South Africas precarious history of struggle can be traced visually through its spatial environment. Cape Town’s urban divide lies as the land flattens out to the East of the city, opening up onto the Cape Flats. In this space, one can trace the lines left by apartheid zoning policies designed to keep black from white. Today these lines remain visible as divides between wealth and poverty.
The Wash House Quarry was named in colonial times after its purpose — a slave driven laundry for the wealthy. It’s rock was mined for the grey stone that adorns the battlements of the Castle Of Good Hope. It is located at the botom of the Bo-Kaap area on the slopes of Signal Hill, and was home to the only informal settlement found within the boundaries of the Cape Town CBD. The residents called their community ‘The Kraal’ — the term for a traditional African village of huts typically enclosed by a fence. In the context of this community the term is imbued with notions of community, safety, protection, yet also the paradoxical lack thereof.
The quarry was home to roughly one hundred residents. They were housed in shanty-town style shelters and shipping containers, which formed a misshapen landscape of wood and corrugated iron. Perched above, and accessible only by treacherous winding paths, were a number of separate camps of refugees divided by stark boundaries of nationality, faith and political stance. This project was photographed between 2012 and 2016, after which time most residents were relocated to housing programmes in the Cape Flats.
There are on and off propositions to develop the land into high-end apartments, thus continuing the cycle of forced systematic spatial division implemented by both the apartheid regime and the colonial rule that came before. “The Kraal” tells a tale of the bureaucratic brutalisation of a compassionate community, imbued with notions of desperation and gentrification. It is indicative of the broader socioeconomic urban spatial environment in South Africa.
