earth of Africa into the streets (1990:62).

The diabolical project of creating Europe in Africa appeared possible through pass laws, the Group Areas Act, and segregated amenities. Through such mechanisms people attempt to control those things that threaten their identity. What the colonial and apartheid projects in South Africa had created were identity-affirming spaces for European settlers within which Europeans could feel at home. The boundaries around one's sense of oneself are matched and managed through spatial boundaries. Social distance and spatial distance are thus closely co-ordinated.

2    Adapt or die: the return to assimilation
From the 1970s, of course, apartheid's crisis of legitimacy began to escalate. This prompted the return to an old idea that had been rejected for much of the 20th century: that people of other "races" were capable of integrating into modern urban society. In its final two decades the "white" state was forced to abandon orthodox Verwoerdian thinking and its last roll of the dice was to turn to the market as a possible sustainable means of keeping problematic others out. The "white" hegemony began to allow for the possibility that some non-"white" people with sufficient education, "development" and acculturation into Western ways of life had the potential to become "modern" and "civilised" and could therefore be assimilated into the Western, first-world, "developed" section of the population. With democratisation in the 1990s (and arguably in the "reforms" of the 1980s), South Africa's moral position on racism shifted to be broadly in line with that of the West, which itself had undergone a transition several decades earlier. The holocaust, jim crow racism, colonialism and apartheid were all underpinned by the belief that some nations were justified in the extermination, subjugation, segregation, and exploitation of others simply on the grounds of their "race".

It is now rare to find such rationalisations in the mainstream. The enormity of this shift in the moral thinking of previously racist powers should not be taken for granted. However, various analyses have considered the extent to which this shift falls short of a truly comprehensive abandonment of all the effects of these racist pasts (eg Barkin 1992; Frankenberg 1993; Van Dijk 1993). While racism is no longer as explicit as it once was, defensive identity-making processes have continued. What has happened through the moral shift of the latter half of the 20th century is that this mode of identity-construction-through-othering has become deracialised. Since a sense of "racialised" superiority is no longer acceptable - both publicly and in the minds of most "white" people themselves - it is no longer the explicit origin of "white" people's positive self-image. "White" people now seldom articulate their identity in terms of their "whiteness" but rather in terms of their "ordinariness" as citizens of a modern Western developed world. This is not peculiar to South Africa, and the fact that "white" identities are unmarked and invisible while other identities are marked, is a widespread feature of social differentiation globally (Bonnett 2000:140; Frankenburg 1993:17; McGuinness 2000:227; Sibley 1995:23). For Norval, the "conception of white identity had become less important than the notion of a system, a way of life, which linked SA to the 'free West'" (1990:146). The fact that most people they classify as part of this developed community in South Africa are "white" is seen as a matter of overlap rather than there being an acknowledged causal link. Markers such as "developed", "modern", "Western", "first-world" euphemistically replace the now less acceptable "civilised", and have become explicitly detached from "race".

Being first-world is not a necessary property of "whiteness" in South Africa. Thus, while the "racial" way in which "white" people historically understood themselves and social difference is now seldom expressed, much of the substance of the way "white" people understood themselves and others continues. By the time the "white" population arrived on the doorstep of democracy in the 1990s, few retained any faith in the strategy of formal segregation, and most had come to accept the possibility of the upward mobility of other groups.

The start of this transition was signalled when PW Botha took power as prime minister in the National Party-led government in 1978, declaring that apartheid would result in a state of permanent conflict and that South Africans had to "Adapt or die" (Davenport and Saunders 2000:459; Posel 1987:419). Under his leadership (1978-1989) the government explicitly set out to establish a non-"white" middle class that would act as a buffer against communism. This group would join "whites" in having "a stake in the system"; they would secure the longevity of "white" privilege (Marks and Trapido 1987:57; Posel 1987:423-4). Contact with such individuals would not be problematic, since they would largely be compatible with "white" people's sense of themselves as modern, Western and first-world. This would be same-status contact, or contact between people of different "races" who have the same level of income, similar levels of education and similar "Western" lifestyles. It is a type of contact that most "white" people find acceptable and they are willing to abandon their previous "racially" exclusive stance in order to allow these acceptable elements of other "races" in.

