Marvel at skyscrapers and forget the spatial legacies of forced dislocation

Cape Town’s landscape is deeply rooted in European colonial and settler colonial organisation of society, and these are factual realities, not figments of imagination or propaganda.

By Ismail Lagardien

17 Oct 2025

There’s an island in South East Asia that I have visited over and again for more than three decades, and that I have studied academically and personally in some detail. I have also had some kind of a family relationship with the island for almost all my life, going back to before the settlers declared unilateral independence.

On this island a settler community has effectively removed (almost) all traces of the native cultural and historical landscape, paved over it all, and put up a parking lot, a bank or a mall.

Part of the island’s economic and financial success, such as it is, has been a refusal to discuss any injustices, the relegation of native interests and concerns, overwhelmed as it all has been by settlers anyway (they got the numbers right, and native people have been “replaced”), and dismiss all discussions that probe deeper into state, society and history.

One of the conclusions I have reached in a text on the island that I am working on is this: If building gleaming skyscrapers, shopping centres, housing developments and attracting lots of foreign money is the ultimate of human achievement, then we should all surrender.

All concerns of original injustice, lingering marginalisation of native people or cultural landscape are, to paraphrase Cape Town mayor Geordin Hill-Lewis, propagandistic and not rooted in reality.

Perhaps the mayor does not understand the difference between critical thought and evaluation, historical reflection, the work of memory and political statements, oration and rhetoric. Maybe he thinks everyone should agree with him, and if they don’t, they’re just wrong. The world is not as politicians describe it. Politicians are, actually, propagandists.

Beyond priming the pump (a bit like economics-speak for paying the piper) politicians rely on coercion and co-optation, and disseminate information (relying on their own spin doctors, and that of corporate elites and influencers) to gain support and generate acquiescence.

Politicians give themselves the powers to decide what should be said, what is important, and what may be dismissed as “propaganda” or what is disembedded from reality. These are elementary when studying politics, political economy, media, journalism and state and society.

There is, of course, the Hobbesian autocrat or dictator who may accept that others are educated, clever, intelligent or informed, but would insist that theirs is the most superior knowledge, forgetting that they are closest to what they know…

Skyscrapers and luxified skies

It’s all good and well to point to skyscrapers, emblematic of “luxified skies”, but it is on the ground, in places from the Bo-Kaap, to the flatlands of Langa and Nyanga, Khayelitsha, Hanover Park or Manenberg, where the majority of people of Cape Town live. That is the reality.

It might not be the reality that the mayor sees in the mirror, but it’s the reality that breaks onto the front pages of newspapers when rain, wind, homelessness, unemployment, crime and violence pound families and communities on the Cape Flats relentlessly.

To point to these things and to recall that these places were actually specifically designed, as it were, as the spatial layout of apartheid-era city planning, is not propagandistic.

To dismiss it as propagandistic is precisely the way that, when evidence of cruelty and violence and depravity is presented, it is dismissed by the perpetrators as “propaganda”.

It is precisely the way that Donald Trump and his cadres he has deployed over the state and government of the US are sanitising museums and libraries and schools and universities by removing references to slavery, Jim Crow, foreign wars of aggression and highlighting only all “the good things” about that country.

Don’t look at the past, or what’s happening on the ground among denizens – the mayor of Cape Town wants you to cast your gaze at the skyline.

The mayor may live in a different reality, but here (again) is a reflection, the Ladybird version, on how we get to spatial apartheid. There was a time when, over centuries, politics determined where some people could build homes and live, legally, and where some people would be prevented from building homes and living.

This involved (referring here, to Cape Town) forcefully removing black and brown people from, say, Constantia, and dumping them elsewhere to make room for Europeans (white people) who over very many decades built deep wells of privileges and exclusivity.

The properties are now worth a small fortune precisely because of the decades of accumulated privileges and exclusivity. The mayor may not know this actual history, or he does not care, but those privileges and exclusivity and the various forms of capital (social, political, symbolic and economic) are what define places in the shadows of the cordillera along Rhodes Drive and along the Atlantic Seaboard.

Those are facts. The reality of spatial development over very many decades has resulted in a type of exorbitant privilege (I borrowed the phrase from the study of global finance).

There is a wide range of scholarship on the way that post-colonial societies contain evidence and actual spaces of colonial planning. I have referred previously to the way the “Company’s Garden” in Cape Town is precisely an example of colonialists structuring the landscape and the spatial dimensions of domination and control.

In the long liberal tradition of separating politics and economics, and that terribly odious idea that we have to forget the past and “move on”, there is the expectation that everyone should ignore the way that enclaves of privilege (that exorbitant privilege) were created and that the barriers to entry are now determined by economics; you can live here if you can pay.

That is the basis for apartheid spatial development, that political project that is kept in place now by “economics”.

Everyone is now expected to fix their gaze on the “luxified skies” above Cape Town. A gleaming luxury apartment complex, a shopping centre and paved boulevards are all, surely, better than, say, the broken landscapes of what was District Six, or the Bo-Kaap in the bay.

While Trump is erasing the unpleasant things about his country, the mayor of Cape Town is erasing the memory of unpleasant things about South Africa and expecting people to fix their gaze on skyscrapers and the vertical luxification of Cape Town.

The built environment, or buildings, are not isolated sculptures; as Lloyd Alter puts it, “they exist to house people and give them places to work. They are part of a culture and a society, not monuments. They should serve a societal need, not just park money for the very rich.”

Like Trump, Hill-Lewis wants people to fix their gaze on the good and the great things about Cape Town. For many people, very many people, the idea of Cape Town is better than living in Cape Town. Cape Town, most especially Table Mountain (like the Springboks), belongs not to people on the Cape Flats…

About the mayor’s reference to propaganda: that’s one of those silly attempts at conversation-stopping. If something or some fact or evidence makes you feel uncomfortable, dismiss it as propaganda. Discomfort, in this sense, is considered to be an injustice.

People outside the boundaries of the mayor’s support base are not allowed to be angry.

To paraphrase James Baldwin about the US, to be a black in this country and to be relatively conscious is to be in a rage almost all the time. DM

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Skyscrapers and luxified skies