The railway track that runs east-west through Riverlea in the west of Johannesburg divides the township into the larger “Riverlea proper” and Riverlea Extension. The railway also stitches Riverlea into a single entity. But along the line of sleepers and steel, apartheid-era social engineering festers through more than nomenclature in a neighbourhood that used to be exclusively for those categorised as coloured, where “proper” continues to imply social acceptability and Extension infers the underclass of a once-discarded people.

The visible deprivation of many in Riverlea Extension swells from the two- and three-roomed houses, filtering into the small allotments that separate them and spilling out into the potholed and pockmarked tar roads. This contrasts starkly with the larger, walled and gated lots behind which mostly extended and renovated houses line the broad, well-tended streets that deem the larger section of Riverlea “proper”.