Frontiers of freedom: race, landscape and nationalism in the coastal cultures of South Africa

Abstract

The idea that whiteness is not a natural category but one which requires construction, maintenance and investment has provoked a rich scholarship, including in South Africa. The scholarship on whiteness in southern Africa has been marked, in particular, by a failure to consider whiteness in relation to blackness, especially in the post-apartheid era. This article addresses this by focusing on the coast as a contested frontier of identity formation in the Eastern Cape and in its major coastal city, East London, during the twentieth century and beyond. It explores how the landscape of the coast shaped racial identity politics and how the transition in the definition of East London as a white city to its current conception as a black city is crucially connected to identity politics and struggles for its coastline. The paper suggests that the idea of the coast as a “frontier of freedom” expressed the essential meaning of coastal occupation to both black and white residents of the city, who embrace the coast and the city in different ways.