From its inception, the primary focus of the field of Linguistic Landscape Studies has been the interplay between language and space, or language on display. Recently, however, scholars have begun to consider the human element of linguistic landscapes (LLs), and include the body in their work [See for example Stroud and Jegels (2014), Peck and Stroud (2015), Peck and Banda (2014)].

White supremacist rule socially engineered impoverishment, dispossession and fomented brutality that black people in South Africa were made to endure through centuries of settler colonial history, which was intensified during apartheid and continued in the nearly three decades of the post ap era. Governance through attritional warfare, which actively worked to suppress and debilitate the black majority as a tactic of rule, used death, and the threat of death and disablement, to ensure white, and now also black, elites’ security.