Home Spaces, Street Styles: Contesting Power and Identity in a South African City 9780745323282, 9780745323275, 9781868145317

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Home Spaces, Street Styles

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Anthropology, Culture and Society Series Editors: Professor Vered Amit, Concordia University and Dr Jon P. Mitchell, University of Sussex Published titles include: Home Spaces, Street Styles: Contesting Power and Identity in a South African City Leslie J. Bank

Culture and Well-Being: Anthropological Approaches to Freedom and Political Ethics Edited by Alberto Corsín Jiménez

On the Game: Women and Sex Work Sophie Day

Cultures of Fear: A Critical Reader Edited by Uli Linke and Danielle Taana Smith

Slave of Allah: Zacarias Moussaoui vs the USA Katherine C. Donahue A World of Insecurity: Anthropological Perspectives on Human Security Edited by Thomas Eriksen, Ellen Bal and Oscar Salemink A History of Anthropology Thomas Hylland Eriksen and Finn Sivert Nielsen Ethnicity and Nationalism: Anthropological Perspectives Third Edition Thomas Hylland Eriksen Small Places, Large Issues: An Introduction to Social and Cultural Anthropology Third Edition Thomas Hylland Eriksen What is Anthropology? Thomas Hylland Eriksen Anthropology, Development and the Post-Modern Challenge Katy Gardner and David Lewis Corruption: Anthropological Perspectives Edited by Dieter Haller and Cris Shore Anthropology’s World Life in a Twenty-First Century Discipline Ulf Hannerz

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Fair Trade and a Global Commodity: Coffee in Costa Rica Peter Luetchford The Will of the Many: How the Alterglobalisation Movement is Changing the Face of Democracy Marianne Maeckelbergh The Aid Effect: Giving and Governing in International Development Edited by David Mosse and David Lewis Cultivating Development: An Ethnography of Aid Policy and Practice David Mosse Anthropology, Art and Cultural Production Maruška Svašek Race and Ethnicity in Latin America Second Edition Peter Wade Race and Sex in Latin America Peter Wade Anthropology at the Dawn of the Cold War: The Influence of Foundations, McCarthyism and the CIA Edited by Dustin M. Wax Learning Politics from Sivaram: The Life and Death of a Revolutionary Tamil Journalist in Sri Lanka Mark P. Whitaker

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HOME SPACES, STREET STYLES Contesting Power and Identity in a South African City Leslie J. Bank

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First published 2011 by Pluto Press 345 Archway Road, London N6 5AA and 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10010 www.plutobooks.com and Wits University Press 1 Jan Smuts Avenue Johannesburg 2001 South Africa http://witspress.wits.ac.za All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the written permission of the publisher, except in accordance with the provisions of the Copyright Act, Act 98 of 1978. Distributed in the United States of America exclusively by Palgrave Macmillan, a division of St. Martin’s Press LLC, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10010 Copyright © Leslie J. Bank 2011 The right of Leslie J. Bank to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library ISBN ISBN ISBN

978 0 7453 2328 2 978 0 7453 2327 5 978 1 86814 531 7

Hardback Paperback (Pluto Press) Paperback (Wits University Press)

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This book is printed on paper suitable for recycling and made from fully managed and sustained forest sources. Logging, pulping and manufacturing processes are expected to conform to the environmental standards of the country of origin. 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 Designed and produced for Pluto Press by Chase Publishing Services Ltd, 33 Livonia Road, Sidmouth EX10 9JB, England Typeset from disk by Stanford DTP Services, Northampton, England Printed and bound in the European Union by CPI Antony Rowe, Chippenham and Eastbourne

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Contents

List of Illustrationsvi Series Prefacevii Preface and Acknowledgementsviii 1. Towards an Anthropology of Urbanism

1

2. The Xhosa in Town Revisited

35

3. Modernism, Space and Identity

60

4. Rebellion, Fractured Urbanism and the Fear of Fire

89

5. The Style of the Comrades

112

6. Changing Migrant Cultures

138

7. Re-modelling the House

163

8. The Rhythms of the Yards

190

9. Post-Apartheid Suburb or Hyper-Ghetto

210

Conclusion235 Notes245 Bibliography251 Index264

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Illustrations

Map East London and surrounding areas

6

Figure 4.1 Comparison by household types, 1954 and 1995

99

PHOTOS 1.1 A view of the East Bank location in the 1950s 22 1.2 The destruction of the Meine family house on Fredrick Street, Tsolo, East Bank, 1967 23 1.3 Duncan Village Proper, 2004 27 2.1 Tearoom styles and the Italian street look 50 2.2 Crowds gather to watch rugby at Rubusana Park in the 1950s 54 2.3 Sunglasses and smiles, Eastern Beach 55 2.4 The Havana Hotshots perform at the Peacock Hall, 1955 56 3.1 New 51/9 houses in Duncan Village Extension 72 3.2 The East Bank to Duncan Village, 1963 77 3.3 Aerial photograph of Duncan Village, 1965 78 3.4 Windowless Transit Houses in C-Section 80 4.1 Informal settlement behind St Peter’s church, Duncan Village Proper96 5.1 Youths relax with the radio, 1950s 126 6.1 B-hostel complex among shacks and houses, 2004 156 6.2 Kentani migrants, 2004 157 7.1 East Bank propertied matriarch, 1950s 169 7.2 Looking Red: urban women in traditional dress, 1950s 174 7.3 Domestic desire 177 7.4 Urban family with male breadwinner 179 7.5 Thabo in his mother’s home-based spaza shop, 2004 184 8.1 Domestic pride and shining pots in a backyard shack 200 8.2 Women hang up the washing in the yard, 2004 200 9.1 The author with Koko Qebeyi at the Sister Aiden memorial statue in Duncan Village, 2010 217 9.2 Bishop Michael Coleman at the monument at St Peter’s 220 9.3 Women in traditional Xhosa attire wait to perform at the old Welsh High School 221 9.4 Communities of the Saved: conversions in Braelynn Extension, 2004226 vi

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Series Preface

Anthropology is a discipline based upon in-depth ethnographic works that deal with wider theoretical issues in the context of particular, local conditions – to paraphrase an important volume from the series: large issues explored in small places. This series has a particular mission: to publish work that moves away from an old-style descriptive ethnography that is strongly area-studies oriented, and offer genuine theoretical arguments that are of interest to a much wider readership, but which are nevertheless located and grounded in solid ethnographic research. If anthropology is to argue itself a place in the contemporary intellectual world, then it must surely be through such research. We start from the question: ‘What can this ethnographic material tell us about the bigger theoretical issues that concern the social sciences?’ rather than ‘What can these theoretical ideas tell us about the ethnographic context?’ Put this way round, such work becomes about large issues, set in a (relatively) small place, rather than detailed description of a small place for its own sake. As Clifford Geertz once said, ‘Anthropologists don’t study villages; they study in villages.’ By place, we mean not only geographical locale, but also other types of ‘place’ – within political, economic, religious or other social systems. We therefore publish work based on ethnography within political and religious movements, occupational or class groups, among youth, development agencies, and nationalist movements; but also work that is more thematically based – on kinship, landscape, the state, violence, corruption, the self. The series publishes four kinds of volume: ethnographic monographs; comparative texts; edited collections; and shorter, polemical essays. We publish work from all traditions of anthropology, and all parts of the world, which combines theoretical debate with empirical evidence to demonstrate anthropology’s unique position in contemporary scholarship and the contemporary world. Professor Vered Amit Dr Jon P. Mitchell

vii

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Preface and Acknowledgements

This book owes an intellectual debt to Jennifer Robinson and her book Ordinary Cities (2006) which came across my desk at a time when I had more or less given up on the idea of publishing this book. The book revisits and updates the classic urban anthropological work of Philip and Iona Mayer and their colleagues in the South African city of East London in the 1950s. The original Xhosa in Town project, as it was known, formed part of a generation of African urban anthropological studies that flourished in the post-war period when social anthropologists left their rural research sites to follow migrants into towns and cities in Africa, where they studied the social and cultural consequences of urbanisation. This collective body of work was heavily criticised and largely discarded from the late 1960s. In her book, Robinson nostalgically recalls this golden era of urban anthropology and laments the passing of a tradition of urban scholarship which displayed a genuine interest in the comparative and cosmopolitan nature of urbanism. She argues that the dominance of political economy and development studies discourses, since the late 1960s, has shifted attention away from the sociality of cities and placed them in a neat developmental hierarchy with global cities at the top. In this scheme, Third World cities tended to be viewed only through the lens of their material conditions and infrastructural deficits, as cities with poverty, housing, sanitation and basic services problems, rather than places that display diverse forms of sociality and urban cultural life. Robinson exposed the Euro-centric underpinnings of global city discourses and demanded that more attention be given to ‘ordinary cities’ and to the project of ‘post-colonising the field of urban studies’ (see Robinson 2006). In particular, she calls for a return to older urban ethnographies and the use of anthropology to transform ‘urban studies’ back into a truly cosmopolitan field of enquiry, where we can appreciate and acknowledge the different ways in which the urban experience is constituted historically, socially and culturally in different cities. This book is a response to this challenge, it is a historical anthropology of urbanism in an ‘ordinary’ South African city. In the field of African anthropology there has also been a renewed interest in updating and re-assessing older ethnographies. My work thus displays a close intellectual affinity with studies, such as those of Moore and Vaughan (1996), Ferguson (1999) and Hansen (2002) on Zambia, which revisit aspects of the colonial anthropology of Northern Rhodesia and the work of the Rhodes Livingstone Institute. I am especially indebted here to James Ferguson whose work on urbanisation and the Zambian Copperbelt guided me through the project. In conceptualising my work and my contribution to the field, I have also drawn inspiration from the rich and fascinating vein of historical anthropology now available on post-socialism, which explores continuities viii

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and change from pre- to post-socialist urban life. My own ethnography of a South African city explores continuities and change in social identities, power and everyday life before and after apartheid. Most of the work done on the final preparation of this manuscript for publication occurred from March to December 2009, when I was on a Fulbright Scholarship to Emory University in the United States. The scholarship gave me the space to read, write and rewrite most of this book, which started as a PhD thesis awarded by the University of Cape Town in 2002. At Emory, I was hosted by Clifton Crais and Pamela Scully, who together with their students read and commented on many of my reworked and revised chapters. I was also supported by David Nugent and Peter Little in the Anthropology Department at Emory, who gave me opportunities to present my work, and Ben Carton from George Mason University in Washington. Setha Low at City University New York also made useful comments on my work. In addition to this opportunity, I spent time at Oxford and Cambridge Universities with the support of John Lonsdale and William Beinart in 2004. The Oppenheimer Trust and the Ford Foundation financed my time there. In the UK, Deborah Bryceson at the University of Glasgow has also been very supportive of my work, as has my long-term friend and colleague Sakkie Niehaus at Brunel University. However, given that this project was imagined and executed in South Africa, my primary debts are local, to colleagues and friends in South Africa and East London, especially at Rhodes University and the University of Fort Hare. At the Fort Hare Institute of Social and Economic Research, Nkosazana Ngcongolo, Langa Makubalo, Landiswa Mqasho, Langa Makubalo, Ayanda Tyali, Clifford Mabhena, Octavia Sibanda, and Gary Minkley all contributed to my work in important ways. I also extend a special thanks to Mandisi Jekwa who initially assisted me during fieldwork in Duncan Village. Other academic colleagues who have supported me include Oliver Murphy, Andrew Ainslie, Gina Buijs, Chris De Wet, Janet Cherry, Robin Palmer, Roger Southall, Pat McAllister, Lungisile Ntsebeza, Setha Low and Luvuyo Wotshela. At the University of Cape Town, where my career as an anthropologist started, I would like to offer special thanks to Mugsy Spegiel who supervised my PhD thesis. At Pluto Press I thank Thomas Eriksen for promoting this manuscript, Jon Mitchell for his critical comments and role as series editor, and David Castle and Robert Webb for seeing the book through to production. Technical assistance on the manuscript was also provided by Dave Stanford, while Priscilla Hall and Mirie van Rooyen helped me with editing, proof-reading and the index. Due to the length of time it has taken for this book to be published, some of the chapters of this book draw on previous published work. Chapter Two is an updated and reworked version of a paper first published in Kronos: Journal of Cape History, (2002) No 28; Chapter Five is a reworked version of ‘Cats, Comrades and Country Boys’, Anthropology Southern Africa, (2003) 1,1; Chapter Six is based on an article which first appeared as ‘Men with Cookers: Transformations in Migrant Culture, Domesticity and Identity in

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Duncan Village, East London’ published in the Journal of Southern African Studies, 25, 3 (1999), while parts of Chapter Eight recently appeared in ‘The Rhythms of the Yards: Urbanism, Backyards and Housing Policy in South Africa’, Journal of Contemporary African Studies, 10, 4, 2007. I thank these journals for allowing me to reproduce parts of these articles in this book. My final and greatest debt goes to my family. Firstly, I thank Andrew, my brother who has read and commented on everything most studiously. I am also grateful for the support and encouragement of my parents, Louis and Margot, and to Stephen, my older brother, for his interest in my work. I thank my in-laws: Maryke Littlefield and Johan Lotter for their support. However, most of my gratitude is extended to my fellow travellers, my immediate family, Mariette, my wife, and our three marvellous children, Dominic, Sarah and Rebecca, who I dragged halfway around the world in the process. I owe you all a great debt and it is for this reason that I dedicate this book to you.

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1 Towards an Anthropology of Urbanism

In broad terms, urban theory constitutes a series of ideas (sometimes presented as laws) about what cities are, what they do and how they work. Commonly such ideas exist at a high level of abstraction so that they do not pertain to individual towns or cities, but offer a more general explanation of the role that cities play in shaping socio-spatial processes. Nonetheless, such theories typically emerge from particular cities at particular times, to the extent that certain cities become exemplary of particular types of urban theory … (Phil Hubbard 2006: 6)

The city of East London, located on the eastern seaboard of South Africa, represents one of those cities that became ‘exemplary of particular types of urban theory’. In the same way that Los Angeles became emblematic of ‘postmodern urbanism’, the small African city of East London came to represent a challenge to the conventional wisdom about urbanism presented by scholars like Simmel (1903), Park et al. (1925) and especially Wirth (1996 [1938]). Wirth had defined urbanism as involving the ‘substitution of secondary for primary contacts, the weakening of bonds of kinship, the declining social significance of the family, the disappearance of neighbourhood and the undermining of the traditional basis of social solidarity’ (1996 [1938]: 79). In the early 1960s, Philip and Iona Mayer captured the imagination of a generation of urban scholars by convincingly demonstrating how migrants in East London refused to relinquish their ‘primary contacts’ while in the city, or to allow urbanisation to undermine their ‘traditional basis for social solidarity’. Their rich ethnography (Mayer with Mayer 1971 [1961]) showed how some migrants could live in the city for years, some for as long as 20 years, without accepting modernity and its commonly understood urban cultural forms. Mayer wrote at a time when a critique of the Wirthian perspective on urbanism had been gaining momentum in sociology more globally. Peter Wilmot and Michael Young had published their famous book on kinship and family in the Bethnal Green borough of London’s East End in 1957. Bethnal Green was being threatened with slum clearance programmes. Based on interviews with over 1,000 families, their study revealed the dense associative networks and rich family life of the old East End, and highlighted the role of women in coping with poverty and holding extended family networks together. They showed that the highest levels of social coherence and connectivity were to be found in the most densely settled areas of Bethnal Green, whereas the new housing estates being created for the working class tended to be characterised by blasé attitudes and social withdrawal (see Parker 2004: 81). 1

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Across the Atlantic, Herbert Gans (1962) published an important study of an Italian-American community in the impoverished West End of Boston, which was also faced with the threat of urban removal. Gans depicted Boston’s West End as a working-class enclave in which people and institutions were created to ‘serve and protect’ the family and the community. He stressed their unity as a working-class community, dubbing the West-Enders as ‘urban villagers’ rather than as alienated urban individuals. The great irony of Wirth’s analysis of the city was that he himself had described and uncovered such bonds in his own 1935 ethnography of Chicago entitled The Ghetto, but that he had chosen to suppress these insights when it came to developing a more universal and theoretical definition of urbanism, which sought to sum up the collective contribution of the Chicago School of the 1920s and 1930s to urban studies. The problem with Wirth’s definition was that it set up the urban too starkly in contrast to the rural and the traditional. By starting with what the urban was not – a face-to-face, rural folk culture – it became very difficult for Wirth to acknowledge the complex sociality of the city and its social networks (see Parker 2004; Robinson 2006). Within the field of social anthropology, which had but recently begun to address the cultural adaptations of rural people to urban life, Oscar Lewis led the way with his studies of family life and urban adaptation in Mexico (1951, 1959, 1961). In a seminal article, based on fieldwork conducted in Mexico City in 1950, Lewis argued that: this study provides further evidence that urbanisation is not a simple, unitary, universally similar process, but that it assumes different forms and meanings, depending on the prevailing historic, economic and social conditions … I find that peasants in Mexico adapt to urban life with far greater ease than do American farm families. There is little evidence of disorganisation and breakdown, of cultural conflict, or of irreconcilable differences between generations … Family life remains strong in Mexico City. (1951: 30) Janet Abu-Lughod (1961) arrived at similar conclusions in her research among rural migrants in Cairo of the late 1950s, while Bruner argued of North Sumatra of the 1950s that: contrary to the traditional theory, we find in many Asian cities that society does not become secularised, the individual does not become isolated, kinship organisation does not breakdown, nor do social relations in the urban environment become impersonal, superficial and utilitarian. (1961: 508) The Mayers’ book-length ethnography, Townsmen or Tribesmen (the second volume of what became known as the Xhosa in Town trilogy) (Mayer with Mayer 1971 [1961]) confirmed and crystallised this emerging critique of established notions of urbanism. Their study also showed the great difficulties associated with universal definitions of urbanism by highlighting the critical

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role of regional cultural dynamics in shaping processes of urban adaptation. This point had been stressed by Lewis (1951), but was also consistently emphasised in the work of another highly influential American urbanist, Lewis Mumford. In his seminal book, The Culture of Cities (1958 [1938]) Mumford had argued that, in all cities, elements of rural and regional cultures were transformed and ‘etherealised’ into durable elements in a new and dynamic process of cultural synthesis. For Mumford, new urbanisms emerged from the ‘the diffused rays of many separate beams’, drawn from regional cultural, social and historical materials. He expressed these ideas in theatrical idiom: Every culture has its characteristic drama. It chooses from the sum total of human potentialities certain acts and interests, certain processes and values, and endows them with special significance … The stage on which this drama is enacted, with the most skilled actors and a full supporting company and specially designed scenery, is the city: it is here that it reaches its highest pitch of intensity. (Mumford 1958 [1938]: 5) Much of the power and fascination of Mayer’s work lay in his ability to locate his anthropological analysis of urbanisation and urbanism within a regional cultural drama. For Mayer, the character of urbanism in East London’s African residential locations was shaped by a fundamental cultural divide that had deep roots in the Eastern Cape countryside. Indeed, as part of their preparation for their urban fieldwork in the mid 1950s, the Mayers lived in a rural village outside of the city and travelled extensively around the rural reserves of the Eastern Cape. It was here that they became convinced of the centrality of what they came to characterise as the ‘Red/School’ divide to an understanding of cultural process in East London. In the introduction to Townsmen or Tribesmen, they wrote: That two dramatically different sets of institutions exist within the Xhosa countryside is not hard to see. One becomes aware of it before a word is spoken, through the glaring contrasts in dress and personal appearance. There are women – Red women – who go about like a commercial photographer’s dream of picturesque Africa, their arms and shoulders bare, their brightly-coloured ochred skirts swinging, their beads, brass ornaments and fanciful head-dresses adding still more colour. And there are others – the School women – who go in cotton print dresses in sober colours, with neat black head-dresses and heavy black shawls, looking as proper as mid-Victorian or as sombre as Moslem wives. To see a dance for Red youth and a ‘concert’ for School youth, a sacrifice in one homestead and a prayer meeting in the next, or even a Red and a School family meal, is to realise that these belong to two different worlds, in spite of the language and the peasant background being one. (Mayer with Mayer 1971 [1961]: 20) The Mayers went on to state that rural Xhosa (the dominant ethnic group in the region) themselves ‘think of this division as bisecting the entire population’

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and view it ‘in terms of cultural differentia’: ‘Red people do things this way while School people do them that way.’ They claimed that the division between abantu ababomvu (Red people) and abantu basesikolweni (School people) was marked not only by dress styles and social institutions, but was expressed in deeper cultural values kept in place by ‘a kind of self-imposed aloofness’, where each segment of the rural population firmly believed in the superiority of their ‘own way of life’ (1971 [1961]: 21–41). The Reds saw it as their ‘common present duty’ to maintain a distinctive way of life which history and the ancestors had sanctioned for them and for them alone (1971 [1961]: 40). The roots of this cultural division can be traced back to the mid-nineteenth century, during the colonisation of the Eastern Cape Province of South Africa, when a large section of the Xhosa-speaking people were convinced by the visions of the young prophetess, Nongqawuse, who declared that, if they killed their cattle and scorched their fields, the ancestors would drive the white settlers into the sea and restore peace and harmony to their lands. Nongqawuse’s prophecy divided the Xhosa nation between ‘believers’ and ‘non-believers’, between communities and families that had come to accept Westernisation and Christianity and those who rejected these forces, politically and culturally. There is ongoing debate as to whether colonial officials and the Governor of the Cape Colony, who had been struggling to defeat the Xhosa on the Eastern Frontier, conspired to popularise the visions of the Xhosa prophetess (Crais 2002; Peires 1989). The result, however, was undoubtedly catastrophic for ‘the believers’, who implemented the vision of the prophetess by decimating their herds and their livelihoods within a period of weeks and months, thus opening up the Eastern Cape for final colonisation. By 1894, the regional process of colonisation was concluded with the incorporation of the Xhosa-speaking areas of Pondoland in the far Eastern Cape into the Cape Colony. In 1910 the British colonies of the Cape and Natal amalgamated with the Boer republics of the Transvaal and the Orange Free State to form the Union of South Africa. A century after the historic Xhosa cattle-killing, the Mayers argued, rural communities in the Eastern Cape remained deeply divided between ‘believers’ and ‘non-believers’, between Red people and School people. This division was seen to shape the way in which Xhosa people adapted to urban life in East London. The most striking aspect of the Mayers’ ethnography was their account of the urban lifestyles, cultural responses and orientations of the conservative, anti-modern Red migrants. They showed that these migrants remained doggedly traditionalist in outlook, rejecting Christianity in any form and regarding entry into industrial wage labour as a ‘necessary evil’, which they accepted only in order to earn enough money to support their rural homesteads and resources. In the city, these men were seen to encapsulate themselves in close-knit networks of home-mates, who socialised together, resisted urban consumerism and morally enforced a commitment to building rural homesteads. The lifestyles of these Red migrants were contrasted with those of School migrants, who remained connected with their rural homesteads but were much more open to Western cultural influences in

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the city. The argument was thus not only ethnographically compelling, but theoretically important in that: first, it confirmed the findings of other studies that urbanisation did not necessarily lead to social breakdown; second, it demonstrated there could be large rural lumps in the urban ‘melting pot’ that did not dissolve with time; and, third, it illustrated that urbanism was always shaped by its regional or local cultural contexts. East London was already an established anthropological field-site by the time the Mayers conducted their research there. As early as 1931, the African urban locations of the city had been visited by Monica Hunter (later Wilson) as part of the fieldwork she conducted for her classic South African ethnography, Reaction to Conquest (1936). Her book included a large section on social change that covered African life in towns, as well as on white-owned farms, and this urban research was primarily focused on East London. When the Mayers re-entered East London’s locations in the late 1950s, they did not come alone. They were part of a team of researchers who collectively produced what would come to be referred to as the Xhosa in Town trilogy. The first book in the series, The Black Man’s Portion by sociologist Desmond Reader had been published in 1960, presenting a sociological overview of the history, residential life and employment patterns of the East London locations. Reader’s description of the townships was based on a one-in-ten household questionnaire conducted in 1955. He had supplemented this data with in-depth life histories and household case studies, combining qualitative and quantitative research techniques in a manner similar to the Bethnal Green study of Wilmot and Young. Townsmen or Tribesmen (Mayer with Mayer 1971 [1961]) was the middle volume in the trilogy, which was soon followed by anthropologist Berthold Pauw’s The Second Generation (1973 [1963]). The Mayers commissioned Pauw to conduct an ethnographic investigation of the families, lives, networks and adaptive strategies of urban-born families to complement their study of the migrants. These other two volumes in the Xhosa in Town trilogy did not, however, achieve the notoriety of Townsmen or Tribesmen, which was updated and reprinted in 1971; The Second Generation was updated and reprinted in 1973. In this re-study, based on historical research and intensive fieldwork in East London since the South African transition to democracy, I assess and update all of the East London ethnographies, not just the work of Philip and Iona Mayer. My own fieldwork in East London’s townships started 40 years after that of the trilogy researchers, in 1995, and continued intermittently until 2005. In revisiting the townships of East London in the 1990s, I was both preoccupied and guided by the work of the trilogy researchers. I imagined their work as a sort of baseline from which I would proceed by following up key themes and topics, while at the same time reporting on new areas of cultural and social change through the apartheid and into the post-apartheid period. Where my project differed from that of the trilogy (and Hunter’s earlier work) was that I did not enter the city from the perspective of the countryside, hoping to map out continuity and change across the urban–rural divide. My

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interest was in the changing city itself and in townships as complex spaces of creativity, social formation and struggle in their own right. I wanted to contribute to a new anthropology of urbanism rather than simply add to the old anthropology of urbanisation. I aspired to using the texts and notes of Monica Hunter, Philip Mayer and the trilogy scholars as beacons to light the road on a journey in new historical ethnography that would begin in the 1950s and navigate through the 1960s and 1970s and beyond, to end in the mid 2000s. In all the chapters of this book, the earlier anthropological studies, and especially the work of the trilogy researchers, provide critical points of reference and are used as a baseline from which ideas about social change are mapped out, discussed and contested. The years between these two periods of intensive fieldwork were the apartheid years in South Africa. They were years in which the old locations of the East Bank and West Bank were flattened and destroyed by a racist state determined to impose a new regime of urban management and control on the city and its African population. Most of the East Bank location, where the previous studies were focused, was pulled down during the 1960s, and the people living in the wood-and-iron houses there were resettled either to new township houses in the city or sent to the Ciskei or Transkei homelands (see Map). The pace and intensity of these forced removals created serious problems for people and the state, which was forced to build transit housing in the city because the removals had left so many homeless. New hostels were also built for migrants, who were shaken out of the backrooms and yards of the old wood-and-iron houses and kept separate from permanently urbanised working class families. This process of restructuring fundamentally reconfigured social relations, power and identity in the township. One of my primary aims in this book is to offer a new set of understandings of what this restructuring process meant and how it might be interpreted. Instead of simply focusing on the racial dimensions of apartheid and documenting change from above, I explore the everyday encounters, sensibilities and architecture of social and cultural change from below, from various locations within the township itself, and reflect on the implications of urban restructuring for different forms of place and home-making, as well as for gender and generational relations and identities. This study also goes beyond the apartheid period and seeks to provide insights into the nature and form of post-apartheid urbanism. In essence, this book provides a detailed, historical ethnography of social and cultural change in a single township, variously known as the East Bank, Duncan Village and Gompo Town, over a period of 50 years. Before I outline my own interests in greater detail, I would like to reflect further on how responses to the trilogy, and especially to Townsmen or Tribesmen, changed in the 1970s and how, despite this fierce criticism, the Mayers’ discussion of Red and School people, and their concern with the ‘rural in the urban’, have remained important themes in anthropology and African studies since the 1980s.

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Red and School Revisited During the 1970s, celebration of Townsmen or Tribesmen turned to damnation as increasing numbers of scholar – liberals and Marxists alike – attacked the Mayers from different angles. The criticism was intense and formed part of a broad, critical reassessment of the political role of anthropology during the colonial era (Asad 1973; Eriksen and Nielsen 2001; Kuper 1987). In the changed political climate of decolonisation, urban anthropologists were denounced for failing to locate their analyses of urban adaptation and migrant identity within an understanding of the political economy of racial capitalism and colonialism. African anthropologists, like Magubane (1973) and Mafeje (1971), strongly objected to what they saw as an assertion that modernising Africans in towns were just mimicking and imitating the culture of their oppressors rather than creating something uniquely African, their own version of modernity that inspired their struggles for independence and freedom. Reviewers of the 1970s tended to view the urban Copperbelt studies by the Rhodes-Livingstone Institute anthropologists like Gluckman, Mitchell, Epstein and Powdermaker as ‘more progressive’ than the ‘reactionary’ trilogy, which was condemned for arguing that African identities were fixed and static in a context of rapid change. Even the Copperbelt studies, with their emphasis on the malleability and situational nature of identity formation, did not escape severe criticism for their alleged failure to analyse racial and class exploitation, and for simplistically imagining that Africans aspired to mimic a white, Western-style modernity. In his excellent review of the Copperbelt literature, Ferguson (1999) has insisted on the need to go beyond overly simplistic judgements of these researchers as either ‘radical’ pioneers or as ‘arrogant colonial racists’, by examining the deeper underlying assumptions that informed their liberal modernist approach. Ferguson argues that after the Second World War, Gluckman and his colleagues anticipated that the Zambian Copperbelt would become the ‘Birmingham of Africa’, and began to imagine and map a historical progression from ‘tribesmen to townsmen’. These scholars strongly opposed the colonial idea that Africans did not belong in town and exposed the settler argument that Africans were ‘target workers’ as an ideological justification for low wages. In this debate, Gluckman famously argued that Africans shifted identities as they moved between the spaces of town and country. His perspective collided with the government and mining company policy of ‘stabilisation without urbanisation’ and made these urban anthropologists increasingly unpopular with the colonial authorities. Ferguson summarises the view of the Copperbelt scholars on the question of townsmen or tribesmen as follows: The two competing images of the African – migrant labouring tribesmen versus permanently urbanized townsmen – were placed not only in opposition but in succession. The two ideological stereotypes were the different ends of a historical progression. (1999: 35)

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This was not how the Mayers, and especially Philip Mayer, viewed the situation. He did not see a shifting and shuffling of identities in East London within a context of rapid and inevitable industrial modernisation. What captured his imagination was the staunch resistance of certain groups of migrant workers to the cultural influences of town life and their outright rejection of the project of modernisation. For the Mayers, the Red-migrants were heroic figures who still dreamt of an independent existence for themselves and their families outside of the nexus of colonial capitalism, despite having been drawn into the heart of the industrial wage labour system against their will (see Mayer with Mayer 1971 [1961]). While many came to the defence of Gluckman and his left-leaning Manchester school, there were very few who were prepared to defend the trilogy and its narrative of Red and School.1 The work of the Mayers was seen to be particularly problematic because it seemed to suggest that many migrants were essentially tribal in outlook and opposed to modernisation in any form. Archie Mafeje, who had been born and brought up in the Eastern Cape, argued that the Mayers ossified what was a dynamic and changing cultural cleavage. He contested the idea that Red and School were starkly opposed, as the Mayers suggested, indicating that ‘red boys’ in his home village were often seen in church, while ‘school boys’ learnt stick-fighting and underwent initiation. He also said that many of the families had relatives that were both Red and School. The cultural divide was thus not nearly as dramatic as that between Catholic and Protestants in Northern Ireland, as the Mayers had suggested. The boundaries of the categories were porous and fluid rather than culturally fundamental (Mafeje 1971: 5). In his own urban study with Monica Wilson on the Langa township of Cape Town, Mafeje argued that the process of urban adaptation was shaped very specifically by who migrants knew in the cities rather than by some kind of pre-existing cultural identity (Wilson and Mafeje 1963). Mafeje pointed to the critical importance of ‘home-mate groups’ as units of social integration. He suggested that a young migrant with a ‘school’ orientation who moved in with an uncle with a ‘Red’ orientation would in all likelihood become absorbed into his ‘home boy’ group and cultural milieu. With time, confidence and perhaps a change of residence, the same young migrant might enter a new social network and assume a different social identity. Mafeje tried, then, to stress the fluidity of African urban identity formation, claiming that it was irresponsible to speak of essential identities in the apartheid context. Mafeje’s perspective has been theorised by Ferguson (1999), who demonstrates that cultural knowledge and competence in Copperbelt towns was always a prerequisite for the convincing performance of any cultural style. Some migrants from rural areas simply did not have the cultural resources to move between Red and School identities, or what Ferguson terms localist and cosmopolitan styles. Thus, like Mafeje, Ferguson (1999) argues that Africans on the Copperbelt could (and still can) choose between identities and change their cultural styles as long as they have the competence to perform them effectively (see Chapter 2 for further discussion). The point

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that the Mayers would have wanted to make in this debate, I suspect, is that the Red–School cultural division in rural Eastern Cape communities was such that it was not easy for migrants to change identities (or perform new styles) in the city (see McAllister 2006 for an account of the habitus of Redness in the rural Transkei).2 It was the personal nature of the political critique which devastated the Mayers. They were stung by claims that the aim of Townsmen or Tribesmen was to celebrate African tribalism and endorse the policy of the apartheid government. If read in a particular way, the work of the Mayers does seem to support the idea that some African migrants did not want to live permanently in the cities, which is precisely how the apartheid state proposed that migrants be treated. The suggestion that their scholarship was complicit with the apartheid project had a profound impact on the Mayers. Philip Mayer was a German Jew, who had fled the Holocaust to live in Britain and had dealt with his own personal experiences of racial discrimination in Europe (Beinart 1991b: 11–14). He admired the determination of rural labour migrants who refused to be pushed into colonial modernity, Western beliefs and consumerism. He found their denial of the city and modernisation uplifting. To try to clear his name and redeem his project, Philip Mayer recast their analysis of Red and School in more politically fashionable terms in a 1980 essay. Drawing on the work of the French structuralist Marxist, Louis Althusser, Philip Mayer argued that Red and School were both long-standing ‘rural resistance ideologies’, which opposed colonialism in different ways and had their roots in the history of African dispossession, missionary activity and colonial exploitation in nineteenth-century Eastern Cape history. Significantly, while Mayer added historical depth and context to his earlier work, he never suggested that he had over-estimated, or misinterpreted, the social salience or analytical significance of the Red–School divide in the townships of East London. In the long essay, he also suggested that the material and social basis of Redness was rooted in African access to land and agrarian resources in the rural reserves, and that this was being progressively undermined by apartheiddriven agrarian change in the homelands, first through the introduction of betterment planning and then by fully fledged Bantustan development, which increased closer settlement and landlessness in the 1960s and 1970s (see Mayer 1980; see also De Wet 1995). In the face of constant criticism, the Mayers left South Africa and returned to England. They eventually retired in Oxford and Philip Mayer died in 1994. The impact of the sustained attack on their work is that it effectively expunged any serious scholarly discussion of Red and School as social identities for 20 years. In fact, most scholars writing about the region during that period were cautious about engaging directly with these cultural categories (cf. Bundy and Beinart 1987; Mager 1999). It was only after 2000, when the South African novelist Zakes Mda published his award-winning historical novel, The Heart of Redness, that the debate re-ignited. Mda suggested that the old divisions between ‘believers’ and ‘non-believers’ were still alive and well in the Eastern Cape countryside, and remained influential in the politics of

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post-apartheid development (see also Attwell 2005; McAllister 2006). The novel explores the case of a community conflict over the prospect of a large, foreign-funded tourism venture on the Transkei coast. Mda shows how the local community is split down the middle by the prospect of outsiders holding a large stake in the local economy. The modernisers, those descendants of the ‘non-believers’, want to see jobs, ‘progress’ and investment in the area, while the ‘red’ traditionalists, descended from the ‘believers’, want to see their environment and heritage preserved for themselves and their children. The hero of the story, an urbane Johannesburg teacher, returns to the Eastern Cape to rediscover his roots and develops a growing appreciation of the power of ‘redness’. This rediscovery of tradition is occurring on a wide front in the Eastern Cape today, with a revival of local interest in chieftaincy, the creation of heritage trails and community museums, constant and urgent debates about the future and safety of traditional male initiation rites in an age of HIV-Aids, and renewed emphasis on the importance of performing traditional rituals in rural homesteads. Identity, Tradition and the City The bankrupt notion of the melting pot has been replaced by a model that is more germane to our times, that of the menudo chowder. According to this model most of the ingredients do melt, but some stubborn chunks are condemned merely to float. (Vergigratia, quoted in Parker 2004: 147)

In the 1990s, 40 years after the publication of Townsmen or Tribesmen, a new generation of anthropologists working on the postcolonial African city continues to question the idea that urban modernity follows rural tradition in some linear, unidirectional and inevitable way. The collapse of modernist urban planning regimes in post-independence African cities has created new spaces for the reconstruction of the ‘rural in the urban’ in a context deindustrialisation and urban decay. In his work on Kinshasa, Devisch (1995, 1996) argues that the failure of modernisation to create the conditions for stable urban existence has led residents to create new urban communities modelled on ‘matricentral, rural village structures’ (1996: 584). He argues that these communities actively oppose the ‘alienating project of whitening, Christianising and unbridled commerce’ (1996: 584), and reconstruct the migrant’s sense of belonging by reinforcing a sense of longing for solidarity, support and genuine community identity in the city. [V]illagisation in the city undermines and dismantles Western myths of progress or technocratic modernisation. It questions the legitimacy of the (post-)colonial hierarchy of opposing the urban citizen and the villager, the political elite and the people, the educated evolué [elite] and the unschooled peasant, the Christian and the pagan … [It] can be said to be a culturally endogenous domestication of the modernity in which local and often subordinate groups structure themselves along the lines of communes. (1996: 584)

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De Boeck and Plassart (2006) reinforce and extend these observations, arguing that rural cultural images and metaphors, such as those linked to hunting and gathering, are appropriated and applied as the ‘forest enters the city’. These authors also show how notions of the rural and the urban become inverted when diamond dollars are produced in the countryside and consumed in the city. Van Binsbergen (1997) has written about the ‘virtualisation of the village’ in cities in Zambia and Botswana. He is interested in how ideas about village life and ideal social relations are invoked and inserted in town to socialise the city in particular ways. These accounts of ‘encapsulated’ and ‘invented rurality’ in the urban, not only bring the Mayers (1971 [1961]) work back into focus, but also remind us of the critical role that rural hinterlands play in the shaping of the city. The presence of the ‘rural in the urban’ is never simply a matter of the transposition of rural cultural materials into the city, but involves reworking, reconstituting and renegotiating ideas about the rural in the urban in what might be defined as a ‘third space’ (see Bhabha 1994; Soja 1995). The engagement of the rural in the urban is not a retreat into some pre-existing form of identity, as implied by the Mayers, but always in some sense a hybrid cultural form. As Papastergiadis explains in more theoretical terms: Identity is neither in the interior space of the already known experience nor doomed to the exteriority of an experiment with the unknown. Cultural identity is thus never confined to a space on an exterior segment, nor is it projected onto an open plane, but is formed through the practice of bridging both differences and similitudes between the self and the other. Bridging involves the performance of two tasks simultaneously: it requires memory and experience. To know where the self has come from is to gain a sense of belonging that enables one to risk the journey ahead. (2000: 98) In his work on modernity and cultural hybridity in Latin America, Garcia Canclini (1995 [1989]) stated that it is no longer possible for local people to ‘enter and leave modernity’ at will, since they are all defined within it. In other words, there is no escaping modernity, where ‘heterogeneous temporalities’ intersect in a complex process of ‘intercultural hybridisation’ and ‘hybrid sociability’, and where identity struggles unfold in a common, connected cultural space. For Canclini, Latin American countries are now the ‘product of the sedimentation, juxtaposition and undercrossing of Indian traditions, of colonial hispanism, and of modern political educational and communicative practices’ (1995 [1989]: 71). He argues that this does not occur through conventional processes of cultural syncretism, where different cultural elements are separated out and then – and only then – mixed together, but rather through a dynamic process of transcultural exchange. Canclini describes this process as one of ‘truncated innovation’, which often leads to the reinvention of older cultural forms, both urban and rural. He sees identity formation as an ongoing process of negotiating difference, oscillating between fixity and openness.

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In a different context, Brenner (1998) shows how urban traditions can also provide powerful narratives for identity in the city. In her work on the Indonesian city of Solo, Brenner (1998) finds that the heyday of modernity, of cultural innovation and economic prosperity, occurred in the early twentieth century, when the local textile industry boomed and urban Javanese family businesses prospered. By the late 1980s, de-industrialisation and urban decay had set in, and the city had a distinctly unmodern look and feel. The excitement of modernity, as something new and dynamic, was no longer present there, despite constant attempts by the Indonesian state to reinvigorate economic development and urban renewal. In this case study, Brenner finds that Javanese families now live within a romanticised and idealised version of its own urban past, nostalgically recalling social and cultural forms associated with a golden age, traditions that they aspire to recreate in the present. In this case, the urban community has seemingly transformed in the ‘wrong’ direction, ‘from a community that represented an emergent modernity in the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth-century Java to what is often characterised as an anachronistic bastion of “tradition” in the 1990s’ (1998: 13). The ‘tradition’ embraced by the Javanese merchants is not a rural tradition, but a family-centred, cosmopolitan urban tradition of modernity from a bygone era. Brenner’s study illustrates how the urban past can be as powerful as the rural past in the remaking of urban culture and identity. This is a point to note for the African literature, where tradition is usually thought of in a distinctly rural way. One social theorist fascinated by the idea of the city as a kind of ‘dynamic ruin’ embodying many layers of historical rubble was Walter Benjamin. Benjamin (1999) used the image of the flâneur, the voyeuristic walker and observer of the city, as a way of thinking and writing about the changing character of urbanism in Paris. In his well-known Arcades project, he explored the ‘heterogeneous temporalities’ of the city by engaging nostalgically and imaginatively with the run-down world of the ornate Arcades, the old centre of urban consumerism in the late nineteenth-century Paris. Benjamin contrasts the Arcades with the industrial city of twentieth-century Paris, moving back and forth, imagining constellations of the present and the past, while exploring possible urban futures that might take Paris beyond commodity fetishism and urban capitalism. His work reveals the multiple pasts of a city, and how these pasts can be invoked in the cultural imagination, and have an impact on the nature and politics of identity in the city (cf. Merrifield 2002; Robinson 2006; Stevenson 2003). Like Mumford, I see the city as a site of cultural drama, a space of contested practices and identities. Parker (2004) argues that the main source of urban dynamism and innovation is not the interaction between city and hinterland, but that which occurs within and between urban spaces and identities inside the city. He suggests that an understanding of urban place-making and identity formation is critical for any grasp of the meaning of urbanism. In a similar vein, Hansen and Verkaaik (2009: 5) suggest that cities and neighbourhoods often develop a distinctive sense of charisma. ‘Urban spaces have spirits,

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and cities have souls’, they argue, and ‘these are contagious qualities that are said to seep into the character of the people living in such cities’. In my historical anthropology of the urbanism in East London, I am consequently intensely interested in the continuities and discontinuities in place-making and identity formation in the townships. Kolb (2008: 72) makes a distinction between dense and diluted spaces, where dense spaces have multiple layers of memory, routine and shared experience, while diluted spaces tend to be defined by single-stranded relations and a certain shallowness of experience. Kolb (2008: 73) suggests that a place is ‘historically dense insofar as its social norms involve reference to a history that has been sedimented’. But density is not just a matter of age, it depends on ‘how the marks of sediment and age are taken up into the contemporary texture of action in place’ (2008: 73). In addition to density, which refers to the multi-layers of the urban landscape, Kolb also speaks of the complexity of urban places, by which he means the level to which they are connected to places and processes beyond the space itself. The East London township of Duncan Village is both a dense and complex urban place, with a long and contested history as well as a strong set of local and trans-local associations and connections. ‘A dense and complex place’, Kolb (2008: 74) explains, ‘is not all present at once’, ‘it does not come at you from one angle’. This sense of density and complexity was immediately impressed on me on my very first visit to Duncan Village in 1995. As I walked up Florence Street through the historical centre of the old locationcum-township, I inhaled the sour smell of mqomboti home-brewed beer, which drifted into the street from the yards of old one-roomed houses where migrants gathered. As I turned the corner, up the hill I passed an old granite plaque to the South African Governor General Sir Patrick Duncan, who donated the land for a new location in the 1930s, as well as the houses built for returning servicemen in the late 1940s. Many of them had been repainted in bright colours and their front doors literally opened onto the street. It was mid afternoon and the street was bustling with people and activity. I imagined that the neighbourhood would have felt much the same in the 1950s. Further up the road, the street widened and there were newer apartheid-style houses, the 51/9 units, built during the township reconstruction period of the 1960s, while on other side of the road, shacks cascaded down the slope and were packed no more than a metre apart. To the west, across the Douglas Smith main road, I could see the single-sex migrants’ hostels, with their dirty blue exterior walls and smoke billowing out of the chimneys. Beyond the hostels lay Duncan Village Extension or Ziphunzana, which had more a suburban look with mainly free-standing houses on pavilion-style plots covering the rolling hills to the south. There were fewer variations in housing type and fewer shacks too. Across the road, I could also see the old transit area of C-section, which had a completely different look and feel to it too. There were no yards or divisions between structures here, just a dense honeycomb of one-roomed brick structures with shacks squeezed in between. On that afternoon, I had a profound sense of

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having entered a different world, a complex mosaic of different precincts and places in a township that had its own distinctive history and social character. The influx of tens of thousands of individuals and families into the space of the old apartheid township since the 1980s had created an involuted and overcrowded urban space with different residential and social niches, which had their own social character and identities. Over the next ten years, I would walk up Florence Street many times, doing a variety of primary and applied research assignments in the area. In this time I came to realise that Duncan Village was a single township that embodied many different places, where: Physically, a place is a space which is invested in understanding of behavioural appropriateness, cultural expectation, and so forth. We are located in ‘space’, but we act in ‘place’… It is a sense of place not space that makes it appropriate to dance at a Grateful Dead concert, but not at the Cambridge high table; to be naked in the bedroom but not in the street; and to sit at our windows peering out rather than at other people’s windows peering in. Place not space frames appropriate behaviour. (Harrison and Dourish 1996: 69) Rather than encountering a two-dimensional and socially thin space, as a sort of theme park of poverty, oppression and disadvantage, as the townships are often portrayed, I encountered complex, diverse and socially dense place, which was fragmented into different smaller residential niches, but nevertheless remained inextricably linked both to the surrounding hinterland, as well as its own sense of history, as a place with a particular identity. It was the latter, that sense of place, that I felt had been ignored in the earlier anthropology of the city, where localism was understood to mean a longing for the rural areas. Mobility, Localism and Power In this book, I am interested in processes of urban place-making or what might more simply be called settlement. To understand African cities better, I believe that we need to pay much more attention to the creation, character and the charisma or spirit of urban settlements, rather than simply focus on mobility, networks and social connectivity. People do not simply pass through space, they develop memories, meanings and attachments to particular places, where they establish social relations, engage in struggles over resources and construct narratives that valorise those places, as they enter the cultural repertoire of the city (cf. Borer 2006). The conversion of spaces into places is a complex material, cultural and sociological process which needs to be better understood. In African cities, the obsession with migrants and mobility has diverted our attention away from place-making. Many authors define African urban spaces in terms of hyper-fluidity, mobility and informality, arguing that Africans are generally averse to urban permanence and settlement, seeking instead to engage multiple points of belonging and complex migrant identities. Simone and Gotz (2003: 125), for example, claim that ‘African identities

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display a remarkable capacity not to need fixed places’ and that Africans ‘have the capacity to configure highly mobile social formations that focus on elaborating multiple identities’. Nuttall and Mbembe (2008) have also recently affirmed this perspective by arguing that the migrant is the iconic cultural figure in the African city, the local equivalent of what the flâneur was to the European city in the early twentieth century. But we should also be careful not to over-emphasise mobility and movement and the inability of urban Africans to become grounded in the cities and neighbourhoods within which they live. There is a common perception that, because many African urban residents live in shacks, they must necessarily only be temporary sojourners in the city. This is untrue. A great deal of research shows that shack life is far from temporary for those who live in these areas, and that it is common for squatters to live in the same areas or settlements for most of their adult lives. The same problem of perception was noted by Janice Perlman in her book The Myth of Marginality (1976) on Brazilian favelas in the 1970s, where she challenged the myth that favela dwellers were economic, social and cultural outsiders in the city. She demonstrated that they had often lived in the city much longer than had been thought, and were well-integrated socially and economically. The same myth was debunked in South Africa in the 1990s when a new generation of research into life in informal settlements revealed that, contrary to the apartheid ideology, many shack-dwellers were committed to urban permanence. It was this realisation that inspired the African National Congress (ANC) to make low-cost housing delivery in urban areas one of its most important objectives in the post-apartheid period. My own research in Duncan Village showed that, by the late 1990s, the average shack-dweller had been living in the township for longer than ten years. It is interesting that in the United States where, according to Kolb (2008: 32), suburban residents move once every five years, no one seems to think that urban Americans have become ‘hyper-mobile’ and have lost their desire to settle in fixed places. In the anthropology of urbanism that I seek to develop here, I am as interested in urban localists and township flâneurs who wander the city as I am in migrants and restless cosmopolitans. Our obsession with the migrant, especially the male migrant, has led us to think of localism mainly in terms of a longing for a rural home, while imagining cosmopolitanism as a state of homelessness, as the aspiration to belong to something beyond the local, something global (cf. Englund 2004; Ferguson 1999). Appiah (2006) questions whether African urban identity politics is always constructed around an opposition between localism and cosmopolitanism in this sense. He challenges the idea that cosmopolitanism must necessarily involve a ‘sense of homelessness’ and suggests that the notion of ‘rooted cosmopolitanism’ might be more accurate in many cases. But, despite his objections to earlier formulation, the rooted in Appiah’s formulation remains a kind of romantic notion of rural tradition. What we hear so much less about in Africa, however, is that life in the city generates all sorts of localism which need not necessarily have any sense of connection to rural areas or traditions,

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nor any aspiration towards cosmopolitanism. It is entirely possible for urban localists not to hanker after village life and also to remain quite disconnected from transnational social and cultural flows. One of the reasons we continue to miss these aspects of African urban life is that we seem more interested nowadays in social networkers, deal-makers and mobile connectors, than in people who stay in one place, or feel at home in the city. In order to understand the meaning of urban localism and the process of place-making in African cities we need to address what Ortner (2006) calls the ‘refusal of gender and generational analysis’ in many anthropological studies. In the 1930s, when Hunter (1936) and Hellman (1948) pioneered urban anthropology in southern Africa, they placed women at the centre of their analysis and developed compelling ethnographies of the nature of urban localism and the struggle for survival in the city. Hellman’s urban yard came alive as a marginal place in the city through her discussion of how this space was domesticated by poor, but energetic single women with a passion to support their families. In the post-war period, as the emphasis shifted from urban women to male migrants, questions of urban localism were replaced by other concerns, such as whether African male migrants were really tribesmen, townsmen or workers. Rebecca Lee’s (2009) recent work on migration and settlement in Cape Town recovers some of the spirit of these early ethnographies by putting urban women back at the centre of the equation. In Cape Town’s townships, she notes that masculine identities are generally more closely associated with mobility than feminine ones, and that men needed to embrace mobility in order to express successful masculinity in a way that women do not. In this book, I suggest that an understanding of urban localism must start with a reconsideration of the roles, aspirations and experiences of urban women and come to grips with the changing dynamics of gender relationships in everyday urban life. One of the most insightful and brilliant accounts of neighbourhood life and place-making is still provided in Jane Jacobs’ classic, The Death and Times of Great American Cities (1961), published in the same year as Townsmen or Tribesmen. Jacobs celebrates the tolerant, civilised and constrained urban order of the West side village in Manhattan of the late 1950s, which she contrasts to the lifeless mid-town neighbourhoods and the sprawling, low-density suburbs of the post-war American city. She argues that order and civility in this precinct was created and maintained, not by police surveillance or urban renewal schemes, but by the density of social networks, interactions and relationships on the street, and by the commitment of local people to maintain respect and order in their neighbourhoods. The power of Jacobs’ analysis lies in her ability to combine detailed observation and finely textured ethnography of everyday life in her locality, and she conveys a sense of the ‘ballet of the sidewalk’ (Jacobs 1961; see also Flint 2009). Marshall Berman (1988), a great admirer of Jane Jacobs and fellow campaigners against the destruction of old neighbourhoods in Manhattan, attributes her powerful understanding of place to her gender, as West side village mother by day and intellectual by night. He states that:

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She writes out of an intensely lived domesticity… She knows her neighbourhood in such precise twenty-four hour detail because she has been around it all day, in the ways that most women are normally around all day, especially when they become mothers, but hardly any men ever are … She knows all the shopkeepers, the vast informal social networks they maintain because it is her responsibility to take care of the household affairs. She portrays the ecology and phenomenology of the sidewalk with uncanny fidelity and sensitivity, because she has spent years piloting children … through these troubled waters, while balancing heavy shopping bags, talking to neighbours and trying to keep hold of her life. (1988: 322) Judy Giles (2004) argues that while the masculine view of the city has emphasised mobility, adventure and newness, the feminine view has been more sensitive to continuity and routine, and to the meanings of fixed places. My feeling is that our view of the African city remains a very masculine one, influenced by decades of obsessive interest in men, migrants and masculinity, and it is for this reason that scholars fail to understand processes of place-making in these cities. For men and women, memory, routine and shared experience in a specific place creates local knowledge and binds people together in a common urban culture. The history of place and social practice in place defines local notions of identity and belonging. But while I make this claim for us to better understanding of locality and localism in urban African studies, I am also mindful of Massey’s (1995) seminal contribution, that localities are defined as much by the networks that flow through them as by the activities that occur within them (cf. Parker 2004; Stevenson 2003). The power of masculine versions of modernity and the city as public, mobile, connected, self-realising and constantly changing has also played a critical role in creating a dichotomy between the city and the suburb, which is usually portrayed as feminine, repetitive, sterile and repressed. Many feminist scholars, such as Giles (2004), have commented on the limitations of this opposition, suggesting that it not only denies women access to modernity but also misreads the suburb and the home. In this book I resist the tendency, which I believe is still very much alive in African studies, to see the streets and public squares as sites of the making of modernity, and the homes as spaces where traditional roles are entrenched and re-enacted without innovation and change. To the contrary, I suggest that home spaces have undergone processes of fundamental transformation over time in the townships of East London, and that the roles of men and women in the home have constantly shifted. Indeed, I argue that the home and the house in the old location proved to be a critical launching pad for the strategies of urban mothers and matriarchs to assert their social and economic independence. The confidence of these women also spilled over into the streets in the unruly 1950s as they fearlessly took on the apartheid state, which set out to clip their wings and to domesticate and subordinate their daughters in the townships of the 1960s and 1970s (cf. Walker 1995; Wells 1993). But even without their independent mothers in the city and constrained by new forms of patriarchy, I suggest that young

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township mothers and homemakers continued to pursue their own projects and objectives as modern women in their township homes. Urban anthropologists have spent more time in the urban house and the suburb, collecting household details, kinship diagrams and migration histories, than on the streets of the city or simply staring out of the window, like Jacobs, onto the street outside the home. Conversely, Amin and Thrift (2002) suggest that cultural geographers are only just arriving at the doorstep of the house and beginning to encounter the home as a dynamic part of the city. They note that: Strangely the everyday rhythms of domestic life have rarely counted as part of the ‘urban’, as though the city stopped at the doorstep of the home. But domestic life is now woven routinely into the urban public realm … The rhythms of the home are as much part of city life as, say, the movements of traffic, office life, or interaction in the open spaces of the city. Its rhythms, too, need incorporating into the everyday sociology of the city. (Amin and Thrift 2002: 18) In this book, I lament the extent to which anthropologists have been pegged back in the spaces of the home and inclined to produce ‘home-made’ ethnography which often defines the home as a space of the enduring and repetitive structures of everyday life rather than as a site of and catalyst for change. Change in the city and the township, I will argue, has as much to do with change in the home as with change on the streets. Indeed, I find it difficult to account for one without the other. To understand what the ‘comrades’ achieved in the townships of South Africa in the 1980s it is necessary, for example, to know what they were doing in their homes and shacks, how they related to their parents in those spaces and what they wanted to achieve personally in their lives. The anthropology of urbanism that I seek to develop here encourages a more multi-site ethnographical approach, one which supplements the conventional anthropological focus on home life and the formation of urban social groups, on the rhythms of the city as Lefebvre (1991) calls it, with a greater sense of engagement with the way power and identity are contested on streets and in public spaces. The social circuitry that connects spaces such as homes and streets, or verandahs and dance halls, is also critical to understand. It is an approach that deals simultaneously with home spaces and street styles, with the everyday rhythms and routines of urban life at home and on the street, as well as explosive upheavals in the cultural and political life across the space of the city. This highlights another weakness of conventional urban anthropological approaches to the city, which is their general lack of interest in relations of the power and inequality in the city. Appadurai (1996) noted some time ago that we must acknowledge that: ‘neighbourhoods and localities never simply exist, but are always socially produced and consequently have to be constantly defended from competing claims and demands’. In his analysis, ‘locality production’ always involves ‘a moment of colonialization, a moment

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both historical and chronotypic, where there is a formal recognition that the production of neighbourhood requires deliberate, risky, even violent action’. In this process, there is ‘the assertion of socially (often ritually) organized power over places and settings that are viewed as potentially chaotic and rebellious’ (1996: 183–84). In re-thinking space in relation to power, Lefebvre (1991) wrote in the 1970s about spatial relations and the dialogue between ‘representations of space’ (constellations of power, knowledge and spatiality), people’s own ‘spaces of representation’ (counter-spaces of spatial meanings and understandings that emerge from located social life), and the emergent ‘spatial practices’ (time-space routines and the spatial structures through which social life is produced and reproduced). Within this framework, he imagined that spatial relations were infused with unequal power relations and emerged from the struggle between those who are able to define and control space, such as landlords, capitalists or the state, and those who use that space on a daily basis, ordinary people. Both scholars stressed, as I would want to here, that locality is always the product of contested place-making rather than some pre-existing container of ‘local culture’, a site of uncontaminated ‘local knowledge’, or a fixed site of community power (see also Smith 2001, 2005). With these conceptual and theoretical considerations in mind, I would like to turn more specifically now to the field site of my research in East London, Duncan Village, and make some preliminary comments on the politics of place-making and identity formation in this anthropologically renowned space in the period after the Mayers left, namely the apartheid and post-apartheid period. I begin with a very brief history of the city and the townships. East London after the Trilogy The city of East London is located on the eastern seaboard of South Africa. It was established in the mid nineteenth century as a military garrison town on the eastern frontier of the Cape colony and soon evolved into a trading centre as the colony expanded eastwards. With expanded trading, the urban economy grew through the export of agricultural goods, such as wool and hides, and the importation of basic consumer goods and agricultural equipment for white settler farmers in the immediate hinterland and African peasants to the east. East London boomed in the 1870s and 1880s on the back of rising wool prices. In the latter half of the nineteenth century, missions, soldiers and German settlers also came in through the port city as part of efforts by the British to expand the frontiers of the Cape colony. By the 1880s, most of the Xhosa heartland of the Eastern Cape had been annexed by Britain and the structures of colonial administration were in place all along the eastern seaboard from East London. A system of indirect rule, where native commissioners and magistrates ruled over large districts with the assistance of co-opted headmen and chiefs provided the modus operandi of the new administration (Crais 2002; Hammond-Tooke 1975). Missionaries and traders followed in the wake of the colonial administrators and soon established a powerful presence in the colonial interior, first in the western part of the

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eastern frontier; later they moved eastwards, extending mission outposts and trading stations beyond the Mthatha river. The final act of colonial annexation occurred in 1894, after stubborn resistance from Mpondo people collapsed, and with it the independent African chieftaincies that separated the Cape colony from Natal (Beinart 1982). In the early decades of the twentieth century East London rose to prominence as a trading centre, where economic activity centred on the harbour, railway, merchant houses, processing works and craft shops. The town was a centre of African trade, and was also a major port for the export of wool produced in the Eastern Cape, to Britain and elsewhere. By the 1920s, however, the wool-exporting role of the city was under challenge and the city was beginning to experience the effects of economic decline and depression (Bundy and Beinart 1987: 273). Population growth in the urban locations that had been established for Africans at the turn of the century increased steadily during the first two decades of the century, but exploded in the 1920s as rural poverty in the surrounding African reserves of the Ciskei and Transkei intensified in the middle years of that decade. It is reported that, between 1919 and 1928, the African population of East London increased by 41.7 per cent, and between 1925 and 1930 it grew by nearly 8,500 people, an increase of over 50 per cent in five years. In 1929 alone, it was reported that 1,100 immigrants arrived in the city from rural areas, pushing the African population of the city over 25,000. The late 1920s was also a period of growing labour unrest in the city following the consolidation of the Independent Industrial and Commercial Workers Union in East London. It was a time of rapid change in the city, as new African independent churches grew in popularity, and political agitation and anti-white political sentiment were strong in the locations. In the period between the early 1930s and the mid 1950s, when a new group of anthropologists arrived in East London locations under the leadership of Philip Mayer, there was rapid change in the economy of the city. This period of secondary industrialisation started shortly before the outbreak of the Second World War and continued through into the 1960s and beyond. In the 1930s, new industrial parks were established around the harbour and the city was marketed as a growing industrial hub. By the end of the war, there were already over 100 manufacturing plants in East London, and these increased from 135 in 1946 to 323 in 1958. The number of jobs for African workers in the industrial sector also quadrupled within a decade from 3,800 in the mid 1940s to over 13,000 in the mid 1950s. By 1954, it was reported that there were approximately 800 industrial establishments in the ‘eastern half of the Eastern Cape’. The greatest concentration of industries in this region was found in the magisterial district of East London. The total industrial work force in the region was recorded at 17,500 employees, of whom 85 per cent were male and more than 75 per cent lived in the East London and King William’s Town areas. The industrial base of the city was structured around the food, textile, motor vehicle, furniture and chemical producers. In 1953–54, there were 28 food-processing concerns, 11 textile and footwear firms, 11 chemical industries, 48 transport businesses (including those involved in motor

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vehicles and their parts), and 59 construction concerns. In terms of total employment, the industrial sector of the city alone had as many employees as the wholesale, retail and service sectors combined. Industry was thus the mainstay of the East London economy (Black and Davies 1986: 10–15).