Thus, the acceptance of other "races" was conditional upon the conformance of these assimilated groups to the culture, norms and standards laid down by the "host" "white" group. In this way segregationist ideology adapted away from orthodox apartheid towards a discourse not as easily identifiable as racist.

Yet the racist implications should not be underestimated. While non-"whites" would be accepted, they would be admitted only if they made themselves acceptable as defined by "white" people. As Gerhard Schutte explains, "moderates found blacks to be socially acceptable as long as they adhered to civilised standards in their behaviour and lifestyle. The less civilised, according to this view, would automatically and spontaneously distance themselves. This might be achieved through class differentiation. The scheme of reasoning in this case was a social Darwinist kind rather than a racist one. Assimilation of blacks would occur at the top end of society, and at the bottom there would be poverty and ethnic differentiation" (Schutte 1995:334).

The qualified acceptance of people from "other races" abounds in post-apartheid "white" discourse. To illustrate with interview material, a New National Party local councillor in Durban put this rather bluntly when he said he refused to live next to a coolie or a kaffir, but would quite willingly live next door to cultured person of any race (interview, August 2003). Other respondents expressed this logic more politely, for example:

"You've got to accept [integration]; the thing is that economically I think you will get a better class, you won't just get the one who shouts and you know, when they talk to each other" (Lindsay, interview August 1997);

" … basically you're paying quite a sum of money to live in various exclusive areas and you find that those people generally have high-powered jobs or jobs where they're working hard and they actually have moved away from certain traditions" (Jane, interview September 1997).

While the acceptance of "other races" was billed as a moral shift away from the evils of apartheid, the change from segregation to assimilation is not necessarily a weakening of the "white" social agenda but a shrewd move that ensures the sustainability of "white" social control within the suburbs. The strategic potential of assimilation is that it allows for "inclusionary control" of what is classified as deviant behaviour in a way that appears progressive relative to the blunt exclusionism of the past (Sibley 1995: 85). In other words, strangers are challenged to "conform or be damned" in an attempt to prevent the introduction of "alienness" into the space which the social engineers seek to control (Bauman 1991:162).

3    The limits of assimilation
While many placed their salvation in market-regulated assimilation, this strategy was limited since some undesirable people do not always obey the market. Through "land-invasions", squatters have come to occupy land despite market forces which would generally exclude them (Ballard forthcoming). Similarly, informal street trade, although now largely regulated, emerged in cities in the 1990s as and where it pleased without the permission of any authority (Popke and Ballard 2004). The much-cherished market filter - whereby only "desirable" people are able to move near "whites" or take up occupation in cities because of the high cost of renting or buying property in these areas - is being contemptuously flouted (Emmett 1992:78). Such people are not upwardly mobile and their bypassing of the market system means that there can be little confidence that encounters will be same-status. Otherness, therefore, has let itself into the lifeworld of "white" people via the back door.

Events are therefore overtaking those who would control them, and this problem is exacerbated by the slow pace or impossibility of assimilating some people. If liberal optimism derives from the hope that the upward mobility of others is indeed possible, liberal pessimism arises from belief that apartheid prevented sufficient opportunity for others to learn from "whites". One of my interviewees, Martin, illustrates this in relation to street traders:

"It didn't upset me in the sense that seeing [street traders] there is not the problem, it's a question of cleanliness. Why don't they keep the place tidy and neat and clean? And then I don't blame them entirely, because it's a question of have we educated them into that area? Have we taught them, have we taken the trouble to give our time to educate them to say why we want the place clean? It's one thing telling a person 'Clean that' and sit on him with your … foot in his neck demanding that he clean it. It's better to get him to want to keep it clean himself. I feel we've lagged in not educating. That's just one area I mean there are many areas where I feel there's a lagging in this, ... [education is also] cultural and to learn to do things. If we want them to be and behave the way we would like to see [them behave] we must train them, teach them why. They must want to learn to be like we feel they should be" (interview September 1997).

