How do you politicize a place that refuses to be moved? South African authors—in both fiction and nonfiction––have long wrestled with the unique contradictions inherent in modern-day Cape Town, a city with a strong tradition of using narrative as a tool of resistance. K. Sello Duiker’s heralded novel of the South African canon, The Quiet Violence of Dreams, originally published in 2001, continues to find relevancy decades after its publication through his indictments of Cape Town’s parallel realities, flashing a lens into working-class and queer life. For a story based in a city whose wealth and beauty dominate the public narrative, The Quiet Violence of Dreams contends with the places and people for whom beauty comes at an expense.

While superficial readings of the book consider it wrapped up in the hangover of unfulfilled Rainbow Nation promises of post-apartheid, it eschews such trappings to emphasize the condition of humanity that is unrelentingly dispossessed. Duiker’s primary narrator, Tshepo, navigates Cape Town with candor and discontent. Tshepo finds reprieve in the neighborhood of Observatory, colloquially called Obz or Obs, along with his friend Mmabatho, who works in theater and the arts. The two spend their evenings in restaurants like Ganesh and A Touch of Madness, two neighborhood staples known for their youth culture, liberal politics, and bohemian style. Tshepo grapples with unrelenting violence in his personal life, mental health deliberations, and the demands of the city, from spending time in Valkenburg, a mental health hospital that still operates in Observatory today, to working in the upscale queer sex work scene.

The Obs of The Quiet Violence of Dreams is reflected as a liberal place with semi-affordable housing and student digs, bars, and nightlight that was less formal and more communal (and where many conversations happened over a bottle of  Black Label beer). Duiker’s Obs and the Obs of today are recognizable in some ways—Valkenburg still operates, as does the Observatory. Ganesh is still open, though in February of this year, it came under new management (and new menus and prices) while A Touch of Madness shuttered in 2024.What is considered petty crime still persists, as do all the factors that create it.

Observatory’s history of progressive intermixing that was disallowed by apartheid, however, does not render it exempt from being a gentrifying force in the city and its southern suburbs. It is a history inherent in the neighborhood’s etymology—Observatory gets its name in the 1820s from the British when they both took control of the Cape and established the Royal Observatory, a pertinent site of astrological and scientific research. Most recently, in early 2024, Amazon broke ground in Observatory, establishing their sprawling African headquarters, alongside a new mall, two accommodation apartment blocks selling for R1.2 million per studio apartment, and a First Nations Heritage Centre honoring the people whose land was taken and built upon.

The land now known as Observatory was first stewarded by the Indigenous people of South Africa, some of which include Khoi, San, and the KhoiKhoi. The stewardship of the land, which was largely wetlands, was ideal for cattle raising as well as nomadic and symbiotic means of living. As Indigenous communities continue to reckon with the afterlives of the area’s violent colonial history as one of the primary sites of division, imposition, and land theft, the infinite possibilities of fiction writing introduces new prisms to engage with these very contemporary struggles.

What is often excluded from Cape Town’s narrative is its history as a slave colony—the architecture of enslavement is still observable in places like the Iziko Slave Lodge, the Castle of Good Hope, and a barely visible memorial to a slave auction block on Spin Street, nestled inconspicuously between Parliament and a KFC.  In the record of the Royal Observatory, a British astronomical establishment meant to guide ships entering the Cape built in 1820, the neighborhood is described with speculation: “Before Colonial times, the Observatory site was probably summer pasture used by the indigenous Khoisan for their cattle.” The Royal Observatory still operates today, now as the South African Astronomical Observatory (SAAO) in Obs and in another location, Sutherland, conducting astronomical research and being home to the largest optical telescope in the southern hemisphere.

Observatory was one of the first places where Free Burghers, usually Germans and French who came with the Dutch East India Company (VOC) on work contracts, were given land to become stock farmers and hold dominion over land and enslaved people, courtesy of Jan van Riebeeck and the VOC in its settlement in the Cape in 1652. The Khoi and San have a long history of resisting colonial domination—most notably in 1510, when the Goringhaicona clan defeated Portuguese settlers on the banks of the Liesbeek, where Amazon now stands. This early act of defiance challenges the idea that resistance began only in 1652 with the arrival of the Dutch. While state-aligned bodies like the National Khoi and San Council face criticism for co-option, grassroots groups such as the Khoi and San Active Awareness Group, !Khwa ttu, Ndifuna Ukwazi, and Reclaim the City continue to contest land injustice and preserve Indigenous traditions.

The colonial history of Observatory doesn’t just live in archives or contested heritage claims—it’s legible in today’s property market. Even in Tshepo’s time, Observatory was already under pressure from gentrification, driven by demand for student housing and an expanding service economy. In 2025, that process has escalated. A one-bedroom apartment now rents for upwards of R15,000 (about $830) per month—more than twice the average monthly income in Cape Town, which sits around R6,000 (about $330). Amazon’s arrival, with its adjacent mall and the construction of a new highway to support increased traffic, has only deepened this transformation. The result is a spatial logic that echoes colonial land dispossession: Land is carved up and repurposed to serve accumulation, not community.