Photo 1.1  A view of the East Bank location in the 1950s Source: East London Municipal Collections, East London Public Library.

The urban locations of East London became a magnet for new immigration from the rural areas, especially after the war. Between 1930 and 1950, the population of the locations had swelled from around 30,000 people to over 50,000. The provision of local services did not keep pace with the growth in population, and by the 1950s, the East Bank, East London’s largest location had been declared one of the most overcrowded in the union, a festering, uncontrolled slum with open sewers. It was politically volatile and had a well-established and sizeable educated local elite of African teachers, nurses and clerical workers, as well as a growing male working class, most of whom were migrants living in backrooms in the yards of formal houses. It was into this context that Philip Mayer led his team of anthropologists in 1954. Their engagement with the East Bank location and East London lasted for most of the 1950s and, as I have explained, resulted in the production of three books, known collectively as the Xhosa in Town trilogy, published by Oxford University Press in South Africa between 1960 and 1963. One of the reasons why Mayer and his team placed migrants and migrant culture at the centre of the enquiry was because the city was awash with urbanising, rural migrants in the 1950s. They came to East London from the struggling and drought-stricken rural reserves, the Ciskei and Transkei areas, surrounding the city in search of industrial jobs and were found by Mayer and his colleagues huddled together in the backyards and shack areas, struggling to survive

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with their amakhaya (home mates). In this context, it is not surprising that Mayer afforded rural migrants in the city – or what Roberts (in Ward 2004: 183) called ‘urban peasants’ in the late 1960s in his work on slums in Latin America – such a central place in his analysis of the locations.

Photo 1.2  The destruction of the Meine family house on Fredrick Street, Tsolo, East Bank, 1967 Source: FHISER Hidden Histories Collection, Fort Hare.

Racial Modernism, Socialism and the House In the period after the Mayers and their colleagues left East London, the city underwent a dramatic transition with the announcement that the wood-and-iron sections of the East Bank location would be demolished and the old location would be reconfigured as a much smaller urban township, called Duncan Village, housing a combination of permanently urbanised African workers and male migrants, confined to tightly controlled municipal single-sex hostels. Belinda Bozzoli (2004) has recently tried to define this transition from the location to the township strategy as a move from ‘welfare paternalism’ to ‘racial modernism’. Following Rabinow (1989, 1995), I define the township model as a form of middling modernism, a version of modernist planning focused principally on reconfiguring the home and domestic life, as opposed to other versions of modernism which concentrated more on public spaces and the integrity of the city centre. Like many cities in South Africa, East London underwent a facelift in the post-war period that saw the city centre restructured with new multi-storey modern office blocks and shops on wider roads. In the areas outside the city centre and the burgeoning white suburbs, I argue that a fundamental aim of this racial modernism

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in the townships was the desire to re-engineer urban social relations and subjectivities at the local level. It offered permanently urbanised Africans a vision of black suburbia by offering them more solid houses to live in, but denied them the right to own these properties or to express their individuality in their new neighbourhoods. The township affirmed neither individuality nor private property, but actively advocated the universal adoption of the male-centred, nuclear family form for urban Africans. In recognition of these limitations, Freund (2007) has recently equated township formation with a process of ‘sub-suburbanisation’. The restructured African urban space of the township was undoubtedly based on suburban ideas, but the model also drew on the authoritarian tradition of socialist urbanism, which set out to enforce obedience, compliance and feelings of ‘sameness’ among members of the new socialist working class. Under apartheid, private site or home-ownership was abolished for Africans in the city. The township home was conceived as part of the public sphere and, as such, was open to any intrusion by the state. The idea was that everyone classified in a certain way would get exactly the same housing unit and yard. There was no scope for variation according to private or individual difference. Moreover, as Crowley and Reid note in relation to socialist Eastern Europe: ‘new ways of organising the home, the workplace and the street would create [it was believed] … new kinds of persons or moral subjects’ (2002: 15). In a similar vein, Stephen Lovell (2003: 105) writes that, in Russia, the ‘post-revolutionary order was designed to create a new man by remaking his environment in the broadest sense: not only by eliminating political and social opposition … but also by ripping apart the fabric of everyday life and weaving it anew’ (emphasis added). Verdery (1996) argues that socialist states legitimated themselves and their interventions by claiming that they redistributed the social product in the interest of the general welfare. On this basis, Verdery argues, socialist paternalism constructed its nation on an implicit view of society as a family, headed by a wise Party, a kind of male father figure. Verdery (1996) called it the zadruga state, meaning the extended family, patriarchal state. This type of state tried to reconfigure male and female roles. ‘One might say that it broke open the nuclear family, socialised significant elements of reproduction’, she argues, ‘while leaving women responsible for the rest’ (1996: 65). The state clearly usurped certain patriarchal functions and responsibilities, thereby altering the relationship between gendered ‘domestic’ and ‘public spheres’ familiar from nineteenth-century capitalism (1996: 65). Like Verdery’s socialist state in Romania, the apartheid state was also a patriarchal state. Afrikaner nationalism was configured around male heroes who built and defended the nation, while women – volksmoeders (folk mothers) – protected the home and looked after the children (cf. Coombs 2003; McClintock 1995). Afrikaners and the ‘white nation’ generally did not want their women to be drawn into the industrial labour market in the way that socialism opened up that possibility in the nationalisms of socialist Eastern Europe. There was also no need for such a move under the apartheid

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system, because it was designed to release black men to meet the increasing demands for industrial labour in the modernising economy. Some of these black men would have to prove themselves to be civilised labour, capable of living and reproducing themselves in the city. For this to transpire, it was necessary for the state to deal with the dilemma of the urban location, which presented itself in the 1950s as an essentially feminised space, dominated by unmanageable youth and unruly, independent women. A fundamental component of racial modernism, I will argue, was the desire to re-assert male power and authority over the ‘native spaces’ in South African cities. To restore control and discipline, the apartheid state wanted to shut down all spaces where women in the city could act independently of male authority. The aim of racial modernism, I suggest, was therefore not only to disconnect white and African society and deepen the divisions in the colonial dual city, as Bozzoli (2004) points out, but also to restructure power and authority within urban African society itself. In order to do this, apartheid needed to institute a system of patriarchal proprietorship in the township, which transferred the authority for the management of women in the city from the state onto the black male headed nuclear family. Urban women who were not already under patriarchal authority needed to be placed under such authority, or systematically removed from the city. It was also declared in the new township regulations that all forms of petty commerce and income-earning by women would be banned. The limited number of new township formal businesses that were permitted after the 1960s were invariably given to men, and this is precisely what happened in the new Duncan Village as well. The argument I advance here consequently differs significantly from that of scholars like Mamdani (1996), who asserts that it was race that excluded Africans from equal rights and civil liberties in colonial towns and cities, and patriarchal proprietorship that kept African women disempowered and bonded in the countryside. I want to suggest that this distinction is misleading because it not only ignores that extent to which, as Hooper (1995) explains, all forms of modernist planning, including colonial and postcolonial ones, are fantasies of male control – what she calls ‘poems of male desire’ – but also the particular nature of patriarchal entitlement in the apartheid city. In the apartheid city male authority did not rest on any appeal to the legitimacy of customary power, it was simply bestowed on township patriarchs by the white state, which placed the full weight of its repressive power behind the defence of patriarchy. Women who would not submit to male authority in the city simply had no place there. Even widows were driven out to prevent the kind of gender contamination that had characterised the location. The conjoining of white male power at the centre with black male power on the periphery created what I call an invisible staircase within the structure of racial modernism and domination that had crucial implications for the ways in which some men rose up against others within the township during the 1980s and, even more importantly, for the way in which township men have behaved and responded to the collapse of apartheid and the building

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of a new post-apartheid society. Elder (2003: 5) has been one of the few scholars who has clearly recognised these links. He argues that there has been inadequate understanding of how ‘the geography of apartheid’ intersected with ‘heterosexist oppression’, allowing new forms of ‘sexual oppression’ into the ‘nooks and crannies of the apartheid landscape’. He calls for a more detailed analysis of apartheid as a ‘hetero-patriarchal system’ that cut across the urban–rural divide. The historical ethnography presented in this book seeks to respond to this call and places gender relations and gender identities at the centre of the analysis. Indeed, in exploring women’s responses to new forms of male domination and control, I have found that De Certeau’s (1984) distinction between tactics and strategies as forms of resistance to domination a useful heuristic device for the analysis (cf. Chapters 7 and 8). By the 1980s the apartheid model had begun to unravel in East London. The post-war industrial boom in the city petered out in the late 1960s and by the 1970s the manufacturing sector slowed down. To revive industrial interest in peripheral areas, the apartheid state offered firms incentives to relocate to the newly ethnic homelands, which included the Ciskei and Transkei outside East London. The thinking behind the scheme was that it was better to encourage job creation in rural areas than have unemployed Africans streaming into the cities in the 1970s. This process saw some factories shutting down in East London and reopening in nearby homeland towns, where industrialists received state subsidies and labour unions were banned. By the 1980s, labour and political activism, and generalised worker dissatisfaction with low wages in East London, created a crisis, leading to major strikes that threatened to close production plants in the city. At this time local residents also evicted the apartheid government appointed officials from the township and instituted a system of democratic street, branch and area committees as the legitimate authorities in the township. In other words, the residents of township had declared their ‘right to the city’ in the Lefebvrian (1974) sense (cf. Fawas 2009). Part of this assertion of power involved the township civic organisations declaring the right to control influx and settlement in the township. This opened Duncan Village up to new settlement, not only from families who had been removed from the area, but also to new immigrants moving into the city from rural areas. The result was a quadrupling of the township population, which overloaded the existing urban infrastructure and encouraged population densification in Duncan Village that rated among the highest in South Africa. By 1990, backyard and free-standing shacks outnumbered formal structures by a ratio of about three to one. The newspapers and the politicians lamented the reversion of Duncan Village to an overcrowded and under-serviced urban slum of well over 70,000 people. When I entered the field for the first time in 1995, I encountered a community in transition. A large section of the traditional working class had been moved out of the township by large employers and resettled in new company housing estates. This pushed unemployment levels in the area beyond 40 per cent of the adult population. Moreover, the political unity and high levels of community

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organisation that had characterised the township community during the struggle years of the 1980s had begun to dissipate with the collapse of civic structures and the rise of crime and violence, which entrenched the idea that Duncan Village had reverted to being an ‘irredeemable slum’.

Photo 1.3 Duncan Village Proper, 2004 Source: Leslie Bank.

Fractured Urbanism and the Post-apartheid City Colonial cities are classically dual cities, and South African cities, as we have seen, are not exceptions. These days the notion of the ‘dual city’ is most often invoked in relation to post-industrial cities, where the gap between the rich and poor is growing and the traditional middle and working class has been eroded by structural and economic change. Globalisation has increased the ability of the upper classes to realise larger profits while at the same time displacing jobs that were once secure for the traditional middle and working class. In countries like South Africa, where cities were already racially divided, the impact of globalisation and neoliberal economic restructuring has widened divisions between rich and poor, between township and suburb. The rhetoric of urban renewal in post-apartheid development demands that the townships become suburbs. In terms of official policy, all informal settlements are also to be converted into new low-cost housing estates by 2014 and townships are to be converted into vibrant, economically integrated and connected suburban

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settlements. However, everywhere one looks the problem of urban poverty seems to be growing. Thus, despite promises of a ‘better life for all’ in cities where all citizens have access to basic urban services and social welfare, the neoliberal economic policies of the ANC have helped to ensure that economic inequalities have grown since apartheid. The main problem for the traditional African working class in the townships is that steady economic growth since the 1990s has been accompanied by de-industrialisation and downsizing in manufacturing and mining (cf. Barchiesi 2008). This has undermined the traditional African urban working class, which is being replaced by what Waquant (2006) calls a precariat, an amalgamation of people who lack social organisation and access to secure wage labour employment. They now mostly live by their wits, depending on part-time casual employment, welfare grants and hustling in the informal economy (see Chapter 9). In 2000, Graham and Marvin developed the term ‘splintering urbanism’ to describe the ‘uneven overlay and retrofitting of new high performance urban infrastructures onto the apparently immanent, universal and (usually) public monopoly networks’ set up between the 1930s and the 1960s. They argue that the market liberalisation of the 1980s and 1990s ensured that high-end services and infrastructure could be delivered to geographically dispersed enclaves of wealthy consumers, thus creating the spatial effect of splintering access and connectivity to infrastructure. In theory, the old comprehensive modernist plans were ditched in favour of a model which allowed private sector agents to partner with the neoliberal state to rapidly improve services in selected, high-value areas, while ignoring investment in others. Other authors have noted how new forms of inequality and spatial segregation, associated with gated communities and fortressed neighbourhoods, have helped to ring-fence the rich and keep out the poor (Caldeira 2000). In Johannesburg, Martin Murray (2009: 10) recently notes that: if the steady accretion of luxury entertainment sites, enclosed shopping malls and gated residential communities in the northern suburbs [of the city] has come to symbolize the entry of the middle class urbanites into the culture of aspirant ‘world class’ cities, then the proliferation of overcrowded, resource starved informal settlements on the peri-urban fringe represents the dystopia of distressed urbanism. This uneasy coexistence of what some call ‘distressed urbanism’ (Murray 2009), others ‘amorphous urbanism’ (Gandy 2005), and yet others ‘ruined urbanisation’ (Simone 2004), – which they all associate with the social and economic dystopia of overcrowded, crime-ridden and poorly serviced townships, slums or ghettos – with areas of privilege, wealth, cosmopolitanism and global connectivity, lies at the heart of current debates about the African city. Some authors are choosing to ignore the distressed areas in their desire to push a version of the African city as dynamic, innovative and global. Nuttall and Mbembe (2005, 2008), for example, declare that to continue to define Johannesburg as a segregated, colonial or an apartheid city diverts attention

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away from its pedigree as an important global metropolis. They claim that Johannesburg is an ‘illusive metropolis’ and that many aspects of the city’s history, cultural and economic life position it within the global cities club. Watts (2005) objects, arguing that such a perspective ignores deeply rooted poverty and slum formation in the city, which is as much part of its ‘city-ness’ as its affluence and postmodern inclinations. Similar arguments have erupted around Dakar, a city that is a centre of cosmopolitan, global modernity, despite the fact that it runs on a fragile infrastructure that denies the vast majority of the population access to basic urban services, such as clean water and electricity (see Scheld 2007). In Lagos, Rem Koolhaus (2002) has famously turned the old dualism on its head by asserting that this seemingly chaotic and unplanned city represents the ‘perfect storm’ of neoliberalism, urbanism and globalisation, the ultimate market-driven global city of the future where the state has little or no influence on the shape and form urbanism takes. Koolhaus sees aspects of the future of Chicago and New York in Lagos now. Gandy (2005) strongly disagrees. He states that the unplanned ‘amorphous urbanism’ of Lagos is a complete disaster for the people of the city and is nothing short of catastrophic for the future, hardly something to be celebrated. Living in such squalor and poverty, he postulates, it is little wonder that so many Nigerians have turned either to evangelical Christianity or fundamentalist Islam for hope, succour and solace (Gandy 2005: 45; see also Davis 2006). One of the challenges we face in trying to move the debate beyond these stylised oppositions of the urban, global postmodern and the slum is to better grasp some of the similarities and differences between cities of the south. Robinson (2006) suggests that one way to achieve this is to dispense with the global cities model and adopt a non-hierarchical approach to understanding ‘ordinary cities’, one that reveals the complex sociality of the city and the cosmopolitan forms of urbanism that exist in the postcolonial world. One problem I have with the dual city model is that it reproduces ideas that locate modernity, change and innovation in that part of the city that is well-resourced and privileged, while it ignores the complexity of urbanism in poor areas of the city. It is bit like the old debate between the city and suburb, invoked by Berman (1988), Sennett (1977) and Jacobs (1961), where the dense and diverse city centre is seen as innovative, edgy, progressive and dynamic, always changing, while the socially thin suburb is presented as boring, repetitive and staid. In the dual city debate, the slums seem to have taken on some of the attributes of the dystopic suburb, which is often feminised as a space of routine, repetition and reproduction, where nothing much changes. The slum is also commonly presented as socially thin and fragile, as a place which lacks social density and durability. Just as everyday life in the suburb and its dynamic contribution to the city has remained sociologically hidden, so too, I would argue, has the sociality of the slum (or the township) remained a mystery, which is often theorised but improperly understood. Watts (2005) claims that if we are to better understand African and postcolonial cities, we need to focus much more on

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those parts of the African city that are less easily legible, recognisable and immediately visible. ‘What one needs to understand’, he urges, ‘is the politics of the governed in these vast spaces of exclusion and invisibility’ (2005: 190). And this is precisely what I set out to achieve in this book, which presents a detailed historical ethnography of social, economic and cultural change on the margins of the South African city. In undertaking this project, we would also do well to recognise that, as Graham (2000) himself points out: ‘binary oppositions are prone to exaggerate differences, confound description and prescription, and set up overburdened dualisms that miss continuities, underplay contingency and overstate the internal coherence of social forms’ (2000: 186). In the case of the South African city, it is clear that the slums or the economically marginal areas, which include the former township, are not actually located completely off the city’s infrastructural grids. In addition, there has been no sudden and absolute move away from urban modernist planning traditions to something openly neoliberal, postmodern and purely market-driven. What exists is a hybrid set of plans and practices that blend older ideas of the state as ‘master builder’ with a drive towards a more market-driven, splintering urbanism. It is also incorrect to assume that apartheid racial modernism, which precedes the current moment, was always successful in creating entirely new urban communities. People resisted forced relocation, state funds ran low at critical points, and the focus of urban planning sometimes shifted to other projects. This is precisely what occurred in Duncan Village in East London, where racial modernism was introduced in the 1960s and 1970s but never taken to its logical conclusion before it imploded, thus fragmenting the urban landscape of disadvantage further. The place is not and never was homogeneously ‘distressed’, nor is it a socially and economically ‘amorphous’ slum. In conceptual terms, I would like to suggest that the term fractured urbanism might usefully describe what is happening in many old townships and settlements like Duncan Village in South Africa, where the apartheid urban infrastructure still operates and is periodically extended and upgraded through new state investment, but nevertheless remains hopelessly over-extended in places where social life and economic need exceed both the capacity and the physical reach of existing grids. Under such conditions, distress translates into fracture, which breaks and segments the urban locale into different zones, niches, territories and settlements that are created, not by the force of real estate capitalism (Harvey 1989; Zukin 2000), nor by the imperatives of market-driven infrastructure and service provision for the rich, but by the failure of comprehensive urban planning systems and state structures to effectively manage counter-insurgent urbanisation and settlement, which continually overruns the plan. The process of fractured urbanism I describe in Duncan Village started in the 1960s, when the apartheid state failed to forcibly remove all targeted residents of the old East Bank location, leaving many to linger in transit camps and residential niches that were never removed or destroyed, and that gradually developed their own social character or charisma. In the post-1980s period, further fracturing has occurred as older

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grids and templates in the township plan cracked, broke and segmented under the weight of demographic stress, insurgent urbanisation and low levels of public investment and maintenance. This transformed the place into ‘complex and dense’ settlement of a variety of socio-spatial communities, with different settlement histories, dynamics and trajectories, all displaying a slightly different level of access to urban infrastructure, social services and livelihood opportunities. In this book I focus on different parts or zones of the new post-apartheid urban ecology and give the different socio-spatial segments – backyard shacks, hostels, free-standing shack areas, old formal rental enclaves, new Reconstruction and Development Programme (RDP) housing enclaves – careful attention in their own right, looking at their social composition, gender dynamics, identity politics and place-making tendencies. I argue that while the boundaries of these new socio-spatial communities are often very fluid, connections exist within and between them which contribute to the feel and identity of different niches and social enclaves. I also acknowledge varied and diverse forms of temporality in different localities, which gives each one its own unique character and identity within a broader sense of belonging to the marginal space, which has its own challenges and issues of identity and definition. These I address at the end of the book in a detailed discussion of marginality and the dissolution of place. The Organisation of the Book The chapter outline is broadly in keeping with the conceptual and historical analysis outlined above. In Chapter 2, as noted above, I revisit the East Bank location of the 1950s and attempt to re-evaluate some of the criticisms levelled against the trilogy volumes. Based on the restitution research I conducted between 1999 and 2001, I reconstruct a somewhat different account of the social and cultural history of that period and the nature of urbanism in the East Bank to that presented in the trilogy. In particular, I address significant silences in relation to urban cultural formation, which I attribute more to limitations of method than to a deficit of theory. The chapter does not discount the trilogy as an impressive ethnographic baseline from which to work, but highlights analytical gaps in these earlier analyses. The third chapter of the book turns readers’ attention to the unfolding of racial modernism in East London and its impact on the residents of the old locations. I argue that urban restructuring gained momentum after the urban riots in the East Bank in 1952, which had a profound impact on race relations in the city. The political mood in the city literally changed overnight as the old paternalism of the ‘city fathers’ was replaced by repression and authoritarianism. I then examine how the old East Bank location was destroyed and how Duncan Village township was erected in its place. I argue that the township model was much more than a means of controlling Africans and containing political unrest. It developed as a socio-spatial model, which drew inspiration from the American city and socialist urbanism, to design new urban African

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communities and subjectivities. The main focus is on the way this new regime of power and control was implemented and how local residents responded to it. Here we see how the new Duncan Village ended up being a social mixture of old and new, with important implications for the cultural politics of the new township. Chapter 4 picks up the story of Duncan Village in the 1980s, after the forced removals and restructuring of the previous two decades. The new township population stabilised at around 15,000, as opposed to the 50,000 people that had once lived in the East Bank. The residents of Duncan Village kicked out the apartheid-appointed black town councillors in 1982, ushering in ‘the era of the comrades’. The township was declared ungovernable and was now effectively ruled by young men deeply hostile to the white racist state. These youths deliberately reversed the rules of township governance and opened Duncan Village up as a ‘space of liberation’, as a new people’s democracy, a space of socialism where all who wished to live there would be permitted to do so. Within just a few years, apartheid modernism had imploded and the neatly planned neighbourhoods were again overrun with wood-and-iron shacks, transforming the township back into an overcrowded urban slum. This chapter pays particular attention to the emergence of the sprawling new shack areas which encircled the township, and analyses the changing social and cultural dynamics of the township as a whole, telling a story of multiple transitions in politics and identity as Duncan Village was remade. The above discussion lays the foundation for a series of more specific investigations of social identity, cultural style, and the politics of space and place. In Chapter 5 I look at the phenomenon of ‘the comrades’, not as a political movement, which is how they are usually described, but as a cultural style. I argue that ‘the comrades’ dismantled the central divide between urban and rural youth that had dominated township politics over the preceding decades. By dismantling the age-old division between ‘borners’ and ‘bumpkins’, they strengthened their capacity for resistance and encouraged the formation of more hybrid identities and values, ones that could absorb aspects of rural youth socialisation while still embracing urban values and forms of struggle. Rural tropes of power and identity informed the creation of ‘people’s courts’ in this period, while country values associated with fighting and bravery were valorised. The chapter also explores how the style of the comrades came to be expressed in the domestic sphere through the creation of new kinds of youth households, where young people lived together without getting married. From the free-standing shacks and the township streets, my attention shifts to single-sex hostels. The research for this chapter is based on extensive fieldwork in B-hostel complex in Duncan Village, which had been built in 1959 and was transformed into a family housing unit in 2000. My research was conducted just before this transformation occurred, at a time when women were not welcome in a hostel complex, which remained a residual focus of an older male migrant identity. The central theme of the chapter is a concern with the reconstruction of migrant cultures and consciousness in the

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hostel after the 1960s. I argue that, far from falling away with relocation, Red migrant culture was powerfully reconstructed in the hostels by conservative migrants from the former Transkei area. The chapter tracks the reconstruction of these pockets of Red subcultural life and explores its longevity in the township. Chapter 7 moves from the hostels to the homes of the formal township residents who were expecting Duncan Village to evolve into a stable and prosperous suburban-style residential area. Here I explore cultural models of the house and of home-making, and show how these have changed over time. I begin by documenting the destruction of the female-centred, matrifocal household model and its replacement with the hetero-patriarchal model of the township house, which casts men as breadwinners and women as homemakers. I argue that individualising the home inside was a way in which women could assert their individuality and resist the uniformity of the authoritarian township model. I then proceed to explore how house-making has changed since the 1980s with the collapse of full male employment and the growth of new opportunities for women in the informal economy. I argue that, while many women would like to recreate older models of a female-centred entrepreneurial household, these are increasingly difficult to realise in the context of domestic fragmentation and intergenerational conflict. I also show how many of these households have become ‘married to the state’, in the sense that their members are critically dependent on state grants for survival. From those in the formal homes we move to the backyards and, more specifically, to the social spaces of shack communities that have arisen in yards behind formal houses. Here I track the changing history and social composition of the backyard residents. When the Mayers worked in the location, the yards were filled with migrants. By the 1990s, however, these spaces were predominantly inhabited by single women with children. The feminisation of the yards thus forms the central focus of this chapter, as well as the changing relationships between landlords and tenants. I argue here that backyards emerged as critical spaces for the survival of women in the city. Through an analysis of the rhythms of the yards, I demonstrate how networks are constructed and spaces used in women’s struggles against marginalisation, interpersonal violence and exclusion. The concluding chapter of the book shifts the discussion from the anthropology of urbanism to the comparative sociology of exclusion and marginality. Here I apply Wacquant’s (2006) model for the analysis of advanced urban marginality and assess the extent to which it fits the Duncan Village case material. I am particularly interested here in the issue of ‘spatial stigma’ or the disillusion of place. I try to show how Duncan Village, despite its very distinguished history of urban achievement and struggle, has now become a place of shame, a dishonoured urban locality, which few believe has a viable future. In making this argument, I suggest that it is the increasingly fractured nature of the township urban experience, the deep

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social and gender cleavages that exist in the township, and the failure of new place-making strategies to capture the imagination of township residents that have ensured the increasing marginality of Duncan Village as a place and generated increasingly bleak imaginations of the urban among its residents, many of whom are convinced that yet another spatial removal represents their best chance of urban survival. I conclude by suggesting that, as yet another set of redevelopment plans are implemented, the very future of this historic township hangs in the balance.

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2 The Xhosa in Town Revisited

Modernity is of course a notoriously baggy concept that resists narrow definition … It refers not only to the technology and the emergence of an administered and industrialized society, but also to the fluid but powerful system of ideas that we inherit from the bourgeois revolutions of Europe in the late eighteenth century – ideas such as autonomy, personhood, rights, and citizenship … There is no escape clause for the encounter with modernity unless one is to accept isolation or eccentricity. In practice, however, people facing this situation make a continual effort to translate modernity’s promises into their own situations and histories, indeed to de-europeanize them wherever possible. (Attwell 2005: 4)

In the literature on urbanisation and social change in southern Africa, I have suggested that the Xhosa in Town trilogy stood out for the clarity and depth of its ethnographic account of cultural conservatism and the persistence of tradition in a changing urban context. Like Monica Hunter’s Reaction to Conquest of the 1930s, Townsmen or Tribesmen (Mayer with Mayer 1971 [1961]) became an instant anthropological classic that vividly revealed the capacity of poor rural migrants to resist cultural domination and defend their pre-existing rural cultural identities and traditions in an industrialising South African city. In a context where anthropology as a discipline was starting to grapple more seriously with issues of rapid social and cultural change, the Mayers’ work provided a good example of the lengths to which some people would go to resist acculturation and defend themselves against Western culture. But the initially positive reception given to the trilogy faded quickly in the 1970s as apartheid policies were entrenched in South Africa and social anthropology as a discipline came under close scrutiny for its political role during the colonial era (Asad 1973; Eriksen and Nielsen 2001). In the new political and intellectual climate, as I suggested, the Mayers’ celebration of Red identities and lifestyles in East London became problematic, especially since they seemed to be suggesting that some Africans in the Eastern Cape were incapable, or at least unprepared, to modernise, preferring instead to remain tribally oriented. As a result, the Mayers were now accused, especially by scholars working outside anthropology, of being apologists for apartheid (Beinart 1991b: 15–17). From within anthropology, the assessment of the trilogy also changed in the 1970s. With the increasing influence of Marxism and historical materialism in southern African studies, the Mayers and their colleagues were criticised for their theoretical conservatism, their lack of historical perspective, and their failure to situate their analysis of cultural change adequately within the 35

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political economy of colonialism and racial capitalism. The trilogy was found both politically and theoretically wanting and was said to over-emphasise, even reify, the Red–School, townsmen–tribesmen divide. It was pointed out that other divisions, such as those based on class difference, were ignored; and that these studies under-estimated the cultural competence of individuals to shift situationally between different identities in their everyday lives. The essential critique of the trilogy project was that it had been theoretically overdetermined and became locked into an outmoded ‘two-system’ cultural model that could not account for the enormous complexities of urban African identity formation in the 1950s. The critics had made some powerful points, and in 1980 Philip Mayer recast his analysis of Red and School in more politically fashionable terms. Drawing on the work of the French structuralist Marxist, Louis Althusser, he argued that Red and School were, in fact, both long-standing rural resistance ideologies, which had their roots in the history of African dispossession, missionary activity and colonial exploitation in nineteenth-century Eastern Cape history. Significantly, while Mayer added historical depth and context to his earlier work, he did not suggest that he had originally over-estimated the social salience or analytical importance of the Red–School divide. He pointed out that the material and social basis for this division was historically rooted but was being progressively undermined by apartheid-driven agrarian change, first with the introduction of ‘betterment planning’ in the rural areas in the 1950s and then later with fully fledged bantustan development, which increased rural poverty and landlessness in the 1960s and 1970s (see Mayer 1980). In this chapter I want to revisit the Xhosa in Town project again from a less familiar standpoint, namely its methodological foundations. Between 1999 and 2002, I was given the opportunity of researching a land restitution claim lodged by a group of 5,000 families from the former East Bank location who were forcibly relocated out of the city during the 1960s and 1970s. Most of the claimants lived in the satellite commuter township of Mdanstane outside East London, others in the Coloured townships of East London (collectively called the Buffalo Flats). As a sample of former East Bank residents, the claimant group mainly represented ‘site holders’ from the 1950s. This group was dominated by ‘borners’, or what Pauw called ‘second-generation’ families. There were some single women and former migrants within the claimant group, but very few individuals who would have classified themselves as ‘Reds’ in the 1950s. Nevertheless, the oral and visual histories collected from members of the claimant group provided an interesting counterpoint to the ‘tribesmen-in-town’ narrative of the trilogy.1 For many of the claimants, who were in their 20s and 30s during the 1950s, the central cultural dynamic of the 1950s was structured around an infatuation with a new cosmopolitan style and ethos, or what Joel Kahn (2001) calls ‘popular modernism’.2 Old East Bank residents from the 1950s said that the location youth at that time were passionate about sport, music (especially jazz), fashion, entertainment (foreign films and magazines), politics and the quest to define new identities

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and a truly unique urban style. They reflected the optimism that was common throughout post-war urban Africa and their representations of themselves and their outlooks were imprinted with a powerful sense that they were part of something new, something very modern and something dynamic. The two main aims of this chapter are, first, to explore why these narratives are largely absent from the trilogy ethnography and, second, to reveal some of the cultural circuitry of the ‘hidden history’ of popular modernism in East London’s townships of the 1950s. Like others who have commented on the trilogy, I am therefore also centrally interested in trying to explain why that work, which was so detailed and ethnographically rich, seems to have missed out on an important part of the urban social and cultural dynamic. How could urban anthropologists, who claimed that their aim was simply and honestly to ‘describe and record’, end up with such a one-sided account of urban location life in this city? In trying to address this question, I focus less on issues of politics and theory, which have dominated the previous assessments of this work, and more on the nature of fieldwork practice and its role in the production of knowledge. I suggest that by confining themselves largely to the space of the house and the yard – the domestic realm – the Mayers overlooked crucial aspects of the social and cultural worlds of ordinary East Bankers that had opened up ‘on the verandah and beyond’ – on the streets, in the tearooms, at the dance halls, in the sports clubs, and even in public spaces beyond the location such as the beach, the station and the high street. In this chapter I also suggest that had more fieldwork been conducted at the weekend, when the township was abuzz with jazz, fetes, sports and politics, the trilogy researchers would have exposed themselves to more of the new urban cultural outlook and attitude that permeated the East Bank at this time, and was so richly revealed to me in the oral accounts and narratives of the land claimants I interviewed. A different and more varied fieldwork strategy, especially one that was multi-sited and which shifted attention away from the domestic arena to more public sites of social interaction and cultural production, would, I believe, have generated a different understanding of the cultural dynamics of location life. More specifically, it would have placed engagements with ‘popular modernism’ at the centre of the township scene in the 1950s, and located migrant subcultural styles, such as those of Red migrants, more on the margins. In sum, then, this chapter attempts to provide a methodological critique of the trilogy while at the same time crafting an alternative framework for the analysis of the urban cultural dynamics of the location in the 1950s. Before turning to the trilogy, I want to start by briefly considering the view that Monica Hunter generated of urban life in East London in the 1930s. Hunter conducted several months’ fieldwork in East London in 1931, and published the results of her findings in her classic ethnography, Reaction to Conquest (1936). Revisiting the East Bank In the early decades of the twentieth century, East London rose to prominence as a trading centre on the east coast of Africa, where economic activity centred

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on the harbour, railway, merchant houses, processing works and craft shops. The town was a centre of African trade, and was also a major port for the export of wool produced in the Eastern Cape, to Britain and elsewhere. It was in this context that the young Monica Hunter (Wilson) entered the East Bank location of East London, following almost a year’s fieldwork on the eastern frontier of the Cape colony among the Pondo people. To supplement her work among the Pondo, who were still isolated from the mainstream colonial economy, Hunter was determined to try to capture the dynamics of social change in her work. She was not satisfied to simply present her ethnography as a static tribal study. As a result, she made arrangements to spend several months in the urban African locations of East London. In 1931, she entered East London to explore the impact of urbanisation of the social lives of migrants and newly urbanised families from the rural areas. In a period of four months, she collected over 500 pages of field notes based mainly on interviews with households in the old East Bank location. Her main preoccupation during these interviews was to discover how urban households survived in the city and how well social and cultural practices and beliefs travelled from the countryside to the city. Hunter was no fan of urban living, having grown up on a rural mission station; she found a lot that upset her in the old East Bank location. Monica Hunter’s account of the cultural dynamics of the East London locations in the 1930s is seldom referenced as a pioneering piece of urban anthropological research in southern Africa. We tend to see Ellen Hellman as the mother of urban anthropology in this region and Monica Hunter as the doyen of rural fieldwork and ethnography. This is partly because she is best remembered for intensive work among the Pondo and the Nyaskusa. But what is interesting about Hunter’s urban ethnography is that, in many ways, it is strikingly different from that presented in the trilogy 25 years later. Unlike the Mayers, who were struck by the cultural conservatism of city migrants and the desire of many to defend rural cultural values and orientations, Hunter was alarmed by the speed with which newly urbanised individuals and families were changing their outlooks and how quickly the ‘superficialities’ of urban culture were imbibed by the urban poor. She was, for instance, concerned at the enthusiasm with which location residents, some of them in the city only briefly, desired money and modern things: Money gives power to obtain so many of the desired things of European civilization – better clothing, housing, furnishing, food, education, gramophones, motor-cars, books, power to travel – all the paraphernalia of western civilization is coveted. Again and again old men spoke to me of how intense was the desire for money in the younger generation. (Hunter 1936: 455) In relation to money she noted that there was also a widespread appetite for gambling in the location, that betting games were common on the streets and

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that many men spent their Saturdays at the tote betting on the horses. The Chinese betting game ‘fah fee’ was also popular. She writes in her field notes: Big crowds turning out to watch football matches. Interpreter lost 1 pound at the Easter horse racing … Keep their dreams [of money] because they play fah fee (3 Chinese run fah fee), attend horse racing, much betting on cards, many tickets sold for the sweep stakes. (MW field notes)3 People would seemingly ‘do anything for money’, Hunter remarked disapprovingly, thinking perhaps of the increasing problem of prostitution in the location. The desire for money, in her view, undermined moral and social cohesion, generating a sense of alienation and of the blasé, not dissimilar to that noted by Simmel in his accounts of money and mental life on the European metropolis of the early twentieth century. Furthermore, she noted that: ‘in town it is smart to be as europeanised as possible. In their dress men and girls follow European fashions – “Oxford bags”, berets, sandal shoes. Conversation is interlarded with European slang … Houses, furniture, and food are as European as earnings permit’ (1936: 437). ‘Raw tribesmen’ found themselves in a marginal position in the city: The values in town are European, not tribal. Status depends largely on wealth and education and these entail europeanization … Knowledge of tribal law, skills in talking, renown as a warrior, and even the blood of a chief’s family, count for comparatively little in town. These conditions make for the speedy transference of at least the superficialities of culture. (1936: 437) Even in terms of social life and entertainment, Hunter argued, tribal influences were on the wane. She observed that tribal rituals were not held in town: There is little Native dancing … Young people gather in private houses, particularly on Friday and Saturday evenings, for parties, but here European fox trots [sic] were more often performed than the old Bantu dances. And the music is European or American ragtime. About the street one more often hears ragtime hummed than an old Bantu song. (1936: 455) In highlighting this appetite for Western-style entertainment, she noted that by the 1930s the location had its own cinema, ‘at which there are two evening performances and one matinee a week’ (1936: 467). She also provided a detailed inventory of the wide range of social clubs, societies and churches operating in the East Bank. They included dancing clubs and musical societies specialising in European and American styles, savings groups, tea clubs, and a wide variety of sports clubs. Her Xhosa fluency, and her close connections with the township elite, ensured her access to these associations. During her three months in East London, Dr W.B. Rubusana,4 leader of one of the location’s largest Christian churches and a founding member of the African

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National Congress (ANC), hosted her. Through Rubusana and other local leaders, like Clements Kadalie, she appears to have had easy access to the location and was able to walk the streets and enter households, almost at will. Her view was framed, however, within a model of ‘culture contact’ and ‘detribalisation’ that precluded her disguising her concerns about the social consequences of rapid social change.5 In her account of the internal divisions within the urban community, Hunter did not prioritise Red and School in the way the Mayers and their colleagues do in the trilogy. Monica Hunter was more interested in what she called the division between ‘temporary’ and ‘permanent’ urbanites. In the case of the former she anticipated close social connections with the countryside and frequent return visits to family and kin. Her interest in bus and railway timetables, and the flows of migrants and commuters between town and country bore witness to this interest. But, while recognising this distinction, Hunter also noted that many of the ‘temporary urbanites’ were family members of the more permanent ones, and that the contours of these categories were constantly changing as the process of urbanisation intensified. Among those who were temporarily in the city, Hunter identified a category called qaba (pagan), sometimes written xaba in her notes, which appears quite often in her inscriptions (typed and written) as a classificatory short-hand. Consider the following inscription from her notes on hlonipa (a language of deference and respect among the Xhosa): Hlonipa is still carried out by red and school, who only hlonipa the bed, some do it to the back of the house as well – this speaks to male power and authority in town. School people hlonipa too. ‘Hlonipa in town – turned me off’. ‘Never went to school … intombe ya xaba. Was from a school family, but never went to school.’ This is one of the rare passages where she used ‘Red’ and ‘school’ as opposing or twinned categories in a way which seems to suggest that it would capture all of those who were not from the city, as if there were only two categories of temporary residents – Red and School. In most other cases, she uses the term qaba or xaba as a short-hand to identify non-Christians and traditionalists on their own. She clearly sees a qaba type and notes that there are particular places in the location where these ‘xaba types’ hang out. However, she does not make a particular effort to visit these sites, nor to map out their social contours and cultural dynamics. Thus, it needs to be noted that there were some limitations to Hunter’s fieldwork in East London, which she readily acknowledged. It appears that, while her language skills and social contacts allowed her easy access to both public spaces and private houses in the location, she did not manage to break into the male migrant subcultures of the old location. One clear limitation for her in this regard was that she worked with Dr Rubusana’s wife, who acted as a chaperone and assistant, but was also clearly identified with the Christianised urban middle class.6 Dr Rubusana was a stalwart of the ANC in the township and a Wesleyan minister,

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whose popularity was waning in the East Bank in the 1930s as labour unions and independent churches challenged the authority of the ANC (Bundy and Beinart 1987).7 The cosmopolitan cultural influences alluded to by Hunter in Reaction to Conquest seem to have deepened significantly during the 1940s and 1950s and emerged as a central theme in the narratives of former East Bank residents in their recollections of this period. Many identified the Second World War as a political and cultural watershed, a period when location residents became more aware of their rights and were profoundly affected by popular transnational cultural forms. In the late 1940s, drought in the Ciskei pushed a new wave of rural youth to the city in search of work and the possibility of permanent urban residence. On the streets of the East Bank these youths encountered local urban-born peers who exuded a new self-confidence, a fashionable look and a streetwise, cocky modern style, which was now more conspicuous than ever. Writing of the changing mood in the townships after the Second World War, Drum magazine photographer Jurgen Schadelberg highlighted some of the broader issues at play: During this period there was a dynamic cultural explosion [that] related to a number of things. [One trend was that] people adopted more and more an association with American society. [We] saw Louis Amstrong, Charlie Parker, Lena Horne and so on as role models. But the other reason was political. You saw it in the north – Ghana, Tanzania and so on – the rejection of colonialism and the movement for independence in Africa. So people felt very positive about the future. At that time, in the early 1950s, they did not take the apartheid regime so seriously. It was so ridiculous it couldn’t last. (quoted in Ansell 2005: 68–9) On the local political front this new verve was reflected in the formation of a dynamic branch of the ANC Youth League in East London in 1949. The Youth League, led by the multi-talented triumvirate of C.J. Fazzie, A.S. Gwentshe and J. Lengisi, broke ranks with the more conservative ANC old guard in the locations as they injected new life and energy into resistance politics (Lodge 1986). With key political figures like Gwentshe and others involved during this period in popular jazz bands, theatre and dance groups, and sports clubs, there was a significant convergence of struggle politics and the new cultural politics of cosmopolitanism. This is not to suggest, as Lodge points out, that the political leadership did not try hard to bridge the divide between urban and rural youth, but simply to note a growing infatuation among the East Bank youth of the 1950s with a fashion-, musicand entertainment-driven Americanised ‘popular modernism’. The reasons why America provided such a powerful model for East Bank residents was not only because popular modernism was able to absorb and incorporate black cultural styles and influences, but also because it seemed to offer a competing, more opened-ended narrative of the modern, which ran against the grain of

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the conservative, racialised settler version of the modern that circulated in East London. As Gwen Ansell puts it: The America that was loved was both illusionary and real. The reality was that ‘Africans in America’ had achieved much moral emancipation from the kind of legal oppression that rendered life for all South Africans of colour intolerable. That achievement had come through struggle whose history was known to politically aware South Africans … America held out the promise that ‘we can do it too’ (a phrase used in black newspapers at the time). America also connotated a sophisticated modernism that stood in opposition to both the rural, tribal image the authorities were trying to foist on black urbanists and the closed-minded Calvinism of those authorities themselves … [In the end more] people loved America than knew the full story. (Ansell 2005: 48) According to the former residents of the East Bank whom I interviewed, the cultural dynamism of the late 1940s and 1950s had diverse sources. Some attributed the changes to the influence of returning Second World War servicemen. Others associated them with the opening of new factories and the growth of the local urban working class. Yet others referred to events on the Reef and the popularity of South African magazines like Drum, Bona and Zonk, which kept location residents abreast of cultural developments in larger cities and abroad. Whatever the reasons, there was consensus that the post-war period signalled a local cultural renaissance that raised cosmopolitan influences in location life to new levels. It initiated an explosion of new music groups, sports clubs and dancing styles, and brought a succession of musical, sports and dance acts to the city. One former resident explained: It felt like we had become the Sophiatown of the Eastern Cape. We had the jazz bands, the politicians, sportsmen and the style. We were up with all the new trends. Here in the location we did not have much time for tradition and tribal culture. The guys had come back from the war with a new confidence and there was a great expectation of change.8 In writing the history of Drum magazine, Michael Chapman points out that when the magazine started in the early 1950s it carried stories about tribal customs and dance which attracted such negative readership response that they had to be dropped. A reader reported: ‘Ag, why do you dish out this stuff, man?’ said the man with the golliwog (sic) hair in a floppy American suit, at the Bantu Men’s Centre [in Johannesburg]. ‘Tribal Music! Tribal history! Chiefs! We don’t care about chiefs! Give us jazz and film stars, man! We want Duke, Satchmo, and hot dames! Yes brother, anything American. You can cut out this junk about kraals and folk-tales … – forget it! You are just trying to keep us backward, that’s what! Tell us what is happening here, on the Reef!’ (Chapman 2001: 187)

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Such a view was common in the East Bank too. Young people in particular did not want stories about tribal culture so much as to keep up with metropolitan styles, watch American movies, and engage in dynamic new urban cultural forms and styles-in-the-making. They recounted stories about the notorious shebeens on Ndende and Camp Streets; tsotsi gangs including some called the Vikings and the Italians; jazz events at the Peacock Hall and political meetings on Bantu Square. They also remembered Coca-Cola fashion shows and ballroom dancing at the Social Centre, B-grade American movies at the local Springbok bioscope, and exciting sports and social events hosted at Rubusana Park. As in Sophiatown, East London’s urban youth fed on images of black America, developing a myriad new styles and fashions, which were displayed on the streets and at the dance halls (see Ansell 2005; Coplan 1985; Glaser 2000; Hannerz 1997; Mattera 1987; Themba 1985). The evidence collected from former East Bank youth of the 1950s clearly suggests that there was considerable overlap between the cultural currents that washed through the Reef townships in the 1950s and those which hit East London after the war. Obviously the size and scale of the wave differed and was affected by the generally lower levels of household income in the city. However, we also know that cash was more available in the East Bank, with the employment boom in the city associated with post-war industrialisation and that many of the mainline department stores did have branches on Oxford Street. We also know that the city’s African population was almost exclusively Xhosa-speaking and that there were very large numbers of new migrants in the city at this time. However, one point that is not sufficiently emphasised in the existing literature is that East London was still a settler town, largely shielded from political dynamics of the rise of Afrikaner nationalism. In fact, white East Londoners seemed to have more in common with urban settler communities in, say, Nairobi, Salisbury and Bulawayo than they did with their urban counterparts upcountry. In the post-war period, settler lifestyles and outlooks remained predicated on a fierce loyalty to Britain and Empire, and were socially structured around an allegiance to their mainstream churches and the exclusive world of the country club, which entrenched notions of cultural superiority and racial conservatism. The local appeal of American-style popular modernism, especially among the location youth, was a direct response both to this conservatism of settler versions of modernisation and social inclusion, as well as to the long-standing trend of black elites to buy into ideas of qualified citizenship based on education and property ownership. Sophiatown, and the more open-ended and subversive narratives of modernism generated through an engagement with black American music, gangsterism and urban popular culture, seemed to provide a more inclusive counterpoint for youth resistance cultures in the 1950s. Indeed, it comes as little surprise that the political challenge of the 1950s against the state came predominantly from the ANC Youth League in the province and the city.

