This chapter reflects on research that I have been conducting in South Africa in recent years with my colleague at University of KwaZulu-Natal, Richard Ballard. It was written just days after the death of Nelson Mandela was announced on 5 December 2013, an event that has produced considerable reflection on his political mission and achievements. His death has raised questions of how South Africa will now speak of apartheid’s past and its legacy after 20 years of African National Congress (ANC) rule which has witnessed stubbornly high levels of poverty and possibly worsening levels of inequality.Yet, the television images after Mandela’s death showed numerous signs that South Africa was – in ways unimaginable 25 years ago – a multicultural society, as white people wept at the passing of Madiba and sang Nkosi Sikelel’ iAfrika. The South Africa ‘celebrating’ on the streets seemed to be at peace with itself. Was this the same country that only a few months before had recoiled against Jacob Zuma, now national president, and Julius Malema, the ‘commander-in-chief’ of the Economic Freedom Fighters, singing “kill the boer” at rallies? Mandela’s death laid some metaphorical ghosts to rest but for how long?

This chapter offers some thoughts about how people act where tolerance for others is fragile. I forward my analysis from the perspective of white elites, and consider how their identities are constructed and grounded in urban space. My argument is that apartheid allowed white identity to go unmarked (invisible) as it represented the urban norm, whereas democracy brought a threat of disorientation to race identities. The resolution to this disorientation has been a careful negotiation of how far white identities can be projected in political and social space. The Mandela project of multiculturalism offered a space to preserve an identity of whiteness so long as this was kept discrete from the public sphere. But this idea of multiculturalism was, and is, up for grabs and can seem uncertain. Nevertheless, multiculturalism, and in particular the ways that it imagined the post-apartheid city, allowed whites the chance to domesticate identities within certain spaces and especially the gated estate. In so doing, whiteness has become constructed as a matter of class (status), to which Black Diamonds and others should aspire. The conceit is that the estates offer a form of multiculturalism-lite, where differences are tolerated so long as similarities of class are in place. In practice, within...