The politics of boundaries in South Africa: the case of Matatiele

This paper engages with a key concern in boundary studies namely what are the major forces which inform boundaries and boundary demarcation/making. Boundaries being quintessentially geographical are infused with social, political and spatial content. While the Berlin Conference imposed national boundaries using geography as a colonial tool, the principle of boundaries imposed at the intra-national scale is a current concern. The paper focusses on boundary demarcation in post-apartheid South Africa through a consideration of the Matatiele boundary dispute. Matatiele, a small town, situated towards the south-western corner of KwaZulu-Natal, but now part of the Eastern Cape Province, has been the subject of a longstanding boundary dispute between the two provinces. The matter has been a subject of a number of protracted court battles between residents of the town and the different tiers of government, the provincial and national tiers of government in particular. The paper details the struggle for spatial justice - the political strategies, in particular - of proponents for the inclusion of Matatiele into KwaZulu-Natal. The paper demonstrates that in a (quasi) federal spatial formation such as South Africa, boundaries are politically overdetermined at the national scale. The local democratic content, therefore, is rendered inconsequential.