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In East London, the entrenchment of ‘Drum culture’ occurred in the interstices of particular forms of white cultural domination and black conservatism, which in this case were liberal and traditionalist in nature. The new popular culture in the city locations in the 1950s was therefore both unique to the city and also part of a more general cultural and political awakening that was occurring in urban society at large. The power of the new black urban popular cultural forms, and their social dominance after the war, was based on their ability to navigate a path between the qualified citizenship of a tainted liberalism and a retreat into African traditionalism. In reflecting on the visual histories collected from former East Bank residents, I was struck by the extent to which the language of images contained in these collections was both specific to the South African context, but was also part of pan-African post-war urban modernity, where urban youths and middle-class families would collect and project similar images of themselves, images alive with both the cultural apparatus (radios, gramophones, telephones, cars, fashionable clothes, cigarettes) and the expectations of modernity. Home-made Ethnography How could the Mayers and their colleagues have failed to notice such seemingly obvious social and cultural dynamics? Did they not emphasise these popular cosmopolitan cultural forms because they were deeply committed to clearing ethno-spaces that conformed to the dominant models in the discipline at that time? Or were there other reasons? Both the Mayers (Mayer with Mayer 1971 [1961]: 319) and Pauw (1973 [1963]: 230) explicitly denied that they were overly influenced by theoretical models, emphasising rather that their main aim was ‘simply to record’ and to present ‘first-hand factual knowledge’ about urban African society. So how in the process of ‘simply recording’ could they have missed so much? Several factors suggest themselves. First, it should be noted that, when the Xhosa in Town researchers first visited the East Bank in the mid 1950s, the township was in political turmoil. In 1952 the locations erupted into political violence when police and army troops were deployed to quell, violently, political protests. During the unrest several whites were killed, including a Roman Catholic nun who lived and worked in the location. The political environment in the East Bank was still tense in 1954 when the Mayers and their colleagues started their research (see Chapter 3). Unlike Monica Hunter, who came to the East Bank with the blessing of one of the location’s most senior political leaders, the trilogy researchers lacked powerful local political allies within the location and had to rely heavily on the support of white clerics and officials. When I interviewed Iona Mayer in her home in Oxford in 2003 about the fieldwork methods they had employed in the East Bank, she recounted their difficulties as white non-Xhosa speakers from out of town, with no local reputation or any significant political connections. She explained that they relied heavily on Xhosa-speaking field assistants to gather information and spent limited time in the field in the East

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Bank themselves. In fact, more fieldwork time had been spent in the rural location of Tshabo, outside East London, than in the East Bank. She also said that her husband’s work commitments at Rhodes University in Grahamstown, 160 km away, precluded a sustained presence in the field. As the research project wore on, he was increasingly forced to rely on local research assistants to stand in for him, and to administer pre-designed questionnaires aimed at gathering information about household dynamics and social attitudes. She showed me some of the questionnaire schedules he had given his assistants as a means of gauging ‘urban commitment’. They included questions about issues such as clan affiliation, frequency of home visits and religious beliefs, as well as migrant views on their agrarian resources, such as fields and livestock. The structure of certain questionnaires seemed to allow for the easy classification of respondents as either Red or School, without necessarily discovering how they classified themselves in various social contexts. Mafeje, who worked with Monica Wilson (formerly Hunter) in the 1960s, has claimed that their feeling at the time was that the social categories of Red and School had been somewhat over-determined in the Xhosa in Town project (Mafeje 1997; Wilson and Mafeje1965). In retrospect it appears that Philip Mayer had already decided that Red and School was the regional cultural drama he wanted to document prior to his arrival in the East Bank. He had witnessed this division first-hand in his work in Tshabo location outside the city and wanted to document its expression in the city itself. Red and School as social categories had been established a priori, outside of a social and cultural understanding of identity politics in the city. These categories had been established before the urban fieldwork started and the function of the project was to give these subcultural forms, social content and meaning in the urban context. In some ways it is a bit of a mystery why Mayer chose the city as the arena within which to document the regional cultural drama of Red and School. The reason that Mayer ended up in the city, I suspect, was that major research funds were available at Rhodes University for such a project at precisely the time he was ready to move. This might have pushed Mayer to commit to urban social and cultural research when his real interests remained in the rural setting. Accurate answers to these questions will become clear when Philip and Iona Mayer’s personal papers become available.9 The use of questionnaires was also a key feature in Pauw’s work. It appears that his research was based mainly on the administration of formal structured questionnaires, coupled with occasional field visits. He explains: Liberal use was made of the services of Bantu (sic) research assistants, but the author made a point of taking part in different phases of the field-work himself so as to be able to evaluate properly the information collected by assistants. Mr S. Campell Mvalo must be mentioned for having done the lion’s share in collecting raw material … Mr Enos L. Xotyani also gave assistance at various stages and his contribution of reports rich in detail was particularly valuable. (Pauw 1973 [1963]: 230)

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In my interview with Iona Mayer, I was also struck by the limited extent to which Philip Mayer and his colleagues had engaged in what some anthropologists call ‘deep hanging out’ (Rosaldo 1989) – simply circulating in the townships, speaking to people informally and gathering information on an ad hoc basis. In retrospect, it appears that the Xhosa in Town researchers employed a two-pronged strategy, combining structured household interviews with attitudinal surveys generally conducted by their assistants. This is clearly evident in the text of Townsmen or Tribesmen, where attitudinal information is often presented without close attention to biographical (life history) or situational context. The attitudes of migrants and townsmen often appear detached from their social and historical contexts, simply given as apt illustrations of Red or School outlooks or orientations. This style of presentation also contributes to the over-determined distinction between Red and School in the Mayers’ work. Consequently, Townsmen or Tribesmen gives the reader very little sense of the blurred and complicated nature of the Red and School cultural categories in people’s varied and complex everyday interactions. Thus, rich and detailed as the Mayers’ ethnography is of migrant life in the city, there is nevertheless a disjuncture – a sense of distance between the cognitive maps of migrants and embedded social and cultural practice. Such a disjuncture leaves an impression that ‘the cultural’ and ‘the social’ have been separated out, and then – and only then – mapped and overlaid each other.10 While there were similarities in the research methods of the trilogy and those of the Rhodes Livingstone Institute (RLI) anthropologists of the 1950s (Schumaker 2001), it is significant that the trilogy lacks any sustained analysis of public events, such as political or labour union meetings (Epstein 1958), or occasions of the kind analysed by Mitchell in the Kalela Dance (1956). One of the reasons for this silence is related to the trilogy researchers’ understanding of processes of cultural transmission. The assumption that seems to underpin the project as a whole is that the transmission of culture essentially occurred as a domestic intergenerational process, through socialisation, where learned behaviour was passed on from one generation to the next in situations of social intimacy. As a result it is perhaps not surprising that domestic groups and their local equivalents – the migrants’ intanga (age-mate), domestic and iseti (derived from the English ‘set’) beer-drinking groups – emerged as the primary focus of analysis. This belief that the domestic domain was the critical and formative locale for the analysis of cultural transmission in East London’s politically unstable locations was clearly central to the spatial strategies the Mayers and their colleagues adopted as fieldworkers. It is indicated by the extent to which the trilogy’s ethnographers confined themselves to the relative safety of peoples’ homes and yards. Such spatial confinement blunted their sensitivity to developments beyond the house, and especially to the changing cultural dynamics on the streets, in the dance halls and in other public spaces. By the same token, one of the main reasons for the comprehensiveness of the Mayers’

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own account of amaqaba11 cultural forms and of Pauw’s detailed account of the social dynamics of the matrifocal household was that these forms were largely contained within the spaces of East Bank homes. In the case of the amaqaba migrants, the social stigma they carried in the location meant that they felt safest in their rooms and yards, where they communed with home mates (abakhaya). In the case of Pauw’s (1973 [1963]: 141–65) account of matrifocality, the situation was a little more complicated because single mothers (amakazana) often exerted considerable power and influence on the streets and in their neighbourhoods. The active involvement of these single, unmarried women in public life was seen in the fact that many of them ran businesses and were actively involved in public and political protests during the 1950s (Mager and Minkley 1993). It is surprising that Pauw makes no mention of these public roles. One way of explaining Pauw’s rather narrow ethnographic focus is to return to the project’s evaluation of the domestic arena as the primary site of cultural production and transmission. By his own admission, he spent little time attending public events, visiting shebeens, or standing around on street corners. The public roles, voices and agency of single women were therefore generally beyond the reach of his ‘field’. This contrast between the largely home-focused fieldwork strategy of the Xhosa in Town researchers and the RLI researchers’ strong focus on the urban public and political sphere is interesting and clearly requires more careful attention than I have space for here. One of the reasons that Philip Mayer shied away from the public sphere and the political was also because he was more influenced by Meyer Fortes and Monica Wilson, with their concern with institutions, social group formation and domestic cycles, than by Max Gluckman, with his penchant for social change and ‘situational analysis’. But it should also be noted that South African townships such as the East Bank in East London, Cato Manor in Durban or Alexandra in Johannesburg were very different places to mining towns on the Copperbelt, where Mitchell and Epstein worked (Schumaker 2001: 176–80). They had complex and particular internal residential ecologies in which migrants and permanently urbanised families lived cheek by jowl on the same residential sites. In many areas like the East Bank location, the space of the yard, which usually contained a main house and several outbuildings, appeared as a natural unit of analysis, a fairly clearly demarcated physical and social space. The spatial layout and social syntax of old locations like the East Bank drew researchers into what appeared to them to be the relatively enclosed world of the house and the backyard. In compounds and townships, like Luanshya in the Copperbelt, there was a different socio-spatial dynamic and this left its mark on the way fieldwork was undertaken there.12 Moreover, it was clear that Mitchell had more flair for statistics and sociological survey techniques on the Copperbelt than Philip Mayer ever had in East London, and this might also account for differences in approach (Hannerz 1980: 119–63).

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Spatial Circuits and Street Styles How might a different spatial strategy have led the Mayers and their colleagues to different kinds of conclusions? In this section I explore this issue by attempting to trace the circuits of connection between the house and other more public spaces such as the street, the verandah, the dance hall, and beyond. Let me begin with the street. The streets of the old East Bank location were created at the turn of the twentieth century as wide public thoroughfares associated with neatly fenced-off residential sites. As the population of the location increased, people spilled out of their overcrowded houses and the streets emerged as important sites of public interaction and everyday community life. They became places of recreation, sites of contested identities and reputations. The process whereby East Bank’s residents claimed the streets was slow and geographically varied. As the location grew, new streets were added, some outside the original grid pattern, making them and their associated neighbourhoods relatively invisible to the purview of officials. Areas like ‘Gomorrah’ and ‘New Brighton’ became infamous for their drinking houses, tsotsi gangs and prostitution, as well as for the absence of any official presence, as did Camp and Ndende Streets. But it was not just everyday occupation of the streets that occurred. In some areas, older public thoroughfares had been blocked off and the spatial layout changed with time. Ronnie Meinie recalled: As it became very overcrowded, people had nowhere to build extensions to their properties, and this sometimes led them to build into the streets. You really had to know your way around, because some streets just came to a dead-end because people had built houses and rooms across them. In my case, you had to know that you couldn’t get to Coot Street from Fredrick Street, where I lived, because there were dwellings in the way. It was like this all over. I remember clearly during the 1952 riots when we were running away from the police, how we would use these dead-ends and detours to trick them. We knew that they would not be able to get vehicles through in certain places and darted for those streets where the police would be trapped and have to turn back. This is how we played cat and mouse with them.13 The state’s loss of control of the streets was one of the main reasons why white local officials increasingly insisted, from the 1930s, that the location be demolished. Many former East bank residents said that, if rural migrants exercised some influence on the streets in the East Bank in the 1930s, times had changed by the 1950s. The city had experienced sustained economic growth and the size of the urban working class had grown. The war effort had broadened people’s horizons and growing talk of independence and an end to colonialism brought a new mood. There was more money around and a strong desire to engage with the ‘world out there’. As rural styles were pushed out of view into the

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backyards, the tsotsis, the so-called oolaytis and the oobrightys, took over the streets, together with a range of other urban interest groups. Mr Pule Twaku recalls that it was now increasingly difficult for conservative rural migrants to move around freely. ‘We would spot them a mile off just by looking at the way they walked, at the awkward fit of their jackets, at the way they wore their trousers and at their shoes. We could see they had no style; that they were outsiders.’ Twaku explained that these country bumpkins (imixhaka) were now mercilessly preyed on by the tsotsis, who were quick to relieve them of their cash and possessions. But in the 1950s there were not only tsotsis on the streets. There was a new outlook – everyone was experimenting with fashion and styles. It all started in the tearooms and on the verandahs, where people would listen to the radio and read magazines like Drum and Zonk, and at the cinema where American movies played all week. The youth would copy the imported styles, adapt them and put them on display on the streets and at the dance hall, where on Saturday night everyone was ‘dressed up to the nines’. ‘Dressing up became a big thing’, Mrs Vuyelwa Makatala said. There was always talk about what was new in the shops on Oxford Street. Many of us bought outfits from ‘La Continental’, a fashion shop, which had good Italian gear in the North End. Some of the older men would not buy off the shelf. They preferred to have their suits made up by a tailor, of which they were many in the location and the North End. For men, Panama hats and light Palm Beach suits became very popular after the war. But soon the darker Christies ‘rollaway’ 16-gallon hats, the doubled breasted suits, neckties and Italian shoes came in. The ladies would wear brown golf shoes, stockings, shiny knee-length dresses, and white blouses, often with a colourful cardigan. The new youth styles were on display in the tearooms as well as the streets. Young men would also sit for hours polishing their shoes and chatting on the verandah. Mrs Irene Moyake recalled that: For the ladies, Saturday was always a busy day. Sometimes we would change three times. First, to do some housework, then to go out to the sports fields to watch rugby or soccer, and then into our evening dresses for the Peacock Hall. Even on Sundays. We would dress up for church and then get ready for social get-togethers in the afternoon. There was competitiveness about dressing and style-making at that time. Everyone wanted to look good, especially in styles. The ultimate symbol of modernity in the location was the automobile, especially big American cars. Even the tsotsis, the unkempt street ruffians of the 1930s, began to embrace the quest for style in the 1950s. They no longer just wore a checked cap, a rough blazer and a pair of stovepipes. They too experimented with new outfits. Mr Pule Twaku recalls how two of the most famous tsotsi groups honed their styles in the 1950s:

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The Vikings suddenly became very style-conscious. They would wear Oxford bags and two-tone shoes. They also took to wearing caps with the peak cut off and baggy Italian style jackets, gathered up at the waist. The Italians, by contrast, wore tight-fitting stove pipes, Embassy jackets and Crockett and Jones shoes. The other brands of shoes they liked were Saxones and Freemans. They also wore button-down shirts and sometimes carnations in the lapels of their jackets. The most distinctive feature of the Italians, however, was the way they modified their shoes. In order to make them look long, sleek and sharp, they used to cut off the heels so that the toes would point up in the air. On Saturday nights, the gangs would gather at the dance hall and social events. They were no longer ruffians. They were ‘dressed to kill’. I remember watching in trepidation, as they gathered on opposite sides of the halls. When both gangs gathered in numbers there was sure to be trouble. It often started as an argument about a lady.

Photo 2.1  Tearoom styles and the Italian street look Source: Photo by Daniel Morolong.

In the midst of the infatuation with American styles and the increasingly visible tsotsi street cultures, there were a few individuals who stood out above the rest. The most famous of these was the flamboyant Peter Ray

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Nassua, a trade unionist who claimed to be related to the great Industrial and Commercial Workers Union (ICU) leader, Clements Kadalie. He claimed to be an American, but locals said he came from Johannesburg. He was a trickster who lived by his wits. In the East Bank, he made more impact with his stylish dress than his union work. In fact, Peter Ray came to epitomise the flamboyance of the American style. He wore Al Capone black and white suits with two-tone shoes and a necktie. He drove a black Daimler with his name inscribed on the side and had his own chauffeur wearing a white suit. To complete his image, he employed a bodyguard, called ‘Ngonyama’, who would look out for him and fight his battles on the streets. Reverend Thozamile Hopa recalled: I remember this guy in town. He would always come strutting along with his whippet dog on a lead. He liked to cross Oxford Street at the OK Bazaars and walk over to the Netherlands Bank, swaggering in his iron-tipped shoes and his Texan tie. Ordinary people were so impressed with him that they would sometimes clap as he crossed the road. He loved that! And Mbuti Adonisi explained: Peter Ray liked to drive his car around the location, leaning out of the window and greeting people as he went. He would often suddenly stop the car and get the children to push it to the ICU hall. When they reached the hall, he would reach into his pocket and toss a few coins for them. There were other more sinister characters on the streets. One such individual was Bortjies from Ndende Street. Bortjies father died when he was young. He was brought up by his mother. He was always stylishly dressed in an Italian suit. At night he worked as a dancer at the Moonglow nightclub in the location. He was also a part-time musician. Bortjies thought of himself as the king of Ndende Street. He was a tough guy whom everyone feared and he was regularly involved in fights on the street. The Verandah and Beyond In connecting the space of the street to that of the house, the intermediate, almost liminal space of the verandah proved to be a critical conduit for transactions. The verandah constituted a sort of social membrane between street and house, between public exterior and private interior. In many East Bank houses the front rooms were blocked off from the street by heavy drapes, while the front door was left open to allow access to the house’s main living rooms. One reason for shutting off the street was that residents did not want officials surveying their house interiors from outside. With police raids a regular occurrence and families often harbouring ‘illegals’, either as tenants or visitors, it was inadvisable for a house’s interior to be visible from without. The verandah thus became a space from which threats of raids

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and official surveillance could be monitored. Shouts of kobomvu (literally, ‘It is red’) hailed out from the slightly elevated verandahs warned people of impending police patrols. The warnings were not only to assist the queens of larger shebeens and urban ‘illegals’, they were also important for ordinary townsmen and women travelling without one of the multitude of documents required by the state. The verandah, usually above street level, was also a space from which women made their presence felt. The East Bank’s verandahs can in some ways be likened to the Dutch window, which (according to Cieraad 1999) allowed women, who were expected to remain indoors and attend to domestic pursuits, to extend their gaze and influence onto the street.14 In the East Bank, where female domesticity was not as spatially confined and women were generally more visible on the streets, the verandah proved to be an important site from which women could command a hearing on the street. One former East Bank resident explained: Women were always on the verandahs, chatting and going about their business, but their eyes were on the street watching everything that was happening. They were always the first to know if a stranger was hanging around or whether something significant had happened.15 Other ex-residents remarked on how women would lean over the verandah and communicate with people on the street – other women or children at whom they were shouting. Washing clothes on the verandah allowed East Bank mothers and matriarchs to exercise surveillance of the street while pursuing their domestic chores. We were told that it was common practice in some areas that, every morning before they had left for school, the children of the house would collect two tubs of water, one for washing and one for rinsing, and leave them on the verandah for their mothers. It was also their job to dispose of the dirty water when they returned from school. The verandah was also a space from which urban mothers and matriarchs created solidarities and extended their influence beyond the home. It was from here that independent women solicited migrants and lured men into their drinking houses. They used the verandah as a relatively secure, albeit liminal, space from which to comment on, criticise and engage the street without having to occupy it physically. The verandah was also a space from which women could quickly disappear when threatened. It allowed them to be simultaneously on and off the street. Occupying the verandah was a statement of wanting to develop a street profile and presence. The verandah was, therefore, a critical conduit in allowing women to exert a presence on the street and escape the confines of the house. But the verandah was a contested space too. Men and youths found they had to compete with women for the right to be there. Youths liked to sit on the verandah smoking and chatting. New musical groups even practised on the verandahs of houses, using them as a testing ground for artists with ambitions of making it to the Peacock Hall or the Community Centre.

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Behind each house’s verandah lay its more private space, not readily seen from the street. Despite the use of drapes to hide the interior of a home, the sharp distinction between the house and the street, between the private and the public (as noted by authors such as Cieraad in her account of nineteenth-century Dutch life), was not so very evident in the East Bank, where overcrowding limited the capacity of households for privacy. Many wood-and-iron houses were extended by building backrooms to accommodate tenants. In some cases backrooms were allocated to extended family members, but more often than not they were rented to migrants for extra cash. Township rentals were high and proved to be a good source of income. The physical location of migrants in these backrooms, with their activities spilling out into the yards, created a distinction in many houses between the front and back sections. The distinction between migrants and townsmen in the East Bank of the 1950s was thus often a distinction between front rooms and backrooms – house owners generally used front rooms, while migrants lived in backyards. Backroom living was always more acceptable for migrants than living on the street fronts. As the Mayers describe, it was in those yards where migrants gathered to socialise over weekends and iseti beer-drinking sessions took place (Mayer with Mayer 1971 [1961]: 111–24). The other key circuit of public power and cultural exchange was one that connected the community halls, sports grounds and other recreational areas to the street. Productions of regular musical, dance, sports and entertainment events at places like the Peacock Hall, the Community Centre and the Rubusana Sports Grounds made these important sites for cultural production and performance. They emerged as defining spaces in the construction of cosmopolitan styles, fashions and an East Bank economy of prestige. The latest fashions and styles were displayed there, and people from the East Bank, West Bank and North End socialised and engaged in processes of competitive style-making. Rubusana Park and the Peacock Hall were particularly significant, the former because it was the city’s major sports venue for blacks, the latter because it was the main live music venue for East Bank, West Bank and North End residents. Given the limited access location residents had to public space in the white city, they made the most of their segregated public facilities by hosting a wide range of events that drew massive popular support. One former East Bank resident remarked, ‘If you wanted to hire the Peacock Hall you would often have to wait more than a year for a booking.’16 The venues’ annual calendars were full of public events and carnivals: Santa Day, the Bat Fair, the Hobo Show, Mfengu Day, music concerts, fetes, ballroom and other dancing competitions, and sports tournaments. Rugby was the main sports activity and there were many teams such as Swallows RFC, Winter Roses, Black Lions, Storm Breakers, Bushbucks, Tembu United, Early Roses, Busy Bees and the Boiling Waters (Ayabila), each with its own following. Great excitement marked meetings of rival teams. The cultural exchanges and interactions at these events were critical to the way East London’s cosmopolitan styles were made. Other spaces outside the township, such as the beach, the city centre, the West Bank racetrack and

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Photo 2.2  Crowds gather to watch rugby at Rubusana Park in the 1950s Source: Photo by Daniel Morolong.

elsewhere, also became focal points for socialising and style-making, with the swimwear displayed at fashion shows and beauty pageants in the locations being paraded there in public. As Mrs Majavu explained: The thing that made the beach such a wonderful place for us was that it was out of the location. It was not cramped. There was open space, clean air and the sea all around. The beach was especially popular on Sundays after church when we used to pack a picnic and go down there for the day. It was really great fun. It gave the young guys a chance to check out the girls and for people to meet old friends and socialise … You can imagine what a shock it was when the apartheid signs went up: ‘Whites Only – Net Blankes’.17 Analysing such events, Arjun Appadurai (1986) coined the term ‘tournaments of value’. Using the classic anthropological example of exchanges of prestige goods in the Trobriand kula rings, Appadurai suggests that tournaments of value be seen as ‘complex periodic events that are removed in some culturally defined way from the routines of economic life’ (1996: 21). He argues that they contain a ‘cultural diacritic of their own’ and are involved not only with the quest for status, rank, fame and reputation among different actors, but the disposition of the central tokens of value in a given society (1996: 21). This is seemingly how the sports, dance, music, beach or cinematic events were constituted in the East Bank during the 1950s. They created an air of expectation and exhilaration, especially when top local bands like the Bright Fives, the African Quavers, the Bowery Boys, the Havana Hotshots or one of

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Photo 2.3 Sunglasses and smiles, Eastern Beach. The motor vehicle is the centrepiece of this group shot of a beach visit. Its East London number plate is clearly legible, along with a lock and chain dangling above. While clearly posed, there is still a naturalism about the group, evident in their postures and facial expressions, as well as an air of easy intermingling between young men and young women. Source: Photo by Daniel Morolong.

many other local bands was performing. As new styles and influences came into circulation in the dance hall, for example, so they found their way onto the streets through imitation and alteration. Appadurai uses the concept ‘diversions’ to explore the ways that the politics of value is domesticated, appropriated and altered to carve its way along different paths of value and meaning. This concept is useful for trying to make sense of how the dance hall, the beach and sports stadiums were connected and reconnected to the street and the house. It again invokes Hannerz’s (1987, 1992) notion of creolisation as a complex marriage of cultural flows and transactions between various spatially defined sites of cultural production, as well as between locations and wider cultural processes. Applying these ideas shows that the 1950s emergence of cosmopolitan styles in the East Bank was clearly more than a simple imitation of Western cultural forms. It necessarily involved an active process of cultural appropriation and reworking. As new fashions, styles and cultural forms went on display at these tournaments of value, so they were absorbed, appropriated and reworked to create new constellations of value and meaning for the streets (see Hansen 2000). The cultural circuits created between the streets and the dance hall enabled a constant process of appropriation, re-appropriation and transformation as cultural forms and styles moved back and forth, blending cosmopolitan and local elements along the way. One example of this was the way in which the tsotsi youth would focus their attention on the villains rather

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Photo 2.4  The Havana Hotshots perform at the Peacock Hall, 1955. The Havana Hotshots emerged out of a jazz group called the Cotton Planters Band, which had been established in the early 1930s. They were said to be the first major jazz band in East London locations. In March 1947, the Hotshots played at a beachfront hotel as part of the festivities organised in the city to welcome King George VI, Queen Elizabeth, and Princesses Elizabeth and Margaret to East London. In the 1950s, the Hotshots renamed themselves the Havana Hotshots in order to emphasise their connection with the international ‘dance craze’ and Cuban music. The latter also influenced African ballroom dancing. In the late 1950s, the Havana Hotshots added the rumba and the chachacha to their repertoire, and were one of a number of groups, such as the Cuban Stars from North End, who drew inspiration from political and musical developments in Cuba. Source: Photo by Daniel Morolong.

than the heroes they encountered in B-grade American movies and imitate and strut their styles on the streets. As Pule Twaku explained: We were always watching out for something new, where the style was going. Like when the Vikings came first to the Peacock Hall in their gangster style. Suddenly, everyone was checking them out and it was not long before other youths on the streets were trying to imitate them. The same happened with the Panama hats … it was a fashion for a time, then people got tired of it and looked for something new.18 Conclusion Homi Bhabha (1994) famously argued that mimicry has an ambiguous presence in the cultural politics of colonialism. At one level, colonial rulers explicitly aimed to ‘civilise’ their subjects and to mould them in the image of Europeans. Natives, who became ‘missionised’ and ‘modernised’, were part of

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the colonial plan. But, at the same time, colonial imitation always threatened to become excessive and uncontrolled, and thereby to unsettle the boundaries and relations of authority between settler and native on which the colonial order depended. The uncanny presence of the ‘civilised native’ thus destabilised colonial identities and presented a spectre that haunted the colonial subject. Bhabha asks: What happened when the native became too civilised? What if mimicry was really parody? When did respectful imitation give way to cheeky back talk? Thus he argues that mimicry locates ‘a crack in the certainty of colonial/racial dominance’ (1994: 55). It is ‘at once resemblance and menace’ (1994: 55). The narratives and photographs represented above constitute such ‘cracks’, they are cracked at one level with white resemblance, but also with a menace, an alternative, a different modernity, imagined and lived with increasing confidence and verve in the East Bank of the 1950s. In this context, the youth of the East Bank, in particular, became ‘inappropriate colonial and racial subjects’ who disturbed the normality of dominant discourse. In the next chapter we will explore in greater detail what came of this disturbance politically. The main aim of this chapter has been to highlight the power, social presence and pervasiveness of local engagements with cosmopolitan styles and orientations in the East Bank in the late 1940s and 1950s. There is a sense in which this engagement was part of a much larger, trans-regional story of post-world war political and social optimism in urban Africa, as the continent started on the road to decolonisation that would lead eventually to political independence and rapid upward social mobility for African urban elites. But the transatlantic influence of black America and the associated consumerist impulses were especially powerfully felt in South Africa because of the relatively high level of industrialisation in the society and the emergence of a large black working class, in circumstances not unlike those in industrial cities in America (see Chapter 9). In East London, the number of manufacturing plants skyrocketed from 135 in 1946 to 228 in 1958 and this increased employment levels in the location. The high quality of mission education for blacks in the Eastern Cape also contributed to the capacity of location youth in this region to engage in cosmopolitan pursuits and parodies with such intensity. Besides the very distinguished Welsh High School in the East Bank, there was a host of excellent African mission schools in the hinterland of East London. They included Healdtown, Lovedale and St Matthew’s, as well as the famous Fort Hare University College in Alice. These educational resources and networks had a profound impact on the level of cultural and social sophistication among Africans in the city. In exploring how cultural appropriation occurred, the concept of mimesis is certainly relevant here, which means to ‘to get hold of something by means of its likeness’. It can be a way in which colonised people appropriate power, probe the modern state, represent themselves and others. Appropriation is always translation and thus representation. Mimesis is therefore central to auto-ethnographic production. In the space of cross-cultural encounters, mimetic appropriation inevitably occurs. Turino (2000: 8–9) argues that:

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Within my framework, the major break comes when local people deeply internalise foreign ideas and practices and make them their own; that is, foreign dispositions become deeply constitutive of local habitus … It is crucial to understand that once thus socialised, such individuals are not simply imitating foreign activities and thinking foreign thoughts when they go to ballroom dancing, take part in nationalist movements or contemplate Jesus. Rather they are acting and thinking from their own cultural position – this is part of who they are. In the East Bank, as we learnt from the ethnography of Hunter in the 1930s, local people had begun to internalise foreign ideas dispositions and styles long before the 1950s. By the mid 1950s, when the trilogy researchers arrived in the location, local engagement with cosmopolitan styles and cultural forms had greatly intensified and the latter were a critical part of the local urban habitus, as well as the struggle for power and recognition in the city. I have argued that the failure of the trilogy studies to acknowledge and reflect on the intensity and extent of local-level involvement with transnational social and cultural influences and their political implications is a major weakness of this work. Unlike others who have commented on the trilogy, I have not focused here on the political and theoretical motives of the authors for this omission as much as their method. I have suggested that the Xhosa in Town studies were all essentially ‘home-made ethnographies’, in the sense that the bulk of the fieldwork and interviews took place inside or around the space of the home. Philip Mayer clearly believed that a strong focus on the domestic domain would provide key insights into the cultural dynamics of urbanisation in East London. What the Mayers failed to explore was that the space of the house, the rented room and yard figured differently in the social lives and cultural experiences of different categories of urban dwellers in the East Bank. In the case of migrants, especially the frugal Reds, the space of the rented room and the yards formed a primary node of socialising, drinking and relaxation. If the rented room and backyard were focal points of migrant social lives in the city, this was certainly not the case for the majority of urban-born and School youth, who preferred to socialise on the verandah, on street corners, in local shebeens, dance halls and tearooms. Given the social profile of the ‘borners’ and the physical location of their preferred leisure activities, it is difficult to understand why Pauw used household surveys and family histories as the basis of his analysis of the cultural orientation of the so-called ‘second generation’. Compared with the rich and detailed ethnography of migrant lives found in Townsmen or Tribesmen (Mayer with Mayer 1971 [1961], Pauw’s work appears ethnographically thin and unconvincing. The problem for Pauw was that so much of what he needed to see and experience in order to develop a fuller analysis of urban cultural life among the ‘second generation’ and School youth was simply not visible to him. In order to tap into the dynamics of non-migrant lifestyles and identities, offering the same level of

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ethnographic detail and insight as Townsmen and Tribesmen, he would have had to adopt a very different fieldwork strategy: one that engaged with extradomestic spaces. I have also suggested that, had Pauw and Mayer adopted a less domestically focused approach, they might have arrived at different conclusions, especially in relation to the power and influence of cosmopolitan cultural styles in the location.

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3 Modernism, Space and Identity

Modernist planners became thieves of memory. Faustian in their eagerness to erase all traces of the past in the interest of forward momentum, of growth in the name of progress, their drive-by windscreen surveys of neighbourhoods that they have already decided to condemn to the bulldozer have been, in their own way, as deadly as the recent drive-by gang shootings in Los Angeles. Modernist planners embracing the ideology of development as progress have killed whole communities by evicting them, demolishing their houses, and dispersing them to edge suburbs or leaving them homeless. They have killed whole communities by not understanding the loss and grieving that go along with losing one’s home and neighbourhood and friends and memories. (Sandercock 1998: 208)

In 1952 the East Bank location, the largest black residential area in the coastal city of East London, was torn apart by political violence. This erupted on Sunday 9 November 1952, when 1,500 residents from the city’s locations came to a mass meeting at Bantu Square in the East Bank. The meeting took place under the banner of the ANC and followed in the wake of rioting in Port Elizabeth and Kimberley and of numerous arrests of Eastern Cape political leaders (Mager and Minkley 1993: 229). The police were expecting trouble and had brought in truckloads of reinforcements for the weekend. According to former East Bank residents, the troops gathered at the old police station on the hill overlooking the adjoining Tsolo section, where they relaxed on the lawns at the station under an old fig tree, playing boeremusiek (Afrikaans folk music), talking and eating biltong (dried meat).1 When the crowd gathered for the Sunday meeting, the troops marched down the hill into Bantu Square and ordered the crowd to disperse. The crowd refused to move and police opened fire on them with Sten guns, revolvers and rifles. Chaos ensued. The crowd dispersed hysterically as the police pursued individuals and groups around the location, firing at random up and down alleys and in between streets and houses. The police struggled to keep track of youths as they darted in between wood-and-iron shacks and lured police into blind alleys, where they beat them with sticks and stones. Street battles raged throughout the afternoon. By nightfall, when the police withdrew from the East Bank location, nine people had been killed and scores of others were injured. Among the dead was Dr Elsie Quinlan (Sister Aidan), a Roman Catholic nun who had lived and worked in the East Bank. During the night the youths and political activists went on the rampage, looting and burning down church property, community halls, business premises and government installations. In the mopping-up operations that followed this night of destruction, the police made hundreds of arrests and deported thousands of ‘undesirable youths’ 60

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who were believed to be responsible for the trouble. Many single women were also sent away to the rural areas. In the court cases that were brought against members of the East Bank community, 15 people were charged with the murder of Dr Quinlan: five were convicted and two were hanged, while hundreds of youths and other activists were jailed and detained for public violence.2 The riots of 1952 proved to be a decisive turning point in the history of the East Bank location. They marked the beginning of a new regime of planning in the city and the end of the era of ‘location management by neglect’ for the people of the East Bank, who by 1950 numbered over 50,000. Prior to the 1950s, the white authorities had viewed the locations of East London as a necessary but an undesirable part of the city. The white East London city council’s attitude was one of neglect and containment (Atkinson 1991; Nel 1990; Tankard 1990). It aimed to spend as little money as possible on the locations, which continued to grow rapidly through the 1930s and 1940s. By the mid 1950s, a range of new schemes had been proposed by the city council to de-densify or demolish the old locations by creating residential options on undeveloped land in and around the city. This debate was eventually resolved in favour of mass forced relocations of all ‘surplus’ Africans out of East London into the new Ciskei township of Mdantsane, which was to be built 25 km outside the city (see Atkinson 1991; Nel 1990). Between the early 1960s and late 1970s, over 8,000 families were relocated out of the old locations of the East Bank and West Bank in East London, the majority of whom were resettled in Mdantsane. This chapter reflects on the forced removals of the 1960s and 1970s and explores the social and cultural consequences of urban restructuring in the city during this period. I begin by exploring the social and political impact of the 1952 riots on the politics of urban restructuring. I suggest that the events of ‘Black Sunday’ proved to be the catalyst for a new style of confrontational local identity politics and paved the way for the introduction of a ‘racial modernism’ in the city, which used housing as the primary means for ‘norming and forming’ of new African subjectivities in East London. In the chapter, I use the event of Black Sunday as a social drama, or extended case study, to reveal shifts in the urban political imagination and in the structure of power and control in the city. Clifton Crais (2002) has recently noted that to better understand colonialism and apartheid, we should move beyond common-sense notions of struggle, of resistance and collaboration and the formalities of political ideologies and organisation. Instead, he argues that we need to realise the power of the ‘cultural politics of the encounters’. In his view, it is critical events and encounters, as much as longer-term processes of change, that have provoked new forms of consciousness and political imagination in South Africa, and have challenged accepted ideas of progress and development. The events of 9 November 1952 at Bantu Square in East London constituted a decisive moment of change in the history of the city and the region. This chapter seeks to explain why this is so, and what forms new regimes of power took in the city.

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In the second part of the chapter I explore the consequences of these changes for the residents of the East Bank location, which, by the 1960s, was being rapidly restructured into a modern apartheid township, now called Duncan Village. In the early 1970s, the publishers of the trilogy encouraged Mayer and his colleagues to go back into the field in East London to update their volumes, reflecting the impact of apartheid policy changes. Both Mayers and Pauw returned to East London in 1971 and 1972, but this time they did not visit the East Bank. They focused instead on the new satellite township of Mdantsane in the burgeoning Ciskei homeland, which had become the main destination for apartheid forced removals from the city. It was here that the Mayers and Pauw found that Red and School migrant subcultures had faded away, as older networks were broken up by relocation and the old sense of community in the East Bank had disappeared. What was missing from this account, however, was any analysis of what happened to those who remained behind in the city. While thousands of families were relocated out of the East Bank, to rural and urban areas in the Ciskei and Transkei, approximately half of those in the old locations were rehoused in the city, either in migrant hostels or in the new sprawling township of Duncan Village (extension). There were also hundreds of families settled in one-roomed transit houses on the fringes of the old location (called C-section). Many of these families were never transferred out of the city and, over time, the transit housing area became a permanent feature of the urban ecology of Duncan Village township. The primary aim of the chapter is to assess continuities and change in cultural styles and social life in Duncan Village as residents and migrants from the old East Bank location were shuffled around and rehoused in the new township complex. One of main questions I ask in the chapter is whether the new township spatial regime, which aimed to re-engineer urban African identities and subjectivities, managed to undermine older identities, networks and social patterns? Did the new space/power regime of the apartheid township ‘norm and form’ African subjectivities and orientations in the city, or did local resistance ensure fundamental continuities in social and cultural life? I argue that there was much more continuity with older social patterns in Duncan Village than was the case in Mdanstane, investigated by the Mayers and Pauw in the early 1970s, but there were also significant and fundamental changes in street and home life that ushered in a new era of urban identity politics. East London’s Mau Mau and the Politics of Dead Bodies To understand the transition from pre-war to post-war regimes of urban governance for Africans in South Africa, Belinda Bozzoli (2004) has suggested that this period witnessed a shift from what she calls ‘welfare paternalism’ to ‘racial modernism’. Bozzoli (2004) notes that the old urban locations of the first five decades of the century were usually spatially ordered around a central square into which most roads led, and were designed to accommodate families in small detached houses, set back from the street on plots of land – or ‘stands’ as they were called – with space for a front and back garden. Most

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townships had their own officials and superintendents who often lived within the location grounds ‘amidst a cluster of location offices’. This close social and physical proximity allowed administrators to keep close connections with ‘stand holders’, especially with the Christianised, black educated elites that emerged in the towns during the inter-war years. In this context, Bozzoli (2004: 45) argues that administrators tended to govern by ‘exception’ rather than by strict reference to the rules. Location supervisors often adopted a paternalist ethos, which was overlaid in many instances by a complex web of formal and informal social links. Using the Alexandra location in Johannesburg as her model, Bozzoli goes on to argue that the racial paternalism that came to dominate this period was accompanied by an element of ‘welfarism’, which ensured that the township poor were able to survive. She points out that the city council provided subsidies for houses to be built and channelled the profits from beer halls into the townships to keep rents down. This modest welfarism, she argues, was in a sense necessary for the social reproduction of the expanding urban working class. The paternalist ethos that was evident in Alexandra in the inter-war years was replicated to some extent in East London, where the native administration block in the location was known as ‘Kwa-Lloyd’ after the first administrator of the location. Middle-class residents of the location and municipal officials were known to have a close inter-relationship and worked together on the Location Advisory Committee. But, despite some cooperation and the generosity of churches and liberal do-gooders, living conditions in the location were appalling. Infant mortality rates were extremely high and the municipality only provided on 60 standpipes for over 20,000 residents. The council also consistently voted for more investment in white suburban areas at the expense of delivering even the most basic services in the locations. In the East London locations, there appeared to be plenty of well-intentioned paternalism and not much genuine welfare assistance. It is in this context that the events of November 1952 had such a profound effect on race relations in the city. The political profile of the (ANC) Defiance Campaign meeting at Bantu Square on 9 November was such that police and army reinforcements were bussed in from Bloemfontein. The events of that day are well documented. After the police and troops had opened fire on the crowd, pandemonium broke loose in the location. Eyewitnesses recall that after the warning was given to the crowd to disperse, some youths at the fringes of the square threw stones at the police, others started singing freedom songs. This heightened the fear and tension, and the senior officer ordered the troops and police to open fire. The intense violence of the police produced extraordinary counter-violence from crowds on the streets, who torched and destroyed community halls and administration blocks in a frenzy of anger, which lasted through the night. In the first volume of the trilogy, where Reader (1960) sets out a history of the old locations, several pages are devoted to the 1952 riots. He stresses the intensity of the violence, claiming that it was almost as if ‘the passion which had lain dormant since the Frontier Wars flamed up on that day’ (1960: 28). He suggests that the township youth,

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in particular, exploded into a ‘frenzy of bitterness’ and struck everything in their path with an ‘an ecstasy of abandon, with no property, no future, no employment, nothing to lose save their seemingly worthless lives’ (1960: 28). One of the acts of violence to which Reader refers, but which he does not fully explain, was the murder of a Roman Catholic nun, who lived and worked in the location, at about three o’clock on the afternoon of the riots. She was one of two whites killed on that day. The other was a salesman, who, like her, drove into an angry crowd and was stoned to death. But it is the story of Sister Aidan, the innocent Catholic nun, which captured the imagination of the media and white population of the city. The horrific details of the nun’s death, which circulated quickly, have received surprisingly little attention in the existing historical accounts of the events of Black Sunday (Lodge 1983; Mager and Minkley 1993). A recent biography of the renowned apartheid policemen, Donald Card, who investigated the nun’s murder, has revealed shocking details. Card suggests that, as Sister Aidan turned into Bantu Street in her black Austin, she was confronted by an angry mob coming up the road from Bantu Square. Card claims that the crowd started stoning the car, smashing the windows and striking the nun, who had now assumed a crouched position as if praying. Two young men broke ranks with the rest of the crowd and lurched into the vehicle, stabbing the nun several times. Several blows were also delivered with a kierie (a stick) to her forehead, before the car was set alight. Her body was then dragged from the smouldering car and set upon by the crowd. He goes on to reveal the following details: When it [the car] has cooled down slightly, the burnt body of Sister Quinlan [Aidan] was dragged out and the people started cutting pieces of her flesh off the body and ate the flesh. Witnesses described how people walked down the street eating her flesh, with blood running down over their chins. The remains of the body were collected by the police at about 6 pm (on Sunday the 9th) that evening and all that remained of her was her torso. The arms had been removed from the elbow down and the legs were missing up to the hips … stories told by some of those who ate the flesh stated that they did it to gain strength and power. Several pieces of flesh taken from the body and not eaten were found hidden in homes in the township. (Donald Card quoted in Thomas 2007: 37) In the days after the event, the cannibalism of the crowd was highlighted in the local press, leading some township residents, especially the middle-class elements in the ANC to distance themselves and the organisation from the actions of the ‘unruly youths’. Local clerics also expressed moral outrage at the ‘barbaric actions’ of their fellow township residents, who had consumed the nun’s body. Details of the mutilation and eating of the nun’s body circulated quickly around East London both within the suburbs and within the white administration. The timing of the riot was significant. It occurred only a month after disturbing reports of similar violence in the Mau Mau rebellion in Kenya had

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begun to appear in the local papers on a regular basis. Stories of the murder of white settler farmers and the alleged rites and rituals of the oath-taking ceremonies of Kikuyu Mau Mau warriors had filtered through in the local press. According to local sources, the Mau Mau had become a hot topic of conversation among whites in East London. According to one informant I interviewed from the leafy middle-class suburbs of East London: there seemed to be eerie connection in our minds between what we were hearing on the radio from Kenya, from the Mau Mau, and what was happening in our own backyard. The excessive violence and brutality of the Mau Mau murders, which were reported in the press, and the drinking of blood by Mau Mau warriors as they prepared for battle did not seem very far removed from what we had heard in the reports about Sister Aidan’s death. ‘The events of 9 November 1952’, she continued, ‘changed race relations and racial attitudes in East London.’ In the Kenyan context, recent research has shown just how quickly white attitudes towards blacks changed during the early 1950s as brutal farm murders and Mau Mau assaults on settlers became more common. In two recent books on the topic, Anderson (2005) and Elkins (2005) suggest that there was a definite shift from a benevolent colonial paternalism, which had characterised the 1930s and 1940s, to outright and aggressive racism. White settlers in Kenya argued that people who now behaved ‘like barbarians’ by indiscriminately murdering white settler farmers and Kikuyu who underwent primitive rites on initiation to prepare for battle could not expect to be treated with civility. They argued that one of the fundamental sentiments to emerge from within the white settler community at this time was the ‘sense of betrayal of trust’, as workers on farms left for the forests in their droves to join Mau Mau forces. Anderson writes: White Highlanders could only ‘understand’ this gross breach of trust [when former workers started to attack farms and murder settlers] if their African staff were in some way deemed to be possessed, or in the control of other forces. This led many whites to take refuge in the interpretation of the Mau Mau as a kind of illness, or even a disease. The mystification of the oath [which was taken by those joining Mau Mau] fed such anxieties: Kikuyu who had taken the oath were no longer in their right minds: they had been transformed and brutalised. The firm denial that Africans had any legitimate grievance against the way they were treated by settlers closed the door to any materialist or social explanations. (2005: 88) Elkins (2005: 97) suggests that the ‘cultural otherness’ of the Mau Mau ceremonies, which allegedly involved the ‘consumption of blood and other primitive rites’, was quickly used to justify the repressive actions of the colonial state against the Kikuyu rebels. The idea that blacks were no longer

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deserving of the goodwill of whites characterised settler responses to Mau Mau activism. In the Kenyan case, the gruesome murder of white farmers and the nature of Kikuyu oath ceremonies hardened racial attitudes. The consequence of these developments was that British settler attitudes towards Africans in Kenya changed quite radically during 1950s. The rounding up of Kikuyu into concentration camps, not dissimilar to those used for Jews in Nazi Garmany, has been dramatically revealed in the most recent research on the subject. One author calls the management of Mau Mau ‘Britain’s Gulag’ (Elkins 2005). The events of Black Sunday and murder of Sister Aidan had a similar impact on racial relations in East London. It was a defining moment in the city, not so much because a white woman had been murdered, but because of the way in which the crowds conducted themselves during the 1952 uprising and the way Sister Aidan was killed and her flesh consumed. In the local press, the cannibalism of the crowd overshadowed any fair and proper assessment of the extreme and clinical brutality of the police and army. In a recent article, Buur (2009) notes that mobs and their history are ‘about constant boundary setting and transgression’. Once the crowd-turned-mob forms, it tends to claim a political space and life of its own, claiming a sovereignty for itself and its unquestioned right to act for ‘the people’. Buur also notes that once the mob has acted, the state, government and political parties tend to reinforce their authority by representing the mob’s actions as ‘threatening and uncontrollable’, ‘wreaking havoc on the established order and the imagination of the majority’ (2009: 29). In much the same way as the colonial army and police force in Kenya suddenly changed tack after the gruesome murder of white settlers, so the local police force and township administration changed gear after the mob violence and riots of 1952. The violence was a catalyst for the creation of new political order in the city from the mid 1950s. The hardening of white attitudes towards the residents of the East Bank was reflected in many ways, but was clearly noted in the vociferous and outspoken objections by white residents to the extension of the new Duncan Village township in the 1950s. Since the 1930s, the municipality of East London had recognised that there was a need to extend the old location to address the housing shortage and upgrade the township. Very little came from these initiatives until 1950, when the municipality agreed to invest in a major new housing extension in the direction of the Amalinda suburb. After the 1952 riots, however, local objections to the proposed new scheme quickly gained momentum. Some white residents even wrote to the Minister of Native Affairs, claiming that they objected to the fact that the new township development would now become ‘visible from their areas’ and that they found this unacceptable. In 1955, the leaders of the Amalinda Residents’ Association flew to Pretoria for a hearing with the Minister of Native Affairs, at which he indicated to them that, as a result of their objections, it had been decided to extend the township in a south-westerly direction, away from the white suburbs and city. It is striking that a set of proposals that had had support

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from the white public in the city prior to 1952 were suddenly no longer so popular after the November riots (see Nel 1990). Middling Modernism in East London In trying to reconceptualise the spatial and social transformations associated with apartheid development in East London between the 1950s and the 1980s, I have found Rabinow’s (1989, 1995) concept of ‘middling modernism’ a useful starting point for analysis. Rabinow (1989) develops this idea from his analysis of French modernist urban planning in the inter-war years. He argues that the key departure of middling modernism is that it no longer focuses on ‘regulating and ameliorating a locale and its inhabitants, but rather on treating both as a matter to be formed and normed at will’ (1989: 345). It is no longer concerned with ‘the isolation and rectification of islands of pathology’ but instead with providing ‘a blueprint for the scientific administration of modern life’ (1989: 344). As the influential French modernist planner Louis Boulonnois explained, the aim of the exercise was ‘to bestow on the allotments a city plan (plan de ville) and, symmetrically, on assisted families a life plan (plan de vie)’ (in Rabinow 1989: 332). The intention is to create abstract sites where ‘all reference to older modes of life, to history, to the sedimented place of memory, and to sociability had been eliminated’, and where ‘the central point of the city had been reserved for public administration’ (1989: 358). According to Rabinow (1989, 1995), ‘middling modernism’ imposes itself from the outside as a universal grid placed onto an existing situation without taking cognisance of local conditions, values and practices, which are regarded as ‘beyond reform’. In this sense he sees it as different from other planning traditions, especially in the colonies, which aimed to work through pre-existing cultural, social and aesthetic institutions, spaces and meanings. ‘Middling modernist’ regimes, he insists, set out to ‘create New Men freed, purified and liberated to pursue new forms of sociality which would inevitably arise from correctly designed spaces and forms’ (Rabinow 1995: 60). For Rabinow (1995), ‘middling modernism’ is defined not only by its drive to eliminate pre-existing urban social forms and its quest for a new universal grid for modern life, but also by its emphasis on housing as the central locus for the interaction of macro- and micro-knowledge and powers. Unlike high modernism, with its focus on grand transformations in the public space of the city centre, Rabinow views middling modernism as working through housing as the main vehicle for social transformation, where the establishment of technical standards could be linked to a set of normalising criteria for usage. Referring again to French planners of the inter-war years, he notes: These norms of sociability were based on la famille normale moyenne, a stable and rational household. The norms not only classified families but also served as the basis of intervention to hasten their creation and stabilisation … Families who failed to qualify for housing were not definitively eliminated

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from the pool but, rather, offered the possibility of consulting with social workers and reapplying. Once they aligned their practices with those of the scientifically defined and selected normal community, they might qualify for housing. (1995: 76) In South Africa it appears that housing was similarly elevated in the restructuring of black residential areas in urban areas in the 1950s and 1960s. The new 51/9 and 51/6 house designs that became the blueprint for township redevelopment during this period were based on precisely these universal (Western) standards (Japha 1999; Mabin and Smit 1997). My assessment of the township model is that it is a hybrid, with some characteristics drawn from the welfare state in Europe, others from the American suburban model and yet others from authoritarian socialist urban planning regimes of the inter-war years. In her work on the American suburban project, Dolores Hayden (2003: 27) argues that ‘unlike every other affluent civilisation, Americans have idealised the house and the yard rather than the model of the neighbourhood’. She argues that greedy developers sold Americans short on the triple dream of ‘house, land and community’, by offering them tract houses with attached yards without proper services and infrastructure. She notes that the cost of building proper residential neighbourhoods was left to local citizens and taxpayers: Vast American suburbs of post-World War II were shaped by legislative processes reflecting the power of the real estate, banking and construction sectors, and the relative weakness of the planning and design professions … Developers of the ‘sitcom suburbs’ insisted that mass producing two and three bed-roomed houses was not just one way, but the only way to house the nation. However badly they were built, however lonely their location, these new houses and raw neighbourhoods could always be upgraded. And this is what residents did pouring time and money into creating school, civic organisation and town committees to make public improvements and generate a sense of community. Year after year, American women, even more than men, dedicated their energies to these volunteer campaigns. The township was based on a similar model, except that it was the apartheid state rather than private developers that built and owned the standardised family housing, then left the new inhabitants of these houses with sub-standard services and no political rights to claim improved services. In America local citizens successfully petitioned the local and federal state to provide the social services and infrastructure that profit-seeking real estate capitalists were not prepared to invest in their neighbourhoods. One of the great myths of the American suburb is that it is a triumph of private capitalism when, in fact, its success was largely predicated on massive state investment in roads, schools and other infrastructure. On the other hand, I would argue that the township model has a lot in common with some features of socialist urban planning, especially the

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desire of planners to eradicate petty bourgeois tendencies, ornamentation and variation in domestic spaces and material cultures. When the European urban cultural critic and Marxist Walter Benjamin travelled to Moscow in the 1920s, he was appalled at what he regarded as the dour and lifeless character of the city’s new socialist suburbs and streets, which had been stripped of cafes, small shops and street life by the socialist system. The only spaces for socialising seemed to be in the food queues, which were dominated by old women because men and women had been driven into the factories. Like the Soviet model, apartheid urbanism carried the authoritarian imprint of tight state control and aimed to create a life of uniformity and sameness in urban African townships – something that was, incidentally, never achieved in Duncan Village, as we will see below. It is interesting that, although apartheid planners did not renounce the market, they essentially wished to transform the township into a de-commoditised space (with one or two general dealer stores). They wanted a space of state management and control, like the Soviet housing estate, where streets became sterile conduits for workers and police to move around efficiently, rather than noisy, pedestrian spaces of commerce, mobility and sociality. With those comparative thoughts in mind, let us turn now to the specific trajectory of township development in South Africa and East London. In 1951 the National Building Research Institute (NBRI) began work on experimental housing projects at Witbank and KwaThema in the Transvaal. According to Japha (1999: 423): these projects provided a rigorously theorised planning framework for the ‘native township’ of the 1950s and 1960s that did so much to define the form and the character of the apartheid city, as well as providing designs for the houses in them and the practical demonstrations of the technical methods that had been devised for their realisation. By the mid 1950s, the local authority in East London was presented with boxes of material from Pretoria on the new format for township and housing design.3 These materials encouraged local authorities to adopt the new models to avoid the spatial chaos, disorder and moral degeneracy associated with the old location strategy. The materials also provided officials with guidance on the intended functions of the rooms of the new housing design: The technical plan of the new township house defined the normal use of such a shelter, making this a condition of occupation. The functions of the rooms were specified – ‘bedroom, kitchen-dine, living-sleeping, bathroom, passage’; and the proper furnishings for the interiors sketched in – ‘bed, table, chairs …’ The spatial requirements were also specified according to ‘the type and the size of the dwelling, based of course on the average family size of 5 persons’. A residential plot must also ‘house the dwellings and provide space for (i) privacy (ii) laundry and clothes drying (iii) children’s

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play (iv) cultivation (v) sufficient overall area to fresh air and uninterrupted light’. (Minkley 1999: 212) Reading through the East London municipal archive of the 1950s, one is left with no doubt as to the centrality of housing in the minds of officials as a vehicle for the reconstruction of the East Bank as a modern working-class community in the city designed to serve industry. With the Transkei and Ciskei homelands situated close to the city, there was little emphasis on the need for elaborate hostel complexes to house a massive migrant population. The focus was instead on the rapid construction of households of 51/6 and 51/9 family dwellings for the accommodation of a new urban working class. But it is also clear from this documentation that, by the mid 1950s, the authorities increasingly came to view the new African working class not as a unified grouping but as divided between a commuterised segment living outside the city and a permanently settled component located in the city. This ensured that, from the outset, middling modernism in East London developed along two distinct but parallel tracks. By the 1950s the East and West Bank locations in East London were widely regarded in official circles as islands of pathology, ‘irredeemable slums’, which had little potential for proper regulation and incremental redevelopment. In fact, from the 1940s it had been suggested to the city council that the locations be rased to the ground and rebuilt.4 White ratepayers also consistently argued that the place was an eyesore and only contributed to the chaos and depravity of black lives in the city (Nel 1990: 123). The events of 1952 shocked the white city fathers out of their inertia and brought a new urgency to discussions concerning township upgrading and development. One of the ways in which the authorities attempted to deal with their fears and concerns about the locations was by arresting and deporting political activists, ‘urban illegals’, and unruly and deviant township elements. After 1952 approximately 6,000 women and youths were deported to the rural areas in a campaign to clean up the East Bank. However, a year later, one official estimated that more than a quarter of the population of the location was still in the city illegally. In 1957 another official estimated that there were over 7,000 women illegally living in the city (Atkinson 1991: 364). In 1958, in a desperate attempt to bring the situation under control, police officials galvanised conservative migrants to chase and beat boys who were lingering on the streets (see Chapter 5). The reign of terror lasted several months and provided no lasting solution to the problems in the location. Having exhausted other options, the East London city council, in consultation with the Department of Native Affairs, embarked on a major residential restructuring and relocation programme in the East Bank. The programme was predicated on a two-pronged strategy which involved the demolition of the East Bank ‘tin towns’. The idea was to demolish the wood-and-iron houses progressively and either to move the inhabitants to the new dormitory township of Mdantsane in the Ciskei or to accommodate them in an orderly manner in Duncan Village or elsewhere in the city. In Duncan Village, families

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were settled in four-roomed 51/9 municipal houses and were expected to urbanise on a family basis in modern workmen’s cottages. Those who did not qualify for permanent urban residence under the Section 10 regulations, were either relocated to Mdantsane or housed in a limited number of new male hostels in Duncan Village. Under the new planning regime, the new township was to be clearly divided between ‘urban spaces’ represented by the 51/9 workmen’s houses, and ‘rural spaces’ characterised by the rows of fenced and guarded single-sex hostel blocks. In Duncan Village, the highway served as a natural barrier in keeping these different socio-spatial categories apart. The construction of a beer hall inside the B-hostel complex, as well as the provision of a range of services to the migrants, including free coal, minimised their need to make contact with the township world outside. In the minds of the apartheid planners, the hostels were modelled on the idea of a kraal – the village space in the city. Access to the ‘urban’ component of the new township spaces was clearly regulated and it was stipulated that housing would be restricted to ‘fit and proper persons’ who were employed in the area and had a legal right to reside there. The regulations defined a fit and proper person to be any person who is of good character and can produce proof that he is married either by Christian rites or civil law, or that a customary union subsists between himself and the woman who he describes as his wife, or that she is a widow or a divorcée and living with his or her family.5 In terms of the regulations, it was technically possible for widows to retain sites after the death of their husbands, but they could not acquire new houses in their own right. In Duncan Village these regulations were strictly imposed. In fact, the location superintendent was not at all in favour of widows taking over the houses of their deceased husbands, and routinely evicted widows to make way for new nuclear families.6 It was this ‘fatherless family’, he claimed, that bred the ‘juvenile delinquents’ who had gone berserk in the city in 1952 and who needed to be deported to rural areas to calm the situation down.7 Technical and administrative capacity, and the will to enforce ‘the plan’, Rabinow (1989, 1995) suggests, are key ingredients in the implementation of modernist planning projects. The seeming absence of political will and technical capacity in the East London Native Administration Department (NAD) structures prior to 1952 was a matter of concern to the state. Thus, in 1960, Mr F.W.C. Buitendag, a new apartheid city manager from the Transvaal, was appointed to investigate and overhaul the functioning of East London’s NAD. He was also to consider ways in which the city might better manage its African population. Buitendag was shocked at the lax manner in which the local African population were controlled and at the chaotic state of the influx-control system in the city. He recommended far-reaching changes to modernise and rationalise the functions of Native Administration. Buitendag suggested that both bureaucrats and Africans had to be disciplined to ensure that apartheid laws on the statute books were enforced on the ground. He recommended that new personnel be found to control the locations and clear ‘illegals’ out of the city.8 Atkinson (1991) views the Buitendag report as a key

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Photo 3.1 New 51/9 houses in Duncan Village Extension. These were the new working-class family houses for urban-born working men and their families. They were rented by the municipality to male household heads with stable urban employment and were located close to East London industries, which are seen in the background. Source: Photo by Daniel Morolong.

turning point in the management of the city, claiming that it served to shift the local administration from a system of relatively ‘benign paternalism’ to a regime of ‘disciplinary power’. It was precisely this kind of power, capacity and efficiency that was required to administer mass forced removals in East London in the 1960s. Thus, from 1960 it was declared that those families living in the East Bank who did not meet the stringent requirements for residency in Duncan Village were to be directed either to their home villages outside the city or to Mdantsane, the new homeland town located only 25 km outside the city. However, it was soon realised that the construction of Mdantsane would take time and that there was an urgent need for temporary housing for those displaced by the demolition of the East Bank ‘tin town’. To address this problem, 3,500 temporary one-roomed emergency houses were constructed on land adjoining the old location. The new administrative efficiency in the city was demonstrated by the fact that, from mid 1961, these temporary houses were erected at a rate of approximately 100 a month. During the 1960s these houses were used as transit houses for those individuals and families en route to Mdantsane. This part of Duncan Village became known as C-section. The idea was that C-section would eventually be destroyed once the relocation process had been completed. In the new spatial hierarchy, C-section was seen as a transitional space – a space where people could begin to adjust socially and morally from the chaos and degeneracy of the slums and prepare themselves for a new life in the orderly ‘garden city’ of Mdantsane.

