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54 2 Children in the Streets: Urban Governance in CapeTown City Center Government has not done a damn thing for me lately. I often wonder whether we actually exist or whether we’re just that almost-half-of-the-nation that shows up only on sets of stats. Politicians acknowledge me, sure, but as a nuisance, a threat, a black mark on their dreams. But they don’t know me, they don’t feel my needs or understand what scares me. And yet we simply want what you wanted when you were young. We want to grow up and live fairly comfortably, without fear, without having to watch our backs all the time. —George Hill Siyaya One legacy of youth leadership in the antiapartheid struggle after 1976 was that large numbers of young people, by virtue of taking to the streets, sacrificed their individual futures for that of their country. The continued evocation by politicians of youth development as a national priority is a reminder of this now historical, as well as historic, reality. A focus on the apartheid generation and its struggle, however, deserved as it is, may obscure a much deeper, and perhaps more powerful, current in the country ’s history, the marginalization of black youth. Although the specifics of youth marginalization, including responses by young people, have varied over time, marginalization itself continues to be a defining feature of the nation’s socioeconomic and political landscape. The country seems as far from overcoming this challenge today as it has ever had been; indeed, the realignments of South African society in an era of neoliberal governance are more likely to reproduce rather than reverse the disempowerment and underdevelopment of youth. Animating this process is a troubling narrative that has shown a remarkable ability to survive and adapt throughout the many periods of South African history, a narrative in which the tensions, conflicts, and anxieties born of a society organized by white supremacy are expressed through a language and imagery of danger, crime, and security. Children in The STreeTS · 55 Black youth in South Africa’s cities have played an outsized role in this drama, an ironic situation in which their marginalization is at the same time the source of a particular kind of power. The apartheid state and the opposition forces both recognized this after the youth rebellion launched in Soweto in 1976, in which the older narrative was reinterpreted to celebrate black youth for many of the very same reasons that whites feared them. From the vantage point of the present, however, we can see that this was itself a transition phase; today, the old narrative seems to have returned, transforming youth from heroes to problems. A close look at the intersection of youth, crime, and development in the city thus constitutes an important site for tracing the trajectory of urban governance and the politics of urban inequality across time and political eras. To this end, the following chapters explore this intersection as it currently plays out across the varied spaces of Cape Town, juxtaposing the governance of security in its affluent core to the very different, though intimately related, governance of the underdeveloped periphery. To begin, this chapter opens with a brief discussion of the situation of youth in the country generally and in the Western Cape specifically, providing an overview of what has happened to them since 1994, their current socioeconomic status and their relationship to crime as both victims and perpetrators. The chapter then turns to the affluent city center, the politics of youth representation, and the ongoing efforts to secure what many see as the key to Cape Town’s economy and its world class status as we view the urban revitalization of downtown through the conflict over the existence of a modest population of street children. The chapter provides detailed analysis of neoliberal governance in the urban core, where street children have emerged as central subjects. Although the township skollie (“gangster/thug” in Afrikaans) is the more infamous and numerous character from the urban periphery, street children came to play a similar role as a governmental category, retailored for the very different sociospatial realities of the core but similarly representing a target of security governance. Here we see how through categories and vocabularies of neoliberal governance, the black threat is rearticulated in ways more appropriate to a democratic era. The emergent narrative of urban renewal and revitalization—and threats to them—contains embedded, locally understood racial codes that remain central to maintainingtightcontroloverurbanspace...

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