Abstract
South Africa attracts migrants because of its reputation as a free, democratic, and developing country. South Africa has long been considered a hub of employment for migrant workers lured by the diamond and gold industries. As attractive as South Africa appears it carries the veil of a superiority complex and the culture of violence targeted at black immigrants. This culture of violence can be argued is due to South Africa’s violent and inhumane apartheid history which brewed intolerance amongst people of different ethnic backgrounds. This Major Design Project reveals the toxic experiences of migrants in Johannesburg, adding to the existing spatial dialogue around the toxic relationship between South Africans and migrants. I look at toxicity from the definition used in “Toxic Landscapes” by Haeden Stewart (2017) who is a professor in the department of anthropology at the University of Massachusetts. Toxicity in this proposal focuses on the ways shared materials, interests, and harms that ‘objectively’ bind communities and how these community ties are identified and become meaningful as these materials, harms, and interests become visible (Stewart: 2017). This proposal highlights that as a migrant, whether you come into South Africa legally or illegally, you will experience xenophobia in some form. The project acknowledges that some migrants are protected by class from the experiences poorer migrants might experience. Your class and social standing subjects you to the advantages and disadvantages you might face as a migrant in South Africa. This emphasizes that there is an issue of migrants experiencing indignity in South William Edward Burghardt Du Bois is an American sociologist who in ‘The Souls of Black Folk’ (1903) writes about racial injustice in America faced by African Americans. William Edward Burghardt Du Bois coined the phrase “double consciousness”, described as the internal conflict experienced by a person or group of people. This theory was initially described through the experience of African Americans (Dubois:2008). Where African Americans seem to be frequently looking at themselves through the lens of white racist society. Double consciousness sets a framework for understanding the position of oppression in an oppressive world (Dubois: 2008). This theory of double consciousness is important because, in South Africa, we have a different geographic and historical context however we relate to the concept of double consciousness because we share similar experiences. In America, black people were inferior to white people. In South Africa during apartheid, black people were inferior to white people. Apartheid was characterized by an authoritarian political culture based on supremacy. In the mines, mine owners would get labourers from other surrounding areas and countries to work for lesser wages. The migrant labour system was a historical system used to reconcile the conflicting need for cheap labour in the mines and cities, with the apartheid ideology that workers should not reside there permanently...
M.Tech. (Architecture)