If the wrong kinds of people are flouting the market system, and if there seems to be little prospect of "educating them" in order to diminish the pernicious effects of their otherness, local living environments no longer function as comfort zones. Otherness is brought into the lifeworld of "white" people in a way that upsets the norms of that space.

In Zygmunt Bauman's definition, these others are "strangers": the stranger undermines the spatial ordering of the world - the sought-after co-ordination between moral and topographical closeness, the staying together of friends and the remoteness of enemies. The stranger disturbs the resonance between physical and psychical distance: he [sic] is physically close while remaining spiritually remote. He brings into the inner circle of proximity the kind of difference and otherness that are anticipated and tolerated only at a distance - where they can be either dismissed as irrelevant or repelled as hostile (1991:60).

As Bauman went on to elaborate in 1993, the most frustrating thing about strangers is that they are not a temporary breach of the norm and a curable irritant. Strangers stay and refuse to go away (though one keeps hoping that they will, in the end) - while, stubbornly, escaping the net of local rules and thus remaining strangers (1993:151).

I would argue that much of the uncertainty experienced by "white" people in the 1980s and 1990s stemmed from a fear of the unregulated access by people previously excluded to "their" cities. The arrival of street trading in the CBD and squatter settlements alongside suburbs represented a breach of the buffers and modernist planning that sought to keep people separate. The very basis of "white" identity as "civilised" and "modern" - as created through spatial segregation - was, for some, under threat by the presence of others.

Robert Wilton explores this through Sigmund Freud's notion of the unheimlich: spatial proximity weakens the social distance between self and other and challenges the integrity of individual identity; what is normally projected beyond the ego can no longer be completely distinguished from the self. Interestingly, if we read unheimlich as unhomely, what produces anxiety is an encounter in a place we think of as our own with people who don't appear to belong. Yet the reaction we experience is not just because people are different and out of place. It derives from the fear that they might not be different enough (Wilton 1998:178). Unlike the identity-affirming role previously played by spaces such as city centres, they now have the opposite effect: they are seen to undermine modern and Western identities. For some, the arrival of street traders in the CBD altered that space from a more or less European city to a "third world" or "African" market place (Popke and Ballard 2004). "Whites" became uncomfortable there and avoided it. The arrival of informal settlements alongside suburbs has provoked a similar discomfort (Ballard forthcoming; Dixon et al. 1994; Saff 2001). Such spaces are now for some what Bauman describes as "either normless or marked with too few rules to make orientation possible" (Bauman 1993:153). Spaces that once generated a reassuring sense of "white" achievement are now experienced as "uncanny" or "heterotopic", words that describe the "unsettling juxtapositions of incommensurate 'objects' which challenge the way we think, especially the way our thinking is ordered" (Hetherington 1997:42; also see Gelder and Jacobs 1995; Wilton 1998).

Quite simply, home no longer feels very homely. One speaker at a Conservative Party rally lamented: "I feel like a stranger in my own fatherland" (Schutte 1995:113).

The fears experienced by some "whites" today are similar to those of the past; the main difference is that the state no longer shares them, and now organises against them. The fear of mixing that once drove the colonial and apartheid state projects, as with many modernist projects around the world, is now privatised (see Bauman 1992:xviii). The result, then, is a degree of alienation and displacement, which prompts the avoidance of areas where "whites" feel they lack control and the attempt to find spaces within which control can be adequately maintained. "Whites" fear that the very progress of the country is under threat:

"We would probably very soon be classified as a third world country and I suppose … levels are dropping, roads are all collapsing and all this stealing of telephone wires … I mean as if they weren't bad enough before they started doing that and that sort of stuff" (Lindsay, interview August 1997).

Richard: "Do you see South Africa as part of the first world or part of the third world?"
Denis: "It's got a long way to go to become part of the first world."
Richard: "You think that's where we should be going?"
Denis: "Ja" (interview September 1997).

These quotes highlight the divergence between the speakers' sense of their local environment and their identity. Denis aspires to first-world but believes the country he lives in to be third-world. It is this consequence of the failure of assimilation to regulate the lived environment which forces the search for even more private strategies.