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If we accept that apartheid urban restructuring in East London was not only racial in character but centrally modernist in orientation, then we must ask: to what extent did the forms of urbanism that emerged in Duncan Village and Mdantsane after relocation fulfil the expectations of the planners? Did these areas develop along similar lines? Did they come to reflect a new universal, male-centred urbanism based on the nuclear family? Was the social and cultural dynamic that emerged in these areas really so fundamentally different from that which had existed in the East Bank? What happened to the older distinctions between Red and School, and to the cosmopolitan influences that swept through the East Bank in the 1950s? In the discussion below I reflect on these questions in an effort to assess the impact of forced removals and resettlement on the urban social fabric of the city’s African residential areas. Relocation and Blurred Identities: Mdantsane In the early 1970s the Xhosa in Town series, which had already gone into several reprints, was updated to reflect the changing situation in East London. Between September and November 1970, the Mayers embarked on follow-up fieldwork in Mdantsane, where many of their former interviewees had ended up after relocation. For the Mayers, the main aim of their follow-up research was to assess whether Red cultural life had survived the removals. Their findings were published as a postscript to the 1971 edition of Townsmen or Tribesmen. Two years later Pauw, who had been working on a book on Xhosa Christianity in Port Elizabeth, also visited Mdantsane, where he conducted further survey research and tracked down some of the households he had previously interviewed in the East Bank.9 These findings were also published in a second edition of his book, which appeared in 1973. In conducting this new work, both the Mayers and Pauw relied on field assistants whom they had used during their original studies. The fieldwork was largely impressionistic and combined information gleaned from interviews and social surveys, with facts and figures supplied by government officials. While the Mayers concentrated mainly on the fate of the Reds, Pauw focused on the family structure and the changing sociocultural orientations of Mdantsane townspeople. Both Pauw and the Mayers were critical of apartheid resettlement in the city. Like many British and European scholars who challenged the impact of comprehensive modernist planning in these areas, they applauded the physical aspects of the resettlement but generally lamented the social consequences of the forced removals, especially the loss of community and the breakdown of pre-existing social ties.10 With regard to East London, the trilogy researchers acknowledged that Mdantsane created a healthier and more hygienic environment than that of the overcrowded East Bank, where the housing stock was in poor condition and garbage littered the streets. They also remarked on the pleasure that many relocated families derived from the spaciousness and greater privacy offered by their new four-roomed houses. The houses were said to be ‘decent and solid’, and Pauw (1973 [1963]: 209) also noted

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that the larger residential plots allowed families to start gardens in their backyards. It was a development, he felt, that not only provided households with additional resources, but added a charming semi-rural, garden-village feel to the new township.11 On the other hand, there were also many aspects of the Mdantsane rehousing scheme that these authors disapproved of. The first was the absence of adequate employment and community facilities for local residents. Unemployment levels in Mdantsane (although not measured) were said to be very high – interviewees complained that ‘here we are without employment’, ‘we are starving here’ (Mayer with Mayer 1971 [1961]: 302). These problems were compounded by the distance of the township from the job market in East London and the rising cost of transport, which remained high despite state subsidisation (Swilling 1987). Behind the new façade of suburban respectability lay real hardship and poverty, which was far greater than that people had encountered in the old East Bank location.12 One of the consequences of this situation, as the Mayers noted, was that the level of crime and violence increased dramatically in Mdantsane. Gangs of unemployed youths roamed the streets, and ‘the rule of the tsotsi element after nightfall is generally more frightening than it ever was in Duncan Village. Even vigorous men rarely dare to venture out at night’ (Mayer with Mayer 1971 [1961]: 298). In Mdantsane, they argued, ‘boredom, poverty and alcohol encourage thuggery and crime’ (1971 [1961]: 298). Pauw claimed that crime and gangsterism were exacerbated by the absence of adequate policing. He indicated that, while the relocation process itself was highly bureaucratic and tightly controlled, people were largely left to fend for themselves once they had been allocated their new houses (Pauw 1973 [1963]: 214). The new urban environment was also seen to lack key facilities such as proper shops, schools, and places for entertainment and recreation. The few shops that did exist carried only a limited range of goods and their shelves were reportedly ‘often empty’ (1973 [1963]: 214). This offered opportunities for some residents to run informal shops from their homes to supplement their income, but it also denied residents access to the wide range of shops and businesses in the city. The Mayers (1971 [1961]: 299) note that in Mdantsane there were consequently few opportunities for residents to engage in ‘a kind of vicarious participation in the shiny complex world of the whites’. Pauw, more upbeat, suggested that, despite the lack of shops in Mdantsane, local residents remained fashion and style-conscious: Judging by the women’s fashions, the cultural variety in Mdantsane is no less than it was in East London twelve years ago. The same long-established dress of Red women from the country – large woollen turbans, long skirts, shawls around the shoulders, garments tied around the waists as a sign of respect, and rough bare feet – is still there, while Euro-America fashions of the last decade, like miniskirts, slacks and modern shoes, have appeared at the other end. Black and brown wigs in Western and Afro styles are another addition. (1973 [1963]: 214)

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He also pointed out that old recreational, social and entertainment activities were also reappearing: The musical companies, which featured prominently in East London, are gradually becoming active in Mdantsane, but more halls are needed if they are to flourish. Sporting activities are also increasing. The first attempt to offer a regular film show in the community hall has been abandoned. (1973 [1963]: 206) Despite Pauw’s optimism, the truth of the matter is that none of these activities were ever recreated with the same intensity, social influence and impact as before. Music groups did use the new community hall in Mdantsane, and band members from Duncan Village travelled there for performances, but these occurred infrequently and were not supported as they had been in the East Bank. Music tastes also changed and there were few new groups to replace the old ones. The collapse of the Boy Scout movement, the Welsh High School choir, and the frequent street musical parades which had been a feature of East Bank life, also took their toll. The vibrant rugby scene of the old location was never recreated as rugby quickly lost ground to soccer, which was now preferred among the youth. The only sports code that travelled well was boxing, which became entrenched in the schools; the International Boxing Club from Duncan Village started up again as the Golden Gloves Boxing Club in Mdantsane in the 1960s, and under new leadership produced some excellent talent. In the 1970s Happyboy Mgxaji became a national champion in the featherweight division and laid the foundation for the current crop of Mdantsane-based national and world champions.13 On cultural style, both Pauw and the Mayers agreed that the sharp oppositions that they had seen between those who emulated Western dress fashions and lifestyles and those who adopted traditional outfits and outlooks had begun to soften in Mdantsane. Pauw (1973 [1963]) argues (perhaps more through a change in his own thinking than in the empirical realities he described) that the cultural orientations of the permanently urbanised and better-off families in Mdantsane were somewhat at odds with the modern urban environment in which they now lived. Referring to Mitchell’s situational analysis framework, he suggests that there was much evidence of code-switching among the elite, who remained committed to Xhosa cultural values, ritual and beliefs. This surprised him, as did the almost universal adherence to male initiation among the youth. He suggested that the urban African experience in Mdantsane was a synthesis of tradition and modernity (1973 [1963]: 217). The Mayers also noted that the influence of ‘the rural’ on ‘the urban’ was strong in Mdantsane because residents felt more insecure there and now actively sought to regain customary rights in the rural areas (1971 [1961]: 305). In their writing on Red and School in the new Ciskei township, the Mayers focused their attention on what they called the ‘torn social fabric’. They reported on how relocation had served to break up the entrenched Red networks of the East Bank and had undermined the institutional foundations

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needed for reproducing this subcultural form. They identified several factors that made Red life unsustainable in the new township. First, they noted that since the forced removals were conducted in a bureaucratic manner that took no cognisance of social networks, formerly close-knit amakhaya groupings14 were scattered to different corners of the new location. Irreparable damage was thus done to amakhaya networks. Second, they explained that the urban spatial ecology of the new township made it virtually impossible for amakhaya room-mates to regroup after relocation. The new four-roomed houses were isolated from one another and located on pavilion-style plots designed to accommodate families. To be sure, in some of the new houses landlords did rent out rooms to groups of migrants, but with a formal restriction of seven people per dwelling, the scale and intensity of the old room-sharing practices could never be replicated. Third, they argued that relocation broke down the subtle distinctions of social class and status that had been embedded in the East Bank urban ecology. Clergymen, nurses and teachers were randomly relocated next to poor migrants or unemployed people. This further inhibited the reconstitution of older amakhaya networks in Mdantsane (1971 [1961]: 302–15). The general consequence was the disintegration of migrant networks and subcultural styles, seen in the new types of drinking groups that formed in Mdantsane. The Mayers (1971 [1961]: 304) note that the composition of iseti beer-drinking groups changed from close-knit amakhaya migrant groups to ones with a mixture of migrants and townspeople. The social basis for association at these mixed iseti was no longer merely home ties, but a range of other associational links, including clanship, friendship, work links and neighbourhood ties. The new mixed iseti simultaneously lost their distinctive focus on rural issues and began to extend to other concerns such as raising money for abandoned urban children or helping neighbours in times of difficulty. Relocation, the Mayers argued, had thus manufactured a general shift away from amakhaya home ties to the looser and more informal networks of clanship, kinship and neighbourliness as the primary basis of migrant sociability in town. They concluded that the net result of these new developments was a rapid blurring of the old Red–School migrant cultural divide, and a general erosion of ‘Red confidence’ as access to education was increasingly seen as the road to economic security. In this process of transition, new categories and self-definitions began to emerge – such as ilulwane (literally, ‘bats’), or ‘those who were neither bird nor animal’ – to define formerly Red migrants who had lost their identities and begun to switch their codes of interaction and social behaviour. In his 1972 Mdantsane research Pauw (1973 [1963]) commented on the fate of the matrifocal family, which he had identified as a major feature of the East Bank social scene in the 1950s. His research in the new location showed that more than one-third of the new households in these areas were femaleheaded, with the majority being mother-and-children households rather than the extended multi-generational matrifocal units common in the East Bank.

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Pauw found that the officials in Mdantsane, unlike those in Duncan Village, were prepared to classify unmarried mothers as ‘fit and proper’ heads of families, which was the legal requirement for allocating houses. He also notes that, while the female-headed households in Mdantsane were much smaller than in the East Bank, some mothers and daughters were allocated houses next door to each other. Pauw concludes that the trend towards matrifocality thus continued in Mdantsane, with unmarried women still heading their own families without an effective male presence.15

Photo 3.2  The East Bank to Duncan Village, 1963 Source: East London Municipality.

The general assessment of social and cultural life in Mdantsane provided by the Mayers and Pauw was that it was not only characterised by increasing poverty and violence, but that the whole place was socially barren and sterile. As the Mayers described it: ‘a heavy, lonely boredom that descends over weekends’ engulfed this ‘cheerless new community’ (1971 [1961]: 298).

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These conclusions are supported by Minkley’s (1999) more recent work on ‘native space’ in East London. Like the trilogy researchers, he notes the initial optimism of many of the new residents moving to Mdantsane. However, by the 1980s, Minkley claims that these dreams had been shattered by unemployment, poverty and loneliness. Mdantsane residents, he argues, had become like ‘corpses behind screens’, the screens of racial modernism, stuck in a ‘paradise lost’, a place of shattered illusions, a monotonous space ‘marked by uniformity and separation, by loneliness and hardship, by starvation and unemployment and distance’ (1999: 217). Mdantsane had failed to live up to the expectations of both the modernist planners who created it and the people who moved there, and thus were safely contained politically out on the fringe of the city (see Swilling 1987).

Photo 3.3  Aerial photograph of Duncan Village, 1965 Source: East London Municipality.

Resettlement and the New Duncan Village One intriguing aspect of the literature on African urban life and apartheid planning in East London is the general silence on developments in East London

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after 1960. The focus of most analytical work on the city has been on the satellite homeland town of Mdantsane, which had become the second biggest African township in South Africa after Soweto by the mid 1970s (see Hirsch and Green 1983; Mager 1999; Swilling 1987). In fact one might be forgiven for thinking that the removals of the 1960s had succeeded in leaving the city without an African population at all. But, as Pauw (1973 [1963]: 201) points out, while 64,870 people, or 11,916 family units, had been moved to Mdantsane from the former East and West Bank locations of East London during the 1960s, in 1972 there were still almost 40,000 people living in Duncan Village. Now, besides a tiny cluster of wood-and-iron houses still standing in Thulandiville, most people in the township there were housed either in Ziphunzana (Duncan Village Extension), or in the transit houses at Juliwe (C-section), or in one of two new migrant hostels. Of the three residential zones in Duncan Village, C-section was the least tightly managed and it was here that the social networks and cultural dynamic of the old location survived the longest. In the new spatial geometry of urban restructuring, C-section constituted a transitional space, one that was not meant to be either part of the new Duncan Village or of Mdantsane. The physical layout of C-section, which eventually comprised 35,000 units, reflected these imperatives. Like the rest of the new township, the area was symmetrically laid out with compact rows of windowless, rectangular one-roomed dwellings. No provision was made for yards or proper streets. In C-section, four or five dwellings were squeezed into the same amount of space as one new family plot in Duncan Village. State control in the area was lax as it was anticipated that families would be moving on, rather than staying in Duncan Village. Audrey Tjali from Mekeni in the old location recalled that the move to C-section had been less traumatic than she had expected because both her neighbours had been relocated next to her. Although life there was very different from what she had been used to, she said, at least some of her old social network was still intact ‘to see her through hard times’: The C-section houses had a room with no windows, just a door. It was a big shock for us. It was cramped and dark and there was no space to socialise – no verandah, no backyard. But we were close to our neighbours and friends from Mekeni. They were all around us, helping out. This allowed us to find some joy in all the misery of forced removals … We could still share jokes and remember the good old days. Between us we recreated a little bit of the magic of Mekeni in our new concrete boxes.16 Others recalled that people, when separated, sometimes defied the municipal authorities and exchanged houses to be closer to their friends and relatives. It was also noted that, although families were supposed to move into the one-roomed houses, some houses were taken over by small groups of migrants, who lived together as single men in intanga (age-mate) or amakhaya (home-mate) groups. The continuation of Red migrant lifestyles in C-section

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was reflected in the presence of numerous iseti beer-drinking groups, long after the 1950s. As Banzi Jabu explained: We lived next door to a house that just had migrants living there. It was just like in the old location where they lived together. These men were from Bola village in Gatyana and they liked to drink their mqomboti beer. At the weekends, there were often 10 or 15 of them in the house, drinking and talking. In those days they still used to dance until late at night at their beer drinks.17 Banzi Jabu also recalled how everyone laughed one Saturday afternoon when the same group of migrants brought a stolen cow into the location and, using mirrors, herded the beast into their concrete house, where they hid it away from officials. Over the weekend the men called together their amakhaya, slaughtered the cow and had ‘a huge feast’. It was events like this, Banzi remarked, that ‘made us think what life used to be like in East Bank’. Still, the relocation process then undermined the social networks built up in C-section as many people moved on again just as they had begun to settle in.

Photo 3.4 Windowless Transit Houses in C-Section Source: Photo by Daniel Morolong.

But former East Bank residents also commented on the negative aspects of life there. For instance, they were quick to point out that crime became a big problem in C-section in the 1970s and that new groups of tsotsis preyed on vulnerable and insecure people living in the transit houses. They often noted that the ‘eyes upon the street’ that had previously helped to quickly identify strangers and criminal elements did not exist in the same way in C-section

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(Jacobs 1961). This allowed crime to rise, and numerous stories were heard of families who lost many of their personal possessions long before they arrived in Mdantsane. Crime was also fuelled by unemployment. As an area, C-section was defined by the fact that the people living there were considered to be ‘surplus’ to the labour requirements of the city – they were the ‘idle and the undesirables’.18 This ensured that many were without full-time employment for long periods and were forced to explore other options to raise money. In many ways the whole area was characterised by the same sense of desperation and poverty described for Mdantsane but with one important difference, that the people generally had greater access to their old social networks and support structures. The conditions that prevailed in the new housing estates of Duncan Village Extension, also known as Ziphunzana, and the old Duncan Village (proper) created a different social dynamic. Here people were located in pavilion-style residential plots with gardens surrounded by wide streets and public thoroughfares. The physical environment here was identical to that of Mdantsane, but the socioeconomic profile of the new housing estates was different in that virtually every household was headed by a male breadwinner. In Duncan Village middling modernism came with a wage, which, although small, nevertheless laid the foundation for a new kind of urbanism in the city. It was an urbanism which was focused on the house and its potential evolution into a private space of modern suburban residence. In these houses new forms of domesticity emerged as residents lived in smaller domestic groups and attempted to transform their houses into modern suburban spaces (see Chapter 8). With residential development new shops and beer halls were constructed. All the liquor outlets belonged to the administration boards which used the profits to maintain the township. Eric Thobela explained that there were different drinking places for migrants and townsmen: I remember that there were new two sorghum beer halls, one at B-hostel and the other at the new D-section. These halls drew in all the migrants and replaced the old iseti drinks they had in the yards. Groups of amakhaya would gather at the beer halls and would sit together on benches and drink. There was also the new Highway Bottle Store for the townspeople, which sold spirits and beer, such as Loin and Castle. Loin beer was the most popular. Locals from DV Extension would buy beer and spirits at Highway and take them home to consume there. There were only a couple of shebeens in the township in those days – one belonged to Nomakwezi, who later rented and then bought the Highway Bottle Store from the municipality. I also remember two other places in the 1970s, Mancirha (which is a clan name) place and Sowazi’s place, this guy was a married man and he ran a shebeen, that is unusual! Thembani, who also grew up in Duncan Village Extension, recalls that there was still a lot of tension between migrants and townspeople. He recalled that the borners referred to migrants as amajoina because they ‘joined’ the urban

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areas via the labour offices in the homelands which brought the migrants to the hostels. In the 1960s he remembers some migrants’ wives visiting them at D-hostels, but being deported almost as soon as they arrived. ‘These guys were on their own here’, he continued, ‘their families were invited so they relied on one another and hung out with the amakhaya.’ ‘Migrants were still easy to identify’, he insisted. ‘They had a way of talking and walking that would give them away’, but in the ‘new township we hardly saw them because they were mostly behind the fences of the hostels or in the beer halls’. Another Extension resident, Jozi, commented on the town girls and migrant men in the new environment: The town girls would not go for these guys at all. Some of the poor girls would go have sex with these guys for money. They would want to do this in private because there was some embarrassment to engaging in this way. It was not something you wanted other town girls to see. It did happen and it does still happen – girls need money and they go for men with money. This is the basic principle, money talks. In the new location, many recalled that the streets were eerily quiet and empty. The streets of the new township were no longer the busy, multi-purpose, heterotopic spaces of the 1950s. They had been transformed into functional axes of control and movement: carrying workers to work and back, allowing consumers to walk between the homes and local shops, and officials to move around freely. Moreover, because taps and ablution facilities were now on individual sites, women and children no longer needed to leave their yards to do their washing, to go to the toilet or to collect water, thereby undermining the significance of public spaces for community interaction. ‘Loitering’ on the streets was, in any case, discouraged, something that led to the disintegration of youth cultures based on the use of the street as a public arena for style-making and display. As Pule Twaku explained: The streets of the new location were wide and empty. You couldn’t just shout across the road for a bottle of paraffin, call a kid to run to the shop on an errand, or sit out on the pavement or verandah and watch the world go by. There was nothing going on to watch! There were no street hawkers, minstrels or gangs like the Vikings to watch out for – no noise to distract your attention. The streets were quiet and orderly. It felt like a depressing, deathly silence had fallen over a place that was once alive and vibrant.19 The street was also more generally associated with police patrols and the gaze of officialdom.20 To be off the street and out of the view of passers-by meant that it was less likely that officials would stop you to ask questions, require identification and meddle in your daily life. Eric remembers that they were still able to buy tripe from meat sellers on the street, but it was not at all like the old location when the streets were full of traders. Most shopping was

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done at a handful of licensed general and speciality stores in the township. He recalls that: there was Pondoland Butchery in the township for special occasions and ‘chops’, also the Spezbona dairy and Mr Soga’s store and few other general dealers like Dambisa Fisheries and Trading Store, Mkhala Cash Store, Kwinana Cash Store, and Themali Cash Store. All these stores had licences with the municipality and were owned by men, members of the old location Christian elite and Location Advisory Board. Eric recalls that the big difference was that there were very few informal traders and that the township stores were not well stocked. ‘Our parents always went to town, to Oxford Street for big grocery shops and we bought all our clothes and other items in town at stores like Garlicks, Wales, and Jinx for kids’, he recalled. The absence of urban matriarchs shouting on the streets, marshalling children and commuters, and the closure of tearooms, churches and the myriad food outlets on the verandahs of houses made the new streets seem strange and uninteresting. In the new Duncan Village, the street belonged to the state and the houses to the residents, who were not prepared to compromise their autonomy by exposing themselves to unnecessary harassment and control. As a result, the backdoor and yard emerged as new semi-public spaces where families would socialise and urban housewives would communicate with one another across garden fences. As Sybil Hans remarked, ‘When I think of those days, I think of sitting and chatting in the backyard, of tending the washing on the line, and of spending hours in the kitchen ironing and listening to the radio.’21 Keeping off the streets and out of sight was important because that was where the surveillance of the state was focused. The backyard was somewhat protected from the officials’ ‘eyes on street’, but it was the interior of the house that was most protected from police or officials. There were occasional pass raids but these were not that common in Duncan Village Extension. It was in this context that the house, empty and stark as it was when families moved in, often became a sanctuary and a site where family and individual identities could be built and cultivated. Women wanted to fill the ‘empty rooms’ of their new houses with a repertoire of modern furnishings and appliances which would be indicative of their status within the new urban spatial environment. To the dismay of many, the municipality announced that it would not supply on-site electricity in Duncan Village as it was doing in many of the new Coloured townships on the Buffalo Flats. In the case of Africans, access to the electricity grid was reserved for those with the financial means to pay for the cost of laying cables from their houses to the street, where street lights lit up the new neighbourhoods. As a result, only a few residents opted for electricity and this limited the number of labour saving appliances that housewives could buy and use to save time and effort.

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But many acquired modern kitchen cabinets, appliances and tables to furnish this space nonetheless and improved the ‘look’ of the kitchen, which was the main reception room for informal visitors. The other space that was given careful attention was the lounge, which often stood empty for some time after families had moved in. For those with the means, however, it was a priority area for investment and upgrading. The general aim was to fill this space with expensive-looking modern furniture, items like lounge suites, dressers and gramophones that were available in the 1960s to the mass market at city stores like Lewis and Russels. The dark-wood dressers, tables and cabinets that had been popular in the old location were cleared out to make way for a flood of new products now on the market that were specifically designed for small houses. Many of these products were relatively cheap and could be bought on a hire-purchase system, allowing households to acquire items before they had saved enough money to pay for them. However, creating a lounge (or sitting-room) remained a long-term project that could take years to complete. I will not discuss the issue of domestic desire and the home further here, as they will be the topic of a fuller discussion in Chapter 8. However, it is important to comment on residents’ lack of access to public facilities like the Peacock, Makambi and ICU halls, the Rubusana sports grounds, Bantu Square, city beaches and some cinemas. Many former East Bankers claimed that problems with alcoholism in the township in the 1990s were rooted in the closure of the recreation facilities of earlier decades. As Bongani Jack explained, ‘By stealing our recreation facilities, they stole our souls and left us with little else besides the beer at the municipal beer halls to drown our sorrows – it is little wonder that so many distinguished citizens ended up as drunks!’ Many of those with talent and education, who were able to resist the pull of the beer halls, left Duncan Village in the 1960s. Some went into exile, others pursued careers overseas, and yet others were drawn into new jobs and lifestyles in the nearby Ciskei and Transkei homelands. By the 1970s, as Jack remarked, there was ‘nothing left for people in Duncan Village besides anger, bitterness and a great sadness at what had been lost’. As musicians, politicians, teachers and lawyers left, the cosmopolitan dynamic that had been such a distinctive mark of cultural life in the old East Bank disappeared. New Identity Politics In terms of Red and School identities, the situation that emerged in Duncan Village was markedly different from that in Mdantsane, where relocation thrust people from Red and School backgrounds together in new neighbourhoods, allowing old identities to ‘blur’. In the Duncan Village housing estates there was no blurring of identities in the sense of Red and School identities being mixed together to create new hybrid urban–rural identity, since the residents here had always associated themselves with the city and with urban identities. What occurred was that people’s urban identities changed as they lost contact with the wider world beyond the city. They became more parochial

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and focused on the here and now of city life rather than with the world out there. This shift in identity politics was seen in the toning down of dress styles and lack of flamboyance and self-confidence in the youth, who had lost access to the public space in which they had previously experimented with style and fashion. In the late 1960s and 1970s, certain cohorts of youth continued to connect with developments across the Atlantic, but these groups formed a small and largely silent minority. Yet by shifting their attention to matters local, those living in the housing estates became acutely aware of the differences in living and working conditions among urban residents in the city. From the mid 1960s, and especially in the 1970s, there is strong evidence to suggest that the African urban working class of East London had begun to develop class consciousness. By the mid 1960s the ability of workers to exit the city at will had been greatly diminished by tighter labour laws and stricter controls on mobility (Atkinson 1991). This meant that workers had less room to manoeuvre and that their interests became increasingly firmly focused on issues such as wages, overtime pay and working conditions. This trend resulted in the rise of labour unionism in East London, which started modestly in the early 1970s but gained momentum as the decade wore on (see Hirsch and Green 1983). The increasing assertiveness of African workers in the city culminated in a wave of strikes in the late 1970s and early 1980s, which brought the motor, food and textile industries in the city to a standstill (see Swilling 1987). In this period of labour unrest it was nevertheless evident that clear divisions existed between the migrant and permanently urbanised segments of the African working class in East London. The cautious approach of migrants to unions and strike action was indicative of their different situation and experiences of urban life in the township after the 1960s. In 1964, when the bulk of the urban working class were being shifted into family housing estates, several thousand migrants were allocated to bed spaces in the new municipal hostels in Duncan Village. The new hostel complexes housed approximately 2,000 migrants. In the hostels, as we will see in Chapter 6, migrants continued to stress specific ‘tribal’ identities, when the tendency in the township as a whole was for people to adopt more generic ethnic identities. In Duncan Village, the term ‘Gcaleka’ no longer referred specifically to the cultural traits of people who came from a specific part of the southern Transkei but was increasingly used to refer to all those in the township with Transkeian connections. Indeed, earlier references to tribal identities were gradually replaced by a simple two-way distinction between Gcalekas (‘those who came from the Transkei’) and Ngqikas (‘those who came from the Ciskei’).22 These labels were apparently used in all sorts of contexts. For instance, I found that hostel migrants who came almost exclusively from the Transkei often referred to all other township residents simply as Ngqika, and used a common set of characteristics to define them. Many said that the Ngqika were reckless spendthrifts who were unable to manage money, paid little attention to their rural relatives, and were unable to hold their liquor. Township residents, by contrast, often remarked that the Gcalekas tended to be stingy, ignorant

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and were always badly dressed. In Duncan Village, these stereotypes appear to have emerged in the late 1960s and 1970s and followed the contours of the internal spatial divisions of the township, which entrenched older divisions between townspeople and migrants. This period was also marked by increasingly tense relationships between Coloureds and Africans in the city. In the 1950s about 10 per cent of the population of the East Bank was made up of Coloured families.23 Most of them were concentrated in the oldest Tsolo and Moriva sections of the old location. They were remarkably well integrated into the location community: they belonged to a range of local sports clubs, they were actively involved in the music scene and virtually all spoke fluent Xhosa. However, when the relocations started, the Coloured families were separated out from the African families and were allocated houses in their own areas. One of these areas, known today as Pefferville, was built on the ruins of the old Mekeni and New Brighton sections of the East Bank. It was also common practice at this time for Coloured families to be moved to houses occupied by Africans. These practices generated conflict and animosity between Coloured and African families, and at various times in the 1960s the Coloured residents of Pefferville made deputations to the city council to ask for protection from the reprisals that they feared would follow in the wake of the removals (see Maqasho and Bank 2001). Oral evidence suggests that there was actual physical fighting between Pefferville and Duncan Village residents in the mid 1960s, and relations between these communities remained tense throughout the 1960s and 1970s. The use of the derogatory term mlawu, meaning ‘those without custom’, was now widely applied to Coloureds by Duncan Village residents, who referred to them as drunks and gangsters who had no respect for family values and traditions. Conclusion In this chapter, I explored apartheid urban restructuring of East London’s locations. I started by suggesting that events of 1952, and especially the murder of Sister Aidan, had a profound effect on race relations and official perceptions of the future of the East Bank location. The violence and unrest, together with the new policy imperatives that were being communicated to local authorities from Pretoria, put paid to any hope of extending the old location and in situ upgrading. By the late 1950s, the fate of the location had been decided: most of it would be demolished, while the residential core of Duncan Village’s municipal housing section would be extended westwards to create Duncan Village Extension. For migrants displaced by the destruction of wood-and-iron houses, some space would be made available to resettle in tightly managed male, single-sex municipal hostels. It was also decided to build 3,500 one-roomed temporary structures in C-section to accommodate families that were due to move from the East Bank to Mdantsane. Overall, I argue that the planning regime adopted in East London was essentially a ‘middling modernism’ one, with its focus on the new housing estates of Duncan Village

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Extension, which attempted to use housing as a means of constructing new African subjectivities, new men and women liberated from forms of identity and sociality associated with the old location. A critical point of departure for my discussion in this chapter was the observation that accounts of township life in East London after the 1950s have tended to project the Mdantsane experience onto the city as a whole, and in the process have ignored changes that were taking place in African urban communities inside the city. Using oral history material from Duncan Village, I suggest that here a slightly different urban dynamic emerged in the 1960s and 1970s, which was not characterised by cultural blurring as described by the Mayers and Pauw for Mdantsane in the early 1970s. The new Duncan Village was not an undifferentiated space. It was divided into different ecological zones which were controlled in different ways, and each developed its own particular sociocultural dynamics. In the case of the transit housing area of C-section, I argue that something of the social character of the old location was retained as people resisted relocation and rebuilt older social networks. But these networks, however carefully reconstituted, only provided a partial shield against poverty and alienation, and it was not long before criminality, violence and fear started to engulf these neighbourhoods too. In the sprawling new housing estates of Duncan Village Extension (or Ziphunzana as it was also known), I suggest that middling modernism achieved some results as residents here used their access to employment, which Mdantsane residents lacked, to entrench themselves in the city and embrace the promise of ‘black suburbia’. As a result many local families continued to strive for modern suburban lives and identities under the new and oppressive township regime. There was still the hope that, despite racial oppression, there could be upward social mobility and the realisation of an increased quality of life for urban workers and their families. The last ecological zone or spatial niche described in the chapter was that of the municipal hostels, which were designed to recreate the kraal in the city (Elder 2003). I suggest that in Duncan Village the hostels achieved this objective, as they became sites for the reconstitution of a variety of quite specific Red migrant subcultures, which remained hostile to modernisation and cultural change. In their reconstituted form, these subcultures became deeply entrenched as I demonstrate in greater detail in Chapter 6. By the 1970s, township residents were divided into two camps: those who identified themselves as migrants and those who embraced urban identities. It was precisely these processes of segmentation and differentiation that politicised Duncan Village in a very different way from Mdantsane. The new Duncan Village was not a space of undifferentiated monotony, blurring and indifference, but rather one of fraught and sharpening social and political difference – between the house and the street, the location and the factory, the hostel and the housing estate, the rural and the urban. By the 1970s the regime of middling modernism had begun to perform its Faustian tricks of erasing memory and transforming identity. Within a decade traces of the East Bank were gradually wiped away and replaced by

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a new social and cultural dynamic. The new style was encouraged not only by the changing physical form of the township but also by the way in which residents lost all meaningful access to public space. This had a fundamental impact. First, it stripped the township of the cosmopolitan drive which, as I argued in Chapter 2, used public spaces as testing grounds for cultural change and creativity. The social death of the street under apartheid, the closure of recreational facilities and restrictions on mobility stunted creativity and ushered in a bland parochialism in urban life. In the new Duncan Village, people’s engagements with modernity were now effectively confined to home, where the low-budget consumer catalogues of Lewis Stores and other mass-market furniture outlets washed through the township, producing a dull sameness of experience and aspiration in the housing estates. The closure of public space sharpened and intensified the politics of difference. Without access to public space where differences could be negotiated, social and cultural divisions were intensified behind fences and buffer zones, shutting out possibilities for hybridity, intersection and coexistence. In addition, domestic patriarchy was entrenched by ‘middling modernism’, which marginalised women, trapping them in the house, where they had no choice but to operate as obedient wives and daughters. Their dependence on men for survival changed their position from the days of the old location where many single women enjoyed social and economic independence and operated as autonomous agents in their own right. In the next chapter I follow the story of Duncan Village through to the 1980s and trace the collapse and implosion of middling modernism described here. I trace the process by which comrades in Duncan Village reclaimed the street, and explore the remaking of social and political order in the township in the period 1985 to 1995, and the implications this order had for social reproduction and cultural identity formation.

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4 Rebellion, Fractured Urbanism and the Fear of Fire

On Saturday 13 August 1985, the politics and planning of the apartheid era in Duncan Village came to an abrupt end. It was the weekend of the funeral of the slain United Democratic Front (UDF) activist and prominent lawyer, Victoria Mxenge, who was buried near King William’s Town. The funeral attracted thousands of sympathisers from all over the Eastern Cape, including Duncan Village. On that day, numerous speeches delivered by prominent ANC and UDF activists urged the crowd not to allow Victoria Mxenge to have died in vain. They asked the people to deepen the struggle against apartheid and spread the message of resistance throughout the Eastern Cape. By late afternoon, when the buses arrived to take people back to East London, the atmosphere at the funeral was politically highly charged. As the Duncan Village people boarded the buses, they sang freedom songs and toyi-toyied in the aisles. On arriving in Duncan Village, the youth spilled out of the buses and onto the streets where they set up barricades, stoned cars, ransacked schools and looted municipal buildings. To restore order, the police and army moved in to quell the rebellion and indiscriminately opened fire on the protesters, killing 35 people including an 18-month-old toddler, and injuring hundreds of others. The violence of the police and the reaction of the crowd echoed the tragic events of November 1952. Spurred on by police violence, gangs of youths now moved through the township destroying all symbols of authority and power; they started by burning down the houses of community councillors and then moved on to torch schools, administration blocks, clinics and libraries. They also destroyed infrastructure, including electrical installations and a substation.1 The riots of August 1985 spilled over into sporadic incidents of violence, which lingered on throughout 1985 and into 1986 and ultimately contributed to the declaration of a State of Emergency in South Africa on 12 June 1986. This effectively amounted to an acknowledgement by the state that the townships had become ‘ungovernable’. In this chapter I consider the period between 1985 and 1995, when the control of Duncan Village slipped out of the hands of the state and the day-to-day running of the township was taken over by the Duncan Village Residents’ Association (DVRA). I explore how Duncan Village was transformed from a ‘dominated space’, shaped by the imperative of racially determined modernist planning, to an ‘appropriated space’, redefined by the populist civic structure, the DVRA. In socio-spatial terms, I argue that this dramatic shift in political power enabled the creation of new spatial practices, what Lefebvre (1991) 89

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would call ‘spaces of representation’ – counter-spaces and subaltern spatial conceptions and practices that imaginatively challenge the dominant spatial regime. During this phase of popular planning and urban management, the dominant ‘representations of space’ – reflected in earlier plans to enforce distinctions between public and private, between urban and rural, and between subject and citizen – were reworked and redefined in response to new spatial and social practices. The changes that I document emerged as a decision by the DVRA to open up the township for immigration from surrounding rural and urban areas and to permit shack erection in backyards and in open spaces. As a result, the population of the township more than doubled between 1984 and the first democratic election in 1994. Following the account of key political changes in the 1985–95 period, I report on the main findings of a household survey undertaken in 1995, which was modelled on the questionnaire Reader administered in the old locations in 1955. The 1995 survey was confined only to Duncan Village Proper,2 where a 1 in 10 household sampling technique was employed, similar to that of the trilogy survey 40 years earlier. This section explores whether the Duncan Village of the mid 1990s displayed any social and cultural similarities to the old East Bank location of the 1950s. The demographic and social features of the different residential niches investigated in the survey not only confirm that aspects of life in the old location had begun to reappear in the postapartheid Duncan Village township, but also that the township community had become increasingly fragmented into different socio-residential niches with their own distinct social composition. The remainder of the chapter is devoted to exploring the social dynamics of the shack fringe, which was dominated at this time by an incredibly high incidence of shack fires. Following Murray (2009), I argue that far from being periodic disasters, shack fires were a structural feature of urban life on the urban fringe, and that fires were central to the very fabric of urban life and experience in the free-standing shack areas. In her work on Rwandan refugees, Lisa Malkki (1995) writes about the power of ‘accidental communities of memory’, which arise when refugees who have no prior social relations are powerfully bonded together by fleeting common experiences. I suggest that shack fires are similarly powerful, organising and reorganising everyday life on the urban fringe and instilling particular rhythms, temporality and urban sensibility. In his classic cultural history of work on the Dutch Golden Age, The Embarrassment of Riches (1988), Simon Schama argued that Dutch social, political and cultural life during the Golden Age was dominated by an overwhelming fear of flooding. The titanic struggle of the Dutch people during the seventeenth century to keep the sea from erasing their coastal villages and farmland was a major preoccupation of Dutch life. In fact, Schama suggests, so pervasive was this fear of flooding that it became a central metaphor for the construction of Dutch identity. For the Dutch, the struggle against flooding was perceived to be part of their divine calling as the ‘chosen people’ and their ability to endure floods became central to their notions of freedom and survival. Like Noah, they came to believe that they had been called on by God

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Almighty to overcome the calamity of flood. To achieve this objective, they felt that it was imperative to be disciplined, industrious and devoutly religious. The wild forces of nature, it was believed, could only be tamed through the trilogy of prayer, psalms and self-sacrifice (Schama 1988: 27). Ultimately, this account of struggle, perseverance and the control of environmental constraints and nature is redemptive, because the Dutch built a positive self-identity around the control of water. Like Schama, who brings water out from the background of Dutch cultural history, I attempt to take shack fires out of the ‘news’ of accidental deaths and periodic disasters and position it within ‘culture’, as part of the durable social and cultural fabric of shack life. In this chapter, I use the experience, understanding and social force of fire as a prism through which to view one of Duncan Village’s most volatile and dynamic new social niches in the 1990s. I argue that fire played a decisive role in shaping local notions of politics and community, restructuring new possibilities for domestic life and organisation, as well as cultivating a sense of the city as dangerous, precarious and destructive, something to be feared and carefully managed. Through this analysis I hope to reveal a sense of the nature of the free-standing shack areas of post-apartheid Duncan Village and the kind of urbanism that emerged in these areas during the 1990s. Rebellion, Influx and the ‘Septic Fringe’ The political tide in Duncan Village had already begun to turn in the early 1980s with a series of crippling strikes in the motor, food and textile industries (Swilling 1987). The growing confidence of city workers in challenging their employers was translated into growing civic activism and political awareness inside Duncan Village itself. In 1982, residents boycotted the elections for a new Gompo (Duncan Village) Community Council (GCC) and gave their support to the old anti-removals committee, which now transformed itself into the DVRA. By 1984 the DVRA was well-organised and opposed to the development agenda of the new GCC, which managed the township in partnership with the East Cape Development Board (ECDB). The DVRA and its political allies, the UDF and the ANC, rejected the Gompo town councillors as ‘puppets’ of the white state and urged township residents to resist their authority and their ‘illegitimate’ development schemes.3 To express opposition to the GCC they instituted a rent boycott and set up their own alternative structures for the management and control of the township. By 1984 DVRA was firmly in control of Duncan Village and was able not only to mobilise resistance to the state but also to contain the interventions of apartheid planners and GCC officials in the location. In the face of mounting resistance to government structures, Dr Piet Koornhof, then Minister of Cooperation and Development, announced in 1984 that the state would no longer forcibly remove township residents to Mdantsane (Daily Dispatch, 16 October 1984). The announcement was interpreted as a major victory for the DVRA, who now stepped up their

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defiance campaign by instituting a rent boycott. By the beginning of 1985, 1,755 municipal tenants in Duncan Village were already not paying rent, and the GCC – which was meant to replace ECDB as the official manager of the township – was powerless, bankrupt (without rental income) and ineffectual (Daily Dispatch, 15 August 1985). Thus, when youths took to the streets in August 1985, the scene was already set for major political upheaval and disruption. The events of that weekend of the Mxenge funeral merely confirmed the reality that the apartheid state had lost control of the township. One consequence of the weakening hold of the state over the township was its inability to stop new population influx into Duncan Village. After 1984, C-section, designated as a transit housing area, was one of the first areas to experience residential densification. During the early 1980s, increasing numbers of ‘illegals’ had started moving into this area, but the trickle of new arrivals soon turned into a flood as the DVRA endorsed the right of new arrivals to built shacks on all available vacant land. After the August 1985 riots, the DVRA pushed its policy further by allowing shacks to be built in the backyards of formal 51/9 and 51/6 houses as well. Before long, Duncan Village Proper, which included some of the oldest municipal houses, was rivalling C-section as the most densely settled part of the location. In December 1984, Duncan Village was officially said to house a population of only just over 17,000 people: 11,161 adults and 6,279 children (Daily Dispatch, 9 April 1986). Given the residents’ growing suspicion of officials in Duncan Village at the time, this figure is likely to have been a conservative estimate. By the end of 1986, however, unofficial estimates put the population at over 50,000, and by 1990 there were approximately 80,000. In other words, the population of the township more than doubled in less than ten years. In Duncan Village, the right to squat was controlled by the DVRA. People who wished to build their own shacks had to apply to the DVRA branch or area committees for permission to occupy a site. It was also common for the DVRA to allocate sites in the backyards of municipal houses. In Duncan Village Proper, street committees would often intervene in the allocation of residential sites by instructing families living in formal houses to accept backyard shack-dwellers on their sites, as a ‘contribution to the struggle’. Moreover, shack-dwellers who were evicted by the occupant of the main house had the right to apply to the street committee to prevent the eviction. In many areas the DVRA also set the backyard rent to prevent landlords from exploiting tenants. These interventions greatly angered landlords, but were supported by many rent-paying young adults living in backyard shacks. One of the very few areas where shack erection was not permitted was within the premises of B-hostel, where hostel migrants refused to tolerate the DVRA policy on settlement. Conservative migrants said that it was inappropriate to have young families living in the precincts of a single-sex hostel. The hosteldwellers even insisted on keeping their own wives and families out of the hostels, despite the breakdown of influx control in the township. By permitting new settlement in public spaces and denying private tenants the right to control settlement on their own sites, the DVRA fundamentally

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redefined the socio-spatial dynamics of the township. They interfered with the orderly layout of streets and public spaces, with the carefully planned division between rural and urban segments of the location, with the separation of public and private space, and with the norming and forming of nuclear families on fenced pavilion-style plots. Moreover, by shifting the control over the allocation of residential space in backyards from private individuals to street-level civic representatives, the DVRA reconstituted private, singlehousehold sites as multi-household yards which were semi-private and semi-public spaces. By penetrating these spaces, the DVRA hoped to create moral communities that were connected together within a broader, unified political community. The DVRA imagined that semi-public yard communities would combine to form street communities, which would in turn combine to form broader political communities that could act in unison against the injustices of the state. In Alexandra in Johannesburg, the civic activist Moses Mayekiso argued that black people’s places of residence, rather than simply their sites of employment, were places of suffering and hardship. He argued that organisation must stem from experience and a system of organisation at the yard, block, street and area levels provided the foundation of a participatory democracy in the township. Although activists in Duncan Village never opted for the creation of yard committees (see Chapter 8), each street and area had their own committee and these were connected together into branch committees and ultimately a central committee for the township as a whole. At each level, disciplinary structures were set in place, which dealt with cases ranging from political dissent to domestic disputes as these spheres interpenetrated each other. Under the new regime, the power and authority of the old household patriarchs was undermined: senior men found themselves having to obey ‘Comrades’ 20 or 30 years their junior. They found themselves being told what to do, where to go and how much rent they could charge lodgers and tenants. The Comrades also told their wives where they could or could not shop during the consumer boycott that was instituted after the declaration of the State of Emergency in 1986 (see Chapter 5). The apartheid divide between urban and rural space in the township was destabilised with the influx of thousands of individuals and families from rural areas. After 1985, rural migrants, for instance, increasingly found accommodation not in the hostels but in the backyards of municipal houses or in the free-standing shack areas. It was also usual for young Comrades born within the township to move away from their parental homes and into the new shack areas, where they lived cheek by jowl with new arrivals from various parts of the Eastern Cape. The mixing together of urban and rural-born youths had a profound effect on the political culture in the township, as we will see in the next chapter, which relied as much on Western notions of individual civil rights as it did on communalistic and customary ideas about discipline, respect and justice.4 The rise to power of the DVRA as a political formation dominated by youth, and the policies they adopted towards settlement in the township, introduced a new socio-spatial dynamic which was in some ways

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reminiscent of that which had existed in the old wood-and-iron neighbourhoods of the East Bank. For city officials, white ratepayers and the media, the reversal of apartheid planning in Duncan Village was greeted with shock and horror. During the 1970s, an image of Duncan Village had been promoted as a modernising township, home to an increasingly stable and sedentary urban working class. Whites felt that it was a place that the city could be proud of. But, as new informal settlements opened up and started engulfing and surrounding the planned formal residential areas, the old discourse of the ‘septic fringe’ and the ‘irredeemable slum’, which had been so prevalent in the 1940s and 1950s, began to re-emerge in the city. In the 1980s and 1990s, officials and the media once again constructed Duncan Village as a site of infection, disorder and innumerable pathologies. White East London ratepayers were especially vocal, demanding that decisive action be taken by the state to bring the situation under control. They demanded that the city authorities stop the ‘unacceptable, indiscriminate shack and hovel erection’ that threatened their families and the city. They also argued that the new squatters were ‘backward tribal people’ who lacked a ‘commercial culture’ and, as such, had little to contribute to the development of the city. The narratives of white ratepayers and city officials constantly contrasted their own respectability, diligence and moral superiority to what they regarded as the ‘disreputable, slothful and property-endangering behaviour of the squatters’ (extracted from Amalinda Ratepayers’ Annual General Meeting minutes of 1992). The voice of white dissatisfaction brought action, as it had done in the 1950s. But this time there could be no talk of removals and displacements. In trying to address the situation in Duncan Village, the state now favoured the carrot over the stick. In 1986, when the severity of the political situation was clearly evident to the state, Chris Heunis, a National Party cabinet minister, announced in parliament: ‘The whole area [Duncan Village] will have to be replanned and upgraded and the 99-year leasehold system will apply. Residents still wishing to relocate in Mdantsane will be helped to do so but no forced removals will take place’ (Daily Dispatch, 15 May 1986). He suggested that the levels of congestion in the location were now unhealthy and that new land might be required to develop a new township in the city. Business joined in the fray by donating R2 million for the construction of classrooms that could later be converted into houses. Shortly after these announcements, the National Party MP for East London, Mr Peet de Pontes, unveiled a new plan for ‘the complete redevelopment and upgrading of Duncan Village’. The plan aimed to stabilise the township population at around 30,000 people and to move about 12,000 people to a new township located on the West Bank of the Buffalo River. The local newspaper heralded the plans as a breakthrough, which could restore community peace ‘by allowing blacks to set down permanent roots and become pillars of the society in which they live’ (Daily Dispatch, 13 January 1987). The editorial stated that such ‘progressive plans’ finally dispelled fears that blacks would still be forcibly removed to Mdantsane or other parts of the Transkei and Ciskei homelands.

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It noted that the new township, which was to be situated near the airport on the West Bank, might eventually house as many as 100,000 residents by the end of the century (Daily Dispatch, 13 January 1987).5 This announcement was twinned with other projects such as the proposed development of a new middle-class housing estate to the west of Duncan Village, as well as the promise that housing and infrastructure backlogs would finally be attended to. But the work undertaken by the state to placate Duncan Village residents was soon undermined by the GCC, who wanted to claim credit for new development plans and reassert their power in the township. In an effort to unlock revenue flows for township development, the GCC demanded an end to the rent boycott. And when residents refused to pay, the GCC moved in to evict municipal tenants. The tenants took the council to court in February 1988 and won their case (Daily Dispatch, 25 May 1988). The court ruling against the council proved to be a turning point, but the GCC ignored the rising militancy and insisted that, for its plans for the redevelopment of Duncan Village to succeed, at least 5,000 squatters would have to be removed from the area. The DVRA rejected this move, and in January 1990, 12,000 township residents marched to the city centre in an action reminiscent of the lodgers’ protest marches of the 1950s. The protests resulted in violent clashes with the police that left at least 28 people injured (Daily Dispatch, 15 January 1990). The squatter march marked the beginning of a new cycle of violence and protest that deepened in May 1990 when youths went on the rampage in the city after news broke that the Ciskeian dictator, Chief Lennox Sebe, had been toppled in a coup. Shops were looted and dozens of youths were arrested. Later, in October 1990, the power of the ‘Comrades’ was demonstrated at a huge public gathering in Duncan Village when a group of alleged informers were beaten within an inch of their lives. The release from prison in 1989­and 1990 of many of those detained under the Emergency regulations of 1986 also gave the DVRA a boost, as its old leadership took up the reins again and redirected the community back to its revolutionary path (Switzer 1993). The re-establishment of the DVRA executive, with its full leadership contingent, served to ensure that the development plans for Duncan Village, proposed by GCC mayor Eddie Makeba and Peet de Pontes of the National Party, were scuttled. In 1995, when I first visited Duncan Village, the only evidence of the Makeba and De Pontes redevelopment plan was a large vacant site-and-service scheme, which had been built next to the highly congested and politically unstable C-section. The site-and-service area sported generous pavilion-style plots set out on a neat rectangular grid, with flush toilets and full street lighting. The sites stood empty despite chronic overcrowding in the township. They served as a symbol of the power of DVRA, which had decreed that anyone who moved onto this land would be seen as a ‘traitor to the revolution’. Every night the streetlights in the complex burned brightly in an effort to lure in potential clients. These bright lights, set among the dim paraffin lamps of the surrounding shack areas, were intended to give direction to those who wished to leave the ‘darkness’ of their congested shack existence.

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But such was the resolve of the people of Duncan Village not to be fooled by the promises of apartheid development that it was only in June 2002, almost a decade after the ANC has come to power, that the first low-cost formal houses were erected there.

Photo 4.1  Informal settlement behind St Peter’s church, Duncan Village Proper Source: Photo by Leslie Bank.

