'Teen die pad, Die Bos' (Alongside the road, The Bush)

Nongwase's post box was blue. It stood proudly on the fence pole of a yard edged with straggling flower beds in The Bush, a shack settlement on the outer perimeter of the city of Cape Town, South Africa. The home Nongwase had built for herself and her children was typical of others in the settlement; a single room assembled from wood off-cuts collected from a nearby timber merchant, cardboard boxes, estate agents' 'For Sale' boards, and roofed with corrugated iron. The post box marked her home from the scurry of surrounding shacks. It seemed simultaneously incongruous and bold: a statement, an affirmation of presence. I once asked Nongwase whether she ever received mail. She replied that she did not – too few of her relatives were literate. If they could or did write, I pressed, what address would they use? 'Teen die pad, Die Bos', she replied.

In 1991, when I encountered Nongwase and her family, The Bush was an illegal settlement that had already been razed several times by the apartheid state and which was again under threat by local landlords. The post box has stuck in my mind all that time as a symbol of Nongwase's aspirations to an ordinary urban life in Cape Town, an expectation that an African woman and her family would remain in one site long enough to receive mail and would do so legally. That aspiration was shared by many of the residents of this and other shanty settlements across the city and in cities elsewhere in South Africa, and slowly came to fruition in the post-apartheid period.

In apartheid South Africa, such aspirations were almost revolutionary for a black woman. From the 1950s, the apartheid state had legislated against permanent African presence in towns under any but the most stringent circumstances. African women were considered perpetual minors, under the guardianship of their fathers, husbands or brothers. The City of Cape Town and surrounds were declared a Coloured Labour Preference area in 1954: under this legislation no African person could be offered a job if there was a Coloured person to do it. The Group Areas Act of 1950 was stringently implemented from the mid-1950s and the city that prior to the Second World War had been the most integrated in the country quickly became the most segregated (Western 1981; Pinnock 1989; Besteman 2008). The pre-apartheid city's apparent racial integration overlay a cruel class structure that apartheid re-rendered in crude racial terms. Despite massive post-apartheid change, Cape Town remains South Africa's most segregated city.

The city stopped building housing for Africans in the mid-1960s and its housing provision for Coloureds was limited. Informal shack settlements sprang up as migrants and urbanites tried to