4   Emigration and semigration
Assimilation, then, is not a sufficient guarantee for some people that they can go about their daily business without encountering people and events that confront their sense of themselves. They therefore begin to engage more proactively with space by shrinking or shifting the boundaries around their communities in order to find a zone that accords with their identities. The most extreme form of this is emigration. Emigration occurs for a multiplicity of reasons, and neither the argument (that some "whites" emigrated who believed that it was better to preserve their "whiteness" by leaving South Africa than to jeopardise it by staying) nor my own should be seen as attempts to collapse these complexities. Rather than offer a comprehensive explanation of emigration, I will focus on one of these reasons as pertinent to this paper.

For some, it might be argued, emigration is the ultimate response to the dislocation they felt in South Africa. In the past, "white" minority governments explicitly set out to craft cities and a society that would allow their modern, Western, first-world identities to flourish. Under democracy, these people fear, there will be little commitment to providing such spaces. Anxieties around crime, education and unemployment are not unrelated, and are in themselves direct threats to the ability of individuals to continue a secure sense of self. Where better, then, to be Western, modern and first-world than in countries which people felt could hardly be more unambiguously characterised as such? The United Kingdom is a favourite destination, as are Australia, New Zealand and Canada. Like South Africa, the latter have been colonies of the UK, but unlike in South Africa there is no longer a majority indigenous population.

This is illustrated in the following exchange in which an interview respondent, living adjacent to the newly-established Cato Crest informal settlement in Durban, was considering emigrating:

Interviewer: "Do you feel South African as a citizen?"
Respondent: "You know, I always have done, but recently I'm beginning to doubt whether I really want to live here the rest of my life because I'm very unhappy about it, I'm actually nervous. I don't know; you live from day to day, and you wonder if today's going to be your day that someone will stick a gun in [your] head. I mean especially when I go out in the morning I'm very nervous … You're conscious all the time. When I open the garage I look behind me, get in the car, look behind me, lock my door, reverse out fast, jump out the car, look behind me again to make sure there's no one there, lock the garage, get back in my car; that's the routine and night time is even worse if I'm going out to get children. So I am nervous, yes, and … I can't actually tell you if we're going to live here the rest of our lives, I can't actually tell you that, it depends if we can sell this house. At the moment we are prisoners. I am actually a prisoner here. We don't have a choice, we cannot sell the house" (interview July 1996).

It is clear that this respondent's immediate surroundings are not a source of security, or safety, let alone comfort.

Emigration obviously requires significant resources and particular life circumstances and is not a viable solution for many. Furthermore, regardless of a loss of normative social control, South Africa is the place in which some "white" people want to make their home. Certainly, many "whites" have a strong commitment to South Africa (Steyn 2001:xxiv).

When the shape of post-apartheid South Africa was being negotiated, the strong interest in federalism and an Afrikaner homeland represented a tension between wanting to remain in South Africa but to withdraw from a democratic future; to secede (Hook and Vrdoljak 2002). However, the actual form of this succession was to manifest itself in privatised enclaves. The word semigration has been mooted in the print media as a way of describing these strategies:

… while many whites continue to emigrate - notably the young in possession of sought-after skills - others are "semigrating", as the business leader puts it. That is, they are remaining in South Africa, but "withdrawing, opting out of being citizens". Many of these whites are convinced - and who can convince them otherwise? - that they can never be anything other than second-class citizens in the present government's eyes. So, they ask themselves, why concern themselves with the obligations of citizenship? (Barrell 2000).

Semigration emerged specifically to describe the migration of many from Johannesburg to Cape Town in the 1990s. Christopher Hope suggested that Cape Town creates the illusion of "not really being part of Africa at all" (Hope 1998). However, taking Howard Barrell's logic, we could include other practices under the "semigration" rubric, such as high perimeter walls around properties, enclosed neighbourhoods, and gated communities. To push the term somewhat, semigration is a hybrid of emigration and segregation. In its extreme, semigration is the creation of a "self-contained town" from which residents seldom need to venture. While they happen to be located in South Africa, they would like to have as little to do with it as possible (Hook and Vrdoljak 2002:202). At various times after the democratic transition, reports in newspapers announced plans of particular communities to enclose their neighbourhoods behind fencing and booms across roads (Kirk 1996; Perkins 1997; Nagoor 1997; McGreal 1999; Rossouw 2001).