Looking Back and Forward: The 1995 Social Survey In the mid 1990s, a township that had been planned for 20,000 people now housed at least three times that many. Shacks sprawled out in all directions, engulfing the neatly planned and laid-out streets and houses. The basic infrastructure and services were atrophied, with each communal toilet block serving hundreds of families in the new shack areas. Some of the new shack areas had no toilets at all and people used the bush or walked to other areas that did have facilities. In the two most densely settled parts of the township – Duncan Village Proper and C-section – population densities exceeded 3,000 people per square km. In these areas there was no place for the orderly street and site plans. Shacks were packed together, with less than a metre of space between them, and burgeoned across formally planned areas. Residential sites that were planned to accommodate one male-headed nuclear family suddenly became home to four or five families, some of which were headed by single women or rural migrants. In 1994, a local NGO carried out a census

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of the township and found that there were now 5,083 backyard shacks and 7,854 free-standing shacks in Duncan Village, which only had 3,564 formal municipal dwellings, excluding the hostels (Afesis-Corplan 1993). They found that there were four shacks for every formal dwelling and approximately two backyard shacks per formal house. Moreover, with the persistent problem of shack fires, this population had become highly mobile and was constantly moving around seeking more secure accommodation. When I entered the field in 1995, I conducted a social survey of Duncan Village Proper, including the hostels, that followed the format of the 1955 survey undertaken by Reader (see Reader 1960). Although the question schedule used by Reader was not available to me, I could infer from the tables in the text and appendices of his book what types of questions he had asked. Pauw (1973 [1963]) had also used a questionnaire in his study and I gleaned additional questions from this work that could be included. From my own point of view, the main aim of the survey was to develop a profile of the demographic, social and economic characteristics of the different residential niches in the changing township, as well as to establish a basis for comparison between the new post-apartheid Duncan Village and the old East Bank location of the pre-apartheid period. I start this chapter by highlighting some of the survey’s main findings, which will lay a foundation for a more detailed discussion of the social dynamics in the new shack fringe that surrounded the township at this time. One of the main findings of the 1995 survey was that, despite sustained efforts to encourage urban permanence in established residential areas in the township, a quarter of all household heads said that they had a ‘second home in rural areas’ and over 40 per cent of them claimed to be ‘sending cash and goods home on a regular basis’. This indicated that a large population of urban residents still had rural links. Those with rural links were also relatively evenly spread across the different housing zones: 19 per cent living in municipal houses had rural homes, 25 per cent in backyard shacks and 31 per cent in the free-standing shacks. The results showed that migrant and non-migrant sections of the population were increasingly living in the same neighbourhoods, as they had done in the East Bank in the 1950s, and were no longer separated between hostels and town houses. But the 1995 survey also revealed that, unlike in the 1950s, women were more likely to be sending cash and groceries to the rural areas than men. This presented an interesting inversion of the old male-oriented migrant patterns reported by the trilogy, where men tended to be the migrants and women stayed behind in the rural areas. The second significant feature of the general population growth of Duncan Village between 1985 and 1995 was the rapid increase in the number of young adults in the township. At a political level, the ascendancy of the youth was evidenced in the way in which they took charge of township politics from 1984 onwards. In the 1980s, the rise of the Comrades (amaqabane) was so swift and decisive that it left very little political space for rearguard action from the older generation (see Chapter 5). The dominance of the youth was not confined to the political domain, however. It was reflected in the increasing

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demographic presence of youth in Duncan Village after 1984. The AfesisCorplan survey of 1993 showed that 48.2 per cent of the population of the township as a whole was located in the age band 14–34 years. Significantly, the same survey also found that less than 30 per cent of the population was under the age of 14 years. This suggests that a large number of children of school age were left behind in the rural areas when their parents migrated to the city, and that a considerable number of urban-born adults were still sending their children to live with relatives in rural areas. In terms of the residential location of young adults it was evident that the vast majority had found accommodation in the free-standing and backyard shack areas which provided homes for new arrivals after 1984. The survey also found that the congested formal residential areas were no longer dominated by male-headed nuclear families created by government policy in the 1960s and 1970s. By 1995, there was a wide range of new family forms in these areas and a growing number of female-headed households in the township. These had not been permitted after the 1960s. In comparing the 1995 findings with those of Pauw’s 1959 survey of households in the municipal area, I found that there were striking similarities in the distribution of different types of households in the formal housing areas, although average household sizes were much smaller in 1995. What was particularly surprising was that there were fewer male-headed nuclear households in formal houses and yards in 1995 than there had been in the late 1950s. This was partly due to the large number of mother–child households counted as ‘separate households’ in the backyards of formal houses. Contrary to expectations, female-headed households were common and seemingly increasing in all areas in the township. The survey did, however, reveal that the state’s attack on large, independent matrifocal households had been successful. There were far fewer of these units in the 1990s than there had been in the 1950s. In the formal houses and backyard shacks, the number of multi-generational female-headed households had dropped from nearly 20 per cent of the total in the 1950s to about 10 per cent in the 1990s, while the proportion of large male-headed units increased from 15 per cent to almost 25 per cent. In 1955, Reader (1960: 117) found that the majority of lodgers living in multi-roomed wood-and-iron houses in the 1950s were unrelated to the owner or tenant of the dwelling. Only 36 per cent (8,780) of the lodgers in these houses were related to the owner or tenant, while 64 per cent (15,830) were unrelated. Among the unrelated lodgers, over 37 per cent (9,000) were male. This confirms the Mayers’ (1971 [1961]) observation that large numbers of male migrants lived in the backrooms of houses with their iintanga (male age-mates) or other male amakhaya (home-mates). The remainder of the rooms were inhabited by an assortment of other domestic groups – nuclear families, single-parent units, young couples ‘living together’, sibling groups and so on. The occupancy rate for wood-and-iron rooms ranged from 1 to 12 people, depending on the standards set by the house owner. Reader suggests that the average room-occupancy rate was about 4.5 people per room (1960: 118).

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35 30 25 %

20

1954

15

1995

10 5 Other

Mother child

Nuclear

Multi-gen (female)

Multi-gen (male)

0

Figure 4.1  Comparison by household types, 1954 and 1995 Source: Pauw (1973 [1963]: 149) and Bank (1996).

In 1995 the average room-occupancy rate in the shack area in Duncan Village was less than four people. Household sizes were generally smaller in the backyard shacks than in the free-standing shacks. It was also found that closer to half (as opposed to roughly a third in the 1950s) of those living in the backyards of formal houses were actually related to the owner or official tenant in formal municipal houses in 1995. But the 1995 figures significantly revealed that very few shacks were inhabited by groups of male migrants. In the 1990s, migrants either lived with girlfriends or lovers or lived alone. This indicates that the old migrant residential patterns described by the Mayers (1971 [1961]) had fallen away. In fact, the shack areas (both backyard and free-standing) were dominated by single parents and young couples living together, rather than by groups of male migrants. Single women with children, living without a male presence in their households, preferred to live in the backyards rather than in the free-standing shack areas, because it was safer there and they could often rely on the support of other women in the yard to look after their children. By contrast, the free-standing shack areas were dominated by young couples living together out of wedlock. Young couples chose these areas because they gave them independence and freedom from parental control. Although there were uncanny similarities between the domestic structures of the 1950s and the new households in Duncan Village in the 1990s, there were nevertheless significant differences in the economic position of residents. In the 1950s, Reader found that 83 per cent of the male population of working age in the East Bank were employed, while 7 per cent were unemployed and 1 per cent unemployable (1960: 62). Among women he found that only 36 per cent were employed. These rates of employment actually increased in the 1960s and 1970s, because unemployed elements in the townships were

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relocated out of the city. By 1995, the picture had changed dramatically. First, female participation in the labour force had risen to about 40 per cent and women were now strongly represented in all categories of employment. They comprised 49 per cent of all labourers, 52 per cent of machine workers, 66 per cent of professionals (mainly nurses) and 75 per cent of the township’s informal sector operators. By contrast, male employment had dropped off very significantly. In 1995 only about 45 per cent of men in the township were employed in stable formal sector jobs. The rest were unemployed, self-employed or infrequently employed as casual labourers or piece-workers. Close to 40 per cent of the economically active population in the township was unemployed compared with the 10 to15 per cent of the 1950s. The rate of unemployment among household heads was also very high and stood at approximately 25 per cent. The 1995 survey identified important avenues for enquiry. First, it revealed that migrancy and rural–urban migration were still very much in evidence in the township and that migrants were not only confined to the single-sex municipal hostels, as was the intention of the apartheid policy. There were supposed to be no migrants outside of these spaces, only urban-born men and women who were part of the permanently urbanised African working class. Obviously some of those with rural links were new arrivals, but it also occurred to me that there were others who lived in formal houses who also had homes in the countryside all along. This raised interesting questions about continuities and changes in migrant culture and identity which clearly required more detailed investigation. I wondered whether there was still evidence of the old Red cultural style, which was described so fully in Townsmen or Tribesmen (Mayer with Mayer 1971 [1961]), outside the municipal hostels. I also wondered whether I would find evidence of iseti beer-drinking, that is, beer-drinking sessions for a ‘set’ of home-mates, in the shack areas or in the yards of those houses I had passed on Florence Street. I imagined stumbling upon pockets of conservative migrants, tucked away in the shack areas, who still regarded the city with disdain and suspicion, and dreamt daily of returning to their lush fields and glossy herds and homesteads in the countryside. Was it feasible to think that such people and subcultural forms still existed in the mid 1990s? In reviewing the survey findings, I was also immediately struck by how many female-headed households there were in the township. My understanding was that apartheid administrators were determined to remove such households out of the township by relocating independent women from the cities to commuter townships and to rural areas, where they would be under the watchful eye of male chiefs and headmen. It was therefore a matter of considerable interest to me that almost a third of households in the total sample of 385 households were female-headed. What could account for this? Was there re-emergence of matrifocality? Why were these households forming, and what was it that women were responding to in the city that made them to keep men out of their households? Or, did such households form because men did not want these women or refused to get married? I wondered whether the old debates

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about matrifocality, which Pauw (1973 [1963]) had helped to frame, were still relevant in the post-apartheid townships of the 1990s. To discover more it was clearly necessary to seek out some of the new township matriarchs, and find out how they managed their livelihoods as well as their social and domestic affairs. One trend that I picked up straightaway was that there seemed to be a lot of young mothers and children living in the backyards of formal houses. This was interesting to me because, in the 1950s, the backyards had been dominated by male migrants, not young women (see Chapter 8). What had caused this shift, I wondered? But I also reflected on the whereabouts of powerful entrepreneurial matriarchs, the kind that ran their multi-generational families like small corporations and were able to control the street from their old verandahs. The survey showed that Duncan Village of the 1990s also had a very large young population living in the new shack areas. Clearly some of the youth were recent arrivals from the rural areas. The parallels with the 1950s were striking. During and after the Second World War there were several waves of new urban immigration into South Africa cities as rural men, in particular, responded to the rapid growth of industrial jobs in the cities. From the mid 1980s, a similar trend occurred as the influx-control regulations started to collapse. Suddenly it was possible for young men and women to come into the city and settle in shack areas without being harassed. One of the big differences between the two periods was that there were far fewer industrial jobs for the immigrants of the 1980s than there were for those of the 1950s. Nevertheless, with or without jobs, these new immigrants helped to create the new shack settlements in and around the township. No sooner did they set up a new informal settlement than they were joined by hundreds of other youth from inside the township who wanted to get away from their parents houses and authority. This movement had created free-standing shack areas which had their own unique social character. They were made up of young households living together outside of wedlock. These households outnumbered other types of household in the township, and thus raised critical questions about the impact of these new family structures on urban life and experience. To be sure, the youth were powerful and a troublesome force in the 1950s. In fact, neither Hunter nor Mayer liked them very much. But in the earlier period they lacked a territorial base from which to assert themselves, a space outside of parental control. So what did it mean that the youth and young households generally were able to make their own lives away from parental sanction and control? What sort of culture did the ‘Comrades’ and their young lovers create in the townships as they struggled for political liberation and personal freedom? And what was the legacy of the cultural shift for the post-apartheid city? The Social Force of Shack Fires One of the reasons why the DVRA had prevented settlement in certain areas – like 7a and 7b – was to create fire barriers that would stop shack fires, which

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were endemic in the village, from spreading from one area to the next. In the period 1986 to 1992, the East London Fire Department records show that no fewer than 1,151 shacks were destroyed in 208 fires in Duncan Village, at a rate of 5.5 shacks per fire. In the six years after that, when all the breaks had been filled in with shacks, there were twice as many houses destroyed in the same number of fires. In other words, intensified settlement made shack fires ever more destructive. Shack-dwellers were like birds in the cornfield, once the field burnt down they simply flew away and settled elsewhere. The problem was that shack fires destroyed possessions and property, which made rebuilding difficult. Local charities and business always rallied around to help out, and the DVRA appointed itself as the gatekeeper for the distribution of all fire emergency help, to ensure that it retained power and authority in the affected areas. People were not supposed to rebuild without being allocated sites by the DRVA, but those who had money to buy their own materials could easily muscle their way in after fires and simply claim that they belonged to the affected group. This meant that often there were more people trying to move into an area after a fire than before it struck. Young couples who had no money would often queue for free building materials after a fire, claiming to have been fire victims. In some instances, I found that mothers and fathers who did not want their sons at home anymore would encourage them to queue for materials and force their way into areas that were reconstructed after fire. In my earlier fieldwork in Duncan Village Proper, I spent much of my time on fire sites, and working with men, women and families who lived in these areas and had to deal with the recurring nightmare of fire. One such woman was Phumeza Nono, who was a domestic worker in East London and lived in Sandile Street in Duncan Village. She arrived in East London from the Mooiplaas rural location in 1987 and, after working for a period as a live-in domestic in the white suburbs, she purchased a backyard shack in Dunga Street in Duncan Village Proper for R150. Phumeza’s first experience of fire occurred in 1989 when she lost her shack and all her possessions in a blaze caused by an accident with a paraffin pressure stove that burnt out 35 shacks on Dunga Street. The fire left Phumeza destitute and she was forced to return to live-in in the white suburbs. By 1990, she had saved enough money to purchase a second shack, this time in Sandile Street where she felt her small family would be safe. However, in June 1993, fire once again ripped through her neighbourhood, claiming her home in its wake. For a second time, she was left penniless with only a few possessions that she managed to salvage from the blaze. Fortunately for Phumeza, the Sandile Street fire received publicity in the local press and there was welfare assistance provided through the DVRA in the form of building materials, food and second-hand clothes. There was enough for everyone and, within a matter of weeks, Phumeza had rebuilt her shack. For almost two years, Phumeza Nono was spared the tragedy of fire, but then in October 1995 a massive fire broke out again on Sandile Street. When we arrived on the scene, she was sitting on a wooden bench staring at her charred home. She was crying. She explained that she was woken at about

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3.00 a.m. by the familiar acrid smell of smoke and had sprung to her feet, grabbed her daughter, a toddler of one year, and fled. She said that the intensity of the heat was so great that she did not even think of trying to salvage any possessions. All she could think of was getting her baby out alive. However, as she emerged from the dense smoke, she realised that her two other children were still trapped in the flames. Instinctively, she rushed back into the fire, amidst cries from on-lookers that if she went back in she would be burnt to death. A few minutes later, she emerged with the remaining members of her family in tow. She had saved her family, but lost her home. Phumeza Nono explained that she was not crying about her lost possessions. Her tears, she said, were for the children that she had so nearly lost. ‘Siyatsha yile parafini sihlala kuyo’ (‘We live in paraffin and burn in it’), she lamented. The impact of fire on the urban poor, however, went far beyond the trauma of lost possessions and dragging frightened children from burning shacks. It hit at the very fabric of this urban society and at people’s perceptions of themselves and the city. Because fires were constant, uncontrollable and random, people became conditioned to think of themselves as victims, caught up in a powerful and destructive city system over which they had no control. Like many of the other mysterious aspects of the urban system, fire was too ubiquitous to be ignored – it had to be explained to address people’s fear and alleviate their sense of powerlessness. In Duncan Village, such explanations took various forms, but the most immediate metaphor used by local people for the understanding of fire and its destructive potential is that of witchcraft. This is not surprising given that the use of fire has long been implicated in Xhosa witch beliefs. Fire (umlilo) was one of the malevolent forces used by witches in the form of vutha to perpetrate their evil deeds. To suspect witchcraft where fire was involved did not demand a great leap in the imagination of the urban poor. It was always a real possibility that had to be carefully considered in each case. Shack fires, it was said, were like witches. They struck in the small hours of the morning when the people were least prepared to deal with them. They tore through entire neighbourhoods with the speed of lightning and caused havoc and mayhem in their paths. They always arrived unannounced and disappeared unexplained. Moreover, the devastation wrought by fire, like the action of witches, seldom only affected the lives of one person. Fires challenged people’s perceptions of social and community life as orderly and stable. They appeared to embody a selfish and gluttonous desire to destroy the lives of others. Fire offered no ordinary threat to this beleaguered community. To use Monica Wilson’s (1951) phrase, it represented ‘the collective nightmare of the group’. Besides the damage wrought to property, fire claimed more than 30 lives in the shack areas of Duncan Village in the years between the rebellion and 2000, when new measures were taken to control fire in the township. Consequently it is not surprising that people so often dealt with fire within the idiom of witchcraft, refusing to focus on the structural conditions of life in the slum which caused their misfortune but rather attributing its arrival to individual causation. In Duncan Village, it was often assumed that fire was

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driven by malice (especially when people were injured or died) and that, if there was evidence to suspect direct nefarious intent, those who started fires should be pursued as if they were ‘witches’. The most famous witchcraft case in the history of this township occurred in 1986, when a leading political activist died in a motor accident on the same day that a residential fire destroyed his shack in his township. The two events were quickly connected in local interpretations that circulated in the neighbourhood. The fire that burnt the shack had been used by the witches who killed the activist. This seemed plausible because fire is associated with witchcraft. This version of events soon became widely accepted in the township as a whole, where it was believed that the sister of the activist had conspired with two other women to bewitch her brother. In the week that followed the fire incident, a people’s court was arranged for the women to stand trial. The court hearings were held in public (near St Peter’s church) and attended by thousands of people. According to eyewitnesses, these women first denied that they had anything to do with the fire, but as public pressure mounted on them to admit their culpability, they capitulated, and were summarily burnt to death in one of Duncan Village’s most famous ‘necklace’ cases.6 The dramatic fate of the three women was determined largely by the coincidence of two connected disasters on a single day. It seemed incomprehensible to local people that these incidents were not connected. They demanded an explanation and that proper retribution be exacted for the threat these deeds presented to the integrity of community life and the political struggle of the people of Duncan Village. In the decade of fire between 1986 and 1995, I was told that many others had been accused of causing fire and of maliciously destroying property through selfish and anti-social behaviour. In the vast majority of these cases, people were not necklaced, or even labelled as witches. But the fact remains that the idiom of witchcraft is one of the ways in which local people in Duncan Village explain and deal with the consequences of fire on their lives. This was powerfully brought home at the Sandile Street fire on 3 July 1995, an area very close to my main field sites. I was not on Sandile Street on the day of the fire, but participated in the mopping up work that was done afterwards. The press report of the incident we witnessed read as follows: Armed police prevented an enraged crowd from meting out mob justice to a sixteen-year-old girl who allegedly caused a fire which left 200 people homeless in Duncan Village yesterday … While the fire was raging residents caught and bound the alleged culprit whom they claimed has started a fire twice before and shouted that they wanted to hold a people’s court, police said. Police Internal Instability Division members who were on the scene to assist firemen fired rubber bullets to disperse hundreds of angry residents and rescued the girl. The mob who were wielding sticks and throwing stones again tried to attack the girl as police escorted her to an armoured vehicle with her arms held behind her back and bundled her inside. She was

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guarded by police clad in bullet-proof vests and holding tear gas canisters at the ready. (Daily Dispatch, 4 July 1995) As the police escorted the girl away, the crowd bayed: ‘makatshiswe, makatshiswe’ (‘let her burn, let her burn’). There was no doubt that they meant what they said. Had the police not arrived on the scene this girl would have been burnt by the mob. So intense was the fear of fire that those who caused it were made to endure it. In Duncan Village, those accused of causing fires for selfish reasons were not taken through the slow and arduous process of the state legal system and penal institutions, they were exposed to the full wrath of popular justice on the street. In most cases, local police or political leaders intervened to extricate the accused from the mob and calm the situation down, but there were also cases where the accused were beaten and even killed. One of the interesting aspects of the pattern of witchcraft accusations in cases of fire is that they were often directed at women, especially single women and social marginals, such as epileptics or people who were said to be mentally retarded. This distinct pattern of implicating women in witchcraft accusations is, of course, not unique to Duncan Village. Research throughout Africa (see chapters by Austlander, Bastian and Schmoll in Comaroff and Comaroff 1993), shows that this is the trend across the continent, especially in urban areas. Men in Duncan Village often caused fires, especially when they were drunk or fighting with their wives, but they were seldom exposed to the wrath of stick-wielding mobs baying for their blood. The evidence suggests that where men did cause fires, at best, local interpretations of their actions tended to blame them for ‘carelessness’ or attribute their actions to the resolving of interpersonal politics. Thus, when a middle-aged, male taxi owner started a fire on Florence Street during October 1995, it was suggested that the fire might have been caused by the man’s involvement in the ongoing taxi feuds in the township. The explanation of the fire became submerged in a well-known discourse about male business politics. At worst, however, men were accused of using sorcery in domestic quarrels or in altercations with their lovers to start fires. In such cases, men were blamed for consciously manipulating medicines to harm other people, but these actions were not generally seen as morally depraved or aimed at undermining the integrity of the entire neighbourhood or community. Township women, on the other hand, it seems were believed to have a natural propensity for evil. In much the same way as old matriarchs were victimised by local male elites and city councillors in the 1950, who feared their economic independence, their ‘indiscipline’ and accused them of creating ‘juvenile delinquency’, young women in the free-standing shack areas bore the brunt of community accusations in the aftermath of fires. Some young women lived alone with their children in shacks, others with female siblings or with friends. They were part of a growing stream of young rural women who flooded into East London’s shack areas in the 1990s. One study found that in East London as a whole twice as many young women were entering new shack areas as men (Bank 1998). The argument that was often presented by male leaders, as

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well as older men and women at workshops on fire and paraffin safety, was that these women were irresponsible housekeepers, having not learnt to be proper mothers and homemakers before running away from their parents. As a result, it was said that they were most inclined to neglect their pots and stoves while food was cooking, and would be seen chatting or visiting others when they should be at home. The very presence of these women in the shack areas seemed to place them in the firing line of accusations concerning anti-social behaviour. In considering the gender politics of witchcraft accusations in Duncan Village, it must also be remembered that the popular justice system in this township was dominated by men. The DVRA people’s courts were open to every man and woman in the neighbourhood over 18 years old, but the sentences administered by these courts were decided upon and passed down by men. This is why women have found it so difficult to press charges of domestic violence against them and why many of them are suspicious of the popular justice system in Duncan Village. In reflecting on the widespread implication of women in witchcraft activities in Africa, the Comaroffs (1993) suggest that the targeting of women as witches may have a great deal to do with the increasingly ambivalent position of women in contemporary African societies, especially in the urban areas, where they have acquired new roles as accumulators of wealth, bearers of independence and enemies of custom. They argue that because women now bear the brunt of witchcraft accusation in Africa, we should not think that this has always been the case. Ritual, they argue, is not only about affirming past practices, it is about enforcing new regimes of power. This kind of analysis has direct bearing on the Duncan Village situation where, during the decade of fire, young women poured into the township in unprecedented numbers, and also have made considerable headway in a tight urban job market, as well as in the township informal sector. Women in fire-prone shack areas would say: ‘we live in paraffin and burn in it’. Local rituals of witchcraft accusation and the fear that they provoked served to discipline women, and to remind them that their responsibilities were in the home. Fire and the ritualised forms of punishment that sometimes accompanied it acted as powerful reminders to women of the dangers of challenging male domination and of rejecting their socially ordained roles as mothers and domestic workers. Fire, Domesticity and Social Fluidity Although the reasons for the changes in domestic group composition over time are complex, fire has played a decisive role in the desegregation of larger domestic units. By rasing free-standing and backyard shack areas to the ground, fire has stimulated processes of fission and fragmentation in household units. Young adults, in particular, have used the opportunities provided by fire to break away from their parental homes. Under normal circumstances, they would have found it difficult to set up their own places, especially given the cost of building materials. However, in the wake of fire, when building

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materials are readily available and new residential spaces are created, young adults are frequently able to assert their independence, often with the support of their parents. In the cramped circumstances of squatter life, parents were seen to encourage their children to go out and build their own places. As one mother explained: ‘It is not good for my son to live here anymore as he is old enough to work now and support himself, and there is also the problem of privacy in these shack areas – it’s better that he takes his girlfriends to his own place.’ In the discussion that took place after fires, parents often suggested that new sites be created to accommodate young adults who wished to move off on their own. In fact, in one shack area, we discovered that this tendency was given the status of a formal ruling at a Residents’ Association meeting. The other households that commonly split after fires were those that had become extended as a result of the arrival of siblings and relatives from the countryside. In Duncan Village, as in many other shack areas, people who wished to move into the township from elsewhere usually do so by using their kinship networks. Newcomers would move into the house of a relative or friend – or a home-mate – while waiting for a more permanent place to stay. Among regular township-dwellers, these people had a reputation of over-staying their welcome, and, when opportunities arose for them to move out into their own places, they were often supported in doing so by the host family. Fires provided precisely such opportunities because, when the civic official went around asking for the names of householders, new arrivals were encouraged to put their names down as separate households. This way they would be assured of getting their own sites and of establishing a permanent foothold in the city. These processes of household fission, however, took on a further spatial division during the reconstruction when there was insufficient space at the fire site to accommodate all those who had allegedly lost their homes. In this process, the older, male household heads would usually get first choice to rebuild, while the new households and, especially, female household heads would have to wait in line. The disadvantages experienced by female-headed households were mainly due to the gendered distribution of welfare aid. At fire sites, it was conventional for the building materials to be distributed to men and the food and blankets to women. Female household heads, who could not afford to purchase their own materials or did not have male kin to stand in the queue for them, tended to lose out and were often forced to accept relocation. Younger couples were also at a disadvantage because the principle of seniority was applied in the welfare queues. In spatial terms, this meant that the new shack enclaves created as a result of fires tended to be dominated by women and young unmarried couples. The other major consequence of fire on domestic fluidity and orientation in Duncan Village was that it encouraged new arrivals in the city to maintain active connections with their ancestral homes in rural areas. Almost one third of those living in the free-standing shack areas claimed that they had a house elsewhere. Some of these houses were located in Mdantsane. There was a trend for residents from Mdantsane with low-paid jobs to build shacks for

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themselves in Duncan Village (especially if they came from families with old East Bank connections) in order to save money on taxi fares. These shackdwellers went home at the weekend and lived rent-free in the shacks during the week. I heard at the time that the dangers of shack fires were chasing some of these commuters away. There were often households in the shack areas that were socially connected to families in formal houses in Duncan Village. These people moved into the shack because of overcrowding and conflicts at home. Housing shortages in the formal areas, domestic overcrowding and the opening of shack areas combined to encourage a process of ‘household decompression’, which saw larger multi-generational households from the apartheid era break up into smaller units as new opportunities for settlement emerged in the city. This process has continued in many informal settlements, where average household sizes have shrunk below three people per shack. In times of crisis, such as in the case of fire, these shack-dwellers could always go back to their father’s or mother’s house, if relationships with the main family were still good enough. A third trend in the free-standing shack areas was for shack-dwellers to keep active links with their rural homesteads in order to manage social and material possessions. Many single women who were involved in small home-based businesses, like spaza shops, or had children to look after turned to their rural homes and kin for support. As one woman explained: There is no point for me to hoard any of my possessions here because they will just be stolen or destroyed by fire. I send my stuff home to my sister in Kentani to keep and when I eventually get a house of my own here in an area where there is no fire and I feel there is enough security, I will bring them all back – my cupboards, carpets, kitchenware – and display them in my new house … It is difficult to tell how people are doing in the shack because none of them are stupid enough to store their wealth here. Other women said that they were prepared to endure the shack areas in Duncan Village, despite the dangers of fire and victimisation, because they were close to town and close to home. Many young women sent children home to the rural areas to be looked after by their mothers. As one woman said: I do not like to keep children here as the environment is not fit for them – it is too dangerous and you will always see that the ones who die in shack fire are always children who are asleep or too small to escape … Most of the women around here try to keep good relations with their mothers at home so that they have somewhere to send their children. Consequently, fire had a profound effect on the nature of household formation and on the general structure of domestic social relationships. First, there was constant pressure on domestic groups to split and to disperse as a result of fire and this meant that the average size of domestic groups in informal settlements in Duncan Village was much smaller than those in other informal settlements

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in the region. Second, the spatial fragmentation of domestic groups across different residential areas meant that domesticity was diffused. Young adults who moved out of their parents homes’ did not always have jobs and often returned to their parental home for meals, recreation or to borrow money, appliances and other items. Sometimes they even continued to participate in household decision-making processes, despite being physically located in other areas. This meant that domestic life in Duncan Village was often diffuse and that there were high levels of inter-household mobility. Third, fire worked as a shifting and sorting mechanism which pushed economically weak domestic groups, such as female-headed households and young unmarried couples, to the fringes of the urban system. In the aftermath of fires, the latter households tended to be pushed out of the more established residential areas and into new informal settlements. Fourth, fires also ensured that many shack residents kept in close contact with their rural kin, relying on them to look after any possessions they acquired and also caring for children who could not stay with them in towns. In Duncan Village Proper, fires were no mere epiphenomena, which delayed real urban development and temporarily disrupted the normal functioning of urban social relations. They were, I have argued, powerful social forces that shaped and structured everyday social life and relationships in the free-standing shack areas. Fire is a major social force in its own right, which has made its influence felt at every level of society, from the structure of community relations and politics, to household formation and through to people’s notions of personhood, power and identity. The experience of fire and the new communities it created served to reinforce and uphold a social order which is based on gender inequality, poverty, powerlessness, dependence and social instability. In the face of fire it was difficult to imagine a secure and permanent future in the city. Living with fire encouraged a sense of the immediacy of life, a notion that what happens today is what matters because it might not be long before fire snatches your possessions and loved ones. It also encouraged a certain kind of recklessness and risk-taking that was a feature of youth culture in the city at this time (see Chapter 5). Conclusion This chapter has explored some of the consequences of the political rebellion in Duncan Village and the associated implosion of modernist planning in the township. I considered the political and demographic implications of the collapse of apartheid planning in Duncan Village, and the struggles for power that ensued in the wake of the dramatic events of August 1985, when the township slipped irreversibly away from the state and into the hands of the DVRA. In this chapter I have described my entry into Duncan Village as a fieldworker in 1995 and my selection of the free-shack areas, which encircled the formal houses in Duncan Village Proper as a focal point for investigation. The analytical core of the chapter deals with the nature of urbanism and of social relations within these new shack areas. I argue in the chapter that fire

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and the experience of fire disasters provides a critical lens through which to explore social life in these areas. In the chapter I argue that shack fires, far from being simply periodic disasters that make ‘good news’, are persistent, repetitive and structural features of shack life in Duncan Village that shape attitudes towards the city as well as the relations between people and places. I concur with Liisa Malkki’s (1997) warnings that we should be careful in anthropology not to discard ‘news’ simply because it seems fleeting rather than enduring. In this chapter I have explored the social dynamics of the free-standing shack areas in Duncan Village in the 1990s through the prism of an analysis of fire and its social impact. I have also tried to draw attention to the volatility and social fluidity of the free-standing shack areas, and how they often elude management and control. In fact, one of the reasons why the DVRA was so keen for me to ‘research in the new shack areas’ was because they felt they needed more information on these areas to help to understand them and to bring them under control. The perception that the new popular political structures in the townships in the 1980s and 1990s were all-powerful, domineering and able to control township populations with an iron rod is often exaggerated. Many civics,7 like the DVRA, were able to inculcate a culture of fear and respect, as we will see in Chapter 5, but there were always unruly pockets of migrants and shack-dwellers who proved difficult to control in the townships. In the analysis presented here I have suggested that, while the DVRA certainly emerged as the uncontested representative of the people during the 1980s, it was not always in full control of urbanisation and settlement in the township. People living in new shack areas often took matters into their own hands. They accused people of starting fires with malicious intent and punished them without consulting the DVRA structures; they disobeyed orders and directives about where it was legitimate to erect shacks and defied the DVRA rules that there had to be at least 1.5 metres between each dwelling after fires. Local people often claimed their own spaces, chose their own neighbours and asserted their independence by using their own building materials, money and resources to rebuild their dwellings. In the shack areas, spaces were constantly being claimed and reclaimed in an ongoing process of struggle, which saw female-headed households lose ground to male-headed ones, and households with money and resources push poorer households aside. Some of the biological metaphors about competition and the survival of the fittest, which were embraced by the Chicago School in the 1930s, seemed appropriate to the realities of shack life in Duncan Village in the 1990s. The neighbourhoods and shack areas were like moving juggernauts, in a state of constant flux and fluidity. At some levels one felt that the standard sociological vocabulary of urban households and social groups seemed to miss the contingent nature of all social formations, including households, in this urban context. Nevertheless, in order to generate a more formal description of the nature of the emerging post-apartheid community in Duncan Village Proper in the mid 1990s, a social survey was designed and administered, not only to describe current realities but also to explore continuities and change over

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time. The survey, which I describe in the chapter, covered the entire township and demonstrated that many of the desired outcomes of apartheid planning had already been reversed by the mid 1990s. Migrants and townspeople were intermingled in all settlements. Female-headed households had re-emerged in force across the social landscape, and there seemed to be some evidence of social forms similar to the matrifocal households described by Pauw in the 1950s. There was also a relatively large portion of the population in the township that kept active links with their rural homes. Such links were encouraged by the extremely insecure and precarious nature of urban existence. But perhaps more than anything else, the survey revealed the realities of deepening poverty and escalating structural unemployment. In the 1950s, perhaps one in five adults in the old location who wanted to work was without a job. By the mid 1990s, the figure was close to one in two. The quality and nature of work available had also changed. A much larger proportion of the labour force were in insecure casual employment, while a significantly greater number of employees in the 1990s were women by comparison to the 1950s. Township political and economic struggles, as we will see in the chapters that follow, created new cleavages and identities. In the next three chapters I will focus on different categories and spaces in the township. The next chapter leads on from this one, exploring the ‘style of the Comrades’, who had emerged in the post-1980s period as the dominant social and political formation in the township. This chapter is followed by an ethnography of changing lifestyles and cultural orientations of migrant workers inside Duncan Village at the end of the millennium. Much of the evidence presented is based on extensive fieldwork in the late 1990s in the B-hostel and the surrounding shack areas near the complex. From the hostels, I enter the spaces of the backyards of formal houses to explore how backyard shack life had changed in the township, and uncover the feminised rhythm of the yards. The penultimate chapter focuses on those families that were rewarded with formal houses in Duncan Village in the 1960s and 1970s, and how they have coped with change, especially the transformation of the emerging working-class suburb into an urban slum. And, finally, we leave the congestion of Duncan Village Proper and move over the road, where new housing estates were created in the 2000s to address the housing needs and demands of the urban poor in Duncan Village. What do these types of settlements offer those who move there, and how have they changed the lives of the urban poor in this city? To set out on this journey we first need to meet and understand those actors who turned Duncan Village upside down and ended decades of apartheid rule and domination – the amaqabane or the Comrades.

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5 The Style of the Comrades

The aim of this chapter, as the title suggests, is to focus on the Comrades as a social and cultural style rather than a political movement. There is already a large literature on South African urban youth politics in the 1980s and 1990s, which stresses the rise of the Comrades (amaqabane) as a political phenomenon (Carter 1992; Lodge 1983: Mayekiso 1996; Seekings 1993; Sitas 1992). Most of these works concentrate on the organisational structures and political ideologies underpinning the nationwide mobilisation of youth in the 1980s, and on the politics of the liberation movements and the emergence of democratic civic structures in the townships during the 1980s and 1990s. Other more sociologically oriented studies focus on the pavement politics and street masculinities associated with the rise of the Comrades (Bundy 1987; Xaba 2001), while a third stream in the Comrades’ literature, associated with scholars like Catherine Campbell (1994), attempts to explore the impact of violence on youth identities. Work in this third stream generally explores the domestic situations and life histories of Comrades as a means of assessing the impact of the political involvement on family life and personal identity construction. The three streams have run along parallel paths, seldom intersecting in meaningful ways. Those interested in political formations have generally kept out of the sociology of the street, while those dealing with issues of violence and identity have focused mainly on the home and the intimate social relationship within youths’ lives. Although much of the political work on urban youth in the 1980s is sensitive to historical continuities in the ideological and organisational dynamics of youth political formations, the more sociologically oriented literature has paid far less attention to the historical dimension of the youth cultural styles, social values and attitudes. Glaser (2000) has recently expressed dismay at the extent to which current analyses of urban youth, for instance, continue to ignore the in-depth social histories that have been produced on urban youth identity, culture and politics in the 1950s (Bonner 1988, 1995; La Hause 1991). One of the consequences of the failure of scholars to situate the social and cultural dynamics of youth identity politics within regional and city-specific histories is that the urban youth of the 1980s often appear as a homogeneous category. Whether encountered in Cradock, Kimberley or Katlehong, they appear as remarkably similar formations, barring small differences in ideology and organisational capacity. While there can be no doubt that the same broad national political and economic tendencies structured the responses of youths in different centres, it also needs to be recognised that these formations were 112

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constituted within a specific urban context and shaped by particular regional and local historical circumstances. In the case of Soweto and the Reef townships generally, Glaser (2000) has argued that pre-existing urban gang structures, many of which date back to the 1950s, laid the social foundation on which the Comrades established new articulations of power and authority at the street and neighbourhood level. In this context, he suggests that the Comrades quickly developed a ‘distinctive subculture with its own style and ritual’ that fused ‘politicised student and gang subcultures’ in the city (2000: 187). The image that emerges from Glaser’s work on the Reef is that the Comrades here appear as a specifically urban phenomenon that weld together different aspects of urban youth experience to form a tightly knit social and political formation that bears the social imprint and values of earlier gang brotherhoods. The idea that the new political identities that emerged among the youth in South African cities were specifically urban identities has also been developed in the work of Mamdani (1996). He argues, rather more optimistically, that the political culture of the urban youth embraced the values of civil society and civil liberties, and was specifically constructed in opposition to the undemocratic traditions of patriarchal power and entitlement associated with the system of customary power and authority in rural areas. This formulation, which is based largely on his reading of the secondary literature on political developments on the Reef during the 1980s, is then generalised to characterise the political identities of urban youth across the country. The problem with these constructs is that they shut out the critical role that rural youth played in shaping the Comrades as a social formation, and thus reproduce the idea that urban and rural youth were still deeply divided in their social and political outlooks and orientations in the 1980s. While such a division might have lingered on the Reef, I suggest that one of the reasons why the Comrades of Duncan Village were able to consolidate power with such force in the 1980s was precisely because they were able to address and break down these barriers. One important reason for this was that the Comrades in Duncan Village never actually evolved as a ‘distinctive subculture’, but emerged as a generationally based cultural style (in the sense that Ferguson [1999] uses the term), which drew in youths from different backgrounds and experiences. This style, I will argue, set itself off against other styles on the streets of the township with which it engaged in an ongoing dialogue throughout the 1980s. In the making of the Comrade style, I suggest that the construction of shared notions of masculinity and male power consolidated through acts of collective public violence emerged as an important point of convergence where urban and rural youth were brought together in an uneasy alliance. But this alliance was also not unbreakable and, when political power had been secured in the 1990s and the focus of the youth turned again to the harsh realities of making a living in an impoverished community, older differences re-emerged. In this chapter I also argue that it was not only on Duncan Village’s streets that the style of the Comrades was made, but in the home too. The

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reconstruction of youth domesticity, especially with the large-scale adoption of ukuhlalisana (living together outside marriage) as the preferred domestic style among both urban and rural youth in the 1980s, contributed to the convergence of disparate groups of male youth under the umbrella of the Comrades. The ideological undercurrents associated with ukuhlalisana set out a new agenda for how youths should relate to their parents and respond to existing forms of domestic authority, social obligation and engagement. In this discussion I suggest that, while the youth should have displayed a high level of commitment to the reconstruction of domestic and social relations, young men and women developed conflicting expectations around what ‘living together’ meant. This created tension and conflict, aggravated by the difficulties that male Comrades experienced in attempting to translate their self-confident street masculinities into domestic power and authority. This chapter therefore ends with a discussion of the fragility of the power of the Comrades and the difficulty they experienced in the 1990s in turning their fantasies of power and authority into action in the township. It also highlights gender relations as a critical terrain of struggle at that time, and lays the foundation for further discussion of the topic in Chapter 7. Rural and Urban Youth in the 1950s In the Xhosa in Town trilogy, very little reference is made to the youth as a distinct social category. In these texts, the role of the youth is generally dealt with as part of the larger narrative of the construction of Red and School identities and lifestyles in the city. Different categories of rural youth, therefore, feature as carriers of these identities, and are presented as fulfilling social roles required for the social reproduction of Red and School responses to urban life. Nevertheless the Mayers reported that, in the East Bank of the 1950s, urban and rural-born youth formed two opposing categories where ‘the glaring contrasts in dress, in speech, in manner, are only the outward signs of completely different values’ (1971 [1961]: 188). While town-bred youth ‘put the accent on smartness, rather than trying to be smart’ (1971 [1961]: 188) and embraced a wide range of cosmopolitan styles and influences, the country-born youth, whether Red or School, were seen to show a lack of urban sophistication in their dress styles and general social behaviour. The reason for this, as the Mayers argued in their later work on youth socialisation in the Ciskei and Transkei, was that rural youth had been socialised in a very different way to urban youth.1 In rural areas around East London, where Red families predominated, the Mayers (1970, 1972) reported that rural youth were taught to respect rank or seniority, to show respect for tradition and the law (umthetho), and to eschew urban values and life from an early age. At about the age of 12 they started to attend umtshotsho meetings, which involved dancing, sweethearting and stick play. These activities encouraged age solidarities and were regulated by certain norms, contraventions of which were dealt with by the umtshotsho group as a whole. The umtshotsho groups were organised on a strictly territorial basis

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and proved to be a great attraction for both girls and boys in rural areas. As boys went through initiation and became young men (abafana) they joined intlombe groups, which placed strong emphasis on traditional dress, debate among men, and dancing and singing. These groups, seen as the ‘schools’ of the Red people, were widely evident in rural communities in the East London hinterland in the 1950s and were noted in many rural communities through to the late 1970s (Mayer and Mayer 1970, 1972; see also McAllister and Deliwe 1994). Former East Bank residents said that the influence of Red youth culture was seen in the intlombe groups that sang and danced at beer-drinking sessions in the location, and in the ubiquitous stick-fighting that occurred among youth. These fights sometimes broke out in the backyards of houses but were most commonly seen at the weekend when groups of youths from different rural areas were involved in stick-fighting competitions in the bushes surrounding the location. In their analysis of School youth, who came from areas like Keiskammahoek, the Mayers found local groups similar to the Red umtshotsho, known as inhavu. These groups did not mature into intlombe groups after initiation. In School areas young men did not automatically belong to the territorially intlombe groups, they noted, but could choose to participate in one of a variety of voluntary groups known as ‘parliaments’ or ‘meetings’, where youths discussed various issues and drank beer together (Mayer and Mayer 1970, 1972). These activities were often not approved of by seniors and provided a forum where young men developed identities that were not necessarily in keeping with those of the older generation. The parliaments were structured along Western lines, with a leader, a secretary (who recorded the minutes) and a treasurer. Western-style dress was worn and education valued, but the poorly educated were not excluded (Mayer and Mayer 1970, 1972). The Mayers go on to report that, unlike the umtshotsho meetings of the Reds, the parliament get-togethers could be unstructured and competitive and often ended in drunkenness and violence as men squabbled. In the Khalana district near East London, where Red youth associations flourished, the Mayers found that these meetings, by contrast, were elitist affairs where tea was preferred to beer and where a great deal of discussion centred on the value of education and ukhongo (enlightenment) (Mayer and Mayer 1970, 1972). Variations on the parliament form have been noted in areas like Mount Ayliff and Pondoland in the former Transkei, where youth groups known as indlavini, with a strong urban influence, also existed at this time (Beinart 1991a; O’Connell 1980).2 When the urban-born youth of the East Bank used the term imixhaka (meaning ‘country bumpkins’) to denigrate rural youth in the city, they referred not only to the Red youth but School youth too, who were also distinguished from the city youth by their dress styles, accents, and forms of association. If the rural-born youth of the East Bank constituted a differentiated yet general category, so did the urban youth. Ntsebeza (1993), in his work on the urban-born youth of the East Bank, reports that they were divided into iingxungxu (‘those with temporary jobs’), tsotsis (‘criminal

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youth’) and oobrighty or bright boys (‘fashion-conscious youth’), who mingled with tsotsis but were not necessarily involved in crime. The Mayers also refer to the oobrighty youth at one point as ‘flashy and irresponsible’ rather than ‘criminal’ like the tsotsis (1971: 198). These categories were generally distinguished from the amasinala (educated youth or senior students), a highly influential category in the 1950s East Bank. Most came from prominent East Bank families and attended the local Welsh High School, with its strong academic traditions and range of clubs, societies and sports to stimulate the youth and ‘keep them off the streets’.3 While the amasinala youth formed networks across the location as a whole, the less well-educated but fashionable oobrighty youth formed their own groups in particular neighbourhoods and streets. The oobrighty youth consisted of a mixture of owners’ and tenants’ children and spent more time on the streets than at school or in the community hall, or on extramural activities like scouts or choir practice. They liked jazz and were regular supporters of musical and dance events at the Peacock or Makambi Halls. They engaged in competitive style-making and were always on the look-out for new influences ‘to show off their new styles’ (see Chapter 2 for details). This quest for style, however, was not restricted to male urban-born youth. In fact, as the Mayers (1971: 201) point out: ‘the girls too go in for smart styles, though sometimes combining these with beads worn around the ankles; some like to use lipstick, and to powder their cheeks with pink face powder’. The association of young townswomen with fashionable styles is noted too by Mager (1999), who points out that female tsotsis, known as the amatsotsikazi, were also seen on the streets of the East Bank dressed to the nines themselves (1999: 123). Despite the differing styles and social upbringings, former East Bank residents suggest that the urban youth, also known as the ‘borners’, were generally united by their common interest in cosmopolitan dress styles, jazz music and sport. As Ben Ntamo explained: All the urban youths in those days were interested in sport and music. And when it came to picking the best team it did not matter which street or area you came from. Everyone pulled together to get the best results for the club. And on Saturday afternoon when the youths went to Rubusana Park to watch matches, they would mix freely, thinking only of their sports team, hoping for a win … There were also lots of tournaments where East Bank teams played others from King William’s Town or Alice. At these events the youth also stood together behind their players. Jazz was the other thing that united us. Local bands like the Havana Hotshots, the African Quavers, the Swingers and many others enjoyed a strong following in the location. And when it came to talking about jazz and listening to it, the urban youth in those days all spoke the same language. It was the style they liked and everyone could relate to it.4

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The integrative power of sport and music was also seen in the extent to which coloured youth, born and brought up in the location and who lived mainly in the Moriva and Tsolo sections, were also incorporated into the social activities of the urban youth. They played in bands and rugby teams, and belonged to the same gangs and social groups as African youth. In fact, as I learnt while working on the East Bank restitution case, in the 1950s there was far less social distance between coloured and African youth in the East Bank than there was between urban and rural youth. In a context where urban and rural identities were relatively clearly marked off from one another, the scope for crossover from one category to another was limited. But this did not mean that rural youth, who found themselves ostracised on the streets, did not attempt to seek access to street or neighbourhood cohorts of urban youth. These attempts were obviously much more common among School youth from rural areas like Keiskammahoek, where they had lived under the influence of mission education and mainstream churches. This tendency is noted in a section of Townsmen or Tribesmen (Mayer with Mayer 1971 [1961]: 188–91) where the Mayers report on Red youths who try to break links with their abakhaya in town. They call these youths ‘half-Reds’ and ‘ex-Reds’: The ex-Red recruit to a town clique will fall over backwards in his own eagerness to cut himself off from everything that is Red. Whether out of insecurity or ineptitude, ‘half-Reds overdo everything’. In his own room the young man may be living with the rough and ready furnishings typical of poor Red homes, may be sleeping on a mat on the floor, but with the gang he is all out to impress. To this end he exaggerates his dress; he is all for using the special slang of the town; to him a girl is always icherry and a detective iturkey. (1971 [1961]: 189) They go on to state that: some of the low-class ‘urban’ girls may [also] be Red girls in disguise, who find it possible to keep up the pretence in low-class company, but not in ‘respectable’ circles where they constantly risk being given away by small points, such as their inability to serve tea in the proper manner. (1971 [1961]: 190) In the earlier quotation the Mayers allude to one of the features of how urban youth cultures were constructed in the East Bank in the 1950s, namely the social distance between the house and the street. In the cases they quote of half-Reds, they hint at the disjuncture between home life and street life – between the capacity of youths to adopt and perform particular identities and styles on the street that were not necessarily sustained in the home. This tendency was certainly not confined to half-Reds seeking access to street gangs; it was true for urban youth in general.

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On the streets, the urban-born pretended to be free agents making their own destinies. They displayed a cocky self-confidence and independence to their rural counterparts which many knew had no place in their homes and would not be tolerated by their social or biological parents. Kulile Radu explained: ‘As far as our parents were concerned, the attitude we had on the street was not the attitude they wanted to see in the house, where they demanded respect and that we behave in a proper manner.’5 In most cases, urban youth lived in extended family situations where their parents or other senior kin owned the houses in which they lived. This placed adults in a position of power over youths who could not realistically consider moving out of home before finding some kind of employment. The relatively high degree of residential stability among urban youth contrasted with that of the working rural youth, who lived with their abakhaya or in intanga groups. The urban youth, who seemed so free on the streets, were thus often exposed to close control in the home. The stories of former East Bank residents suggest that the activities of young women were particularly tightly controlled. Thenjiwe Ngcebetsha recalled that ‘in those days we had to listen to our parents and obey their instructions. We could not just go where we wanted and do what we wanted like the youth of today. At home there were lots of rules, and chores to do.’6 She experienced firm parental discipline when it came to township courting rituals and evening outings: In those days, you could not just go out with your boyfriend on a Saturday night without your father’s permission. The young guys were too scared to just knock on the door and come into my house in case my father was there. They would wait in street and whistle to attract my attention … I remember how, on Saturday nights, we would sneak out of our rooms after they [her parents] went to sleep to meet up with our boyfriends on the street corners. I used to carry my high-heeled shoes and tiptoe down the passage so as not to make a noise in the corridor. When we got back late at night from the dance halls, we sometimes used to sleep on the verandah so as not to wake our parents up. It was a constant cat-and-mouse game … If we were caught sneaking out there would always be extra chores and even a beating. My father believed in giving us a good hiding with his belt if we misbehaved.7 Other women recalled their heavy household workloads. Tumi Majola recalled that it was her duty to milk the three cows that her father pastured on the East Bank commonage and bring milk to the house every day before getting ready for school.8 This work, she said, was in addition to helping her mother with chores around the house. Zinzi Bata, who lived with her grandmother on Camp Street, recalled that the domestic load placed on teenage girls was no lighter in female-headed households: My mother and my grandmother would give the orders all the time. It felt like we had no time to ourselves. We were always in the house working

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and had no choice but to obey them, especially my grandmother, who was very strict.9 Young men had greater freedom to roam the streets and to get on with their business. They often managed to stay out until after dark and operated on the premise that domestic work was for girls. But, as Ndyebo Momoti recalled: In those days our fathers still had respect and authority. They would watch how we behaved, and if word got around that you were getting out of hand they would call you in and give you a hiding. The best thing to do was to show them the necessary respect and then just get on with your own business. But there was a fine line that could not be crossed. If you got into trouble with the police or with a girl there was a lot of explaining to do, and many visits were made between families to sort of the problem. The worst-behaved young men, who became tsotsis, were usually ones who had no fathers in the location. They would not listen to their mothers and had much more freedom than us. We were often envious of them because they did what they liked.10 The situation varied from family to family, of course. But the general picture that emerged from interviews with former East Bank residents was that the freedom and power that urban-born youth enjoyed on the streets in the 1950s did not extend into the home; there they had to respect their parents and obey house rules. This disjuncture between the space of the street, where urban-born youth identities and power was celebrated, and the space of the house, where established notions of generational authority and respect were enforced, created tension in the 1950s East Bank. At that time, when youth had adopted increasingly radical political positions, sometimes clashing with those of their parents, this opposition between power on the street and in the home came into sharp focus. Yet urban family unity was never fundamentally undermined. Even when groups of rural migrant men were urged by state agents to take to the streets in 1958 to enforce discipline and clear the location of criminal and tsotsi elements, they enjoyed limited support from most urban-born parents.11 Changing Youth Styles and the Rise of the Comrades During the 1960s, when the streets of the new Duncan Village had fallen silent while rumblings of government bulldozers echoed in the distance, rural youth were pushed out of the township. In this period, as I noted in Chapter 3, tsotsism and street gangs were also eradicated and were prevalent only in pockets in C-section, as the focus on youth social activities now moved from the streets to the new run-of-the-mill Bantu Education school, Ebenezer Majombozi Qaqamba High.

