Traveling on a bus in South Africa with apartheid on the brain, one sees its legacy everywhere. This year’s Johannesburg Workshop of Theory and Criticism, which takes up “The Archives of the Non-Racial” as its theme, is mobile. As we drive around Durban, colonial and apartheid-era architecture is noticeable everywhere. I wonder what remains in these structures. When we try to remake a society, how do we undo and replace social structures that have oppressed and privileged? Even if new monuments and buildings are constructed, streets given new names, the parks, spaces, roadways remain. And thinking and inequality remain. Think: under apartheid, separate walkways and entrances, hospital wings, group areas.
One of the most interesting aspects of the connection between apartheid-era and post-apartheid society is the way that anti-apartheid spaces might differ in these two periods. We visited the Rainbow Restaurant on Saturday afternoon for lunch. Located in Pinetown, a suburb of Durban, a transfer point between the city and the country, the Rainbow is a jazz club founded in the early 1980s. It was an important site in the anti-apartheid struggle, a place that made space not only for jazz musicians but interracial audiences in South Africa. A place where bass, drums, voices, and the clinking of beer bottles made space to imagine and live something other than the apartheid system. It made the argument for the Rainbow Nation—a society of equality, inclusivity, interaction.
Continue reading From Berkeley to South Africa: An Afternoon at the Rainbow, Pinetown, Durban