A History of the Night in South Africa, 1860s-1980s

This dissertation uses the night as a vantage point to reassess the history of South Africa between the mid-nineteenth and late-twentieth century. It combines methods from cultural and social history, infrastructural studies, and the emerging field of ‘night studies’, to present a new way of understanding the territory’s past. The first two chapters detail the legal and material infrastructure – specifically racialised curfew legislation and the uneven provision of lighting infrastructure – that worked to divide the night racially, segregating space by time, and producing differentiated experiences of nighttime. The subsequent three chapters explore the variable engagement, negotiation, contestation of this legal and material infrastructure by people on the ground, studying the place of the night, both as a symbol and a material time-space, within the New Africa Movement, the ‘Drum Generation’, and Black Consciousness. I argue that colonialism, segregation and apartheid were not only regimes of space, but also regimes of time. Therefore, contestations over time, particularly the night, were crucial in producing, maintaining, and challenging ideas of racial difference, social order, and the meanings and experiences of ‘the modern’ in South African history. South African historiography has traditionally focused on spatial segregation. This dissertation uses the night to approach South Africa’s long history of temporal segregation. Furthermore, the dissertation complicates the smooth ‘nocturnalisation’ narrative in existing night historiography, which posits the progressive ‘taming’ of the night from the seventeenth century for ‘legitimate’ social and symbolic use. I suggest that in South Africa, nocturnalisation was unevenly advanced to enforce separation, and was at the same time creatively mobilised to oppose such efforts. Overall, I offer the night as a crucial point of concern in South African history, where the boundaries and experience of perceived racial difference, social inclusion and ‘the modern’ could be produced, signified and tangibly felt.

Name dc:type.qualificationname

Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)

Level dc:type.qualificationlevel

Doctoral

Grantor dc:publisher.institution

University of Cambridge

Year dc:date.issued

2025

Author dc:creator

• Fleishman, Zachary

Advisor dc:contributor.advisor

• Watson, Ruth

• Apartheid
• Black Consciousness
• Colonialism
• Curfew
• Drum Magazine
• Infrastructure Studies
• Lighting Infrastructure
• New Africa Movement
• Night
• Nightlife
• Nocturnalisation
• Regimes of Time
• Segregation
• South Africa
• Temporal Segregation
• The Modern

Licence

• https://www.repository.cam.ac.uk/bitstreams/84c9fcd8-c1cd-472a-9273-d0e03a2b1394/download
• http://purl.org/NET/rdflicense/allrightsreserved

Language dc:language

eng

DOI dc:identifier.doi

https://doi.org/10.17863/CAM.128897

OAI identifier oai:identifier

oai:www.repository.cam.ac.uk:1810/400893