In some neighbourhoods, organisers attempt to raise money from all residents in order to fence off the perimeter, or a vulnerable section, to erect booms across access roads and to pay for guards to operate them. One area of the Johannesburg metro council reportedly had 360 road closures consisting of booms and gates set up to regulate access (Landman 2000b:2).

Proposals were also made to fence off public spaces such as parks in order to prevent access to all except local residents (Paul 1995).

In green-field residential developments, organisers attempt to raise investment in new fortified villages that will allow secure comfortable living behind protected barricades and controlled access. Such moves are justified on pragmatic grounds: the severe crime situation and apparent lack of action on the part of the police necessitates neighbourhood action and more defensive architecture.

Schutte (1995:180) described the trend as follows:

Over the course of my field trips, I observed how white homeowners increased the height of the fences or brick walls surrounding their properties. Fences and walls 8 to 10 feet high line the residential streets. Some owners have affixed razor-wire coils to the tops of their walls, and most of the walls display signs warning intruders that the property is protected by some alarm system or security firm. The richer the owner, the more elaborate the security devices … This obsession with security is a relatively recent phenomenon that started in the 1980s, when the crime rate soared with the unemployment rate.

At times, the desire to have an enclosed community is linked directly with the local presence of squatters. One resident near Manor Gardens (Durban) was quoted in the newspaper as saying: "This was a beautiful area before the squatters moved in. But now I lie in bed at night when the dogs bark and I can't sleep I'm so fearful. I'm keen to pay to block off our road" (Perkins 1997).

A real estate analyst advised affected residents of such areas to "move out and start again". He stated that he foresaw the tendency for middle-class and upper-bracket home-owners to live behind high security walls increasing in the next five years. "In the Middle Ages people lived behind their drawbridges because they feared for their lives, and that is what his happening here" (De Ionno, 1993). The "upper bracket", then, are likened to landed gentry in the Middle Ages forced to build defensive architecture to fend off the marauding hordes.

Property developers themselves have adopted the terminology of medieval fortresses. George Hazeldon, featured in an article on his plan to build a fortified village near Cape Town, likens his envisioned development to the ancient French fortress monastery of Mont St Michel (McGreal 1999). The planned town, to be called Heritage Park, is to consist of 2 000 homes and is intended to be self-sufficient, providing jobs for most residents and meeting all their retail, health, education, religious, and recreational needs. Hazeldon describes the planned town in glowingly utopian terms, an attempt to recreate a sense of community free from worry. The landscape of this "ideal town", as is suggested by its name, is inspired by colonial European architectural styles such as Cape Dutch and Tudor English. In order to defend this utopia, barricaded entrances, electric fencing, and dozens of patrolling security guards would be put in place.

Predictably, the developer pre-empts any accusation that this is an attempt to secure a "racially" exclusive space. "The blacks and coloureds must be having it worse than we are when it comes to crime, so there'll be some who want to live here. The only criteria is that people want to live as good neighbours. We can build part of the rainbow nation here" (McGreal 1999).

However, plans for the town had to confront the existence of a squatter settlement of 1 000 residents on the proposed site. To solve this "unsightly" problem, Hazeldon planned to flatten the squatter settlement and construct a township located, naturally, on the outside of the electric fence. He seemed unwilling to acknowledge the echoes of apartheid in his planning logic.

The appeal of Hazeldon's vision rests not only on the idealised neighbourhood free from others, but also on the potential avoidance of the city as a whole. Cities are seen to be unpleasant places for many, primarily because of the unregulated mixing and unrestricted access they permit (Hook and Vrdoljak 2002; Popke and Ballard 2004).

The city, then, is "a deteriorated world pervaded by not only pollution and noise but more importantly, confusion and mixture, that is, social heterogeneity" (Caldeira 1996: 309).

