Many of the articles in this book are the result of research conducted as part of a three-year project undertaken with a grant from the South Africa-Netherlands Research Programme on Alternatives in Development (SANPAD). The project was titled ‘Identity, Belonging and Place in Post-apartheid South Africa: A Case Study of Chatsworth’. We take this opportunity to thank SANPAD’s remarkable director, Dr Anshu Padayachee, and her team for their support throughout the project. We would also like to extend our thanks to ‘Chatsworthians’. You opened your doors and your hearts and we hope, in return, that we have opened new ways of seeing Chatsworth while tracing the various veins and arteries that criss-cross in and out of the township. There are a myriad people who agreed to be interviewed, and shared their family documents and memorabilia. All the contributors are indebted to you and hope that in turning private documents and family histories that often circulate within narrow confines into public stories, those people who played such a major role in the making of Chatsworth are acknowledged in one way or another and are able to take their place in history. The contributors to this book comprise a mix of experienced writers who lived the very history they were documenting, as well as young contributors who bring new ways of doing research, often combining archival material with oral history. It has been an absolute pleasure working with all of them as we tried to tell a story that is at once located within apartheid’s boundaries but moves well beyond the social and the structural, the personal and the psychological, in a place called Chatsworth.