By Words by Mercia Tucker
Africandrone, a non-profit entity, funded a photography project in 2017 aimed at showing the separation between the working class and the bourgeoisie’s Unequal Scenes. Headed up by Johnny Miller, the project portrayed that “communities of extreme wealth and privilege will exist just meters from squalid conditions and shack dwellings.” An award-winning exhibition, this juxtaposition from the skies above shocked many at the dramatic scenes of disenfranchisement, but came as no surprise to residents of the city.
The segregation between Lavender Hill and Steenberg, or Hangberg and Hout Bay, is the product of spacial planning as a legacy of Apartheid that has wreaked havoc on the quality of life of the coloured community in Cape Town. Another was the racial identity of coloured people and their expression as a group of people reduced to a caricatured stereotype. In a country where social discourse is more often than not on typically black and white terms, the coloured identity is one that has often been relegated to the fringes of individualised expression.