Garden-city landscapes of parks, salmon-filled lakes and views of mountains contrast with the disturbing CBD environment. By offering "a self-sufficient town" from which some lucky people will seldom have to venture, residents will be able to avoid the city all together (Caldeira 1996:314). Many have therefore abandoned the hope of the achievement of a modern first-world city and have found their "peace of mind" by establishing privatised fortified enclaves, effectively "islands to which one can return every day, in order to escape from the city and its deteriorated environment" (Caldeira 1996:309).

These trends towards the fortification of space are not limited to South Africa, and have been well documented in places such as the USA and Brazil (Caldeira 1996:311; Davis 1990). According to Caldeira, the fear of crime and violence is closely associated with the emergence of new urban forms in a number of places in the world, characterised by private fortified enclaves designed so that their affluent occupants can have maximum control over the enclosed spaces.

Crucially, although crime is cited as the primary reason for such urban forms, it is not the only motivation, and to relate security exclusively to crime is to fail to recognise all the meanings it is acquiring in various types of environments. The new systems of security not only provide protection from crime, but also create segregated spaces in which the practice of exclusion is carefully and rigorously exercised (Caldeira 1996:311). Indeed, it is possible to question the effectiveness of current trends towards high walls as they go against what some see as international best practice in security-conscious architecture. Neighbourhoods that are serious about crime eradication are urged by security experts to build low walls in order to see from and into other houses, and to encourage neighbourly contact (Le Page 2000). This suggests that privacy and boundary control are prominent factors in determining the way people build their homes and communities, regardless of their effectiveness in preventing crime.

The privatisation of space through fortified enclaves also enables the exclusion of those who are seen as both criminally threatening and undesirable. In the process of establishing such urban forms, those who benefit from them are, by necessity, undertaking a process of defining some types of people as safe (desirable) and others as a threat (undesirable).

Contemporary urban segregation is complementary to the issue of urban violence. On the one hand, the fear of crime is used to legitimate increasing measures of security and surveillance. On the other, the proliferation of everyday talk about crime becomes the context in which residents generate stereotypes as they label different social groups as dangerous and therefore as people to be feared and avoided (Caldeira 1996:324; see Ballard forthcoming for further discussion on the conflation of "race" and crime).

These urban forms, then, represent to some extent the privatisation of what was previously a state project: urban segregation. Not only do fences act as physical barriers, ostensibly to keep out criminals, but they also act as powerful symbols to pedestrians, and others who may not be resident in the area but may have wanted to pass through (Landman 2000a:6). Social boundaries are thus "architecturally policed" (Davis 1990:223) and, as David Le Page comments, "an enclosed neighbourhood essentially appropriates to a small community the public spaces within it - roads, parks and greenbelt. It infringes the right to privacy of those who would move within it, by demanding that they provide personal details in order to enter a space in which they have every right to move unhindered" (Le Page 2000).

The role of boundaries, purity, transgression, and out-of-placeness in identity construction are now well understood (Cresswell 1994, 1997; Douglas 1984; Sibley 1988, 1995; Stallybrass and White 1986). The process of othering, described above, which was the basis for traditional strategies for creating comfort zones, map into space by attempting to remove or regulate people who threaten the colonial, Western, modern identity. In a situation where such traditional strategies (ie apartheid) are no longer in place, private boundary maintenance becomes a vital tool.

At one level, then, barriers regulating access to neighbourhoods are physical statements regarding the kinds of people who belong and the kinds that do not. They are an attempt to restore a certain sense of "our" identity through boundary maintenance, prompted by the disturbing presence of others which "threatens to overwhelm the boundaries of individual and collective identity" (Wilton 1998:183). Vividly using the metaphor of the body and infection, Le Page highlights the way in which defensive mechanisms such as security checkpoints are orientated around the health of the suburban neighbourhood: "[Roads] are suddenly closed off and fenced off at the ends, like cauterised veins ... Specially enlisted antibodies - security guards, dogs, little huts, booms and visitors' registers - cluster around every foreign body" (Le Page 2000). Without recognition by officials of the need for purified spaces, residents are left to direct their own resources to attempt to achieve the same function. Through privatisation of residential, retail, and occupational spaces, the "underclass" is kept at bay. The fantasy - sometimes implemented - of a fence around one's neighbourhood, beach, or park, is the expression of the desire to control these spaces so that access may be regulated. Crime, both real and imagined, provides the justification to avoid areas where one lacks direct control (ie public space). A sense of control can be achieved only within private spaces such as the home, the gated community, the office park and the mall. To the extent that people can mobilise resources to manage these fears on their own by moving out of the CBD to secure privatised spaces, they do.

