Apartheid “Everynight” and the Politics of Lighting in Cape Town’s Townships

A CONVERSATION WITH STEPHANIE BRIERS

One of the ways the South African Apartheid manifested was in the imposition of its time on Indigenous people, in particular the quotidian alternance between day and night lives. In Infrastructures of Freedom: Public Light and Everynight Life on a Southern City’s Margins (2023), Stephanie Briers examines that time of the night and the politics of light during the Apartheid and since 1994. Both a symbol and one of its most implacable enforcement of these politics, the high mast lights hovering forty meters above Cape Town’s Black townships are central to the following conversation.

LÉOPOLD LAMBERT: Architectural researchers often focus on spatial politics, and sometimes we forget about the crucial dimension of time. It seems to me that the Apartheid was never more the Apartheid than at night. Indeed, the European settler colony in the southern tip of the African Continent could not operate without Indigenous and migrant labor and, as such, the colonized were often present in the colonizer city during the day. Nighttime, on the other hand, was the time of a quasi-absolute racial segregation. Could you tell us how you articulate these questions of space and time, and perhaps tell us about this notion that appears in your book’s title: “everynight”?

STEPHANIE BRIERS: With all the studies on everyday life, I wanted to make up for all the airtime nighttime has lost out on. But the reason for this important terminology is twofold – shifting lived realities from day to night, and secondly shifting focus on the dominant study of night and crime by placing emphasis on the everyday aspects of nighttime experiences. Many people think my research is about lighting and “crime,” or fear of “crime.” This narrative is very dominant in research studies, especially in poorer neighborhoods, where life at night is often boiled down to this single element. But I found this quite reductive.

My book is about everyday experiences and how they relate to infrastructure, or lack of infrastructure. This everyday lived experience was a powerful way of understanding the rhythms of everyday inequalities, as Stephen Graham and Colin Mcfarlane put it. I took this idea of everyday rhythms further in a circadian sense, into the night. The concepts of lived realities, everyday life, and lived infrastructure by notable authors really helped guide my research. But in everyday, the night is neglected in the very word. So creating a new term and placing it in the title of my book, refocused everyday experiences to the night. Nighttime forms a major part of every person’s reality, not to mention the realities of people who need to access shared basic services such as toilets and taps. During the day physical infrastructure like taps and toilets are present – but they are absent in the darkness of everynight life of many self-built communities.