Despite their peaceful, bucolic appearance, the tree-lined streets of
South African suburbia were no refuge from the racial tensions and indignities of apartheid's
most repressive years. In At Home with Apartheid, Rebecca Ginsburg provides an
intimate examination of the cultural landscapes of Johannesburg's middle- and
upper-middle-class neighborhoods during the height of apartheid (c. 1960-1975) and
incorporates recent scholarship on gender, the home, and family. More subtly but
no less significantly than factory floors, squatter camps, prisons, and courtrooms, the homes of
white South Africans were sites of important contests between white privilege and black aspiration.
Subtle negotiations within the domestic sphere between white, mostly female, householders and their
black domestic workers, also primarily women, played out over and around this space. These seemingly
mundane, private conflicts were part of larger contemporary struggles between whites and blacks over
territory and power. Ginsburg gives special attention to the distinct social and
racial geographies produced by the workers' detached living quarters, designed by builders and
architects as landscape complements to the main houses. Ranch houses, Italianate villas, modernist
cubes, and Victorian bungalows filled Johannesburg's suburbs. What distinguished these
neighborhoods from their precedents in the United States or the United Kingdom was the presence of
the ubiquitous back rooms and of the African women who inhabited them in these otherwise exclusively
white areas. The author conducted more than seventy-five personal interviews
for this book, an approach that sets it apart from other architectural histories. In addition to
these oral accounts, Ginsburg draws from plans, drawings, and onsite analysis of the physical
properties themselves. While the issues addressed span the disciplines of South African and
architectural history, feminist studies, material culture studies, and psychology, the book's
strong narrative, powerful oral histories, and compelling subject matter bring the neighborhoods and
residents it examines vividly to life.