South Africa’s Road Out of Colonialism

About this episode

While researching the history of parole in South Africa, a lawyer and anthropologist discovers the origins of the N2 road, which she drives everyday. Now interested in this highway’s history, she explores how this and other roads were used to expand territory and exploit people during South Africa’s colonial periods under Dutch and British rule, and how they kept people separate during the country’s apartheid government from 1948 to 1994. In the present, she learns of a new highway project that threatens to repeat this legacy of racist displacement. Nicole van Zyl is a South African lawyer and Ph.D. candidate in anthropology at the University of the Western Cape. Her doctoral research explores connections between the first systemized forms of early release from incarceration and the modern practice of parole. She is interested in how incarceration as punishment communicates belonging and exclusion from society, and how this relates to present-day conflicts around South Africa’s land redistribution as an atonement for colonial and apartheid crimes. Check out these related resources: • “Should the Proposed N2 Toll Road Through the Wild Coast Be Moved?”  • Judgment Against Mining