If the apartheid regime obsessed over ethnic, cultural, and racial differences, class differences have largely defined the post-apartheid era. This chapter pays particular attention to the new unfettered market capitalism, which has widened the gap between rich and poor as it promotes the interests of an antidemocratic ruling class to the detriment of the more thoroughly democratic values of dignity, equality, and freedom stipulated in the South African Bill of Rights. The chapter later notes the alignment of transnational capital with the new black bourgeoisie and the growing socioeconomic and political gap between the latter and those without access to sources of capital. For their part, those without the privileges access brings, living as they do on the edges of the city of Cape Town, continue to struggle for water, electricity, adequate housing, and health care. As they attend to day-to-day “money struggles”—battles to economize and to budget through savings—reckoning emerges as the chapter’s overarching theme.
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