5   Integration
Assimilation attempts to control desegregation by reforming otherness. Emigration and semigration are an acknowledgement of the impossibility of that project and the failure of the market to defend Western modern cities from things that don't fit. But to what extent is it the case that "white" people still depend on exclusion for a secure sense of themselves? What has the presence of others taught "white" people? As Wilton (1998:178) asks, is the fear just of different people or that different people aren't different enough? If so, what is the impact of that realisation?

In a focus group for returning South Africans who had emigrated, one respondent explained that he had missed out on integration:

Alan: "I've spent my whole life here … [in] a European society. I didn't have any black friends or, or anything like this and uh … and when I left … I mean that inter-relation, that integration hadn't started yet, social friendship type of thing … But now I come back after five years, I'm actually missing those five years' educational social integration. I'm actually the one (laugh) who's gotta catch up …" (Focus Group 2003).

Thus, while some "white" South Africans fall easily into the old scripts, others challenged binaries such as "first-world"/"third-world" and recognised the poverty and suffering of groups such as squatters and street traders. Some did not read the city as third-world but rather as a cosmopolitan space within which they felt comfortable to move around. Such people no longer depend on a heavily regulated and constrained living environment in order to express their identity and feel secure in what they are. They no longer depend on seeing an uncivilised other - whether expressed "racially" or in more recent developmental terms - in order to define themselves as "civilised" or "developed".

The choice by some to use these discourses represents a shift towards what Chantal Mouffe calls "an identity which can accommodate otherness, which demonstrates the porosity of its frontiers and opens up towards that exterior which makes it possible" (1995:265). In the words of Young, such individuals are open to "unassimilated otherness", the acceptance of and engagement with difference without trying to reform it to fit into what "white" racist societies in the past defined as acceptable (cited in Harvey 1993:16). In this strategy alliances are formed where boundaries were once erected (Harvey 1996:360; Rorty 1989:192).

The search for similarities establishes the possibility of common ground. Thus, urban spaces change from being spaces of avoidance or assimilation to spaces of engagement.

Arguably, the mere presence of others has forced "white" people to reconsider what it is they need from their environments in order to feel secure. If transgression unsettles established identities, the massive extent of transgression in post-apartheid South African cities provides the opportunity for confronting old boundaries. As much as physical proximity has brought social differences into sharp relief, this trend also offers the opportunities for engagement, for increasing knowledge about others and thus the erosion of perceptions of otherness (Bauman 1993:113, 148; Sibley 1995:28; Wilton 1998:181).

This paper has attempted to consider the ways in which "white" people's senses of place have changed in relation to changing senses of self. During apartheid, the everyday performance of "white" identity as modern, Western, first-world and civilised depended on the creation of segregated spaces. The post-apartheid phenomena of emigration and semigration represent some "white" people's attempts to re-establish a comfort zone which reflects their self-conceptions. Other "white" people, however, feel comfortable in a fundamentally transformed urban environment. I suggest that while assimilation posits itself as the progressive acceptance of others, such acceptance is truly progressive only when there is mutual integration in which others do not have to qualify to be acceptable. Integration must entail departure from a logic in which a secure sense of self is dependent on an inferior understanding of others. What is being performed, then, is a different kind of identity no longer aspiring to the West but which seeks to engage with the diversity of society in a way which does not feel threatened by that diversity.

Note 1 Originally published in Distiller, N & M Steyn (eds). 2004. Under Construction: "Race" and Identity in South Africa Today. Johannesburg: Heinemann, pp 51-66.

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