Figure 3: City segregation comparison

2.3. Mapping 1

Where, Finding the

The author was walking in the streets of Sunnyside, Pretoria in the year 2021. This part of the city is primarily filled with local and migrant Africans who are urban migrants from other parts of South Africa or transnational migrants from other African countries. Sunnyside is primarily a dense high-rise residential area, with very few open public spaces beyond the streets. Pretoria is a city that the apartheid government legislation influenced in its formation, such as the Native Lands Act of 1913 and the Group Areas Act of 1950, enforcing segregation of people by ethnicity. (Ducksters.com, 2010) By relocating ethnic groups to areas built for that purpose, the acts achieved segregation, as seen in figure 4, according to the apartheid government’s intent. Due to the Eurocentric application of architectural style, these townships did not cater to Africans or other ethnicities in spatial planning. Most African peoples were still converting from nomadic or tribal farmers to a unified national system when the European powers colonised them. This ethnology is especially true for the South African tribes, although there are some exceptions, such as the city of Mapungubwe built by the Ndebele people. That way of living was indicative that they had not reached the point of developing urban planning solutions for dense city fabrics. These two events, the interruption by colonisation and subsequent disruption by various apartheid legislature, created the city fabric to which the African person has minimal relation. This context continued throughout post-apartheid South Africa as Africans sought to rediscover what being an African means in a westernised post-colonial Africa.