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By the mid 1970s, however, people living in the new neighbourhoods had come to know each other better and there was a growing spirit of resistance, especially to the continuing forced removals. In this period the urban youth started to reappear on the streets in greater numbers. Rising youth unemployment also contributed to this trend as the new groups of youth, known as iingxungxu, forged themselves into neighbourhood gangs, socialising together and using the streets for football, draughts and other games. Tsotsis now also roamed the streets in increasing numbers, and, for the first time since the 1950s, oobrighty youth were seen again in Duncan Village. The oobrighty were divided into two main groups, the iikati (cats) and the ivies (‘Ivy Leaguers’). Tlali Ratshi, who grew up in Duncan Village (proper) in the 1970s, claimed that the name iikati referred to the ways they treated themselves. They were clean-cut and well groomed, and loved to dress in bright clothes. They wore tight stovepipe trousers known as ‘zoots’, which were slightly short in length to reveal their brightly coloured socks. They also liked to wear oomabotshwecelani (shoes with laces at the side) and often had their shirtsleeves pushed back to the elbow. This was even done when they wore jerseys. They also permed their hair in the S-curl style and were known to be highly successful womanisers.12 To a large extent, as Tlali also explained, the iikati modelled themselves on the black American pop idol Michael Jackson, whose music they and other oobrighty youth favoured. The availability of portable hi-fi systems from the early 1980s helped to bring their music and dress style onto the streets. The iikati’s outfits were not expensive, although those with money did prefer to ‘wear designer labels’. The ivies, somewhat better-educated youth, introduced another fashionable street style that suited their image as the township’s ‘Ivy League’. Their look was less shiny, bright and colourful than the iikati’s; they adopted more subdued colours in a more expensive range of shirts and pants – the pants with a looser fit and the shirts smarter and usually buttoned up to the top. They also fancied themselves as womanisers. Mtelele Sam, who later became a leading figure in the DVRA, explained: While the iikati thought they had style that could attract the ladies, they had nothing on the ivies. These guys were the real izifebe (womanisers) and the women flocked to them. They had expensive tastes and gave everyone the impression that they had money to back up their fashionable look. This is what the girls were after and the ivies were generally disliked because they had the reputation of being lady snatchers.13 Unlike the iikati, which were a local group, the ivies of Duncan Village appear to have emerged as an imitation of a fashionable Sowetan style with the same

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name, which first appeared on the streets in the 1960s and grew in popularity in the 1970s.14 In East London, the tsotsis and the ivies often clashed over women and were known to dislike each other. One of the obvious differences between the two in stylistic terms was that, while tsotsis wore their trousers on the hips, the ivies generally wore theirs above their belly buttons. The schoolgoing youth, now calling themselves ‘Comrades’, moved onto the streets of Duncan Village in the 1980s, putting them on a collision course with the oobrighty youth, especially the ivies and iikati, as well as the tsotsis and small-time iingxungxu youth gangs. The Comrades had no time for dressing up (ukunxibisa) – they viewed dress as very functional, and sported T-shirts, track suits, jeans and sneakers that enabled them to remain mobile and elusive. As one former Comrade explained: ‘We travelled light, no heavy suits and fancy shoes, because we were always on the move, fighting the system.’15 The last thing the amaqabane wanted, he explained, was to be conspicuous on the streets and to draw the attention of the police. But because Comrades liked to be associated with workers, they also sometimes sported two-piece blue overalls or work suits, and on official occasions they often wore khaki trousers and shirts for a military look. In line with the clothes they wore, the amaqabane would sometimes refer to each other as msebenzi (worker) or msebenzi wehlabathi (worker of the world), leaders as nkokheli (leader), and rank-and-file street activists often just as ‘soldier’. The term ukurhabulisana, which means sharing or drinking from the same vessel, was adopted by Comrades in Duncan Village too (apparently it was also used by political prisoners on Robben Island to refer to their political sessions and discussions). The language of struggle drew heavily on the slogans and manifestos of the main anti-apartheid political formations of the time. Catch phrases such as ‘Each one teach one’ (used mainly by the Congress of South African Students [COSAS]), ‘An injury to one is an injury to all’ (promoted by the South African Allied Workers Union [SAAWU]), or ‘asinamali’ (meaning ‘We have no money [to pay rent]’), were widely used as markers of identity. Knowledge of liberation songs, which punctuated proceedings on street marches and at political meetings, was also important. Some of the popular choruses sung in the 1980s included the following: Rolihlahla Mandela, Freedom is in your hands Show us the way to freedom In this land of Africa Epalamente siyaya noba kubi We are going to parliament even if it is bad Siphuma eSoviet siphethe ne Bazooka We are from the Soviet and we have Bazookas Siyaya noba kubi We will be there no matter what

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He wena Koornhof, He wena Koornhof Koornhof, Koornhof He wena Koornhof Sukudlala ngomnt’omnyama Don’t play with black people NguMkhonto Lo oweSizwe We are MK [Soldiers of Mkhonto weSizwe] Basebenzi manyanani Workers unite Yiyole intlangano yabasebenzi Here is the workers’ union A basebenzi bomZant’ Afrika Workers of South Africa Weena Mugabe Uyinkokheli ye Mugabe you are the leader of Zimbabwe Zimbabwe Sicel ‘usiph’ndawo Please give us a base, a refuge Siz ‘ongena ePitoli So that we can enter Pretoria Comrades accumulated cultural capital through attending political meetings, workshops, and rallies, and proudly wearing the T-shirts and satchels distributed at these events – indicating their struggle connections and commitment. On the streets the Comrades would taunt the iikati and ivies, teasing them about their clothes and implying that their fashions were effeminate. They also chastised them for their lack of political ideology and direction. From the outset, the Comrades associated themselves with a macho, risk-taking attitude that set them apart from certain categories of oobrighty youth. But while Comrades teased the oobrighty, they had stronger terms for collaborators, terms like umdlwembe, derived from the Zulu, meaning ‘sell-out’, and ukungwakuza, meaning someone who was politically ill-informed and illogical, almost to the point of being mentally ill. Although the interactions between different categories of urban youth, as well as students and workers, had a critical influence on the formation of the Comrades as a social and political phenomenon, it would be misleading to see this movement in Duncan Village merely as an amalgam of urban influences. The re-entry of rural youth in the township in the 1980s also left a profound mark on the cultural and political orientations of the amaqabane. Studies of rural youth in the Eastern Cape in the 1970s show that important changes had occurred in youth identity politics since the 1960s. In the late 1970s O’Connell identified three categories of rural youth in the Mount Ayliff district of the Transkei: the Reds; the Rascals or indlavini, seen as a rural equivalent of the urban tsotsis; and Gentlemen or amanene, who were bettereducated and aspired to impucuko yesilungu (Western ways and lifestyles). He reported that Red youth style was receding rapidly and had ‘virtually disappeared in Nzongisa’, while the Rascals and the Gentlemen, who were ‘inclined to be defiant, violent, uninterested in the community, and often criminally orientated’, were growing (O’Connell 1980: 297). The picture that emerges from O’Connell’s research is one of increasing conflict to the point of violence, and disarticulation between the rural youth and the older generation. McAllister and Deliwe (1994) also argue that, in Shixini on the Transkei coast, the Red organisational frameworks of umtshotsho and intlombe had begun to break down by the late 1970s, and that there was increasing evidence

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of ill-discipline and violence among the youth. By the 1980s, they claim that a new form of social gathering and entertainment for the youth had emerged, namely potsoyi, which grew out of the existing intlombe groups and was said to resemble a ‘shebeen party’ (1994: 27). It took the form of a beer-drinking session where liquor was sold for cash and music was provided, usually by a disc jockey called masikanda. These authors go on to argue: Elders denigrate potsoyi for a variety of reasons, including its reputation for violence, but principally because it ignores the seniority principle, which is still important in rural Xhosa life, with uncircumcised boys and circumcised young men attending together. There is also no discrimination between girls who never had a child [noswananye] and amakhaza [women or girls who have had illegitimate children and who may even have been married briefly] … As a result, Shixini elders refer to potsoyi disparagingly as kwamanisipala ‘the municipality’]. This implies an association with urban lifestyles, but there is more to it. Just as a municipality offers a variety of services to people of an area, so is the potsoyi all things to all people. (1994: 27) Similar trends have been noted in areas closer to East London, whence many of the youth that entered the township in the 1980s came. In traditionally Red areas like Mooiplaas, located 45 km outside the city, umtshotsho and intlombe organisations fell by the wayside in the mid to late 1970s, and a widening gap had emerged between youth and elders in many villages (see Bank and Qambata 1999; also Chapter 8). By the 1980s, the former distinction between Red and School youth had largely fallen away and it was increasingly evident that, like urban youth, rural youth in the Eastern Cape were becoming politically active. In the early 1980s, rural youth from areas like Mooiplaas, Chalumna, Newlands, Kwelera and Nxarhuni, all on the city’s outskirts, had also been engaged in political struggles with the Ciskei homeland authorities over plans to forcibly remove communities and enforce homeland consolidation. Youth from these areas had taken up the cudgels against headmen and state officials in anti-removal campaigns, which had in some cases resulted in significant political victories (see Chapter 8). Involvement in these struggles brought rural youth into direct contact with various anti-apartheid movements and groups like the United Democratic Front (UDF) and the ANC Youth Congress, the latter being increasingly active in the rural Eastern Cape by the mid 1980s. With their shared commitment to political transformation in the city, rural and urban youth soon found common ground; the rural group were quickly absorbed into the DVRA and other local-level political structures. Represented on the DVRA’s street and area committees, they also played a critical role in establishing people’s courts, importing rural idioms of popular justice into the urban setting. Rural youths, who generally had little formal education and lacked the political sophistication of some of their urban counterparts, made their mark on the streets rather than in the classroom. They proved themselves fearless street fighters, often being the first to confront heavily armed security

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policemen and casspirs (armed troop carriers) with little more than stones. Their bravery and commitment earned them the reputation of being among the township’s most valued Comrades. Many attributed their skills as combatants to the gruelling initiation they had gone through in rural areas and their experience of village stick-fighting. Vuka, a politically active youth from Chalumna, explained: In the village there are no shortcuts to manhood; no comfortable initiation lodges on the edge of the township. Out there you encounter the real thing and you learn to be tough and self-reliant, how to survive when the chips are down. This experience served us well when the teargas and the casspirs came to the streets of Duncan Village. We had no other way to survive except to live on our wits. There was no more talk of imixhaka [country bumpkins]. We were all amaqabane.16 Duncan Village’s amaqabane therefore did not emerge as the kind of distinctive subculture that Glaser (2000) has suggested had emerged in Soweto. Duncan Village’s amaqabane were a much broader category, incorporating various youth types, all of whom were able to express a common cultural style, in the sense that Ferguson (1999) defines the term. Above all, being iqabane meant acting like a Comrade, able to perform a certain identity, to speak in a certain way, to have some command of the new struggle rhetoric, to adopt appropriate codes of behaviour and styles of dress. In order to perform the style convincingly, it had to be practised and cultivated over time. But it did not mean having to share a particular upbringing in which certain values, cultural competences and social orientations were inculcated from an early age. And it was precisely because the iqabane identity was more stylistic than a distinctive fully fledged subculture that it was possible for rural youths to access it and to influence its development. But while there were clearly significant points of intersection between urban and rural youth in Duncan Village in the 1980s, which fed on their ability to draw distinctions between themselves and other social categories such as migrants, there were also lingering differences. These must be emphasised if we are to understand the complexity and fragility of the Comrade identity in Duncan Village and avoid assuming that the intersection between rural and urban youth identity politics evolved as a linear process of blurring, where old differences simply fell away. In the section below I attempt to highlight some of these differences, particularly the fraught relationship between rural youth and urban-born Com-tsotsis in the township in the late 1980s. I also consider the role of collective male violence as a means of counteracting these centrifugal tendencies. Rural Youth, Com-tsotis and Masculinity By the late 1980s the iikati and the ivies styles had faded from the scene and were replaced by the increasingly popular amapansula style, which had its

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origin in Soweto in the mid 1980s. Drawing on the assertive urban youth identity politics of the time, the amapansula style bore the imprint of a hardened street masculinity and expressed a machismo not seen in the styles of the iikati and ivies, who were often said to be slightly effeminate. It was a style that was much more acceptable to some urban-born Comrades, despite its emphasis on conspicuous consumption and flashy clothes. In Duncan Village the amapansula brought the tsotsis and the Comrades closer together and contributed to the making of the Com-tsotsis, a category that emerged in Duncan Village after 1985. Mcebisi Qamarwana explained that one of the distinctive features of the new oobrighty youth was their insatiable appetite for expensive clothes: They liked shiny expensive shoes and low-slung heavyweight trousers. They disapproved of the shiny lightweight stovepipes of the Cats, calling them ‘cheap’. These youth would often carry their neatly ironed trousers on hangers over their shoulders so that everyone could see their expensive outfits. They would also sit outside their houses for hours, shining their shoes and listening to their own brand of music. The pansulas also liked hats. They would wear ‘eight piece’ caps with their outfits. Some older pansulas, who were circumcised, wore Stetsons as a mark of their seniority. They also liked Muffler and Ray-Ban sunglasses and shopped at places like Modern Man, That Man, Judges, Canons, Strands, Bryants and Dan Watson in East London. Some also went to Zola’s Fashions in Mdantsane. They liked upmarket brands of shirts like Pringle, Pierre Cardin and Darks, while the best cuts in trousers were the Cutwoods, Punchwood and Cutrite brands. Pansula were also very fussy about their shoes. Crockett and Jones, Medicus Royal, and Flosheim were regarded as the best brands, followed by Barker and Jordan shoes.17 Music was also at the core of the pansula style: South African artists like Paul Ndlovu, Chicco Twala, Mercy Pakela and, of course, Brenda Fassie, the female icon of this largely male style, were all popular. The amapansula were also soccer-mad and were great fans of the two Soweto glamour clubs, Kaizer Chiefs and Orlando. For many rural youth in the city, the enterprise of playful style-making on the streets and the associated conspicuous consumption of clothes and fashion seemed frivolous, irrelevant and even reactionary in relation to the broader political challenges they faced. They also objected to the arrogant attitudes of the urban-born oobrighty youth, who they said lacked discipline and had scant respect for organisational rules. The concerns of the rural youth and other Comrades came to the fore after the declaration of a State of Emergency in June 1986, when dozens of senior DVRA Comrades and activists were arrested. In this period the power of the Residents’ Association to control the streets suddenly weakened and there was a period when urban street gangs and tsotsis ran riot in the township. As one resident explained

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in a letter to the Daily Dispatch (7 August 1986), following the escalation of violence and crime: Many of the horrifying petrol bombings and stonings in Duncan Village have been perpetrated by teenage gangs running riot in the township. Most of the youths are not connected with pupils’ or residents’ organisations and roam the streets in pursuit of excitement and a sense of power. Some residents are angry and frustrated at being powerless to stop them. By mid 1987 it was confirmed that the actions of these youth gangs – referred to as Com-tsotsis – had pushed the crime rate in Duncan Village up by 250 per cent since June 1986 (Daily Dispatch, 3 August 1987). The oobrighty and tsotsi gangs, who were only partially integrated into local-level political structures, used the uncertainty created by the arrests of 1986 to pursue their own objectives. Rural youth, by contrast, who still felt insecure in the township because of their recent arrival and were not well integrated into neighbourhood networks, remained loyal to the DVRA. They believed in accountable civic structures and were angry at how the gangs were using their status as ‘Comrades’ to take advantage of township residents and feather their own nests. Dumisane, a politically active rural youth from the Mooiplaas location who arrived in Duncan Village in 1985 explained: ‘The situation was totally, totally not right, we were now at the mercy of these teenage thugs, most of whom had not even reached manhood.’ Dumisane added that rural youth felt that the problems of the gangs could not be addressed via meetings and political education. ‘We were calling for discipline, order and respect – we demanded that those who abused the struggle be punished.’18

Photo 5.1 Youths relax with the radio, 1950s Source: Photo by Daniel Morolong.

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Many rural youth said that it was no good having street committees and other structures if they did not have the power to enforce discipline. They demanded that people’s courts, which were already operating in some areas, be developed and expanded to restore effective control. This in itself required education, as Tops explained: The school-going youth did not know how justice worked in the rural areas. They had to be taught that there had to be law (umthetho), and those who did not obey the law needed to be dealt with severely and publicly. People had to see what would happen to them if they did not respect the Comrades.19 In the period prior to 1986, the Comrades had introduced certain laws in the neighbourhoods. One of these was that Comrades were not allowed to drink or to patronise shebeens. Some migrants and oobrighty youth defied these measures without being punished. Many rural youth argued that the Comrades had shown weakness in their handling of this issue. They pushed for harsher punishment not only on this issue but also on rape, which they specifically associated with the activities of the Com-tsotsis. As Mandisi Jekwa (a DVRA branch committee member) explained, by the late 1980s the interventions of rural youth had delivered results: As Comrades, we agreed that women were vulnerable on the streets and we did not want them to be exposed. It was a war and it was our job to protect the women and children from pain and suffering … We wanted them off the streets for their own safety … But rape was not something that was tolerated at all. There were three things we started punishing severely as Comrades: crime, rape and drunkenness. Comrades who came to meetings drunk would, for instance, have to take what we called a ‘Kool Aid’ and ‘half a loaf’ (a tin of water and Omo (washing detergent) and half a loaf of Sunlight soap). Those who were caught for rape got a lot worse than that!20 While older divisions between urban and rural youth still lay below the surface, there was nevertheless a significant convergence and consolidation of the generational power of male youth in Duncan Village in the late 1980s. In fact, as discipline was restored after 1986 with regular floggings and beatings being meted out by people’s courts, the Comrades became increasingly intoxicated with their own power and were feared by other township residents. In this period, public violence, especially against umdlwembe (spies) or abanqwakuzi (political opponents) elements, served not only as a warning to those who did not obey the Comrades, but as political rituals which renewed the youth’s unity and their commitment to struggle. Mandisi’s account of an incident where three alleged police informers were found living in a shack in his area gives a good sense of the mood that prevailed on the streets of the township in the late 1980s:

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No one who lived in Duncan Village in those days [late 1980s] could escape the wrath of the Comrades. They were so powerful and dominant that people lived in terror of them. I remember as a kid seeing many horrific acts of violence, of old men being beaten up, of girls being raped, and even of necklacing. I remember I was walking home from school through Bebelele and there was a huge commotion because the Comrades claimed that they had found a shack with three police informers. As I passed, I could see the accused men were standing on the roof of the shack with the crowd below baying for their blood. The men were being interrogated by some of our leaders; they were denying their involvement in any police-related activity. I remember that, as they were screaming and shouting, one fell off the roof and was almost instantly beaten to death as he fell to the ground. The noise and commotion had alerted the police, who had brought a helicopter overhead. They started speaking through the megaphone demanding that the crowd disperse and that the men on the roof be left alone. This allowed the men to flee and escape, but I heard the next day that after the police had left they [the three men] had been tracked down by the Comrades and murdered.21 In much the same way as sporting events and musical shows were tournaments of value in the 1950s, political rallies, public floggings and people’s courts served that function in the 1980s and 1990s. These public expressions of collective violence also resonated with rural traditions of stickfighting, where village youth would display their prowess and dominance in public displays of violence. It was the public squares, bus terminals, street corners and church buildings, rather than the dancehalls and sports grounds, that were now critical sites where male youth expressed their power. These spaces provided nodes where the political and social values cultivated on the street and in the schools could be expressed in concentrated performances of power and style. But what was expressed through street violence was a very masculine power. Indeed, as the struggle in Duncan Village moved out of the schools and onto the streets, women’s struggle roles changed. In the classroom, female students had played key roles in debates and in formulating political strategy. But once the struggle moved onto the street, the Comrades increasingly moved female youth out of the firing line, requiring them to operate on the fringes, to provide support for their men on the ‘front line’ (Glaser 2000).22 The forging of new masculinities on the township streets was central to the activism of the Comrades. Xaba (2001: 108), for instance, uses the term ‘struggle masculinities’ for the type of masculinity that became dominant among young urban Africans in their struggle against apartheid. He defines struggle masculinity as a ‘socially-constructed collective gender identity’: Its main characteristics were opposition to the apartheid system (which included Bantu Education, exploitation of workers and communities, high rents and rates, and the suppression of protest) and political militancy.

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Because many older African people (particularly men) were seen to be complicit with apartheid, such opposition assumed a posture that was anti-authority. Since struggle masculinity existed side-by-side with street masculinity, which was disparaging towards women, struggle masculinity was tainted by some of the negative attitudes and behaviours towards women. (2001: 109) Xaba’s definition of struggle masculinity echoes Glaser’s (2000) earlier comments on the links between Comrades and urban street-gang subcultures in Soweto. Both accounts see these forms of masculinity as derived from urban experience. But this view is difficult to sustain for Duncan Village, where struggle masculinities seem to have emerged as a complex amalgam of rural traditions, social memories, and definitions of masculinity and discipline, as well as traditions associated with street gangs. Evidence from Duncan Village thus suggests the coexistence of different and even contradictory tendencies in the way in which youth masculinity was articulated and expressed between 1985 and 1995. It was precisely the existence of these contradictory tendencies that made the Comrade identity both so volatile and so fragile. It was an identity that seemingly needed to be constantly renewed and reaffirmed in order to reassure those who shared it of their common interests and orientations. It is therefore interesting to note that, although differences between urban and rural youth were widely denounced by the Comrades throughout the 1980s, they had begun to reappear in the township in the mid 1990s as the youth began to compete with one another for jobs and scarce resources. The urban youth of the 1990s did not speak of the imixhaka, as they had in the 1950s, but used the term igungqayi (meaning ‘those with a “rural outlook”’) to refer to the youth who were continuing to flow into the township from rural areas. By the 1990s, urban youth as well as those who had come into the city from rural areas in the mid 1980s were complaining that too many unemployed rural youth were taking urban jobs, housing and other scarce resources. In this context, older stereotypes of rural youth had begun to re-emerge as the urban youth complained that these young people lacked the sophistication and political pedigree to share the meagre rewards for which they had struggled so hard in the 1980s. But former Comrades were also highly critical of some of the new urban youth of the 1990s, especially a new brand of tsotsis called the amaginsta (from the English ‘gangster’), who made their appearance on the streets of Duncan Village in the 1990s, wearing gold chains, rings and bracelets. The amaginsta were said to have connections with ‘big-time’ drug and money rackets in Johannesburg, and were joining forces with local tsotsism to commit crime in the township. The evidence presented above problematises the notion that youth identity formation evolved in a linear process where old differences between urban and rural youth simply dissolved in the city as rural youth became incorporated into urban-based political struggles against the state. This information suggests

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that, although rural youth had left earlier forms of youth socialisation and self-organisation behind, they nevertheless drew on ideas associated with older forms of youth organisation in their critique of the behaviour and practices of the Com-tsotsis. This section also showed that the process of convergence of interests among the youth was often situationally defined and that, once conditions changed as they did in the 1990s, it was always possible for older distinctions to re-emerge in new forms. This is precisely what happened in the 1990s as the notion of igungqayi gained currency among the disenchanted urban youth. If I were to end my discussion of youth identity politics here, however, with the styles and public displays of the street, I would miss a critical piece in the puzzle of changing youth identity politics. Youth, as we know, did not only live on the streets; they also went home, and it was in their new homes in the shack areas of Duncan Village that important aspects of the style of the Comrades as a generation-based social movement were forged. In the final part of this chapter I move from the street to the makeshift homes of township youth and particularly to the rise of ukuhlalisana as a domestic form of choice among the urban and rural youth in this period. Ukuhlalisana and the Politics of Home In the 1950s, when youth political activism was on the upsurge in the East Bank, the majority of urban and rural youth in the location still lived in domestic environments with some level of parental or adult control. Urban youth lived mainly in the homes of their parents or relatives, while most rural youth, especially Reds, found themselves having to comply with the rules and regulations of the senior abakhaya, who often acted as their guardians. In the 1980s and 1990s, urban and rural youth found themselves in a very different situation. By then, most urban and rural youths were no longer under the authority of older-generation men and women, but lived in backyard and free-standing shacks where they created their own households. Most of them lived as couples in ukuhlalisana relationships, which formed the basis of a quarter of all households in Duncan Village in 1995. The emergence of ukuhlalisana relationships in urban areas and their connection to the changing politics of the youth is a topic that has not received close analytical scrutiny, but is one that I believe is critical to an understanding of the Comrades as a social and cultural phenomenon. In Duncan Village, ukuhlalisana was not just another domestic option into which urban and rural youth were pushed as a result of the growing housing crisis in the townships. It was an option that they sought out for themselves as they attempted to translate the power they experienced on the streets into the domain of the home. It constituted part of the style of the youth. In Duncan Village in the 1980s and 1990s, such relationships became emblematic of the youth’s desire to achieve social and political freedom. The Comrades associated ukuhlalisana with rejection of older forms of family structure and obligation. They viewed it as a vehicle to express their new-found freedom

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and sense of liberation from existing social and political structures. As one youth explained, ‘It was one of the ways in which we tried to show our parents that we were committed to something new.’ Ukuhlalisana relationships, of course, were not new in Duncan Village in the 1980s. They had existed in the East Bank in the 1950s, but on a much smaller scale, and were also noted in homeland towns during the 1970s (Manona 1980; Mayer with Mayer 1971 [1961]).23 Manona, however, argues that the trend among the rural youth in the Ciskei, especially after the 1950s, was towards a form of informal marriage known as ukuthwala (literally, ‘to carry’). This form of marriage deviated from the custom of careful negotiations between families, elaborate marriage rituals and the transfer of lobola cattle from the husband’s family to the wife’s family. Instead, the couple usually eloped without parental consent and the prospective husband paid compensation known as inkomo yokuthwala to the wife’s family (Manona 1980: 189). With ukuthwala, the expectation was that a full traditional marriage would follow and that proper lobola negotiations and marriage rituals would eventually be undertaken. However, this did not always occur (1980: 202). Ukuhlalisana was different from ukuthwala because it did not acknowledge the rights of the families involved. It represented a much stronger assertion of independence from parental authority and power on the part of the youth. The decision to ‘stay together’ was taken independently by the young people without any negotiations between families, and there was no transfer of cattle or cash. In Duncan Village the adoption of ukuhlalisana on a large scale indicated that the male youth, in particular, did not feel that their parents had a significant role to play in their choice of partners. Ukuhlalisana also differed from ukuthwala in that it did not necessarily anticipate marriage. In Duncan Village, living-together relationships often lasted for years without ukuthwala or formal marriage being transacted. This had important implications for the position of women in these relationships, because without cattle changing hands they could not – at least in customary terms – be expected to take on the roles of wives. Ukuhlalisana partners, unlike ukuthwala brides, could not don German-print dresses, black headscarves and the ixakatho neck-scarf characteristically worn by a new wife (makoti) after an ukuthwala or a customary marriage. One of the problems with ukuhlalisana relationships was that, while they were easily appropriated as symbols of youth independence, they offered no clear cultural definition of the roles that men and women were expected to play within these relationships. As a result, ukuhlalisana relationships in Duncan Village were characterised by high levels of gender tension and conflict. There were several reasons for this. First, the impulse towards living together came unequally from men and women. Young men, who led the rebellion against the state in the 1980s, were more eager to break away socially from their parental homes, whether in town or country, than were young women, who were often ambivalent about setting out on their own. The 1980s political struggles had been softer on the relationships among women within domestic units than they had been on those between men, especially in rural areas where male generational conflict

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had really come to the fore in the 1980s. Cross-generational relationships among women in rural areas, as we will see in Chapter 8, were less severely damaged in this period than they were among men. However, young women also realised that if they wished to find the right man, who many hoped they would eventually marry, they would have to accept the risks of moving out of their natal homes and shacking up with their partners. Young women spoke a great deal about the art of finding ‘the right man’ to ‘shack up’ with. They tended to agree that looks were not the only, or the most important, consideration. As one single woman explained: There are three kinds of men that cause real problems: those that drink too much, those that have extramarital affairs and those that don’t bring home their wages. For me the ideal man is not very good-looking, he doesn’t drink, he won’t squander money. But in life one cannot always be fortunate enough to choose: love is a strange thing. Second, while young men were keen to break away from the formality of conventional kinship and marriage relations, they relied heavily on older ideas about the obligation of women in marriage to inform their relations. This slippage between ideology and practice was indeed a major reason why ukuhlalisana relationships were notoriously unstable and fraught with tension in the shack areas. In many cases, men quickly adopted patriarchal roles by trying to treat their lovers as if they were their ukuthwala wives: expecting them to behave ‘like wives’ in taking responsibility for domestic matters and by tending to their men’s needs and sexual desires. Women in these households often found men’s demands excessive and argued that if they were expected to behave like a wife they should be treated like one. Many said that if men wanted their loyalty, they should at least pay inkomo yokuthwala. The desire of young women to transform living-together relationships into informal marital ones, and the desire of men to avoid marriage at all costs, exacerbated the tensions within these relationships. In ukuhlalisana relationships, sexuality thus emerged as a central issue. Duncan Village men saw sexual conquest as an essential component of their assertion of successful masculinity. Issues of initiation, penis size and virility were part of men’s everyday discourse, as were their sexual conquests and desires. The ability to entertain several sexual relationships simultaneously was seen as highly desirable and something older youths bragged about in front of younger boys. Sexual fidelity, in contrast, was regarded as a state that women constantly tried to impose on them. It was not a characteristic to which men aspired. As Tops worded it: Being loose, mobile and unattached was something we had become used to; as Comrades we were always on the move and did not need to account for our whereabouts. It was now difficult for us to get used to being in one place, always at home, and this was something our girlfriends did not understand.

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They wanted loyal and responsible fathers for their children, men who, like their father, brought home a pay packet at the end of the week.24 In an environment where cross-gender socialising was kept to a minimum, sexuality constituted an important social act of exchange whereby identities were constructed. In living-together relationships, women felt vulnerable to excesses of male sexuality. Among their peers, women were acutely embarrassed if they were regarded as being unable to hold on to their men, whom they valued as economic and social resources, potential household breadwinners, and a male presence in the home. Many believed that it was much easier for a man to find a woman than for a woman to keep her man. Young women thus went to great lengths to hold on to their men. Many invested in love potions, believed to be able to beguile and bewitch a woman’s lover and enhance her sexual attraction and performance. These women would pay up to R400 to local herbalists – sums they were willing to spend even when they had access to very little money. Love potions used in Duncan Village’s shack areas in the 1980s and 1990s included those known locally as ivamna (‘Listen to me only’) and bhekaminandedwa (‘Look at me alone’). They were said to enable a woman to hold on to men or to lure them from other relationships. Usually comprising a mixture of herbs and the woman’s body fluids (vaginal secretions, blood and nail scrapings) made into powders or pastes, they were either added to the man’s food or applied to the woman’s body or the man’s penis. Male youths seen doing what other young men considered to be women’s work were often said to be under the spell of these potions. Men said that they only used love potions very occasionally, often in a fit of jealousy and to prevent their woman from having affairs with other men. The male potions were usually applied to the penis before sex in order to prevent other men from getting an erection if they tried to have sex with one’s woman. Young women in the shack areas also used various cosmetics to enhance their attractiveness. During the day these included camomile cream, applied to the face as a sunscreen to prevent the skin from darkening. A light, fresh skin was said to make a woman more attractive to men. Some women also used Eskamel (a powerful anti-acne cream) that peeled away the surface layers of the skin, exposing the lighter layers underneath. Application of skin creams, in both shack and formal areas, was not merely part of women’s beautification kits. It was also an important marker of women’s domestic roles. Wearing a pinafore or old clothes around the house and in the mornings, when men were out of the house working or seeking work, and whitening one’s face with heavy doses of creams, signified to other women that they were attending to their domestic responsibilities. Once afternoon came and women went out to attend to things outside the house or were waiting for their men to return from the city, they changed out of their old clothes and removed the creams. Many young women now applied cheap perfumes and dressed up in better clothes. The application of skin creams and cosmetics was therefore not only

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a sign of the desire to enhance attractiveness and sexual appeal, but served as a marker of association with the home and domestic roles (see Chapter 7). Women discussed the elaborate strategies they had used to hold on to their men. These included initiating pregnancies even though doing so opened a woman to being taunted by her rivals with comments such as ‘umntwana akayoring’ (‘a child is not a ring’). Young women who adopted this strategy ran the risk of rejection because young men tended to shy away from the responsibilities of fatherhood precisely because it brought with it increased pressure from the family to marry.25 Yet this was just what most young women wanted, because it was seen to secure their access to a man’s attention and earnings. The transition from being a lover to a makoti was a major achievement, proudly symbolised in Duncan Village by the adoption of a new dress code. The standard outfit of a young makoti in the shack areas was a blue German-print dress or pinafore, covered by a towel, worn like a sash across the shoulder. On their heads the makoti all wore the standard black scarves. As these women matured as wives, they tended to move the scarf further back on their foreheads and dropped the sash to the waist; soon also trading their blue German-print dresses for brown ones. With young men’s proclivity to delay and even actively resist marriage, a young woman’s transition from lover to wife was recognised as highly significant, not least because a considerable number of women doubted that they would ever marry. When a woman became pregnant, it more often failed than succeeded to lead to the marriage she desired, and it often also marked the end of a livingtogether relationship. The stresses and strains that a child’s arrival brought on the households of living-together couples were often so severe that break-ups commonly followed after a child’s birth. Even during the pregnancy, men tended to start looking around, and by the time the child arrived the erstwhile couple was likely to be locked into a love triangle. As the new mother applied pressure for the man’s stronger commitment to the relationship, so he tended to move away, often taking up residence with a new lover. A woman exposed to such behaviour found herself in a vulnerable position since she would frequently have defied her parents’ better judgement when first entering the living-together relationship, and she now had difficulty returning to her natal home. Having left in disgrace, she was reluctant to return, and this placed her lover in a powerful position, so that in many cases the relationship became physically abusive. Without the support of close kin, such women had no means to control male-initiated domestic violence. According to the men, such experiences served to prepare their women for the hardships of marital life, including witchcraft accusations and verbal abuse from in-laws. By tolerating these abuses while still in a relationship of cohabitation, the men claimed, women were proving their ability to become good wives – umfazi uyanyamezela (‘to tolerate hardship of marriage’). The everyday realities of male dominance, violence and abuse in livingtogether households recorded during my fieldwork confirmed the extent to which men held the upper hand in such units and were able to dictate the terms of their relationships with women.26 By having separated young women

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from a support group of female kin, drawn them into an ideology of defiance of older forms of association and obligations, and confined them in makeshift wood-and-iron one-roomed shacks, they rendered these women vulnerable to domination and abuse. They created an environment in which they could express their sexuality and assert their masculinity unfettered by the older generation’s norms and sanctions. Young men’s social power in this situation was clearly expressed in the ease with which they were able to shun their responsibilities as fathers and resist the demands of their women to make them respectable wives. But young men were also frustrated because they often lacked the economic resources to fulfil their fantasies of themselves as male breadwinners. Young women would frequently taunt their lovers by demanding that they prove their manhood by putting food on the table and supporting their children. They would use men’s weak economic position to threaten them, saying that if they did not support their families themselves and accept the need for marriage, they would have to find men who would. They would say that their lover could not expect them to stay at home like a wife when they could not fulfil the obligations of a husband. These struggles created enormous tension within households and resulted in high levels of domestic violence and the instability of ukuhlalisana relationships, most of which broke down. By the late 1990s, many young men, frustrated by their own inability to find regular employment in the city, were also finding it increasingly difficult to discipline their lovers, especially if they had a source of income of their own. The desire of men from both urban and rural areas to exert power, and the increasing realisation among women that their own expectations of men as breadwinners were seldom realised, escalated the levels of tension and instability. This is an issue to which I return in Chapter 7, where I explore the growing tendency for women to form matrifocal households in Duncan Village in the 1990s. Conclusion This chapter, divided into two main parts, first explored the emergence of the Comrades as a political and cultural style, which drew equally on urban and rural traditions of youth mobilisation and expression. My discussion began in the East Bank in the 1950s and then linked with the literature on rural male youth associations in the Eastern Cape, much of which stemmed from the Mayers’ own work on youth socialisation in the 1960s. I traced the different paths that urban and rural youth identity politics followed through the 1960s and 1970s, and how these traditions had increasingly converged by the 1980s. By then the distinction between Red and School youths, with their particular forms of youth organisation and cultural expression, had blurred; and the new bonding of the two groups was strengthened by a growing social and economic distance between young and older men in the rural areas. In the city, the flashy cosmopolitan styles of the oobrighty youth of the 1950s, so markedly different from the style of rural youth, also largely disappeared as

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the streets of Duncan Village were now much more tightly controlled by the state. In the late 1970s, some of these styles were revived via influences from Soweto, but this did not significantly detract from the increasing convergence in the outlooks and orientations of urban and rural youth on the eve of the Duncan Village revolt of 1985. It was in this context, I argued, that the rural and urban youth of Duncan Village were able to find common ground and unite under the aegis of the Comrades in the 1980s. Unlike Comrades on the Reef, who seem to have emerged as a distinctive urban subculture, those in Duncan Village evolved within a complex blend of urban and rural influences, traditions, experiences and organisational memories which sometimes meshed rather uneasily under one overarching identity. What bound these youth together was their commitment to the struggle and a shared cultural style, which was easily accessible and served to disguise differences in experience and upbringing. It was the looseness and inclusivity of this generational style, which fused politics and masculinity, that drew youth together into the politically cohesive force that forced the agents of the apartheid state out of the township and established a new social order. In my discussion of how the Comrades consolidated power, I highlighted the continuing tensions between the urban-born oobrighty youth, who reconstituted themselves as Com-tsotsis, and the rural youth, who threw their weight behind the civic, the DVRA and its political allies. The second part of the chapter focused on the power held by the Comrades on the streets and how this was translated into their homes in Duncan Village in the late 1980s and 1990s. I focused on the adoption and use of ukuhlalisana by the youth as a means to express their newfound freedom and power. In this section I suggested that young men generally entered these relations with high expectations, hoping to translate the exaggerated sense of power and control they enjoyed on the streets into the home. Male fantasies of power often failed to materialise, however, because the Comrades had such limited economic resources. From their side, young women were demanding that if young men wanted to behave like powerful patriarchal figures and wanted their lovers to behave like subservient Xhosa wives they needed to support their families and enter into marriage transactions – even if these were only ukuthwala arrangements. The refusal of most young men to contemplate marriage and their inability to support their lovers, while they continued to ‘play the field’, created enormous tensions within many new youth households. This in turn undermined the stability of these relationships and the desire of men to consolidate their power. The outcome was the failure of these men to provide for their lovers and their children, as we shall see in the discussion in Chapter 7 on the increasing levels of violence against women, both in the home and on the streets of Duncan Village. Consequently, women were increasingly seeking other options outside ukuhlalisana relationships. Within my overall argument, this chapter has highlighted the complex interplay between urban and rural identity politics in Duncan Village and

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relates this to the emergence of the Comrades as a cultural style. I have attempted to show that the ideas and aspirations of the rural youth were not simply swallowed up by a new urban politics, but rather that rural youth themselves contributed significantly to the making of new hybrid social identities for the youth in the 1980s and 1990s. The political victory of the Comrades in Duncan Village in the 1990s was not, as Mamdani (1996) would have us believe, a triumph of the egalitarian and democratic values of urban civil society over the reactionary forces of customary power. It was rather more complex and subtle than this, and was centrally built on the ability of urban and rural youth to construct new identities which at different moments absorbed and rejected influences from both urban and rural youth. In the next chapter I turn my attention to migrants and the way they used notions of the urban and the rural to map out their own responses to social and political change in Duncan Village in the 1980s and 1990s.

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6 Changing Migrant Cultures

In his book Going for Gold (Moodie with Ndatshe 1994), Dunbar Moodie sets out to conceptualise the nature of migrant cultures at the South African gold mines. Moodie argues that the material conditions of mine migration and the associated hostel life gave rise to ‘variant strands of migrant cultures’ that had as their ‘central motif a commitment to the independence and satisfaction of patriarchal proprietorship over a rural homestead’ (Moodie with Ndatshe 1994: 21). In order to sustain this vision, male migrant workers had to retain access to arable land in the rural areas, which could provide them with the material foundation for ‘building the homestead’. The sustainability of these migrant cultures depended on the maintenance of specific gender identities: on the conception of manhood as grounded in the desire to preside competently and benevolently over the affairs of the homestead and on the commitment of women to serving this goal. To this extent, Moodie insists that ‘migrant cultures’ must always be constituted as resistance to proletarianisation, at least to the wider systemic pressures that sought to alienate these workers from their productive rural resources. Moodie is careful to point out that the ‘migrant cultures’ at the mines were not only built up around a ‘tenacious attachment to land and agrarian production’ but were also informed by specific experiences and understandings of compound life and mine work. In Moodie’s analysis, then, variant strands of migrant culture were constructed within the interstices of mine labour, compound life and peasant proprietorship. Moodie’s formulation of ‘migrant culture’ is thus very like that of the Mayers, especially in their revised account of Red and School as rural resistance ideologies (Mayer 1980). He also agrees with them that by the late 1970s the material conditions for the survival of migrant cultures had disappeared in South Africa. Land-based subsistence strategies in rural areas had been destroyed by Bantustan development and its associated mass-relocation programmes. This in turn spawned increasing, if uneven, female out-migration from rural areas that undermined the shared household project of ‘building the homestead’. Migrant cultures at the South African gold mines, he suggests, were in a state of terminal decline by the 1980s. New cultural and ideological forces were rapidly transforming them as notions of masculinity at the mines became unhinged from the old moral economy of the homestead, at the same time as the National Miners Union (NUM) was providing migrants with a new ‘progressive’ vision of the future. He concludes by stating that, as old migrant life worlds broke down and new ones were not yet fully constituted in their place, migrant identities became fragmented (Moodie with Ndatshe 1994: 40–43). The decline in migrants’ rural resource bases and the rise of urban 1 38

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labour unions are thus said to reshape migrant identity and consciousness fundamentally. Mamdani (1996) provides a slightly different perspective in his book Citizen and Subject. He argues that the continued appetite of migrant workers for conservative ethnic politics in South African cities of the 1990s, as seen in the continuing violence in migrant hostels on the Reef, was a reflection of the fact that changes in their material conditions of existence did not have a fundamental impact on their consciousness of themselves as migrants. He attributes the resilience of older, rurally oriented migrant identities to the failure of the democratically elected South African government to break down the old colonial political contradiction between civil and customary power. The ease with which hostel-dwellers on the Reef still mobilised behind tribal or ethnic ideologies in the 1990s is seen to reflect the resilience of ideas of customary power and patriarchal privilege. Indeed, Mamdani suggests that hostel migrants were still susceptible to this kind of political mobilisation because the system of customary power had offered them much more than simply a right to arable land. He asserts that as long as customary power is underwritten by state power – as is the case in South Africa – migrants will always want to defend the ‘rural in the urban’, even when their historical rights to land are ‘significantly emptied of content’ (1996: 184). The aim of this chapter is to provide ethnographic substantiation for my earlier assertion that, contrary to the argument of the Mayers (1971 [1961]) about the collapse of Red migrant culture in East London after the 1960s, these forms not only survived but flourished in the hostels of Duncan Village well into the 1980s, and that rural identities were still strongly embraced by active and lapsed migrants in the township throughout the 1990s. In the first half of the chapter I analyse the institutional framework and social relations within which Red migrant culture (to use Moodie’s term) was reconstituted and reproduced in Duncan Village between the 1950s and 1990s, paying special attention to the situation of migrants in the B-hostel complex. I will suggest that, within the space of the hostel, conservative migrants were able to develop an institutional basis for the survival of Red migrant culture, which, while different from that of the 1950s, was nevertheless socially coherent and culturally focused on rural resistance. By the late 1980s, I suggest, this institutional basis for the Red migrant cultural form, which centred on abakhaya migrant cooking groups, rapidly disintegrated as a result of the changes that were occurring both in the city and in the surrounding rural areas. My argument in this part of the chapter therefore intersects with that of Moodie (with Ndatshe 1994), insofar as I concur that it was the1980s that saw the demise of ‘migrant culture’ in Duncan Village. In the second half of the chapter I concentrate on the persistence and increasing visibility of rural-focused migrant identities in Duncan Village after the collapse of Red migrants’ cultural forms. Here I part company with Moodie and his assertion that the collapse of migrant culture triggered a shift away from older rural identities to new social identities forged through participation in labour unions. While this argument might have some relevance

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for the gold mines, it was certainly not supported outside these institutions, where migrants and Comrades continually clashed in ongoing political struggles in the 1990s. In Duncan Village, as we have seen, migrants did not join the South African Allied Workers Union (SAAWU) or other unions in large numbers in the 1980s, nor did they seek an alliance with the Comrades that dominated the township streets. Instead, they continued to defend their rural identities and hostel spaces from outside intervention by reconstituting themselves as respectable rural Xhosa men who rejected what they saw as the degenerate, arrogant and misguided lifestyles of the new youth. But why did they do this? And how could they sustain such responses in a context where the institutional basis of pre-existing migrant cultures had collapsed? Mamdani (1996), as we have seen above, claims that it was because they were still entitled to patriarchal proprietorship in the countryside, even if they were no longer always able to exercise these rights or to reap material reward from their rural links. In other words, he situates the lingering importance of rural identities in the city, which he presents as essential and unchanging, in the politics of the countryside. In trying to account for the continued presence of the ‘rural in the urban’ in Duncan Village, I adopt a different perspective by suggesting that migrants’ primary loyalties in the 1990s were not to the countryside but to their urban jobs and resources. I suggest that, given the diminishing significance of rural resources in the survival strategies of migrants, their interests have become increasingly focused on securing urban permanence and in preventing the Comrades from taking over the urban spaces and entitlements that they had secured under apartheid. Thus, despite the fact that many former migrants in the hostels no longer remitted resources regularly to rural kin, and were feeling increasingly disconnected from their town-based abakhaya, they nevertheless continued to invest in migrant identities to press claims for their right to remain in the city. In making these claims, I argue, former migrants often exaggerated their connections with the rural areas and the differences between their own masculinities and lifestyles and those of other urban residents. The account I present of the ‘rural in the urban’ in the 1990s, therefore, differs fundamentally from those of both Moodie and Mamdani because it is based on notions of disconnection and reinvention, what Van Binsbergen (1997) has called ‘virtualisation’, rather than any political or economic connections with rural regimes. In short, I see the reconstitution of the ‘rural in the urban’ in Duncan Village in the 1990s as an urban rather than a rural resistance ideology, which has come to exist outside the circuits of rural social relationship and political identities. I therefore conclude that the rural identity politics of the 1990s was much more free-floating, flexible and fragile – more public and performative, more style-like – than that with which migrants were engaged during the ‘migrant culture’ era. As with my previous chapters, I begin my analysis by returning first to the 1950s and to the constitution of Red migrant cultural forms in the old wood-and-iron neighbourhoods of the location.

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Domesticity and Red Migrant Culture in the 1950s In the 1950s the Mayers (1971 [1961]) linked Red and School migrant cultural styles to different forms of domesticity in the East Bank. They argued that amaqaba migrants gravitated to the densely settled wood-and-iron shack areas of the old East Bank location, where the central nodes of Red migrant culture were located. In the 1950s there were no hostels in the East Bank, so migrants coming into the city would hire rooms in the rambling wood-and-iron tenements in the township. On arrival in the location, Red migrants invariably moved into communal rooms with other migrants from their home area. In a small sample of 33 Red migrants, the Mayers found that ‘20 had turned to amakhaya when they came to town, 10 had had a brother to put them up, and the remaining 3 had moved in with non-agnatic kin’ (1971 [1961]: 103). To be accepted into the room, a newcomer would be required to offer an ‘arrival gift’ of beer and brandy to his room-mates. In Red rooms it was common for as many as six or eight migrants to cram into a single room as long as the landlady would permit it. One migrant would be the official tenant, but he would ‘sub-let’ space in the room to other migrants, who would contribute to the rent. In some houses, Red migrants from the same rural areas occupied several rooms, giving the house a specific character. Reader (1960) observed: There are definite groups of houses in the location, definite streets, definite neighbourhoods where lodgers tend to all come from the same rural locality. A newcomer hailing from that area and bearing their tribal name is directed to these places for help and accommodation. (1960: 141) On arrival in a room-sharing set-up, the newcomer, referred to as inyuwana (‘new one’), would have the lowest status of the room-mates and would often have to cook for the others, clean the house and make the tea. By contrast, the official tenant would assume the mantle of ‘room boss’. He would be the longest-serving member of the group and would usually do the least amount of domestic work. Red rooms were governed by specific rules concerning cooking, eating, sharing, and the entry of women. Failure to adhere to these rules could lead to a fine or even expulsion from the room. Some room-groups remained together for long periods of time, but the general tendency was for Red migrants to move on to less crowded rooms and eventually into a situation where they enjoyed the status of room tenant. With age and marriage, Red migrants increasingly sought to live alone. Mayer argues that the commonest cause for older Red migrants’ desire for privacy was sexual association with women: The ‘rules of the house’ entail that as long as a man is staying with a group of others he cannot indulge in love-making in the room. Even if the sexual partner is a man’s own lawful wife on a visit from the country, intercourse in the presence of other men is improper. (Mayer with Mayer 1971 [1961]: 108)

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In the overcrowded wood-and-iron shack-lands of the East Bank, where rents were high and space at a premium, few men achieved this goal. In the case of School migrants, the Mayers noted a more varied domestic pattern. School migrants were much less inclined to live together in large groups of non-kin home-mates than their Red counterparts (1971 [1961]: 209). Their entry into the city was usually mediated through family connections – a mother’s sister, a father’s brother, or even a more distant relative. They would normally take up residence with family members until such time as they were able to get a place of their own to rent. Living with large groups of men was regarded by the School migrants as being of ‘low status’, but this did not mean that they were always able to avoid undesirable living conditions. Unlike Red migrants, the School migrants did not insist on women remaining in the countryside; they often came to town with wives or lovers, or alternatively were joined by them shortly after arrival. The tendency of School migrants to include women in their domestic arrangements placed them in a fundamentally different position to the Red migrant groups. In domestic situations involving women it was very unusual for men to take responsibilities for domestic work and cooking. The cultural models of family drawn on by School migrants in these situations were little different from those of urban-born couples. In the discussion below I trace how this amaqaba culture changed over time. Some of the richest ethnography on amaqaba domestic patterns is to be found in Reader’s (1960) work on lodging arrangements in the East Bank. Unlike the Mayers, he takes us into the intimate spaces of migrant rooms, describing the interiors of rooms, the domestic equipment, and daily cooking and eating practices. Given their attempts to reduce consumption expenditure in town, the rooms of Red migrants were typically sparsely furnished, containing none but the most basic domestic equipment: The household articles normally all belong to the registered tenant. They are used free of charge by the sub-tenants, who are personally responsible for replacing any breakage. These belongings of room-groups are generally distinguished by their sparseness, inferior quality and poor state of repair. Cups without saucers, mugs instead of either, are likely to be found. Tin dishes, cracked plates of the cheapest kind, a cooking pot, a water bucket and a pressure stove will probably complete the feeding [sic] equipment. The surroundings themselves are often little better. Sometimes there are no furnishings at all but paraffin tins used as seats and the untidy linen of the occupants. (1960: 138) From his descriptions we learn that these migrants generally cooked with paraffin-wick or pressure stoves. Oil-burning stoves were virtually unknown in these migrants’ rooms and were confined to households in the municipal housing estates. Each room group would have one, or occasionally two, paraffin stoves that would be used to cook meals and warm the room in winter. At night the migrants used candles or paraffin lamps for lighting. Reader notes that many migrants made small home-made paraffin lamps

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that, like the ufinya-futhi lamps used today, ‘made horrible smoke at night’. Reader (1960: 138) reports that the heavy use of paraffin for cooking and lighting so blackened the interior walls that they had to be scrubbed clean by the landlord when migrants left. Reader also provides a detailed account of the way migrants contributed communally towards the cost of meals: As these room-sharers do not usually have regular consorts to cook for them [i.e. women], the main meal of the day is not in the evening, as with the married men, but at lunch-time. Then the men feed [sic] independently at eating houses near their work. The communal room-group meal is thus essentially an evening (and fairly casual) arrangement. The men are tired. They want to smoke their pipes, and drink kaffir [sic] beer, for which a further money contribution to the common pool is required. There are minor difficulties of distribution when all room-mates are not present together. Sometimes a man running short of money has to borrow when his turn comes and pay his room-mates back on the following payday. At weekends those who remain behind prepare a grand supper. On Saturday the necessary meat, potatoes and cabbage are bought for the Sunday supper … On the evening of the day of rest, unwonted and savoury odours, preferably created by the skill of some female consort, emerge to beguile the palates of those who have not had the good fortune to return to the country. (1960: 140) Once the meal had been cooked, social rules and principles consistent with the social hierarchy among Red migrants governed eating. In his account of eating and sharing, Reader (1960: 136) emphasised the unequal status of newcomers and junior men when food was distributed: With seven in a room, the communal dish of gravy circulates from senior to junior, just as it would have done in the country, starting with the room tenant, the registered lodger. He takes several deep sips before passing the bowl to the next man, so it goes down to the newest arrival, who finds the desirable layer of fat on the surface of the gravy entirely gone. This is symbolic of all dealings in the room. The meat from which the gravy is drawn is in principle bought in turn by each member of the room-group. Even if this arrangement is properly carried out, the senior men have the first choice no matter who may have bought the meat. They are adept at chewing and swallowing quickly, so that the newcomer is on his first piece while they are on their third. Outside the domestic arena, iseti drinking groups provided the other social arena where Red migrants interacted with their abakhaya on a daily basis. Iseti drinking groups were much larger than room groups and always included abakhaya from a variety of different houses in the neighbourhood. Social interactions among abakhaya migrants at iseti sittings were much more formal than in rooms. The seating arrangements and the distribution of beer within

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these groups were based on seniority. The oldest migrants were always served first and were entitled to more beer than their younger counterparts, who were ranked in accordance with their year of initiation. Senior men were also given more time to speak at these beer-drinking sessions and had the most influence over the content and direction of discussion. Rural issues and customary concerns tended to dominate conversation. Returning migrants and new arrivals from the countryside were warmly welcomed into the iseti and men listened closely as they imparted fresh information about developments in the countryside. But the iseti was more than a source of information about rural life, it was an important social arena where the morality of Red urban life was imparted and reinforced. It was here that Red migrants were reminded of responsibilities to rural kin, the virtues of saving in the city, the dangers of sexual liaisons with town women, and the corrosive influences of Westernisation and Christianity on the Xhosa way of life. The work of the Mayers and Reader combines to provide a fascinating and textured account of the nature of migrant culture, domesticity and consumption in the slum yards of the East Bank in the 1950s. Their work shows that the approach of migrants to consumption was structured by a conception of themselves as peasants in the city. They viewed their involvement in the urban economy in very instrumental terms. Amaqaba migrants saw wage labour and urban life as a ‘necessary evil’ that had to be endured to ensure the survival of their homesteads in the countryside, and to shield themselves and their families against proletarianisation. The central motif of this migrant culture was, as Moodie has pointed out, the ‘satisfaction of patriarchal proprietorship over a rural homestead’ (Moodie with Ndatshe 1994: 21). In order to effect this, amaqaba migrants involved themselves socially in abakhaya networks in the city. The two key social institutions for the reproduction of amaqaba culture in Duncan Village, as we have seen above, were the iseti beer-drinking sessions, which brought migrants from different age-sets together on a daily basis, and the room-based cooking groups, which involved migrants from the same age-sets and home areas in communal cooking and sharing arrangements. These two social institutions worked in a complementary way to facilitate the social reproduction of amaqaba culture during the 1950s. Room-based cooking groups fostered horizontal solidarities among Red migrants through enforced daily cooperation, while the iseti drinks facilitated intergenerational links among age-sets and inculcated a respect for seniority, discipline and responsibility through the ritualised activities of talking and drinking. Cooking Groups and Red Revival In their revisit to East London in the 1970s, as I reported in Chapter 3, the Mayers suggested that the old division between Red and School migrants had become blurred and that Red migrant life had effectively disappeared from the city, only being found in a small pocket in Duncan Village where municipal authorities had not yet destroyed the old wood-and-iron houses of the East

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Bank. In that chapter I went on to suggest that, in reaching this conclusion, the Mayers had not considered that their finding was based on an inadequate analysis of the new situation in Duncan Village where large numbers of former East Bank migrants were regrouped in male single-sex hostels. In B-hostel the general marginalisation of Bhaca and Gcaleka workers by township people, combined with their confinement in the fenced and guarded hostel complex, served to produce two ultra-conservative Red migrant subcultures, which remained active into the 1990s. McAllister and Deliwe (1994) claim that the expansion of the hostel system countrywide led to a general regrouping of Transkei migrants from formerly Red areas like Kentani into tightly knit abakhaya groups inside hostels. They summarise the core values of this migrant ideology as it was practised in the urban hostel context during the 1960s: Here the older men, acting in loco parentis, would keep a close watch on the younger men and boys to ensure that they behaved in a way appropriate to a ‘red’ Xhosa (amaqaba) – i.e. that they never forgot that they were working for their parents and their rural home, that they did not waste any money, and that they did not engage in urban pursuits and pleasures. Most of all they were told to avoid ‘town women’ who would cause them to squander their money and forget their rural home. One who ignored this rule was told utye intaka eyojiweyo emlungwini – ‘you have eaten a bird roasted at the white man’s place’. This referred to the luxury and the pleasure of catching and roasting birds that boys indulged in while out herding cattle, an activity that sometimes caused them to neglect the cattle and allowed them to destroy crops. (1994: 15) McAllister and Deliwe go on to explain that a trustworthy elder in the hostel block would sometimes be asked to safeguard the earnings of his home-mates. He would have a goatskin purse, umfelemntwini (meaning, ‘die for a person’), implying that he would have to be killed before parting with it. This elder, or another senior man, would assume the position of isibonda: the block representative charged with the responsibility of mediating disputes within the hostel. In the constructed social world of the Duncan Village hostels, the old moral code of Red migrants was reinforced with new intensity after 1960 as senior migrants set out to enforce strict codes based on specific notions of home, seniority, gender and respect. This moral code was built on the unquestioned authority of senior men, and on the maintenance of abakhaya links as the most effective route to building the umzi back home. To use the Mayers’ terms, the hostel experience in Duncan Village intensified experiences of encapsulation in a context where Red migrant subculture was generally in a state of decline in the township as a whole. In comparing Red subcultural forms in the hostel after 1960 with those of the East Bank shack area prior to 1960, it is possible to identify a significant change in the institutional basis of cultural reproduction. In the old East Bank location, it was the iseti beer-drinking sessions more than any other institution

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that constituted the central locus for the reproduction of abakhaya ties and Red subcultural identities. With the demolition of large parts of the East Bank, however, many of these iseti groups were destroyed as migrants were dispersed. In some of the shack areas, which were not immediately affected by relocation, old-style iseti beer-drinking sessions continued for some time, while in areas such as the C-section, migrants were able to regroup with their old drinking partners to establish new iseti groups based on abakhaya links. But from the late 1960s and especially the 1970s, the dominant trend in the township was towards mixed iseti groups with migrants from a wide range of rural areas. The new openness of township-based iseti groups made these institutions poor vehicles for the transfer of core amaqaba cultural values. In fact, with the emergence of mixed iseti groups and the erosion and blurring of the Red–School division inside the township, the focus of Red cultural reproduction shifted to the hostel block and sets of social relations enclosed within it. In this narrow social world, the most critical vehicle for maintenance of abakhaya links and the reproduction of Red social hierarchies and value relations was the migrant cooking group. Migrant cooking groups in the old East Bank location, as we have seen, were generally small, relatively informal, and characterised by age equivalence. The leader of the group was the official room tenant and it was through the use of his appliances and domestic utensils – his paraffin stove, plates and cups – and through his ability to raise credit at the local store that the activities of the group operated. The tenant was the most powerful member of the group, although he was not necessarily the most senior migrant in the room. Moreover, the relative informality of the cooking group could be sharply contrasted with the formality of the abakhaya iseti, where interactions among migrants were governed by myriad formal rules and conventions. The re-emergence of migrant cooking groups in the hostels occurred in a very different context. First, hostel rooms or blocks were allocated to migrants as groups rather than as individuals. This meant that no one individual had control of domestic and cooking activities. Second, the appliances and fuel required for cooking were provided by the municipality free of charge. The costs incurred by the municipality in offering this service were built into the fees charged to the employer for the use of the hostel. In B-hostel, the municipality installed a single coal stove in all hostel blocks and made coal available to migrants as a common facility, kept in a storeroom within the hostel complex. This storeroom was always open and migrants could go and collect coal when and as they needed it. Third, unlike the iintanga (age-set) groups that shared rooms in the East Bank, B-hostel blocks were inhabited by men of all ages. The primary basis for group formation inside these blocks was home networks rather than age-based links. In the blocks, whether Bhaca or Kentani, cooking was performed in groups of between 8 and 16 men. In some blocks, two groups were formed, while in others the entire block would cook together. The groups usually comprised men of different ages who came from the same district. In the Kentani hostels, men from the same villages and locations would gravitate to the same hostel

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block, and the internal sleeping arrangements would reflect the closeness of their association. Fathers and sons would arrange to sleep next to each other; men from the same rural villages organised to sleep together as a unit. In some hostel blocks, cooking groups emerged organically, while in others senior migrants simply used their age and seniority to impose a structure, much in the same way as they had at the iseti. The common pattern in the Kentani blocks was for the entire block to operate as one cooking unit. Senior men or the block izibonda would take charge of the group and decide on the allocation of tasks. This invariably meant that menial domestic work like making the fire, cleaning and cooking, was rotated among junior migrants. When food was served, senior migrants would be served first and would be first in line for a second helping. These practices mirrored the allocation of beer at iseti beer-drinking sessions, where men were served in order of their age and where the oldest men were always first in line for a second beaker. It also echoes Reader’s description of eating rituals among abakhaya of the 1950s, where gravy was symbolically skimmed off the top by senior migrants. The cost of purchasing food for consumption in the hostel block was borne by all migrants in the group. Each would contribute the same amount to a common fund. This would be controlled and managed by senior men, although the task of purchasing food was shared. Unlike the old East Bank room-sharing groups, where food would be purchased on a daily or weekly basis, hostel-cooking groups tried to avoid regular trips to the shop by buying in bulk. At month-end, each cooking group would buy a 50 kg bag of mealie meal as well as a large bag of sugar, and tea, salt and other essentials. The aim was to avoid wasting money during the week on ‘unnecessary luxuries’. In the Kentani hostels, large amounts of amasi (sour milk) were brought in free of charge from the dairy. The pilfering of food, often a problem in the old room-sharing groups, was generally not an issue in the hostels. Contrary to the argument presented by Philip Mayer (1980) that the amaqaba culture in East London was in a state of collapse by the early 1970s, this cultural form was reconstructed in Duncan Village after the apartheid state destroyed its residential base in the East Bank location. Forced out of backyard shacks and wood-and-iron tenements in the 1960s, conservative Transkeian migrants, in particular, managed to rebuild enclaves of amaqaba culture within the transit housing zones of C-section and D-section, and especially in the new municipal hostels in Duncan Village. In the new transit housing zones, clusters of Transkeian migrants reconstituted old abakhaya networks by sharing accommodation and setting up new iseti beer-drinking groups, which could act as focal points for cooperation among abakhaya in town. In the post-1950s period, B-hostel was to emerge as the centre of amaqaba culture in Duncan Village. The boundedness of this institution and its physical separation from the township made it an ideal environment in which Red migrants from the Transkei could encapsulate themselves in an ideology of rural resistance and articulate a discourse of Xhosa tradition. Based in the B-hostel complex, amaqaba culture survived through the dark years of the 1960s and 1970s by shifting the focus of cultural reproduction

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away from the iseti drinking group to hostel cooking groups. The reconstitution of the small iintanga or age-based cooking groups of the 1950s, into large, intergenerational, abakhaya-based social units combined the functions of domestic management with cultural transmission. The relocation of these social functions away from the public domain of township life and into the private domain of the hostel cooking group ensured that the reproduction of cultural values could be insulated from a wider world where ‘Red confidence’ had been eroded. In fact it is arguable that the ability of hostel migrants to control consumption and effect savings to build up their rural homesteads was far greater in the post-1960 period than it had been before. For example, unlike in the 1950s, hostel migrants were not liable for rent in the hostel nor were they expected to pay for fuel. Furthermore, the weekly donations of amasi to migrants from Model Dairy and the curfews that limited the ability of migrants to move around the township also helped reduce urban consumption expenses and maximise rural remittances. What made these hostel-based cooking groups such effective units of cultural reproduction was precisely that they were intergenerational. In the 1950s the Mayers explained that room-based groups were generally fairly informal, ageequivalent, communal groupings where respect on the basis of seniority was ‘seldom very pronounced’. The inclusion of senior men in B-hostel cooking groups had two important social consequences: first, it introduced a more formal ethos into the organisation and management of migrants’ domestic life, and, second, it created a social arena where migrants of different generations could interact on a daily basis. The latter phenomenon was essential for the cultural reproduction of the amaqaba style, since it allowed older migrants not only to inculcate the core values of Red culture among the youth, but it also allowed them to keep a close eye on the ways in which rural youth conducted themselves in the city. Social Dislocation and the Reinvention of Tradition During the political upheaval of the 1980s in Duncan Village, the Comrades tore down the barbed-wire fences around B- and D-hostels, and gutted the guardrooms, the superintendent’s offices and the municipal beer hall associated with the hostel complexes. The destruction of this apartheid infrastructure in 1985 established the hostels as ‘liberated zones’ within the township. B-hosteldwellers could now move freely around the township and their lives were no longer inhibited by the myriad apartheid rules and regulations that governed hostel life. Far from embracing the new political space created for them by the amaqabane (Comrades), however, the hostel-dwellers immediately embarked on concerted rearguard action against any radical change. They rejected the idea that new families, who were now flooding into the township, should be settled on open spaces inside the hostel complex. Led by Kentani and Bhaca migrants, the men made it clear that they would not be prepared to accept women in the hostel even if they were the wives of bona fide migrants. They insisted that the hostel stay a single-sex institution. In order to enforce change,

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the DVRA insisted that the old system of appointed izibonda be replaced by a system of democratically elected izibonda for each block. The hostel-dwellers agreed to this proposal, but in practice the elected izibonda invariably ended up simply being the most senior migrant in the block. The new democracy of the hostel was a qualified democracy of seniority. In fact, by reconstituting the izibonda system outside the control of the local municipality, senior migrants had the political space to resist amaqabane dominance and to reinforce their own conservative ideas based on tradition, patriarchy and seniority. Senior migrants cast themselves as the custodians of a culture of discipline and respect which had to be defended against the tyranny and disorder of township politics. To distinguish themselves from the township amaqabane, the ‘hostel fathers’ set about recreating their own conservative traditionalist culture. They reinforced the old curfew system, which meant that hostel blocks had to be shut by 21:00 in the evening, and established a system where they could fine and punish any block member who disobeyed their authority. The ultimate punishment was eviction from the hostel. The success of the izibonda and other senior migrants in resisting change in the hostels was shown in the fact that in 1995 – almost a decade after taking control of the complex – 82 per cent of the beds in B-hostel were still occupied by single men. Fathers, sons or siblings shared a further 10 per cent of the beds, while a mere 8 per cent of the bed spaces were used by couples. Women constituted only 10 per cent of the total hostel population. The most surprising feature of this reconstitution of conservative cultural values and discipline through the vehicle of the new izibonda system from the mid 1980s was that it occurred in a context where large numbers of hostel migrants were losing contact with their rural homesteads. From the mid 1980s, the material conditions that had supported amaqaba migrant culture as a form of rural resistance had been undermined by devastating drought and stock losses in the Transkei. The life histories collected from hostel residents revealed that both the levels of migrant remittances and the frequency of home visits had steadily declined through the 1980s. There was a growing collective disillusionment in the project of ‘building the umzi’. Men spoke variously of drought-related stock losses, chronic (syndicated) stock theft, the collapse of village-based ploughing teams, the disintegration of agricultural extension services under the Transkeian administration, and the departure of daughters and wives to nearby towns and cities. Although these factors affected individual migrants to differing degrees, it was evident that the overall pattern was clearly towards an increasing withdrawal from rural production and household management. The increasing difficulty of these hostel-dwellers to effect rural retirement was seen in our 1995 survey, which showed that 59 per cent of the hostel population was over the age of 40, while 38 per cent was already over the age of 50. Many of the older migrants in B-hostel were still employed, albeit on a casual basis (many as part-time security guards), and said that they would hold on to their current jobs as long as possible. Other older men had already retired, but had not yet left the hostels.

