picture of Nelson Mandela watches over the dimly lit room where Maggie Mothemba has lived for six years. “He’s like my father,” says the 57-year-old, who remembers the day in April 1994 that she voted for Mandela’s African National Congress in South Africa’s first democratic election.
At its peak, in 1998-99, South Africa’s government built more than 235,000 fully subsidised houses a year. In 2022-23, the number was Policies have not disrupted “spatial apartheid”, says Budlender: “Our cities were shaped so that the white minority would live in nice, sparsely populated areas close to jobs, schools and services, and the black, coloured and Indian majority would commute in and out every day to service them. And that structure remains tragically unchanged.”
The mayor of Cape Town, Geordin Hill-Lewis, says “various municipal-owned properties in central Cape Town” had already been released, adding that the city has “6,500 social housing units in the pipeline at over 50 well located land parcels”. “Cape Town’s entire spatial policy is aimed at unstitching legacy over time,” he says.