LeMarcis could have made this more explicit, but a lot of the criss-crossing of the sick in johannesburg is influenced by the vestiges of apartheid geography. The good hospitals are in historically white neighborhoods, quite far away from the shantytowns where many of the sick live. The city was set up in large part with blacks and coloreds (the SA term for mixed-race) marginalized spatially as well as politically -- historically they would have needed passing papers to be in Johannesburg proper, and so mostly lived in settlements to the south. (Soweto = South West Township)
LeMarcis could have made this more explicit, but a lot of the criss-crossing of the sick in johannesburg is influenced by the vestiges of apartheid geography. The good hospitals are in historically white neighborhoods, quite far away from the shantytowns where many of the sick live. The city was set up in large part with blacks and coloreds (the SA term for mixed-race) marginalized spatially as well as politically -- historically they would have needed passing papers to be in Johannesburg proper, and so mostly lived in settlements to the south. (Soweto = South West Township)
Posted by: metamanda | February 8, 2007 11:08 AM