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In the changing social and political environment in Duncan Village in the 1980s, the reconstitution of a conservative, generationally based system of political control in B-hostel came at considerable cost. Younger migrants and married men felt that the new regime imposed by senior migrants was authoritarian and unreasonable. They wanted to see greater flexibility in the way the hostel was run, not more rules and regulations. But older migrants simply argued that, if hostel residents were not happy with the way the hostel was being managed, they could move out. These generational tensions and other divisions prompted a number of new developments. First, the population within B-hostel became increasingly unstable as some migrants moved out and others were recruited to take their place; and, in finding replacements, the izibonda were always very careful to ensure that the recruits were prepared to recognise their power and authority. Second, the cooperative and supportive ethos that had prevailed among abakhaya in B-hostel during the 1960s and 1970s was breaking down. Migrants who were beginning to renege on their rural responsibilities were less interested in maintaining good relations with their home-mates in town. Third, in the face of deepening internal conflicts within the hostel, the older divisions based on tribal identities – in particular those between Gcaleka and Bhaca migrants – began to fade as migrants identified themselves in new ways. The main social cleavages in the hostel in the 1990s were between young and older men and between ‘active’ and ‘lapsed’ migrants. During the late 1980s and 1990s, the internal politics of the hostel had a profound impact on the institutions of amaqaba culture. In a context of diminishing rates of return, migration and growing intergenerational tensions, abakhaya social networks began to break down. The result was the emergence of new kinds of cooking and drinking arrangements among hostel-dwellers. In 1986, when the East London municipality lost control of the hostel, migrants no longer had a free supply of coal. This initiated a major change in fuel-use strategies within the hostels. Without access to a reliable local outlet where coal could be bought, migrants were forced to change from coal to a paraffin-based domestic fuel-economy. By 1987 the old coal stoves in the hostel block were no longer in use, as B-hostel-dwellers switched en masse to cooking on paraffin stoves. This change in cooking technology triggered the disintegration of block-based cooking groups. By the 1990s, more than two-thirds of the residents in B-hostel were cooking alone, with the rest of the hostel population still involved in some form of group cooking. The new cooking groups encountered in B-hostel in the 1990s were, however, much smaller than the old block-based abakhaya units and were built around new social solidarities. In 1996 there were two distinct types of cooking groups in operation in the hostel: rural-focused kin groups and urban-focused ‘work-seeker’ units. We see a good example of how these kin-group units were formed in the case of the Mlomo family. The Mlomo family built up a strong family presence in Block 16 of B-hostel over a period of almost a decade. The eldest brother and leader of the group, Mandi, arrived in the city in 1987 to join his father, who

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was then employed as a migrant at Model Dairy. When the dairy changed hands in 1987, Mandi’s father moved out of the hostel to set up a small informal business in the shack areas. When his bed became vacant, Mandi persuaded the isibonda to allow him to recruit a younger brother, who had recently lost his job in Johannesburg. In 1993, when another space opened up in the block, Mandi brought another brother to B-hostel, who had been living with their paternal uncle in a hostel on the East Rand. He wanted to leave there because of escalating hostel violence. In 1994, a third brother joined them from their Kentani home, where he had been looking after his mother. Two other men joined the following year – one was the son of their mother’s brother (malome), the other was an age-mate from the village. The six men formed a single cooking unit. Only three of the men were employed and made regular contributions to the domestic expenses of the group; the other three members contributed whenever they could. Every week, each of the employed members put R35 in a communal kitty. The money was spent on maize meal, tea, sugar and paraffin, all purchased at a local supermarket in the location. These were the core ingredients of the daily diet of these migrants. Additional food such as soup packets, vegetables, bread or meat would be purchased to supplement their staple daily dish of mealie meal. If they were desperate for money they would go to their father’s shack to ask for a loan. Every month the men sent between R400 and R500 home to their mother and sisters in Kentani. The shift away from abakhaya to kin-based cooking groups was associated with the increasing residential instability in the hostel after 1986. As established hostel-dwellers moved out of the complex to return home or find alternative accommodation elsewhere in the township, beds were reallocated to new recruits. The selection of new men was done informally. The names of potential candidates were submitted to the block isibonda for consideration. In many cases, block residents advanced names of friends or relatives, often a close male kinsman, as replacements. The izibonda generally supported this system on the grounds that they were less likely to experience disciplinary problems if they chose the relative of a hostel insider than if they recruited an unknown outsider. As a result of these preferences, the social composition of the blocks changed. When the municipality was in charge, workers were sent to stay with abakhaya. Under the new system, kinship rather than home links became the guide for recruitment. Thus, from the mid 1980s it became possible for clusters of close patrikin to congregate within particular blocks. By setting themselves up in the same residential units, these patrikin could then support one another in the city and collectively attend to responsibilities in the countryside. The creation of a kin-based network in the hostel was, however, a slow process that always depended on the availability of new spaces for their kinsmen in the block. The second type of cooking group operating in B-hostel in the 1990s had nothing to do with a culture of rural responsibility. As the turnover of hostel-dwellers increased, unemployed men came to the hostel to seek

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accommodation. Many of those who arrived had previously worked as migrants on the Reef and decided to return to the Eastern Cape to escape the escalating political violence in the north. These men were familiar with hostel life and were generally welcomed into the hostel by the izibonda. They were, however, usually unemployed on arrival and took up residence with home-mates or friends who they hoped would help them to find jobs. From their time of arrival until they found some means of supporting themselves independently, these migrants were often absorbed into cooking groups in order to provide them with a means of subsistence. The creation of these groups was usually initiated by older migrants keen to establish new allies who could assist them in trying to restore discipline and obedience among the youth. The formation of these groups had much more to do with the politics of control within the hostel than with the practices of patriarchal proprietorship in the countryside. One indication of the relatively low levels of obligation among members of these groups was that they usually collapsed as soon as the new recruit had found employment. In the 1990s cooking groups were, however, thin on the ground in B-hostel as the vast majority of hostel-dwellers cooked alone. A much more individualist style now prevailed in the hostel kitchens, one that differed fundamentally from the ethos that had existed only a decade earlier. Migrants now kept their food under lock and key, whereas in the past they had left bags of maize meal and drums of sour milk standing open in the hostel. The shift towards greater individualism was evident in the restricted patterns of sharing and exchange in the hostel. In the 1990s there was very little informal sharing of food and other commodities outside the cooking groups. Migrants who borrowed items – a bottle of paraffin or a cup of sugar – from their block mates, were expected to return exactly what they borrowed as soon as possible (within a day or two), or had to pay the lender in cash. It was rare for the lender to allow the borrower longer than a week to return a commodity and there was little tolerance for delayed payments. There was also no bartering of commodities: a cup of sugar was generally not regarded as a fair substitute for a cup of maize meal or a cake of soap. What was borrowed had to be returned – no more, no less. The same rules applied to money. No migrant would entrust his precious earnings to an isibonda with a goatskin purse. The old moral economy of collective trusteeship and joint responsibility simply did not exist. Each man managed his own money and the exchange of money between men was always carefully monitored. It was only in the kin-based cooking groups that there was any pooling of income. Despite the increasingly instrumental nature of their exchange transactions within the hostel, migrants continued to draw a distinction between their own moral conduct and that of the surrounding township community. On money lending, for example, they contrasted hostel-based schemes with the usurious money-lending rackets in the township. They reported that no migrant was allowed to charge interest on the money he lent to another

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migrant. Although many migrants liked to think of themselves as different from township residents – as individuals who operated in accordance with a superior set of moral values – the circuits of everyday exchange in B-hostel had largely been emptied of their moral content. In virtually every respect, they were now designed to minimise interdependence, mutual trust and social obligation. The disintegration of abakhaya social networks inside B-hostel was also seen in the changing drinking patterns of hostel-dwellers. During the early 1980s many B-hostel migrants drank socially at iseti beer-drinking sessions in the location. These groups still operated on a daily basis and remained important social nodes where abakhaya could meet and discuss matters of common concern. But by the 1990s, old-style iseti beer-drinking sessions had largely disappeared. The only remaining iseti groups that still operated on a daily basis were those of Bhaca migrants who worked for the municipality. Migrants from the southern Transkei sometimes held iseti drinking sessions at the weekend when they had more time to socialise. But during the week, migrant drinking was now mainly done at imbarha home-brew shebeens. Unlike the iseti groups, with their pre-selected abakhaya, the imbarha drinks were open to all. In the past, migrants from B-hostel had avoided these drinks because they were said to be patronised by ‘undesirables’ such as amatshipha (‘lapsed migrants’) and amakazana (‘tsotsis’ women’). But now many migrants were willing to spend their afternoons and evenings at imbarha drinks. By the early afternoon, unemployed men from the hostel could be seen sipping beakers of home-brewed beer while they waited for employed migrants and townspeople to return from work. By shifting their loyalties from iseti to imbarha beer-drinking sessions, migrants distanced themselves from their former close-knit rural networks. Even in these new environments, though, migrants did not make any effort to integrate socially with other sections of the urban poor. They were generally reluctant to join new social groups and placed a great deal of emphasis on their own independence and self-sufficiency. When they moved out of the hostels and into backyard shacks, they generally did so alone. They cooked alone and they ate alone. In establishing new identities outside of the old close-knit abakhaya networks, they generally rejected urban integration and stressed self-reliance. They did their own washing and cleaning, trying to set themselves apart from townsfolk. They emphasised that, unlike the urban-born Xhosa men and the ‘Coloured people’ (malau) in the township, they were able to control their own lives and resources. They said they had learnt to appreciate the value of money and knew how to handle themselves in the city. For struggling migrants, parsimony was more than a value – it became an obsession. They viewed saving as the only route to eventual self-reliance and this could only be achieved through reducing consumption and living with restraint, frugality and discipline. As rural resources disappeared and their ability to save diminished, the ability to control their own income became a source of increasing anxiety for migrants.

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Reconstituting Masculinity In B-hostel, there was a marked change in male attitudes towards women, and a general hardening of gender relations as migrants lost contact with their rural homesteads. A useful way to see the shift is to explore how both active and struggling migrants represented women in Duncan Village in the 1990s. In the past, as we have seen, the construction of a successful migrant career depended on the ability of migrants to ‘encapsulate’ themselves in close-knit and supportive networks of town-based abakhaya, who helped build up the moral strength and personal resolve to resist the lure of the city and stay focused on rural responsibilities. In trying to enforce a moral code of financial discipline, an earlier generation of migrants in Duncan Village had identified townswomen as the major threat to their aims and objectives. Certain kinds of townswomen were seen to represent unrestrained urban consumption. They symbolised a powerful threat to the construction and maintenance of a migrant career. The views of migrants on this topic have been well documented since the 1950s (Mayer 1971; Minkley 1996). In the 1990s, migrants in Duncan Village continued to express strong reservations about the ‘seductive powers’ of townswomen. They argued that ‘townswomen’ were a corrupt and corrosive force that could effortlessly eradicate a migrant’s lifelong savings. These deep-seated fears about the power of townswomen were the underlying reason why hostel migrants refused to open the complex up to women in 1986. They argued that, in order to safeguard their integrity and to remain focused in their objectives, it would be unwise to admit women. But the decision to defend the hostel against women in the mid 1980s was not only based on wanting to keep townswomen out, it was increasingly predicated on the desire of struggling migrants, who were reneging on their commitments to the umzi, to keep rural women out as well. The tension in B-hostel over the access of women to the hostel was essentially about the control of income and changing conceptions of manhood. While many younger migrants were in favour of granting women relatively free access, there was a sharp division in the views of ‘active’ and ‘lapsed’ migrants. Active migrants argued that their rural wives should be allowed to visit them for as long as they wished; their wives had been entrusted with enormous responsibilities in the rural areas and they should be free to come to town to discuss ‘family matters’ when necessary. Those lapsed migrants, on the other hand, who had deserted their rural kin, objected vociferously to such demands on the grounds that it would compromise the generally accepted ruling about women in the hostel. They argued that hostel-dwellers should not turn their backs on ‘tradition’ by watering down their commitment to the exclusion of women; to compromise the ruling would threaten the very survival of migrant culture in the hostel. In effect they were demanding that a ‘hostel tradition’ be enforced to prevent their deserted rural wives and kin from coming into the hostel complex to make claims on their earnings. It was deeply ironic that

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the most conservative views on the issue of women were articulated by men who had effectively lost contact with the rural areas. But as time passed and the collective interest of active migrants and youth came to prevail over that of the lapsed migrants, the number of women in the hostel complex increased. By 1995, women from rural areas had begun to move into the hostel. The response of many lapsed migrants, who had fought tooth and nail to maintain the old gender ruling, was to try to vacate the hostels by moving into surrounding shack areas. The motivation behind the decision by members of the old guard to move out was that the softening of the gender rule inside the hostel complex had exposed them to the claims of their deserted rural dependants. To resist the demands of close kin, some of these men simply decided to disappear. For those with employment and the ability to pay rent, the backyard shack areas provided a safe and stable residential base where they could hide from rural dependants. For those without permanent employment, however, the free-standing shack areas were generally a better option because it was possible to live there rent-free. Some of those who moved out into these areas managed to support themselves on casual employment. Others struggled to make ends meet. After a period of hardship, some of the latter men managed to find accommodation with single women, usually unmarried mothers, who would take them in as guardians. Former migrants regarded this as a personal defeat and embarrassment. By accepting lodging and food, they felt that they effectively crossed the line, had been ‘eaten by the city’; and that they had indeed become no more than amatshipa – the derogatory term popularly used to refer to migrants who had ‘forgotten about the countryside’. A number of these ex-migrants living with single women were depressed and demoralised. In interviews with the household head they sat like shadows in the background, offering no opinions of their own. They appeared as dominated appendages with no voice or authority in the household. For any self-respecting migrant who put great store on his ability to shape his own destiny and achieve self-reliance and independence through hard work and careful planning, the degradation of becoming a domestic appendage was hard to bear. Many ex-migrants only endured this because it was a lesser shame than facing deserted dependants. For struggling migrants in the shack areas who had some means of supporting themselves, the most desirable domestic arrangement was living alone. These men seemed determined to limit the involvement of women in their daily lives: they cooked for themselves, did their own washing, and cleaned their own shacks. They realised that as soon as they took a woman into their household, they would have to relinquish control of at least part of their income and would be turning their back on the possibilities of self-reliance in old age. The decision by many lapsed migrants to live alone and to cook, wash and clean for themselves was a clear statement about their desire to control their own lives. They figured that as long as they lived alone and controlled their own income, they might still resurrect their careers as active migrants and rebuild their resources for independence in the long term, even if this objective could not be realised in their home villages. By holding on to their cookers, these

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migrants symbolically held on to their dreams of self-sufficiency and their identities as rural men in the city. For migrants, their paraffin cooker was not only a domestic appliance, it was a marker of their identity. The notions of masculinity prevalent among struggling migrants in Duncan Village had thus shifted away from the idea that masculinity could only be expressed through patriarchal proprietorship over a rural umzi and guardianship over close kin associated with that homestead. A new urban-based view saw masculinity as a matter of personal autonomy, patriarchal power and control over earnings. Struggling migrants set out to limit the involvement of women in their daily lives, perceiving them as the major threat to their income and, by implication, to their long-term objectives of self-sufficiency. Since the ability to control spending and saving had become something of an obsession among struggling male migrants in Duncan Village, they invested considerable effort in preventing their income from ‘slipping out of their hands’. For migrants who were still attending to rural responsibilities, part of their income was always entrusted to rural kin, to be allocated judiciously to defray the expenses of the umzi. The arrival of money from the city often came with a list of instructions from the migrant as to how it should be spent. The failure of rural wives or kin to comply with their instructions could lead to the withdrawal of remittances. Through the control of their income and their cookers, migrants in Duncan Village set out to shape their own destinies by distributing resources prudently between the demands of household maintenance and the longer-term demands of saving for retirement. Active migrants still believed, as they had done in the

Photo 6.1 B-hostel complex among shacks and houses, 2004 Source: Photo by Leslie Bank.

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past, that their ability to achieve a balance in these competing objectives was the key to their long-term security and personal fulfilment. Lapsed migrants, who were cash-strapped and had lost many of their assets in the countryside, generally set out to resolve the tensions between their long-term objectives of stability and personal security, and the short-term objectives of household reproduction, by withdrawing resources from their rural homesteads but without giving up their dreams of eventual self-sufficiency.

Photo 6.2 Kentani migrants, 2004 Source: Photo by Leslie Bank.

In reassessing their life-strategies, struggling migrants generally withdrew from their social networks in town that linked them directly to their home villages. Many gave up their positions in village-based ploughing teams and other rural institutions, and left abakhaya cooking groups and iseti drinking groups. While some of these migrants continued to return to rural areas to attend rituals and visit friends, their involvement in rural life was superficial. They had effectively lost interest. Migrants without Migrancy This shift away from rural resources, however, was not accompanied by any serious attempt by struggling migrants to integrate themselves fully into urban networks. In the city they found themselves marginalised and isolated. In their economic life many formerly active migrants were unemployed,

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underemployed or dependent on state welfare in the city. Socially they became isolated from the abakhaya and increasingly operated alone. They kept contact with a handful of other former migrants who shared their misfortune. By force of circumstances, they were increasingly looking to the urban area as a base for long-term survival. In some cases, this shift in focus was only partial: a matter of spreading risks or temporarily building up a stronger base in the city, without completely giving up on dreams of patriarchal proprietorship in the countryside. For migrants who had watched their daughters ‘be swallowed’ by the cities and their savings dwindle, too much had already been invested in the countryside for them to abandon it altogether. Thus they remained ‘country people’ in the city and found it very difficult to imagine themselves outside a rural frame of reference. The perceptions of these migrants of themselves as ‘within the city’ but not ‘of the city’ showed in, among other things, the considerable interest they displayed in urban farming as a part-time occupation. The care and attention that lapsed migrants devoted to their gardens that were neatly carved out of tiny parcels of land, usually on steep inclines where settlement was difficult, bore witness to a desire to identify themselves with agrarian activities. These men grew a range of fresh vegetables (especially pumpkins, beans and spinach), as well as maize, on small strips of land in and around the hostel. Some more enterprising migrants extended their operations to vacant land earmarked for family housing projects outside the hostel. The pursuit of farming in the city was not only an exercise in urban survival: it was also a matter of asserting their identities as rural men in the city. Many of these individuals explained that they regarded their urban farming as a ‘labour of love’ – a source of great pleasure and self-fulfilment – rather than as just another economic activity. The positive ways in which these migrants referred to labouring in their gardens could be contrasted with their descriptions of the drudgery of wage work in the city. Migrants often used the Xhosa word ukwakha (to build) rather than sebenza (working) or pangela (working for whites) to describe their farming activities. But the interesting thing about the way lapsed migrants used the term ukwakha and the way this term was normally used by active migrants was that they no longer seemed to use the term to imply building together. For them, urban farming and the work associated with it was a solitary pleasure, yet still connected to the imaginary of the rural. It was an expression that Van Binsbergen (1997) has called the ‘virtualisation of the village’ in the city, or what Baudrillard (1981) would call the process of ‘simulacrum’ – a copy of a copy – that avoids contact with the ideal form. For migrants in the 1990s, urban farming was a matter of self-preservation and self-reliance rather than of collective responsibility. But despite the desocialised nature of the urban farming pursuits of lapsed migrants, the fact that these men held to sharply honed contrasts between urban and rural life worlds, between tradition and modernity, between farming and wage work, meant that they remained conscious of themselves as migrants despite their alienation from their rural homes and their withdrawal from abakhaya networks in the city. It meant that, while migrants were increasingly forced to

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rely on the city for survival, they were still not prepared to embrace urban life and establish new identities for themselves as city people. They still embraced the countryside as an ideal, which they associated with a distinct set of values such as generational respect, discipline, self-restraint, self-reliance and moral responsibility, which they argued were sorely lacking in town. These men were ‘migrants’ without migrancy. They had lost their rural resources, but not their self-respect and sense of identity. They still considered themselves to be rural men in the city and it was precisely for this reason that they resisted the overtures of townswomen and clung on to their cookers with such determination. In view of the above analysis of changing forms, migrant masculinity and identity formation, I have come to an alternative interpretation of the reactionary political responses of B-hostel migrants in Duncan Village in the mid 1980s. Mamdani, looking recently at the Reef hostel violence of the 1990s, argues that Zulu migrants were more politically active in defence of their status as migrants and their identities as ‘tribal subjects in the city’ because they enjoyed stronger social and economic links with their home areas. This simplistic materialist analysis is based on the idea that the stronger a migrant’s material connection with the countryside, the stronger his commitment will be in defence of ‘traditional’ culture and society in town. As this chapter has suggested, though, the relationship between migrant identity politics and migrancy as an essentially economic process is more complex than Mamdani imagines. As we have seen, there is no reason why access to rural resources in the form of arable land should be a necessary prerequisite for the emergence of conservative migrant identities in urban areas. There can be no doubt that migrant identity formations are everywhere constructed around sharply focused contrasts between rural and urban lifeworlds, of course, but this does not mean that these contrasts need to be based on current ‘lived experience’. As Raymond Williams pointed out long ago, the countryside is often more powerful as an idea than as a reality. Roosens et al. (1994) has also pointedly remarked, in relation to contemporary migrant identities in Europe, that the erosion of active social and economic ties between migrants and their homelands can infuse a ‘new conservatism’ into these cultures, where ‘they become more traditional than the cultures of the regions of origin’ (1994: 99). This is precisely what we have observed in Duncan Village. As the active social and economic ties between migrants and their home areas were severed in the 1980s, the processes of migrants’ identity formation and masculinity became unhinged from any real rural relationships. Migrants were then able to reinvent identities for themselves in the splendid isolation of the city. Previously, migrant cultures had kept these men abreast of developments in rural areas and brought them into monthly contact with the complex and changing dynamics of everyday life there. The collapse of those cultures effectively freed migrants who were rapidly losing contact with their rural homes from having to deal with the daily difficulties of managing a migrant career in the Eastern Cape in the 1990s. They could now reconstruct notions

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of their own masculinity and identity as migrants, as men in the city but not of the city, in terms of a set of much more free-floating and imaginative narratives of contrast. They could take views on issues of tradition which were far more absolute and uncompromising than those held by some of their fellow migrants, who were still trying to carve a life for themselves between town and country. This rupture of the relationship between town and country that occurred in the mid 1980s – a time of intense generational conflict in the city – resulted in lapsed migrants taking up rigid political positions, which stressed their traditional identities and a right to a space in the city. Conclusion In this chapter I have moved away from the township in general and into the space of the hostel. My main objective has been to discover how far, and in what form, the amaqaba migrant subculture of the East Bank, which was so richly described by the Mayers and their colleagues, managed to survive the relocation period. I began by exploring the centrality of cooking groups and drinking groups to the reproduction of amaqaba subcultures in the old East Bank location, and wondered to what extent these groups could be reconstituted in the new hostel complexes in Duncan Village after 1960. I found that, while iseti drinking groups were difficult to reconstruct in the tightly controlled hostels, migrants re-established this tradition by cooking together with their abakhaya in the hostels and used these groups as a central means for rekindling their old amaqaba migrant subcultures. With the hostel population being deliberately kept separate from the rest of the township residents, I suggested, processes of social separation and encapsulation actually deepened among hostel migrants after the 1960s. This contradicts the argument made by the Mayers (1971 [1961]), that the distinctive migrant subcultures were effectively destroyed after the removals. The evidence shows that the amaqaba cultural form, in particular, lingered on in Duncan Village long after the removals. But how did the hostel migrants respond to the dramatic political and social changes of the 1980s, when the fences around the hostels were pulled down and these hostel complexes were declared part of a newly liberated township zone? I have suggested that the political changes in Duncan Village as well as changes in the surrounding countryside had a profound impact on the coherences and sustainability of ethnically oriented ‘migrant cultures’ in the hostels. As intergenerational tensions deepened, the old cooking groups that had been so central to the reproduction of amaqaba cultural forms during the 1960s and 1970s started to disintegrate. Other developments, such as the collapse of ploughing teams, prolonged drought and youth out-migration from the rural areas, also weakened the cohesiveness of abakhaya networks and solidarities in the city. The result was that senior migrants in the hostels became increasingly isolated, not only from the rural youth in town (many of whom had joined the Comrades) but also from the countryside itself. In B-hostel in the mid 1990s, there was a sizeable group of former migrants who

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seemed more committed than ever to their identities as ‘rural men in the city’ but had very little contact with their rural homes. These men were no longer integrated into ethnically distinctive amaqaba subcultures, predicated on tight-knit social networks and daily interaction with their abakhaya. Their identities were now defined in terms of much more individualised notions of responsibility that were no longer built on meeting particular obligations in the rural areas. Many of these lapsed migrants left the hostels to seek refuge in the shack areas, where they could hide away from their rural kin, who were constantly seeking to pressurise them to take responsibility for those they had left behind. But, while many former migrants tried to uncouple themselves from rural obligations, they found it extremely difficult to integrate themselves into the hegemonic masculine culture of the Comrades inside the township. At imbarha beer-drinking sessions or in their urban gardens, these men lamented the pace and direction of rural and urban social changes, and continued to distance themselves from developments in the city. They emphasised their identities as real Xhosa men who wanted no part of the new urban cultural and political forms promoted by the youth. They remained adamant that, while they were in the city, they were not of the city. This commitment to the performance of migrant identities without migrancy, marked the end of an era during which migrants in Duncan Village associated themselves with tribally oriented amaqaba subcultures in which they reconstructed their identities as a broad cultural style, based on the contrast between urban and rural life. This analysis challenged Mamdani’s (1996) concept of the making of migrant identity and political consciousness. Rather than seeing these two creations simply as part of the ‘ideological baggage’ of a particular form of the state in Africa, migrant consciousness, I have argued, might be better conceptualised as a set of more free-floating and imaginative narrative contrasts between urban and rural life worlds. Mamdani’s failure to engage with issues of the historical imagination, the making of masculinity and the social construction of identities, leads him to the mistaken conclusion that migrant identities can only ever be an expression of ‘tribal consciousness’ and that migrant politics in Africa can only result in ‘inter-tribal conflict’. However, if one takes a broader view of the construction of migrant identities, then it is possible to see that the narrative contrasts deployed by migrants need not be structured around tribal identities, but can equally be shaped by other ideas such as race or nation. This rather weakens Mamdani’s general argument about the specificity of the African situation, and the role of the ‘bifurcated state’ in the making of African political identities. Within the book as a whole, this chapter has again shown that the relationship between urban and the rural identities is considerably more complex than the idea of a linear rise and fall as originally advanced by the Mayers. In Duncan Village, rural identities did not disappear with relocation or with the tumultuous political events of the 1980s; they were carefully remade and reconstituted, not only in relation to changing material and political realities in rural areas but also in relation to the politics of the city

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itself. In the 1980s and 1990s, hostel migrants were no less responsive to the changing township environment than were the politicised youth (discussed in the previous chapter), who also reworked their own understanding of the urban and the rural and its meanings in a changing context. In the next chapter I shift my attention to the changing positions of women in the township and follow through with my discussion of changing urban identity politics and the reconstitutions of the urban and the rural in Duncan Village in the 1990s.

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7 Re-modelling the House: Gender and the Politics of Domestic Desire

So long as the main activities of the breadwinner and the main expenditure of his money was outside the home, his wife was primarily his housekeeper. If the home has now become his centre of activity and if most of his earnings are spent on his home or in his home, his wife becomes the chooser and the spender, and gains a new status and control – her taste becomes his life. (BBC programme on home-making, 1959, quoted in Giles 2004: 103)

Western critical thought since the Enlightenment has developed an ambivalent attitude to the realm of home and everyday life. Many authors have positioned the home outside or at the edge of modernity, suggesting that it is a realm of repetition and stasis in contrast to the movement, change and dynamism characteristic of ‘authentic modernity’. Lefebvre (1988) argued that everyday life weighs heavily on women in particular, who are ‘sentenced to everyday life’, meaning they are caught in lives of routine and repetition that deny them access to external stimulation, change and excitement. Repetition is seen as a threat to the modern project of self-determination (see Johnson and Lloyd 2004: 152). This was precisely the point of what Betty Friedan called ‘the problem’ in her path-breaking book, The Feminine Mystique (1963), which launched a new wave of feminist thought and critique in the West in the 1960s. Friedan wrote her book as a housewife reflecting on the problem of being sentenced to everyday domestic drudgery, of being trapped in an oppressive feminine mystique which denied her and women like her the right to become self-actualising modern subjects by ‘breaking out’ or ‘leaving the home’. In this narrative, modernity and self-realisation for women lay beyond the home, outside the space of repetitive everyday domestic life in the workplace and in the public domain (cf. Friedan 1963: Greer 1970). Western feminists have subsequently challenged the simplicity of Friedan’s original narrative and have asked questions about the potential of the home as a space in which women can realise their own personal and creative ambitions and identities. Both Johnson and Lloyd (2004) and Giles (2004) have recently suggested that Friedan’s work was so powerful that it did as much to construct a notion of women’s oppression as to describe it. They note that images and representations of women in the popular media, books and magazines in the West were certainly not one-dimensional in the 1940s and 1950s, and that, although they did rely heavily on the notion of the housewife, there were many other ways in which women’s lives were being discussed and represented, including many roles outside the home. Other feminist scholars have argued that we should not be too eager to discount the home as a site of innovation 163

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and change, nor to overestimate the extent to which women within it always act as compliant, dominated subjects. Indeed, many feminists now suggest that the opposition between private and public in feminist writing is too loaded and the space of home needs to be rethought (Bonnin 2000; Duncan 1996; McDowell 1995). In postcolonial studies, Werbner (1999) has argued that women’s assertions of active citizenship often start from the ‘pre-established cultural domains’ of female power and rightful ownership, and women’s power evolves from these domains. She argues that the conditions for the feminisation of citizenship in patriarchal postcolonial settings usually begin with the ‘encompassing qualities associated with women’s roles as nurturers and protectors of the family and its individual members’ (1999: 26). Wells (1993) and Walker (1995) make a similar argument in relation to women’s involvement in popular struggles in South Africa when they note that African women did not see a contradiction, as some Western feminists did, in their commitment to being mothers and home-makers, on the one hand, while demanding rights as workers, tenants and citizens on the other. One of the dangers of the kind of formulation presented by Werbner (1999) is that it does not necessarily give sufficient recognition to the extent to which home, the private sphere or what she calls the ‘pre-established cultural domain’ no longer exists outside of modernity and the power of the state. Indeed, as Duncan (1996) notes, state policy routinely impinges on the private sphere, making the distinction between private and public problematic. What happens in the home is often powerfully influenced by state policy, as was the case under apartheid in South Africa, or under the welfare state in Britain, or under socialism in Russia and Eastern Europe. Moreover, the home, as we have already seen, was never insulated from the wider national and global media, not even in socialist countries. Yet, at the same time, the home is also often a haven from a heartless world and is made internally through the construction and reproduction of family, memory and tradition that exist outside of current state or media models and formulations of domesticity. This chapter explores different models of the urban house and the politics of urban home-making, considering the changing roles and aspirations of men and women in the process. I am interested in continuities and change over time in domestic ideology and practice, as well as the role of the house as a space for self-actualisation, innovation and resistance to domination. I start the discussion by highlighting the way in which the home became a launching pad for certain categories of women to assert their economic, social and political independence in the East Bank location between the 1930s and the 1950s. In 1931, Monica Hunter noticed that there was a category of ‘bold and stout’ matriarchs, who created households without men and were powerful and influential in the township. From her tone, it was evident that Hunter was not a great fan of these women, because they shirked marriage and men and also led migrants astray by feeding them beer and sex, and charged them usurious rents for rooms in the backyards of their houses. By the late 1950s, when Pauw visited the East Bank, he was again struck by the prevalence and

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power of what he called the matrifocal households. In the chapter, I review the literature of this family form and reassess the position of urban matriarchs, arguing that by the late 1950s they had become a significant threat to the apartheid state, which was determined to crush these women, their households and their enterprises. In their place, the state wanted a new township built around the heterosexual patriarchy, with modern nuclear families at the centre. In this system, men were imagined as breadwinners and women as housewives and the township as a version of the suburb, a bulwark against communism and incubator for the production of well-disciplined, male industrial workers. In this chapter I argue that, while the state closely managed most aspects of township life, it allowed the township families to get on with their business as long as they operated within the law. Unlike working-class households in post-war Britain living in public housing estates, township residents did not have to endure regular and unwanted inspections from state-appointed social workers to ensure that their houses were well-maintained, clean and respectable. Those who constituted non-nuclear families were evicted from the city, but beyond that the state did not want to waste time and money micro-managing African families. This created the space in which the home and house was able to develop outside of the immediate surveillance and control of the state, creating opportunities for women to establish their own identities, horizons and projects inside the home. In the chapter, I explore how women set about inhabiting the space of the township house, and how they manipulated this space and those within it to assert their own personal and family agendas and identities. I consider the continuing influence in the township of transnational discourses of the ‘successful housewife’ as consumer, home-maker and mother on the construction of new identities, as well as the way in which women adjusted to the definition of men as breadwinners and women as housewives. I try to show, as the opening quote suggests, how the focus of housewives in Duncan Village shifted from earning their own income to controlling the income of men. How they used the feminine mystique, of which Friedan wrote so eloquently, as a tactical space to protect and promote their own interests. In fact, contrary to the dominant (Western) feminist view, I argue that many young married women who moved into family bungalows in the 1960s and 1970s developed a positive sense of self identity, using their new houses as ‘symbols of success’ and as a means of maintaining and constructing social, religious and personal links. With the street out of bounds, housewives turned to the house as a vehicle for the expression of their new identities. The third part of the chapter deals with the post-apartheid period, when the yards were filled with (often unwanted) immigrants from rural areas and urban families were now struggling to survive under the pressure of retrenchments and rising unemployment. In this period, the lives of urban mothers and home-makers were again transformed as patriarchal power shifted away from a partnership between male breadwinners, over whom women exercised some control, and the state to a regime that was run by their sons and other young men, some from the rural areas (see Chapter 5). Under this new regime, women’s social lives and consumption patterns were curtailed

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as the young men, who now imagined themselves as warriors, liberators and socialists, insisted on their right to call on women to provide them with food and support – and even sex – when they needed it. The struggle years, as we have seen, created hyper-masculinities which were difficult to control. The bodies and homes of women were suddenly more vulnerable than ever before, and it was with a sigh of collective relief that women welcomed the new democracy in 1994 and its progressive Constitution, which enshrined gender equality. As the blanket of legal patriarchy was finally lifted in the 1990s, urban women were at their most vulnerable to domination, violence and abuse. Their social position and networks had been eroded and they were often also without economic means, since both their husbands and sons were generally unemployed and increasingly difficult to control and discipline. In this context, many married women and their daughters turned their attention away from men, who they argued are needy and unreliable, to the state and its welfare system as the new backbone of their personal and collective security. I explore how women became ‘married to the state’ and developed new strategies as mothers and home-makers to reclaim their citizenship, dignity and right to the city. Urban Matriarchs: Styles and Strategies When the anthropologist Pauw (1973 [1963]) visited the East Bank location in the late 1950s to investigate the social lives of the so-called ‘second generation’, he found that there was an ‘unmistakable trend’ among this group towards the construction of matrifocal families, especially in the wood-and-iron sections of the old location. In the 1950s, there was a great deal of discussion about the matrifocal family, especially in the Caribbean, where households were seen to cohere around a mother figure. In these matrifocal families, Smith (1956) noted that the household development cycle does not hinge on the maturation of the married couple and eventual dispersal of their children into separate units, but is inextricably connected to the fate of mothers and other senior women, who do not necessarily allow or encourage their children to disperse as they mature. As a result, Smith (1956, 1996) noted that these households tend to develop as multi-generational units, with at least three generations of women living together. This is precisely the tendency that Pauw (1973 [1963]) found among the ‘second generation’ households in the East Bank, where he noted that mothers, daughters and granddaughters all lived together in the same household, often without any male presence at all. In fact, in the 1950s, there were twice as many female-headed, multi-generational households in the location as male-headed ones. Pauw (1973 [1963]: 52) quickly concluded that, as in the case of the Caribbean, the matrifocal family form was becoming increasingly common in East London, where Xhosa women were setting up their own households ‘without effective male participation’. This trend, he argued, was undermining the urban growth and expansion of the ‘normal nuclear family’ (1973 [1963]: 55). Pauw noted that the literature of modernisation and family

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development suggested that the nuclear family form should become more prevalent and that other forms should shrink in significance relative to that form. This was not the case in East London, and Pauw (1973 [1963]) found this to be sociologically interesting. So what exactly was the reason for the prevalence of female-headed households and the multi-generational matrifocal household in particular? For Pauw, the key to matrifocality was the growing economic opportunities available to women in the city. He argued that the improved access that women enjoyed to the labour market (which was still limited) and other income-earning activities, especially those related to the control of residential property meant that the Xhosa husband-father figure had become dispensable. He explained: For their income, households depend mainly on labour, trading and rentals; none of these are controlled exclusively by the husband-father. Mothers freely take up employment, venture into large- or small-scale trading and can own properties through inheritance or purchase. Even an unmarried mother can manage to rear her own family without a husband-father and even without her own mother ... (1973 [1963]: 162) At a sociocultural level, Pauw (1973 [1963]: 145) also suggested that the disarticulation of domestic and public power in the city encouraged the growth of the matrifocal family. He noted that in rural Xhosa society, the father figure constituted the critical link between the matricentral cell of mother and child and the wider society. In this system, it was the father who gave the mother and children their politico-juridical status and linked the household to productive land and other resources in the village. The male household head thus defined the social, economic and political status of the family in rural society. In the city, though, he noted that the father role was essential neither in upholding the politico-juridical status of the household, nor in determining access to economic resources. In theory, this meant that women with access to their own houses and properties could bypass male-dominated circuits of power and authority in the location and quietly get on with the business of making a living and running their fatherless families. One of the problems with Pauw’s analysis is that he failed to differentiate between different forms of the matrifocal family. There were clearly many female-headed households in the East Bank in the 1950s that struggled to reproduce themselves as independent social units. Mager (1999) writes that large numbers of ‘runaway girls’ flooded into East London in the 1940s and 1950s in their struggle to escape the violence and abuse in their rural homes. She notes that these women often entered the city with a strongly independent spirit and a determination to make new lives for themselves. But it was not only the escape from rural patriarchy that motivated women to stay single, but also their desire keep hold of their own earnings. Hunter writes in her 1936 ethnography of the city that local men and women had become obsessed with money and would do virtually anything to get hold of it, including accuse one

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another of witchcraft. Hunter also notes that married men would demand that women hand over all their earnings to them. In her East London field notes, Hunter writes: Married women hand over their wages to their husbands. Not necessary to ask. Wages of women living with a man unmarried, entirely her own to do what she chooses. Again, no need to ask. Interpreter. … [later] if a wife wants to go anywhere to visit must always ask her husband’s permission. (MW Field Notes, 1932)1 It is not difficult to imagine that a woman working in a local canning factory or as a domestic worker might feel aggrieved by this and might think that she would be better off trying to avoid marriage, and even make a life without male intervention. The trend towards matrifocality was not merely a response to the excesses of rural patriarchy that drove independent, ‘runaway girls’ to town, nor a simple a matter of women capitalising on new earning opportunities in town. It was also a reaction to the nature of the patriarchal expectations in the city itself, where marriage meant relinquishing all economic independence. Monica Hunter was not a great fan of independent matriarchs, calling them ‘stout and bold’ women willing to defend their turf. The key to becoming an independent matriarch in the East Bank was property ownership and the control of family labour. Once women had control of property they could earn income from renting out rooms to migrants and also by using their homes as business premises to sell liquor and food. Nomathemba Sontji recalls that aspiring matriarchs would do everything in their power to get hold of the ‘site permits’ on which the control of property was based. She remembers that senior women would even send their young daughters to the Kwa-Lloyd (the municipal offices) dressed to the nines, hoping to attract the attention of influential white officials. She explained: ‘Women also knew that some white officials at the Kwa-Lloyd offices liked our nice thighs, so they would go there in their most alluring dresses and skirts to satisfy these officials in the hope of getting a site permit.’2 Once women held property they asserted their authority over the site and they often made their presence felt on the street as well. By the late 1950s, Minkley (1996) notes that independent women controlled almost half of all the site permits in the location. Minkley (1996) asserts that at this time: Independent and single/unmarried women ‘owned’ the East Bank Location and the men in it. These women were able, over the period, to shape the location in material, social and cultural ways with a great deal more effect and endurance than men from the location elite, factories and rail-yards, male migrants from the rural areas, or the masters of the local state. The community of the location cohered around these ‘matrifocal family structures’, although it was seldom consciously or publicly asserted. (Minkley 1996: 156)

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The rise of the matrifocal family generated a great deal of public debate in the location and the city. In the minds of white politicians and planners, the single mothers and propertied matriarchs of old ‘tin town’, the amakazana (unmarried mothers) as they were often called, were anathema to order, discipline and progress in the city. After the 1952 riots, they seemed to provoke fear and anxiety in minds of city officials, who saw these women and their bodies as tempting, but also as a threat to male order, self-discipline and the ability of the state to discipline the city. The willingness of single town women to use their bodies and sexuality for personal gain, and to spawn ‘fatherless families’ which created juvenile delinquents, horrified many senior bureaucrats and fuelled demands in the city for these menacing sexualities to be brought under control. The connection between ‘juvenile delinquency’ and tsotsism and the ‘fatherless family’ was made by the Thornton Commission of 1937 and repeated in the Welsh Enquiry of 1949, and then again in the mop-up operations following the 1952 riots. Christianised African elites also felt threatened by the social styles, moral orientation and material wealth of many of the new matriarchs. They echoed the concerns of city officials, calling for action to be taken to bring this ‘unruly’ segment of the township population under control. In my assessment the trend towards a certain forms of matrifocality was less an issue of kinship preference than a matter of incipient class formation and gender struggle.

Photo 7.1 East Bank propertied matriarch, 1950s Source: Photo by Daniel Morolong.

