On an early summer's evening in 2017, passersby stop to see why a crowd has gathered in Long Street, Cape Town, and discover two black women taking off and putting on their clothes. These ‘ghels’ speak isiXhosa, teasing the audience. Using township lingo, they direct their statements to onlookers familiar with what is being said, but also to those who seem oblivious to their taunting assertions. Seeing these ghels may be titillating and amusing for some, but to others, these women are indecent, discomforting and even vulgar. Their expressions, articulations and gestures may seem to belong to black townships and therefore appear ‘out of place’ in the central business district (CBD). The transgressive linguistic strategy of this work points to the fact that most white and coloured people in Cape Town (and South Africa) do not speak isiXhosa and so cannot listen to what is being said.2 The performance points to continuing racial segregationism in South Africa and, more significantly, to a profound sense of not belonging.

This work by Buhlebezwe Siwani and Chuma Sopotela, titled Those Ghels, formed part of the 2017 Institute for Creative Arts (ICA) Live Art Festival, held in Cape Town, which also featured Khanyisile Mbongwa's kuDanger!, Sethembile Msezane's Excerpts from the Past and Dean Hutton's #fuckwhitepeople. These works, as I show in this chapter, explore intertwined themes of spatial segregation, language and displacement. By so doing, they demonstrate the critical impulse in contemporary live art in South Africa to question volatile identities through spatial politics, and to locate them within the incoherence and incongruence of postcolonial urban spaces. I argue that this form of creative protest constitutes a radical intellectual creative language, which deciphers the psychological and emotional burden of historical prejudice, reinforced through racial and class division.