In the resistance to the Amazon HQ, a coalition of people and organizations came together under the Liesbeek Action Campaign. The campaign saw the participation of Obs residents, The Observatory Civic Association, housing and land justice groups, and importantly, Indigenous groups, including the Goringhaicona Khoi Khoin Indigenous Traditional Council (GKKITC), who sought to resist development on the basis that Observatory is unceded heritage land, upon which Amazon should not be built.

While the campaign made serious legal gains and interdicts for development, the Liesbeek Leisure Property Trust (LLPT) ultimately won with both the support of the DA-run city.  This group—some say—emerged after Amazon allegedly co-opted elements of the resistance, turning former critics into supporters in exchange for a First Nations Heritage Centre on the campus.

In this perceived capture of resistance efforts, the authority of indigeneity itself is dissolved into a battle of narratives. But where Observatory continues to exclude is observable on its stretch of the main road, where an informal occupation, Singabalapha (translated from isiXhosa meaning “we belong here”) has been in place for six years. Initially housed in a disused retirement home, the group was evicted by interdict, forcing them and their belongings onto a patch of grass beside a local supermarket chain.The occupation has grown beyond the number of people who were originally evicted, and after some years, tents turned into structures turned into organizing committees. The encampment has become a microcosm of resistance—insisting on central presence in a city that routinely pushes the poor to the periphery.

More than twenty years after The Quiet Violence of Dreams, Cape Town remains a city of sharp contradictions: incoherent in its planning, alienating in its racial and spatial divides, and violently stratified. In 2025, Time Out magazine named it the best city in the world—a title that sits uneasily alongside its deepening inequality. Into this paradox steps Amazon, a corporation known for union busting, strike suppression, and high worker turnover. Around the world, “Amazon towns”—built on tax breaks and promises of investment—have undermined local businesses and transformed communities into logistical nodes. In Cape Town, the company’s arrival is already reshaping the urban fabric, intensifying surveillance and insecurity, and exacerbating familiar divides along lines of class and race. While no outcome is inevitable, the history of tech-driven development across the continent gives reason for concern: labor exploitation, ecological harm, and the erosion of public life.

What becomes of the Amazon development once it reaches a full operating capacity, alongside the new housing development, is a story yet to be told. However, fiction offers a trap door to the demand for precision in the analysis of race that is both infuriating and also possesses no clear answers given its absurdity and pseudoscience foundations. Where theory and ideology dominate, fiction is less considered as a liberatory avenue and nourishing source material. In this way, fiction like Duiker’s includes the contours of Black South African life, but can offload precision onto more amorphous characterizations of the darkness of Cape Town and its reprieves.

Take the way sex work is documented throughout the novel – in The Quiet Violence of Dreams, sex work provides Tsepho  with some financial mobility and camaraderie amongst his colleagues. He visits and frequents gay clubs and defines and redefines his own definitions of desire, lust, and connection. We are simultaneously introduced to more voices and narrators, Tshepo’s colleagues. Duiker pays a great deal of attention and care to this line of work, and all the musings and perspectives of the various therapists. We learn of their negotiations as professionals dealing with sensitivity, vulnerability, domination, and, ultimately, customer satisfaction. Sebastian, a fellow Steamy Windows therapist, incisively describes the worlds they all navigate, “Perhaps it is no coincidence that I have ended up doing this kind of work. Where else can a girl with style and wit go? There are never any vacancies for us. So we create our own world and live in a parallel reality.”

Duiker’s attention to the interiority of each character’s life and thought processes renders immense intimacy for the reader; we can understand where a character is coming from rather than simply following them around through the novel. This delicacy is necessitated given South Africa’s complex and ominous relationship to race and separation. The characters talk about living in parallel to straight people and white people, but there is another reality within the book, and that is about the madness that animates the landscape of Cape Town.

Ernest Cole, celebrated South African photographer, documented some of the most significant moments of apartheid in the ’60s, described South Africa as “a country of signs.” Everything has been overly dictated and backed with physical and mental violence. As such, the humanity that is altered by this kind of imposed violence is what takes center stage for Duiker, highlighting both the desire to know one another and the surrender that the process of learning even just one other person is the work of a lifetime.

How do you learn life’s lessons and its magic and your own place in it when one has to be so deeply governed by the legacy of race and apartheid? Duiker’s characters try out these questions while walking around Cape Town, smoking, drinking, working in the theater or the massage and sex work parlor. They put one foot in front of the other as one does when constructing a life while suppressing the immense violence going on underneath your feet. While Tshepo is in Cape Town putting one foot in front of the other, the parallel reality is that of Cape Town and its incongruency with life itself—the city is a manufactured paradise for indignity and wealth to run rampant.

There is palpable tension between Duiker’s characters because of what has happened to them, and their histories, and current status in South Africa, particularly Cape Town. Sometimes the tension is generative and curious, and at other times, the tension is punitive and violent. These moments of collision between characters illuminate the more personal consequences of the artifice of “progress” and justice. And while this relational tension continues to shape-shift in the contemporary moment, in the contemporary Observatory, what seems to persist is the need for redefining one’s personal freedoms, one’s personal dignity, in the face of being subjected to the violent dreams of a nation-state.