Abstract

From the mid-nineteenth century, towns in the territory we now call South Africa began to light up at night, lit first oil and then gas and electric lamps. By the mid-twentieth century electricity was in place in most South African towns. As they appeared, these new light sources significantly altered the understandings and experiences of the night for those living in the areas in which they were introduced, producing ideas and experiences that came to link lighting and the brightly lit night with notions of security, progress and modern life. However, the distribution of electricity throughout the region was uneven. Consistently, the areas reserved for African occupation, both rural and urban, were not provided with electricity, leaving them in darkness at night. Still in 1989, the national electricity provider reported that only one-third of South Africans had access to electricity. My research explores the work of lighting infrastructure to materially light the night in South Africa, generating a novel set of nighttime activities and sensations, and thereby imbuing the night, as a timespace, with new symbolism and ambiance. However, with attention to South Africa’s divided lightscape, I examine the ways in which the unequal and differentiated distribution of lighting infrastructure works to construct significantly distinct nights, with their own comprising semantic and phenomenal entanglements, in separated areas – discrete timespaces, that nonetheless exist and make meaning/are made meaningful in direct relation to each other.