Geography Reference
In-Depth Information
Of all white immigrant nationalities, British immigrants are consistently and by far
the largest community, comprising between 45.6% and 30.2% of annual immigrant ar-
rivals between 1946 and 1987 (Conway and Leonard forthcoming). Similarly, the UK
was also the leading destination for emigration between these years (RSA 1989, 101).
However, unpalatable political events such as the 1976 Soweto Uprising and the declar-
ation of the national state of emergency in 1986 contributed to further net white emig-
ration in 1977 and from 1986 onwards (RSA 1989, 98; Conway and Leonard forthcom-
ing).
Since 1994, and the shift from an authoritarian white minority regime to a multiracial
democracy, South Africa has come to be viewed more positively by the outside world
more generally and British migrants in particular. Its full readmittance to international
flows of trade, finance, and cultural exchange has been accompanied by significant in-
creases in British tourism, second home ownership, and retirement migration to the
country, along with continued professional and other forms of labor migration. Between
2005and2009,SouthAfricawastheseventhmostpopulardestination forBritishemig-
rating retirees and now has the eighth largest British-born community in permanent res-
idence:219,000peoplein2008(Finch,Andrew,andLatorre2010,29,37).However,di-
visionswithinthecountryremain,notonlybetweenblacksandwhites,butalsoamongst
whites. In particular, the different position of English speakers continued to be revealed
after 1994, where, interestingly, “both conservative and liberal English-speaking South
Africans seem wary of accepting the new dispensation and are accused by Africans of
being less prepared to adapt than are Afrikaners” (Lambert 2009, 611). This differenti-
ation within the white community occurs amidst the wider crisis in white identity after
apartheid, as there is now “an acute sense of loss of the familiar, loss of certainty, loss
of comfort, loss of privilege, loss of well-known roles … a delusional home now col-
lapsed” (Steyn 2001, 150). Although the crisis of whiteness has led to significant white
emigration from South Africa, it is not necessarily accompanied by a loss of discursive
confidence or insistence that South African whites have no right to live in and define
the country (Conway and Leonard forthcoming). Indeed, Steyn and Foster argue that
“In this new context, the central question for whiteness, as the orientation which takes
its privilege as normal and appropriate, can be put simply: how to maintain its advant-
ages in a situation in which black people have legally and legitimately achieved politic-
al power?” (Steyn and Foster 2008, 26, italics added). As this chapter aims to show, the
use of space and the construction of place provide key answers to this question.
The most popular places of British settlement remain as they have been since the
nineteenth century: Johannesburg, Cape Town and the Western Cape, and Durban and
Pietermaritzburg in Kwazulu-Natal. Yet Johannesburg is a very different sort of place
fromCapeTownorDurban.ItlacksthedramaticbeautyofCapeTownorthecosyBrit-
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