There was also an irony at the heart of the matrifocal house model in the East Bank, which was basically a feminised version of the patriarchal rural house model, which was built on the idea of building the umzi or homestead

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through the accumulation of dependants, cattle and fields. Urban matriarchs were determined to build the umzi in the city by manipulating the control of property and young dependent women for economic gain. In the matrifocal house model, access to site permits and small business assets were the urban equivalents of controlling cattle, land and fields in the countryside. As with its rural version, the urban-based matrifocal house economy was based on thrift, rather than conspicuous consumption, and the exploitation of household labour. The heads of matrifocal households were also generally localists rather than cosmopolitans. Ferguson (1999: 64) claims that it is often the case that ‘the best-versed in cosmopolitan style are more local than any localist, focusing as they are on the “here” of town life rather than the distant rural “there.”’ He goes on to state that there is ‘no necessary requirement that those who reject the demands of localism must exhibit any special “involvement with the plurality of contrasting cultures on their own terms.”’ The East Bank matriarchs of the 1950s were certainly aware of the cosmopolitan influences in the township and the new globalised consumer culture in the cities, but they deliberately rejected these styles, opting for something that was more modest and inconspicuous. Powerful matriarchs were generally not flashy dressers who conspicuously displayed their wealth and assets. The income generated in the house from the tenants’ rent and sales of beer and food were seldom showily consumed, but saved and stored. Profits, they would argue, were not gained by throwing money away on smart clothes or by entering the high-risk ‘push-push’ pyramids or rotating credit schemes that some urban women ran. It was better secured, they would say, in savings clubs and in the practice of good housekeeping. Housekeeping values and sound mothering lay at the foundation of the matrifocal house model. While there were certainly stories of power and publicly visible matriarchs on many East Bank streets, women who were a force to be reckoned with and ran the affairs of the street from their verandahs, many others were careful not to make themselves too conspicuous lest they become the targets of officials and local elites, who were increasingly blaming amakazana (unmarried mothers) for a host of problems in the location. In my view, matrifocality was an expression of localism that involved what Garcia Canclini (1995 [1989]) would call ‘truncated innovation’ by transforming, feminising and reshaping a well-understood rural house model and ideology into an urban context. New Families and the Politics of Desire While the tussle between an idealised version of the old functional, faith-based Christian family (based on the ideals of the old Victorian bourgeois family) and the matrifocal family was playing itself out in the East Bank in the 1940s and 1950s, a newer, more American, secularised and consumerist version of the nuclear family was also starting to win support, especially among the new working and aspirant middle-class sections of the location. The culture of the location had always cast an admiring eye across the Atlantic to the changing

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styles and aspirations of black America. The post-war optimism of America was contagious and, although the suburban dream was reserved largely for whites, economic progress and opportunities for black Americans were also visible across the northern industrial cities. Many East Bank residents embraced this optimism and felt that they had no reason to believe that secondary industrialisation in their city would not bring many of the same rewards and opportunities to them. The visions of the modern family that many young East Bankers started to embrace were not the staid old moralist versions of the family, but rather the stylised and fashionable versions of the family, and of modern gender relations, that appeared in the mass media and all the new magazines. The 1950s were boom years for the East London economy and saw a host of new household appliances and commodities, as well as beauty creams and cosmetics, make their way onto the shelves of shops in the city. As a port city, East London had access to many of the new imports. Sybil Hans recalled that in the 1950s there was suddenly a whole range of new household products directly available to East Bank residents: In the 1950s the shops were crammed with new products which were not difficult to get if you had the money. I remember that most of the latest creams and detergents were displayed in the windows of local shops, like Masuali’s store, on our corner. You did not even have to go to Oxford Street to get the latest stuff.3 The marketing of these products was associated with a new set of images for the African housewife that highlighted hygiene, cleanliness and domestic efficiency. The message in the media was that housewives who used the new products would stand a better chance of keeping their men. For example, a popular Sunlight soap advertisement directed at African urban women said, ‘I was losing Tom’s love … until I talked to a friend’, with the story of how a housewife’s use of Sunlight stopped ruining her husband’s clothes and how this made her husband exclaim that she was a ‘wonderful wife’ (Kallman 1998: 106). Surf and Omo offered women ‘the cleanest whitest wash in the world’, while various body creams and skin lighteners promised to keep them beautiful for longer. The dominant image of mature women in the media was that of active home-makers, directly responsible for cleanliness, beauty and keeping a home. Younger women, by contrast, were usually presented as hard-working, but not yet home-makers, who were seeking good husbands (Burke 1996; Kallman 1998). In the 1950s the new images of African housewives that projected a morality of ‘modern domesticity’ circulated in the East Bank through magazines such as Drum and Bona, and radio programmes including Sis Barbara’s Ezamakhosikhazi (‘For women’), which ran on Radio Bantu every morning. Joyce Tjali recalled that listening to the radio was now very popular in the location and Sis Barbara was a ‘hot favourite among East Bank housewives’. Her programmes, she said, ‘gave women all sorts of new ideas and hints on

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cooking, washing, childcare and household hygiene’.4 The BAT fair that ran in September also introduced new products with demonstration vans, fashion shows, beauty contests, stunts and point-of-sale promotions.5 The trade fair attracted large crowds and offered free samples and on-site demonstrations on how to use new detergents, creams and household commodities. By the late 1950s, the East London locations were awash with new consumer products which, as Joyce Tjali put it, ‘opened a whole new world to us women’.6 There was a great desire among urban housewives of the 1950s to improve their homes and adopt new, more modern domestic routines – a clean and hygienic environment would establish them as modern and efficient housewives. But location houses were overcrowded, people were poor, and many home-owners relied on the income they could make from their houses, either by using them for business activities or by cramming as many tenants as they could into backrooms. For younger women who did not own homes and could not transform domesticity into a virtue, their bodies were the source of transformation and the expression of identity. For the daughters of those who were entering the new urban working class, expenditure on clothes and cosmetics was seen as a priority. Sybil Hans recalls that there was much talk of the new lotions, creams and cosmetics on the market: they were always talking about ‘what we could wear to the next dance and what new beauty products were available on the market’.7 Mrs Mthimba remembers that, at the communal washing facilities, where the younger women gathered to wash dishes and clean clothes, the discussion focused less on the power of detergents and more on new beauty soaps, skin creams and clothes: As young women we often talked about what we called ‘can’t gets’ – those coveted products, like scented soaps and special perfumes, that would make young women beautiful and desirable. ‘Can’t gets’ were those desired things that women wanted but were difficult to have because they were either not locally available or very expensive. ‘Can’t gets’ always caused a lot of tension and jealousy among women and would provoke arguments. It was natural because in those days every woman wanted to be stylish and beautiful.8 In the East Bank, young women’s bodies thus became critical markers of identity. According to Mrs Mthimba, the application of clothes, skin creams and cosmetics could be very revealing: You could tell the girls that grew up in the rural areas from those born in the city by the way they used skin lighteners. In the rural areas, these creams were only really applied to the face, while in the location we smeared them all over our bodies, including our necks. So you could often tell the girls from the rural areas from their dark necks and the fact that they liked to wear hats, which was not fashionable among us young girls. It was something that we associated with older women.9

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But the ability of young town women to get out and display their bodies in public was limited by the strict domestic routines that governed their home life. In many male-headed and matrifocal households it was deemed inappropriate for young women to spend too much time on the street unless they had a specific reason for being there, such as running an errand to the shop or making their way to the communal washing areas. In the East Bank, mothers liked to control their daughters’ time and labour, and relied heavily on them to manage the households. Sons and husbands were out of the house most of the time. Daughters used all sorts of pretexts to get out of the house to meet their friends, but were generally not very successful in these endeavours during the week. It was mainly at weekends that they were allowed to participate in structured social events, such as dances, beach outings, sports events, movies and social club get-togethers at the community centre. It was here that all the effort and excitement generated around clothes and cosmetics was put on show. Once out in public places, women wanted to show off their vibrant skins lightened with Pond’s Vanishing Cream, their stockinged legs and their shiny dark wigs. As one woman explained, there was ‘a fine line between looking good and looking cheap – like the amatsotsikazi’. Traditional dress, combined with power and style, also secured the dignity of women. There were many special occasions, such as Mfengu Day, which took place in March, and at various concerts and pageants, when older women in particular often chose to dress up in folk costume. Donning this did not mean that these women were Red rather than School, because in this context folk dress was not a statement of social identity as much as one of fashion. The fact that many educated urban women from the 1950s owned such outfits and confirmed that they wore them on ‘special occasions’ is indicative of their association with dignity and respect. These women would, of course, never wear these dresses for everyday use because then they carried a very different meaning, betokening Redness. In the East Bank location, male anxieties about the changing position of women in the location were, as I have suggested, mainly directed at independent single women. Yet the threat to male power and influence was not confined to the amakazana; it also came from within their own homes, from the rapidly changing aspirations, identities and consumerist tendencies of their own wives and daughters, who demanded more money and freedom to express themselves as modern women. While women were demanding money to become ‘perfect wives’, as the adverts said they should, they were not always complying with the projected media images of the perfect wife. For instance, men felt very uneasy about the way in which their wives were engaging in all sorts of independent moneymaking endeavours which constantly took them out of their own homes in the name of this new domesticity. As Mr Tom said: We never really knew what our wives were doing with all our money. They always said that they were spending it on the household, but then we discovered that they were also involved in these clubs and moneymaking

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Photo 7.2 Looking red: urban women in traditional dress, 1950s Source: Photo by Daniel Morolong.

schemes. Sometimes this led to them having affairs with other men. This made us wonder why they needed so much money to buy all the new cosmetics – who they were making themselves beautiful for!10 Mavis Bam recalled that a lot more happened at tea parties than drinking tea: These tea parties went on all the time. They were big events for the host who had prepared everything. Everything had to be perfect. The room had to be cleared of all. Sometimes two rooms in the house were prepared. Everything was spick and span and shiny by the time the guests arrived. It was the one time where the house was really a showpiece. There was always a masikanda (guitarist) at these get-togethers to provide the music and various things were raffled off, including the chicken, which the women would compete to purchase by putting money in the kitty … The tea parties were mainly for the older women and there was much discussion about their home and children. It was a real opportunity for them to get away from their husbands and many tea parties went on through the night as the women switched from tea to ‘nips’ [brandy and wine] as the evening wore on.11

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Tea parties were not only about domestic display and competition, though. They were also centrally about making money. As Tumi Zwakala explained: ‘The success of a tea party would be judged by the number of guests who came as well as by the amount of cash made. No-one went to the trouble of organising these events without hoping to make money.’12 To gain access to money for themselves, women embarked on a range of other schemes. Mavis Bam recalls the 1950s precursors of what are today known as ‘push-push’ (pyramid) schemes in the township: ‘We used to call it “links”. Each person would put in a guinea, that is one pound ten, and you would be paid out for every ten new members you found.’13 There were also other imigalelo clubs and credit schemes, but Mavis says that links were the big moneymakers for women. Men’s complaints about the sexuality of the amatsotsikazi and the economic strategies of independent women were, in some ways, projections of their worries about their own wives. The evidence also suggests that, when the reality of relocation set in, many women were looking forward to moving into proper new houses where they were hoping to translate the ‘can’t gets’ into realities. When the municipal bulldozers and trucks rolled in to flatten the East Bank in the mid 1960s, it marked the tragic end of an era in the East Bank, but also promised wanna-be urban housewives access to new homes spaces in which to expand and consolidate their aspirations and desires as modern women. ‘Wanna-be Housewives’ and Changing Township Masculinities In the early 1950s, Clowes (2005) argues that men were portrayed in magazines like Drum as still having strong emotional and social ties with the home, and were presented in both adverts and stories as being intimately involved in domestic matters, household chores and even child-rearing. Adverts for baby foods, such as Incumbe or Nutrine, had men holding babies, asking whether the formulae would make their children ‘healthy and strong’ (Clowes 2005: 97–98). Family and studio photographs in East London reproduced such images. There was also a tendency during this period for the camera to catch informal, intimate moments between young couple. Images of young couples posing together in a modern domestic setting with props, like radios and appliances, were indicative of how deeply entrenched new notions of gender identity had become by the 1950s. Clowes states that ‘in the early Drum, it seemed that males became men through social recognition of their richly complex roles as sons, grandsons, fathers and husbands, brothers and uncles, a recognition rooted in a wide variety of domestic obligations inherent in these roles’ (2005: 98). However, she goes on to note that, it was not just social recognition within any social group that mattered, it was the ability of young men and women to position themselves within the modern nuclear family that emerged as the dominant progressive image of the 1950s. In the post-war period then, young working-class households in East London’s locations aspired to set up modern nuclear households along the lines of those seen in magazines and on films, where men and women played their

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different but complementary roles surrounded by the trappings of modernity. The new urban housewife was a young mother who wanted to improve her home and adopt new, more modern domestic routines and appliances. She wanted a clean and hygienic environment to support her role as a modern and efficient housewife. The problem with the old locations, where the majority of urban black families lived in the city, was that they were overcrowded and congested. The streets were dirty and the available services were extremely basic. Sewage flowed onto the streets and only a handful of houses in the older parts of the location had access to electricity or on-site water and flush sanitation. As a result of these conditions, many of those who desired new forms of domestic modernity turned their attention to the new Duncan Village housing scheme, which produced several hundred brick-and-mortar houses for new working-class families in the 1940s. In these house schemes, there were opportunities for young working-class families to embrace a new style of urban living (if their wages allowed them to purchase the host of new goods, appliances and furnishings on the market). Reader (1960) conducted a social survey in the municipal houses in August 1955. He found that most of those living there were young nuclear families. In fact, a third of the household heads were under 30 years of age and the remainder between 30 and 59 years. No-one was over 60 years and almost all of those who lived there stated that they were born in the city. Most of the households were male-headed, and over 80 per cent were nuclear families. The visual and oral evidence collected for the 1950s suggests that it was in these new houses that the domestic desires and aspirations of the new working-class families could be expressed. However, one of the factors that inhibited the new working class from improving their homes and furnishing was the very high monthly rents of £1.20 charged for the houses by the municipality, which was almost half the average monthly wage. For many the disappointment was palpable. The houses they received were often not as well made as they expected. There were leaks and cracks, and sometimes doors and windows were not properly fitted because of the speed at which the state was trying to deliver new houses. But their greater disappointment came when they found it difficult to fill these spaces with the types of appliances and furnishings they desired. One woman explained: The thing I found most difficult about the new houses was that feeling of emptiness, not only on the streets, but in my house. Those brick walls and hollow rooms echoed, and I had nothing to fill them with. It made me long for our old crowded house in the East Bank. Audrey Jokazi emphasised the same point: Many of us could not wait to get into our new houses. We had really felt the overcrowding in the East Bank and couldn’t wait to get some more space to ourselves. If you ask people now what they thought then, many

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Photo 7.3 Domestic desire Source: Photo by Daniel Morolong.

will say that they never wanted to leave the East Bank. This is not entirely true because many of us did not like the idea of having our community broken up, but at the same time we could see that the new houses were going to be better – new, clean and spacious. It was such a strange feeling when we eventually moved into these houses. They were empty and cold inside with cement floors. We were so far away from each other and everything was neatly arranged. It felt very strange to me not to have the hustle and bustle of a busy house … I started to feel very isolated and alone in my new house, although I wanted a four-room house. My husband was away at work all day and the streets were quiet. There were hardly any visitors and the hours dragged. I used to listen to the radio – there was no TV in those days – while I washed clothes, cleaned the house and ironed, but this was not the same as talking to friends or watching people go by on the street. To my surprise, I started to get very lonely and started to wish that we had not been moved at all. More and more, I felt that I wanted to get a job myself just to get out of the house, but my husband did not like that idea. These feelings were compounded by the vulnerability women felt after the state had pulled the carpet of informal earning from under their feet. They were now entirely dependent on the husbands for ‘house money’. Without access to their own income-earning strategies, urban housewives turned their attention to what De Certeau (1984) might have called the tactics of the house

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– to ‘small manoeuvres’ and ‘acts of wit’ within that dominated space. For example, many women supported an ideology of fatherhood and masculinity that acknowledged the role of men as breadwinners and entrenched female domesticity and subordination as long as they were able to secure a decent size allowance in cash from the husbands. Women also resisted the idea of their homes as sites for the reproduction of apartheid reproduction and were determined to express their own personalities and character in the sterile, box houses they had been handed by the state. They resisted being defined as generic social types, as apartheid housewives, and sought to assert their own personalities and identities through consumption and home-making. Moreover, they insisted that, while the state controlled the street and the public spaces beyond the home, they could not easily get ‘behind closed doors’, and this is where they focused on making private spaces that were ‘precious and inalienable’ for themselves and their families.14 Lindsay Clowes (2005) argues that, if one analyses media images of black masculinity in the 1960s, it is possible to note a distinct shift in the late 1950s away from notions of the family man and father as an intimate and socialised being, towards an image of man as breadwinner, as provider and as socially disconnected. In media images and stories in magazines such as Drum, men are no longer presented as caring and socialising with their wives and children, but appear now as upright, responsible and alone. She sees men as more directly connected to public space at this time, and women and children pushed into the background, if not removed entirely from the representation of masculinity. Clowes suggests that this more individualistic and modern notion of masculinity had much to do with the entrenchment of the migrant labour system and the separation of husbands and wives, and with changes in the advertising industry in the 1960s. My own reading of this representational shift would be that it is consistent with urban policy and restructuring measures which insisted that men should stand up as the providers for their families, as real breadwinners, and not lean on their wives for financial support (as was often the case in the old locations). The apartheid state wanted to airbrush women out of the picture, except as housewives, and promote men as responsible, hard-working industrial workers and breadwinners. From the point of view of the new working class in Duncan Village, these images were all well and good, as long as industry was prepared to pay its male labour force sufficient for them to realise their roles as breadwinners and providers. This was not the case and this is part of the reason why Freund (2007) dubs the township project an exercise in ‘sub-suburbanisation’. It was modelled on the ideal of the suburb, but sold its clientele short both in terms the services provided as well as the wages white industry was prepared to pay. The new motor manufacturers of East London did not have the same vision as Henry Ford did in Detroit, where he aimed to build cars and American families at the same time. In South Africa, black wages were kept very low during the 1960s. To compound matters, wages in East London consistently fell below the national average. This had profound implications for new working-class

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Photo 7.4  Urban family with male breadwinner Source: Photo by Leslie Bank

families that wanted to realise their dreams of suburban style living in the new Duncan Village Extension. My interviews with those who had acquired modern new houses in Duncan Village Extension (especially younger couples who had been living in rented rooms in the old location) showed that they had an enormous sense of expectation. Many young men and women actually said that they looked forward to the prospect of moving into modern, betterquality brick-and-mortar housing. They said that they liked the idea of living in better-serviced houses with new rooms to furnish and decorate. They had, in any event, been nourished on images of the modern housewife in the media for more than a decade. Many women were simply bursting to get into their new houses and express themselves by creating modern interiors to match the glamorous images they encountered in magazines like Drum and Bona, and put into practice the advice of the likes of Sis Barbara on the radio. In Duncan Village Extension in 1960s and 1970s, women insisted that, if they were to be the home-makers and housewives of the new township, they needed a weekly ‘allowance’ to perform their tasks effectively. They endorsed the discourses presented in the media of black men as breadwinner and providers, and colluded in their own subordination in order to extract income from their spouses. By dividing household expenditure into recurrent

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bills, such as rent, and then insisting that most of the rest be given over to them to ‘manage the house’, urban women tried to show their husbands that they had retreated from the consumerist tendencies that had so threatened them in the 1950s. They suggested that they were now approaching the tasks of housekeeping with the same frugal determination of the urban poor of the old location. They emphasised the importance of thrift and embraced the new bargain chain stores, like OK Bazaars, Pep Stores and Russells in Oxford Street, rather than the specialist, cash-only shops that had captured their imagination in the 1950s. By showing restraint, women set out to demonstrate that they could manage money efficiently and were not the spendthrifts they had been labelled in the 1950s. Eric recalls moving from a small house in the East Bank into Duncan Village Extension. He said that family names and identities remained very important as families in the new neighbourhoods. He explained: We were the Mgujulwa family … We were well-known as a family of rugby players, members of the Winter Roses club, and my father was also known as a man from Keiskammehoek, who now had a good job in town, but still kept contact with his rural home. In those days we were expected to behave ourselves because of the reputation of our family and my father. We were known as Mgujulwa’s boys and this gave us a certain kind of identity. We were rugby players not tsotsis and it was up to us to behave in a way that would make out father proud – and we felt the need to fulfil these expectations. Eric went on to recall that: ‘The amount of space that was available was amazing for people who had grown up in the old location and this notion of privacy was both new and cherished.’ He remembers how excited his mother was with the amount of space they now had and how she would spend many Saturdays downtown with her friends, looking at all the furniture and appliances that were on display on Oxford Street. Eric remembers the house well: The kitchen was the place for us children. They would always eat there. This is where the cooking was done and some of the socialising when casual guests and visitors who came by to visit my mom. Male guests for my father would go into the lounge or the dining room, where we had comfortable chairs, display cabinets, family pictures and some porcelain ornaments. There was a lot of talk in those days about which dining and lounge suites were the most attractive, and there was certainly a sense of status attached to this … All the children would sleep in the one bedroom. It would not matter how many there were, they would all be expected to pile in. Our parents would be in the adjoining room. In the olden days they would have their beds on either side of the room, but with the new house in Duncan Village they bought a double bed and the bedroom suite, which was more popular now …

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The yard was often devoted to veggies, not shacks. Entry for formal visitors was through the front of the house and at the back door for regular visitors. My father used to make us work in the yard, clearing and weeding, making sure that the yard was clean and smart. It was a shame to have a dirty yard – it would be our job to do this work, while my mother and my sister kept the house clean. Before the shacks came, people were very house-proud here and they would be talking on the streets if so and so’s place was in a mess, or his kids had been seen misbehaving. We still have a sense of family here, but not like it used to be back in those days. That sense of pride has gone now, those feelings of being upwardly mobile and better-off than others … I am not sure what it is, it is also about the respect we had for our parents and our fathers. Many women in Duncan Village Extension, however, resented the level of their dependence on male earnings in the post-1960 period and remembered the 1950s with nostalgia, as a period when women controlled their own incomes and destinies. As Tombi Dlwani recalled: There was something very disconcerting about always waiting for money from our husbands, who were reluctant to tell us exactly what they earned. They would try to be secretive and vague about money and just give us what they thought we needed for the house. But we found out what they were paid at the different factories so that we knew exactly what they earned. We would use this information to get more for ourselves.15 Tombi went on to explain that there was always the danger of demanding too much, which (she said) could lead to men losing interest in their wives and starting up relationships with other women on whom they would lavish gifts. Domestic struggles over the control of income along the lines suggested above thus emerged as a central feature of post-relocation domestic life in Duncan Village. It was a struggle that occurred in the context of very unequal power relations within domestic groups. Unlike the 1950s, when women exercised considerable social and economic power in the old location, men now ruled the roost; they were the official tenants of all municipal houses and they monopolised the formal sector jobs in the city. Female employment opportunities inside East London were still very limited during this period, although as we will see below there were some important changes in this regard occurring on the outskirts of the city. In this we have seen how, when the state drew down an ‘iron curtain’ on female entrepreneurship in the townships, it had significant implications for the urban working-class aspirations. Most working-class households (whether female-headed or not) had supplemented household income in the old location through petty trade and commodity production. The removal of the latter income sources slashed the disposable income of many households and, all of a sudden, desirable consumer goods, the ‘wanna gets’ became ‘can’t gets’ for everyone trapped in low-wage formal sector employment in East London.

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‘Married to the State’: De-industrialisation and Welfare Dependence The sustained economic growth that East London had experienced in the post-war period slowed down dramatically in the 1970s. The consolidation of the Ciskei and Transkei homelands in the 1960s was associated with an attempt by the apartheid government to get industrialists to relocate from urban areas to border towns and rural industrial parks. To assist in this process, generous incentives were offered to industry to take advantage of the rural industrialisation programme. Beall et al. (2002) suggest that these rural industrial growth points became the last frontier of ‘racial Fordism’, which was based on very cheap, non-unionised black labour deployed in factories which, by the 1970s, had out-of-date technology and antiquated production systems. East London has historically been known as a destination for industry seeking cheap labour, but the creation of new industrial parks at places like Dimbaza in the Ciskei and Butterworth in the Transkei, pushed industry away from East London, where workers were not unionised and special incentives did not apply. The relocation of industry created new problems for the predominantly male African industrial working class in East London. Wages stagnated and jobs were lost. This was the beginning of a slow and progressive process of de-industrialisation that continued through the 1980s and accelerated in the late 1990s, as many local firms could not compete in a globalised economy (see Chapter 9 for further discussion). One consequence of these developments was that, by the 1980s, urban housewives could no longer rely on their husbands’ wages and started to take greater responsibility for earning household income themselves. From the mid 1980s women in Duncan Village actively re-entered the formal wage economy as their husbands and sons struggled to find regular waged work. They also started to re-engage in informal sector activities and sought to extract backyard rent from new arrivals in the township. However, unlike the 1950s, the street committees controlled the rents, keeping them down to make urban residence affordable for their comrades and new arrivals. They also limited the sale of alcohol and consumer goods in the township. This angered some older residents, who felt they had every right to set their own rents and sell commodities where they wanted. But they did not have the power to change the situation. Urban housewives lamented the overcrowding and stress that the enlarged population in the township placed on urban services. Women’s domestic routines and consumption patterns were also affected by the introduction of a consumer boycott of white-owned stores in the 1980s, which prevented them from buying goods in town. The entire township now relied on a few local general dealers, who stocked only basic goods and were often unable to get supplies. Gangs of male youth roamed the streets in packs and could enter township houses at will to demand food or shelter.

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As the Comrades asserted their power and the violence of the street entered the house, mothers found they could no longer control their sons and their daughters. Their suburban dreams had been whittled away with new arrivals, increasing poverty and residential overcrowding. Woman’s talk of plushly furnished and well-maintained homes with labour-saving appliances vanished as the smell of paraffin and uncollected garbage engulfed the township. Crowds now swelled at communal toilets and water points, and the shelves of overused township shops emptied almost as quickly as they were filled. The image of black suburbia, once cherished by so many township working-class mothers, had evaporated into thin air as the political mood swung and the township degenerated into a slum. The new pressures on urban mothers created tensions within the house. Disputes between men and women over allocation of funds for domestic expenses, and the desire among women to expand their own earnings, created conflict. As economic conditions worsened, women increasingly took matters into their own hands, trying by all means to supplement household income. Men often objected, saying that their wives and lovers should concentrate on their responsibilities as mothers and stay at home (as they had promised to do in the past). The establishment of home-based businesses, such as spaza shops, seemed a fair compromise since it kept women at home while relieving men of some of the responsibility for supporting the family. One of the features of this period was the decompression of households as young men and women left their parental homes and headed for the freedom of the shack areas. In Chapter 5 we explored how the social and political identities of the youth were connected to the creation of new living together or ukuhlalisana households. Urban mothers often openly lamented the disappearance of their sons into the shack areas and tried, despite conflict with their son’s partners and often their own husbands as well, to continue to interfere in their sons’ lives after they had left home. This was the case with Tops, an unemployed 30-something tsotsi living from a combination of casual jobs, petty crime and some drug-dealing. When we first met Tops in 1997 he was wearing his tartan hat, which was his trademark. He had an earring in his left ear and several amateurish tattoos on his right arm. He was living alone in a one-roomed shack in area 7B. At the time, Tops admitted that, although he had left home, he was still eating most of his meals at his mother’s place, a standard township formal house, a few streets away from his shack. He said that his mother would help him out with food and even did his washing for him. In 1999, on my next encounter with Tops, his fortunes had improved and he was now sharing his shack with his ‘cherry’ (lover) and their child. The shack was better furnished than before, the old single bed had been replaced with a second-hand double bed. There was a kitchen unit and a radio and TV, both operated on batteries. All Tops’s cooking, cleaning and washing was now done by his girlfriend. But his mother did not approve of the new arrangement, complaining that the girlfriend was wasting his income. She was particularly bitter about the clothes that he had bought this new woman.

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Tops’s girlfriend, on the other hand, complained that Tops cared more about his mother and his siblings than about her and their child: ‘I don’t know how long I can stay with this guy because he seems to care about his mother more than me – he should marry her.’ In a context where many of their husbands were now unemployed, urban mothers often turned hopefully to their sons, many of whom had other agendas.

Photo 7.5  Thabo in his mother’s home-based spaza shop, 2004 Source: Photo by Leslie Bank.

Thabo was another male youth who had clashed with his stepfather and moved out of home only to be lured back to help his mother with her home-based business. When I first met Thabo’s mother in 1997, she immediately complained about her son living with his girlfriend in the shack areas. She said that she was not very happy with the arrangement, as she wanted him to help her out with her small spaza shop. By our next interview, Thabo, who was 26 and unemployed, had decided to return to the house to help his mother, despite a complicated relationship with his stepfather. As the oldest sibling in the house, Thabo was entrusted with a great deal of responsibility by his mother, who was employed during the day at a catering concern in town. His stepfather had retired and displayed no interest in running the shop. He preferred to spend his time working in his urban garden and socialising with other older men. He felt that working in the spaza shop was beneath him and was ‘better left to the children’. In the household there was a great deal of conflict between Thabo and his stepfather, who said that he was old enough to move out and find a job for himself. Thabo said that he wanted to move out and had tried several times, but that each time his mother had put pressure on him to return home

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to help her out. Thabo’s mother also admitted that she created conflict between her son and her husband because she was constantly giving Thabo money to stay at home to help her. While most sons that moved away stayed away, daughters often moved away and then returned to settle in the backyards of their parents’ house. The domestic arrangements of adult daughters varied. In some instances they constituted their households in the yards as extensions of the main house and relied heavily on their parents, especially their mothers, for material and emotional support. In other cases these domestic units, normally comprised of women and children, sometimes with a male partner too, operated more independently. In the 1980s and 1990s, as we have seen, marriage was rare among young people and young women were often disappointed when their ukuhlalisana relationships fell apart and they were left to support one or more children. It was at this point that these young women tended to return home, set up a shack in the yard and rely on their parents for support. By the mid 2000s, I found that virtually every house had at least one family member living in the yard. The return of daughters to their parental homes created opportunities for cooperation among women of different generations that had not existed since the 1950s. There were new opportunities to rebuild matrifocal networks and once again exert control over the township’s second economy. The problem was, however, that by the mid 1990s there was already a spaza shop and a shebeen on every corner, which all sold the same range of goods at more or less the same price. Moreover, black consumers were also now used buying their daily and weekly supplies at large supermarkets outside the township. There were just not the same opportunities in the township market of the 1990s and 2000s for entrepreneurial women as there had been in the location of the 1950s. In some households the cooperation between mothers and daughters did revive something of the spirit of the matrifocal family of 1950s, but for the most part the earnings from home-based retailing were very small and only useful in supplementing other forms of income. With meagre pickings in the informal economy, and virtually nothing coming in from their husband’s or son’s pay packets, housewives increasingly turned to the state welfare system as a way to shore up their earnings. Sudden increases in state pensions for urban Africans, to which women had access from 60 years, as well as the extension of disability grants after 1994, created opportunities for women to get themselves and their children on the state welfare system. Moreover, as the 1990s wore on, new opportunities emerged when a new child support grant was introduced in 1998, and other foster care grants. While men continued to look for jobs at the factory gates, more and more women spent their days at the hospital or at the Department of Social Welfare offices, learning about how to get access to various forms of state support, including poverty relief programme and food packages. Mothers would apply for pensions or disability grants for themselves or co-resident members, while daughters tried to access child welfare grants. Their aim was to replace the old allowances that men gave them with state welfare support, which could form one critical

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pillar of their household livelihood strategy. By 2005, more than 50 per cent of households in Duncan Village received some form of welfare grant and the vast majority of these grants were directed towards urban mothers and their daughters (Bank 2006). Grant money was sometimes combined and reinvested in small-scale commerce when mothers and daughters worked together. In the process, they would take turns working in the shop or looking after the children. Men often only played the role of security guards for the business. Urban mothers would also try to control the welfare grants of male household members including their husbands. They spoke about grants as if they were entitled to all grants that came into the household irrespective of who the recipient was. If older men got grants, women would say that they should hand over their grants as ‘an allowance’ for the running of the households. It was as though the grant now replaced the allowance of the 1960s and 1970s. Women argued that the grants were an allowance from the government, which some jokingly called their new husband, and meant to help with running the household. Men had no business controlling grant money, they argued. It was women’s money paid to them by the state to look after their families. As one woman explained: ‘It is like we married to i-government and we have to argue with the government if we want a bigger allowance.’ ‘It is no use arguing with our husbands’, she continued, ‘because they have nothing to give us.’ By the mid 2000s, urban survey revealed welfare grants made up more than half of the income earned by urban households in Duncan Village (cf. Bank and Makubalo 2005). In 2009, an old age pension or disability grant was valued at about R1000 or US $120 a month, a child support grant about R240 or about US $30 a month per child, and a foster grant at R450 or about US $60 per child. These were significant amounts of money for the urban poor and the struggle to access these grants was intense. One form of resistance among old men to the control women exercised over their grants was to spend the grant on credit in township shebeens and at spaza shops before they received their monthly cheques. So when the recipients got paid, the owners of these shops would be waiting at the pay-points to get their money back. The recipient would then have to go home with a reduced package, which angered their wives. So the wives came to pay points to get the cheques before the spaza owners, which resulted in loud arguments and even physical fights. Wives argued that the spaza owners should not be selling their husbands goods and liquor on credit. In one high-profile case, which highlighted the dependence of households on welfare grants for survival, it was discovered that the wife and daughter of a dead man in Duncan Village dragged him to the welfare pay point to use his finger prints to get access to his pension (Daily Dispatch 12 October 2001). The case not only indicates the extremes to which women would go to get access to men’s welfare income, but also how desperately dependent many were on this income for survival. In the period between 1998 and 2005, the attention of women shifted from pensions and disability grants to supplementing their income with child grant supports. These could be received by the parents of children or by caregivers

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appointed by them to look after their children under 15 years. Many mothers asked their daughters to allow them to apply for the grants because they were effectively looking after their children. Sometimes disputes emerged between older and younger women over the control of grants. In one case I recorded, the daughter of the household matriarch – who had taken over the house after her husband died – was robbing her own mother’s pension and using the money to support her drinking habit. In another case, I heard that younger women were not prepared to hand over part of their child support grant to their mothers, despite them looking after the children, and this caused tension. Cases of intense conflict between mothers and daughters were, however, more the exception than the rule in Duncan Village. In the formal houses in Duncan Village Proper I also found that some older women, who experienced the empty nest syndrome as children moved out, sometimes turned their attention to fostering as a means of earning income. By 2000, there were already more than 1,000 children orphaned by HIV and Aids in Duncan Village, as well as numerous homeless children without HIV and Aids. For urban housewives who had lost their husbands or had husbands without jobs, and were still too young to receive pensions, fostering was an option that many considered. With grants of around US $60 per child per month, and social workers who were prepared to allow women to take as many as five or six children if they lived in a township house, there was an opportunity for some women to use foster grants as a means of supporting themselves and their husbands. With shack rentals set at around R100, or US $15 a month, some home-owners figured that they would be better off putting five or six foster children in their yards than renting out space to adults. Two women I interviewed on Sandile and Ndende streets claimed that they had decided to evict their tenants and transform their backyard structures into hostels for foster children. The difficulty for others with similar ambitions, as we will see in the next chapter, was that the yards were difficult to clear. By mid 2000, representatives of the Department of Social Welfare said that they were aware of the potential abuse of the grant system in places like Duncan Village, and would act on evidence of any misuse of the system. Conclusion Anthropological studies in the 1990s picked up on the theme of domestic fluidity within urban households, especially in informal settlements. These studies argued that household-level social relations appeared to have become increasingly individualised, blasé and amoral, and that households themselves started to collapse as cohesive units of social reproduction and interaction (Spiegel et al. 1996). In Duncan Village, mature urban mothers often openly lamented the explosion of ukuhlalisana relationships and the increasing individualism of the youth. In fact, both men and women said that, in the old days, family reputations had meant a lot to them in Duncan Village, and that everyone knew to which family you belonged. To behave badly, many explained, was to shame your family and your parents. It was something

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for which children would be severely beaten by their fathers. This older notion of family, residents now agree, disappeared as neighbourhoods became overcrowded, families dispersed and their children moved away. Many in the older generation complained that things had deteriorated since the 1960s and 1970s, when the township was clean, families stuck together and households enjoyed access to basic services. I have shown how, in the township era of the 1960s and 1970s, housewives in particular tried to transform their sterile matchbox homes, which were owned by the state, into family homes by inscribing them with their own personal and family identities. They did this by furnishing their kitchens, lounges and bedrooms with new consumer goods, and by assembling their own personal objects and images in their houses. They struggled against the depersonalising tendencies of the township project and their limited family income by inserting their own histories and memories in lounge cabinets and displayed carefully chosen personal images and inscriptions on their walls. As Eric Thobela explained: ‘Family identities were at the heart of the old location, especially for us “borners”, and our parents wanted to retain that in the new housing estates.’ ‘My mother’, he continued, ‘wanted everyone to know the Thobela boys were well-groomed and well-disciplined and wanted the neighbours to see us working in the yards and our sisters cleaning the house.’ By the 2000s, many old township mothers remembered the 1960s and 1970s as an era in which they had to adapt and make the best of new forms of patriarchal control and discipline. Yet, they also recalled that these ‘bad old days’ were also times of greater family unity, full male employment and relative prosperity, when compared with the economic and social challenges most households faced today. Legal reforms and political change in the 1990s gave township mothers and daughters access to new opportunities and a new sense of freedom to challenge patriarchal authority and to reassert their independence, as their grandmothers had done in the 1950s. I suggest that there is evidence of a dramatic growth of female-headed households in Duncan Village since democracy; although very few of these households, even the multi-generational ones, have been able to achieve the economic independence of the old matriarchs of the 1950s. Easy access to cheap supermarkets, together with low wages and the absence of a vibrant backyard rental market has curtailed the opportunities for women to make quick and easy profits. By the 2000s, the matrifocal family was once again on the rise in the Village, but not in its old entrepreneurial family form. In the post-apartheid context, I argue that women asserted their independence from men by turning to the state as benefactor and provider. In the discussion I demonstrated how urban mothers, who had seen their children disperse into the free-standing shacks, are asking them to return home to settle in their yards to share their welfare and child support grants. I argue that more and more households were being built and consolidated around welfare grants as their core income, supplemented by small-scale commerce and backyard rental income. Access to welfare grants and the control of the income that derived from it was also a source of

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tension amongst women. I recorded many cases of mothers and daughters squabbling, and even assaulting each other, in struggles over grant money. We also saw how some women took on foster children and Aids orphans to enlarge their access to the welfare grant system. With the dream of black suburbia well and truly shelved, the best hope for ageing township housewives and mothers – if they could not escape the city altogether and retire in the countryside, where life is quieter and cheaper – is to get their hands on as many welfare grants and backyard rents as they can and hold on for dear life.

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8 The Rhythms of the Yards

… the ‘yard’: a square space holding one major house, occupied in the old days by the owner of the stand, and several smaller, often one-roomed dwellings – some of them joined together to make a ‘bond’. Far more than one family shared each yard … In many cases nearly all the rooms in the main house and the adjacent ‘bonds’ would be extensively sublet, so that every room was occupied, often by an entire family. Each yard became so oversubscribed that it almost became a community on its own. (Bozzoli 2004: 23) Real estate markets … have returned to the slums with a vengeance, and despite the enduring mythology of heroic squatters and free land, the urban poor are increasingly the vassals of landlords and developers. (Davis 2006: 83)

The primary aim of this chapter is to enter the space of the yards in Duncan Village, those spaces behind the main house, and explore the dynamics and power relations within yards as significant, but hidden spaces of cultural life and social reproduction in the township. It is intriguing that the notion of ‘the yard’, and especially the idea of the ‘yard communities’, has not been more widely used in the analysis of southern African cities. In West and Central Africa, considerable attention has been given to the social and cultural formation of compounds or parcelles, the public–private social spaces that accommodate extended family, friends and strangers in the same residential complex. In Accra in Ghana, Deborah Pellow (2003), has explored the complex social and cultural rules that structure access to and use of space in a typical Hausa urban housing compound. She shows that the space of the compound is highly gendered and embodies an ‘architecture of female exclusion’, as well as nuanced and interconnected divisions between semi-public and private spaces, with the innermost courtyards and dwellings housing the family of the owners or proprietors. De Boeck and Plassart (2004) makes a similar claim for the centrality of the compound or parcelle as a critical space for understanding urban social life in Kinshasa: Life in the African parts of town … was played out in the compound, parcelle, and in the street. The parcelle is a space that is typical of Kinshasa. Often surrounded by a wall and with an iron gate that marks the entrance, the parcelle, with its house or houses, and usually with its mango or palm tree and little garden of vegetables or crops, creates a small island of more or less private domesticity, in the shared intimacy of one’s (extended) family 1 90

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and ethnic affiliations. In many areas of the city, though, the parcelle has been invaded by and lives in close proximity to the street. As such many parcelles are rather ‘public’ private spaces. (De Boeck and Plassart 2004: 53) In South African cities there is now a discourse about a backyard housing rental market that has come with the drive to build a real estate market in former townships, but there is still very little appreciation of how these yard spaces work socially. In this chapter, I want to approach the yards from the inside out, showing how social life is organised, how resources are contested and how social reproduction occurs there on an everyday level. Such a focus necessarily directs attention to the changing relationship between landlord and tenants, but also to the interactions and relationships between tenants themselves, which lies at the centre of my analysis. In this chapter I focus on the everyday rhythms and patterns of life in the yards and suggest that life in these micro-environments in the city is shaped by its own set of structural pressures and social processes. In the second volume of his classic study, Critique of Everyday Life, Lefebvre (1988) argued that the linear and abstract notions of time produced by modernity do not do away with the rhythmic and cyclical character of time in urban everyday life. Lefebvre also suggested that no cycle of time ever ended up exactly where it started, implying that urban rhythms were capable of evolution and change (Meyer 2008: 148). In recent years, other scholars have drawn on this analysis to focus attention on the ‘hidden social logic of cities’. Allen (1999), for example, argues that cities are not reducible to the movement of capital nor the politics of the state, but have a social order and character which is embedded in the ‘social rules, repetitions and regularities that govern everyday social life’. He asserts that spaces in the city that appear from the outside to be chaotic and disorganised are, as often as not, much more stable and ordered when viewed from closer up. He argues that the metaphor of ‘city rhythms’ can highlight aspects of city life that we have ignored in the past. He elaborates on the concept as follows: By city rhythms, we mean anything from the regular comings and goings of people about the city to the vast range of repetitive activities, sounds and even smells that punctuate the city and which gives many of those who live and work there a sense of time and location. This sense has nothing to do with any overall orchestration of effort or any mass co-ordination of routines across the city. Rather it arises out of the teeming mix of city life as people move in and around the city at different times of night or day, in what happens to be a constant renewal process week in, week out, season after season. (Allen 1999: 56) Amin and Thrift (2002) have recently endorsed Allen’s observations, but added that the arena of urban domesticity is one which has been particularly neglected:

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The rhythms of the home are as much part of city life as, say, the movements of traffic, office life, or interaction in the open spaces of the city. Its rhythms, too, need incorporating into the everyday sociology of the city. (Amin and Thrift 2002: 18) So what might be said about the rhythms of the yards? In this chapter I hope to generate an appreciation of the historical depth and endurance of yards as a residential enclave in Duncan Village. I return to the ethnography of Reader (1960), and especially his descriptions of the residential arrangements in the old East Bank location, to reveal the nature of yard relations in the 1950s. I define this early period as one of ‘yard capitalism’, where landlords and landladies charged usurious rents and mercilessly exploited tenant migrants. From this discussion, I move on to the 1980s, with the re-population of the yards and the emergence of ‘yard socialism’ under the rule of the Comrades. This provides the backdrop for my analysis of the yards in the 2000s, where new forms of feminised yard-level cooperation and sharing have emerged. Again, I use De Certeau’s writings to explore how single mothers have tried to use the yards as sites from which they can convert defensive ‘tactical’ manoeuvres into empowering ‘strategies’. I also turn to Lefebvre’s (1991) rhythm-analysis, which focuses on social and cyclical time in the city to reveal the everyday ‘rhythms of the yards’, the practices and routines of everyday social reproduction. To further illuminate social relations within and beyond the yards I end the chapter by analysing the social circuitry and networks associated with the township’s most deeply social commodities, namely paraffin and alcohol. Both commodities saturate the yards and act as critical social ciphers in marking out the social dynamics of the yards, which change between morning and afternoon, day and night, weekdays and weekends. I argue that, while the former commodity – paraffin – has come to symbolise and consolidate relations of sisterhood and has been used to enhance female cooperation in the yards, the latter often catalyses violence and conflict, highlighting hidden terrains of struggle for power and resources. I conclude by reflecting on what my analysis means for the changing social character of the post-apartheid city. From Slumlords to Yard Socialists In the 1980s, the Alexandra civic activist Moses Mayekiso famously argued that it was not only black people’s places of employment that were sites of suffering and hardship, but their places of residence too. He stated: ‘The battle against apartheid cannot be won on the shop floor. If the community is not organised properly, we could lose. That is why the civic helps community organisation’ (1996: 56). He went on to state that: ‘because we live so close next to each other, we become very close to each other and know each other’s problems … our viewpoint starts right from the yards where you live as neighbours’ (1996: 58). It was on the basis of this understanding that Mayekiso and his associates in Alexandra created the spatial architecture for

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civic organisation, where ‘the yard’ emerged as the foundational building block on which township organisation was built. The creation of yard committees as the bottom rung of a spatial hierarchy of organisation, which included street committees, area committees, branch committees and ultimately a central committee, proved to be a crucial organisational innovation in the struggle politics of the 1980s. The type of spatial configuration set up in Alexandra was replicated in many townships across the country. However, while most of these communities actively recognised the importance of yards as sites of struggle, few followed Alexandra in implementing yard-level political structures. One of the reasons for this might have been that young male Comrades were more reluctant than Moses Mayekiso and his associates in Alexandra to share power with older-generation landlords and municipal tenants. This was certainly the case in the Duncan Village Township of East London, where a powerful and wellorganised residents’ association emerged in the early 1980s. Like Alexandra, Duncan Village was a historic township which had a long history of yard occupancy and rental. From the 1930s, when the municipality placed a cap on township expansion, the yards filled up with new immigrants into East London who flooded into the city in search of the jobs and opportunities that came with secondary industrialisation. The scale of residential extension was reflected in the fact that the population of the old East Bank location (later renamed Duncan Village) doubled from 25,000 to 50,000 between 1930 and 1950. In this period, only 630 new municipal houses were built in the area. Desmond Reader (1960), who conducted research in the location in the mid 1950s, found that the majority of people lived in ‘a chaos of wood-and-iron structures jostling at irregular intervals and angles’: In the shanty [wood-and-iron] area generally, the original demarcation of plots – there are no fences – has been obscured by the proliferation of shacks, sheds and outbuildings behind and between the main buildings. Most of the buildings are shabby and many are decrepit. The wood-and-iron construction is cheap and easy, and … there is nothing to conceal its ugliness. (1960: 155) Rack-renting proved to be a highly lucrative source of income for site-holders in the old location, where landlords and landladies came to exert enormous social power. These owners generally displayed very little concern for the actual living conditions in the yards and focused instead on cramming in as many people as possible to maximise the equity on their assets. Some of these owners controlled multiple dwellings and employed ‘substitute owners’ to look after their second and third properties. The conditions in the yards encouraged the emergence of migrant subcultures (see Reader 1960: 154). By the 1960s, the old location landlords and landladies of the East Bank had driven up the population densities to such an extent that forced removals became inevitable. The apartheid state capitalised on the deteriorating conditions in the location by instituting a massive forced removals programme

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in East London (see Chapter 3). Over the next two decades, 8,000 families were moved away from the city to rural villages and townships in the Ciskei and Transkei Bantustans. The aim of the exercise was to destroy completely the old wood-and-iron sections of the old locations, including the East Bank, and replace them with new brick-and-mortar municipal bungalows for the permanently urbanised African working class. The process of removal and reconstruction occurred continuously during the 1960s and 1970s, after which new housing delivery in the city ground to a halt. By 1980, the new Duncan Village township, built on the ruins of the old East Bank location, was again in a state of political and social turmoil. The Duncan Village Residents’ Association (DVRA) had seized power and had torched the houses of government-appointed local black town councillors, and set up their own structures for the management and control of the township. They also set their own rules for the allocation of houses and sites in the township. One of the first decisions that the DVRA made was to declare the township open for new immigrants to settle. To accommodate the new arrivals, the DVRA declared that township residents should open their yards to those who had the means and desire to build shacks there. The DVRA announcement engendered a process very similar to that which had created the slums of the 1950s. In the 1980s, virtually every yard in the township again sported backyard shack structures. In December 1984, Duncan Village was said officially to house a population of just over 17,000 people: 11,161 adults and 6,279 children (Daily Dispatch, 9 April 1986). By the end of 1986, unofficial estimates placed the population at 50,000, and by mid 1990 it was confirmed that the population was over 70,000 in the township. In other words, the population of the township quadrupled in 15 years. By 1994 there were over 5,000 backyard shacks in Duncan Village, which only had 3,000 formal houses. This meant that there were almost two shacks per yard. The distribution of backyard shacks was uneven, with the majority being concentrated in the older historical part of the township known as Duncan Village Proper. The composition of the new yard populations also in many ways reflected those of the 1950s. Between one-third and a half of those in the yards were members of the family of the landlord or landlady. They had moved into the yards because there was no more space for them in the main house. The remainder of the yard population was made up of other township residents, migrants and immigrants, the majority of whom were women (see Bank 2002). This gender shift in the backyard population was a product of a change in the gender composition of migrant streams into the city in the 1980s; at this time, two women were moving to East London from the surrounding rural areas for every one man. It was also a product of the perception among women that they would be safer in the yards than in the new free-standing shack areas (see Bank 1997, 1998). In the 1980s, male migrants also continued to move into the yards to protect themselves from the urban youths that dominated the free-standing shack areas, but they were far less of a force in the yards than they were in the 1950s. Besides the demographic shifts in yard

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populations, the most profound difference between the new yards of the 1980s and those of the 1950s was the change in the relationship between tenants and landlords. In the 1950s, landlord and landladies ruled the roost. The demand for accommodation was so great at this time and housing so scarce that those with accommodation to rent could, to use Reader’s words, acquire the power of ‘demi-gods’. In other words, they could rule their yards with an iron rod and evict those they did not like. Reader explained that: ‘the resulting situation is in the best traditions of boarding house life in, say, wartime Europe’, where ‘tenants must not do anything to upset their landlords’. He concluded that: ‘the overbearing attitude of the landlord leads to … bullying, insulting, and humiliating those tenants who through inability to find other accommodation cannot fight back’ (Reader 1960: 133). In the 1980s, yard relations were constituted in a fundamentally different way as the new street committees took control of the allocation of yard space. They argued that, since there was now a rent boycott in place in the township, landlords (who were now mostly municipal tenants) were no longer entitled to charge their tenants rent. They also insisted that it was the right of the street committee to decide on the allocation of sites in the yards. The street committees saw it as part of their job to settle households in the yards and to promote peace and discipline there. Like its Alexandra counterpart, the DVRA strongly propagated an ideology of ‘yard socialism’. It stood against the divisive and exploitative nature of landlord–tenant relations that had been such a prominent feature of yard relationships in the past. The civic insisted that, through the street committees, landlords and tenants should operate on an equal footing and should build their yard communities together as coherent social and political units. They also stressed the importance of ubuntu in yard relations and the need for equity in the yards. The oral evidence collected on yard relations in the 1980s suggests that there were often large gaps between ideology and practice. In reality, there was considerable tension throughout this period between the male youth activists in the street committees and landlords. Many of the official tenants (or owners) of township houses were older-generation men who did not like to be pushed around by the youth. Yet, they were also quick to realise that the Comrades (amaqabane) held sway in the community and that if they bucked the system they could easily end up having to explain themselves at a local people’s court. Thus, while landlords remained reluctant to accept the recommendations of the street committees, they were generally forced to comply if they wanted to avoid disciplinary action in the people’s courts. Tenants, on the other hand, welcomed the expanded access that they were given to the yards and the restructuring of power relations in the yards. They liked the idea that they could complain to the street committee if they felt unfairly treated in the yards and action could (and often was) taken against the landlord. The net result was that tenants emerged as relatively powerful members of yard communities in the 1980s. Many were also youths, who were actively protected by the civic structures. In some ways the 1980s saw an inversion of 1950s landlord–tenant relations, with the tenants now

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often dictating the terms of the relationship through the civic. What was also significant about the new backyard shack-dwellers of the 1980s was that the physical structures or extensions in the yards were built and paid for by tenants themselves. This gave them a much stronger sense of entitlement in the yards and made it very difficult for landlords to evict them, especially while the civic remained strong and influential. This is a critical point which has direct bearing on the current sense of disaffection that yard residents feel towards any scheme which seeks to upgrade the yards without their consent. The version of yard socialism that was imposed in Duncan Village in the 1980s was shot through with tensions between aggrieved landlords (some of whom did not even want tenants in the yards) and the street committees. There was also another line of cleavage that had an important impact on the nature of social relationships there. It is clear from the accounts collected of the functioning of street committees and people’s courts in the township that the version of socialism that the Comrades had in mind was a strongly patriarchal one. Thus, while the young male comrades questioned the old hierarchies of property ownership, their version of yard socialism did not extend to the equalisation of relations between men and women. One of the areas where women commonly clashed with the street committees was around the sale of liquor and other commodities. In the 1980s, the Comrades in Duncan Village, as was the case in a number of other townships, banned the use and sale of alcohol. Women who did not have secure access to employment and had relied on selling liquor and soft goods to support their families objected to the measures, saying that the street committees were denying them a livelihood. In Duncan Village, struggles ensued over the control of alcohol. Women also recalled that they received very little protection from the street committees when they reported cases of domestic violence, perpetrated by men against women and children. In many cases, women were simply told to obey the men in the yards and not to trouble the committees with irrelevant issues. In one yard on Ndende Street, a woman was actually beaten by the street committee for being rude and insubordinate to other men in the yards. Reconstituting the Yards Against the backdrop of this history of yard relations, I re-entered the yards of Duncan Village in 2005 to find out what had changed and what had happened to the yard socialism of the 1980s. The first observation that I made was that landlordism was once again on the rise. I found that access to the yards was no longer governed by the decisions of street committees. Landlords said that, when a shack fell vacant, they now relied on word-of-mouth and township networks to identify potential new tenants. Mkhuseli, a landlord on Ndende Street, reported: ‘I do not advertise when I have a space for rental, I always see people coming to ask for a place to rent.’ Sicelo, another landlord from the same area, said he found his own replacements when people left the yards, which wasn’t very often. Asanda Klaas, a landlord with a vacant room, said: ‘Nobody has come to us to ask for a space to rent and we are still

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waiting. We do not build the shacks for the tenants – the tenants come with the material and build the shacks.’ Social connections often played a key role in the selection of tenants. Edwin, a landlord on Florence Street, described how he entered the backyard shack enterprise: In 1997 I decided to give a friend a place to stay. I allowed him to build his shack at the back of my house. We worked together and I also knew him from the rural Transkei. At the same time I was thinking of getting extra cash. I charged him R30 per month and in those days R30 was reasonable money unlike today. Since his friend has returned to the Transkei, the shack is now occupied by a friend’s son who pays a monthly rental of R50. Khunjulwa, a tenant, told us that her father had found their shack by speaking to the landlady at church. Closer scrutiny of the selection practices of landlords revealed that a primary consideration was whether or not the tenants could pay. One landlord said that he ‘did not really care what happened in the yards’ as long as he received his rent. But it was unusual for landlords simply to accept people off the street. Access to the yard normally depended on some form of introduction by a third party. This happened in a number of ways: a common process involved the introduction of a potential tenant to the owner by a person known to the landlord from within the neighbourhood – ‘So-and-so is a good friend of my family and she is in need of accommodation.’ In these cases, the landlord based the selection on two factors: first, the reputation and trustworthiness of the person who gave the reference and, second, the ability to establish the social origin of the tenant(s). Landlords said they liked to know where tenants come from and how to contact them if they happened to disappear without paying rent. In terms of the actual rental charged I found that yard rent remained very low and varied between R50 and R100 a month. However, given that the local municipality was opposed to extending new services to yard households, I did note that landlords and landladies had found additional informal ways of increasing their cash return from tenants. More specifically, it was discovered that new service charges had been introduced to cover the cost of electrical extensions and other services to yard residents, which were charged at a much higher rate than the landlords paid for services. While there seemed to be some difficulty in increasing rents, especially since landlords did not own the actual structures that tenants lived in, they were seeking new ways to increase their returns from yard residents. Probably the most striking change in the social composition of yard populations in Duncan Village since the 1980s has been the increasing feminisation of these spaces. There was already some early evidence of this in the 1980s, but the civic was careful to ensure that everyone got a fair chance to access the yards and this meant that a mix of different types of households were settled there. The trend since then has seen increasing numbers of women, especially single mothers, entering the yards. In 1995, a survey conducted of

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150 households in the backyards in Duncan Village Proper found that about 40 per cent of the households in the yards were female-headed, representing a massive change from the 1950s, when most of those in the yards were men, mainly male migrants. In 1995 the households in the backyards were divided as follows: 25 per cent were male-headed nuclear households, 21 per cent were living-together households (half of these households were female-headed), 22 per cent were single-parent female-headed households, 16 per cent were singles (about half of them women, probably the daughters from the main house), 9 per cent were sibling units (again with the majority of units female-headed), and 7 per cent extended families. This situation had changed further by March 2005. The new survey found that only 28 per cent of the households (compared to the 25 per cent in 1995) were nuclear families, while only 10 per cent (compared to 21 per cent in 1995) stayed in living-together households. The number of single-parent female-headed households had increased from 22 per cent to 29 per cent of the total, while the number of single migrants in the yards remained constant at 15 per cent (compared with 16 per cent in 1995). The results show that the major change in the yards since the mid 1990s has been the increasing number of female-headed households located in these areas, which now accounted for more than 50 per cent of the total. The results suggest that landlords preferred female-headed households and that the women heading them were increasingly seeking out the yards as more desirable places of residence for themselves and their children. One of the possible reasons for the increase in female-headed households in the yards also related to the fact that between 1995 and 2005 there was an increase in the number of landladies rather than landlords in the formal houses to which the shacks were attached. Other evidence shows, as we will see below, that landladies often found it very difficult to control younger men in their yards, and it is possible that this demographic shift helped facilitate improved access to the yards for single women and their children. The 2005 survey also confirmed that the density of backyard shacks remained high with informal structures covering, on average, more than half of the size of the yards. The average age of landlord households was 33.7 years old compared with the 24.8 years of tenant households, where 64 per cent of the latter’s population was under 30 years old. The gender balance among the landlord households was found to be even, but females comprised a higher percentage (59 per cent) of tenant households. Monthly individual income figures presented an alarming picture of poverty, with more than 50 per cent of the individuals reporting that they earned no income. Only 24 per cent of tenants and 16 per cent of landlord households are employed either full- or part-time in the formal market, while 40 per cent of tenants’ households and 23 per cent of landlords’ households are made up of students, scholars or children. The average household size for landlords is 3.8 and 3.20 for tenants. In terms of the social relations in the yards, two-thirds of respondents said they socialise with other households in the yards, borrowing money and exchanging food and childcare services. Almost 70 per cent of households

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reported no conflict between landlords and tenants, with noise, rental and household services each accounting for 8 per cent of conflicts. Overall, 77 per cent of both landlords and tenants rate their relationships with one another as either good or very good. Only 15 per cent of landlords and 30 per cent of tenants claimed that they had access to houses elsewhere, which suggests that the vast majority of the yard population do not have other residential options. The Feminisation of the Yards One of the most significant changes in the social workings of the yard was that the collapse of the street committees had allowed women to exert more social power in the yards. In a sense, each yard has its own rhythm, its own particular social dynamic. However, there are also common patterns that allow us to construct a more general picture of yard life, based on observations and interviews in the field. It is towards this general account of social rules and pattern that we now turn our attention. The structure of yard life is shaped by daily routines which are common to the township as a whole, but take on particular forms in the yards and are shaped by the everyday cleaning, socialising, caring and provisioning. The main meal in most yard households is the evening meal, and this is the time of the day when all yard residents are around. The meal, which usually consists of samp, beans and a relish, is prepared by women, either for their own children or for their male partners. It is very unusual for men to do any cooking or cleaning in the yards unless they live alone (and even here it is not uncommon for a woman to come in the evenings and cook for them). The main meal is consumed inside the shack and represents a private time where household members eat together or in sequence in the privacy of their own space. The general pattern during the week is for the women to announce that food is ready and for household members to come to collect their plate when they are ready. They might come all at one time or in dribs and drabs and then find a seat on the bed, a chair or the floor to eat. The main meal is not exactly a ‘family meal’ in the sense that everyone sits around a table to eat, but it does constitute a time when most of the household members are together in the shack. The main meal is usually ready in the early evening when it is still light and can be followed by social activity where people sit around and talk in the yard. In cases where people have access to television, they often watch TV for a couple of hours before going to bed. Most people go to sleep between 20:00 and 21:00. In the morning, children are prepared for school and men and women also get ready to go out to work. Men who are not employed are also usually out of the yards by 08:00 looking for work, or finding other men with whom they socialise. With the men and children out of the house, women start preparing to clean the shack and do the laundry. At this point the social dynamics of the yard begin to change. Women speak to one another about the order in which they are going to use the outside sink and communal tap during the morning. The other issue that requires negotiation is the use of the washing facilities

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Photo 8.1 Domestic pride and shining pots in a backyard shack Source: Photo by Leslie Bank.

Photo 8.2 Women hang up the washing in the yard, 2004 Source: Photo by Leslie Bank.

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in the yard. For this reason, a schedule needs to be set up so that everyone is not doing the same thing at the same time. In the process of going about their morning activities, the women in the yard often eat the leftovers – embeko – which they share among themselves. The communal ethos and solidarity among women in the yard at this time of the day is represented in this sharing of food. It is often extended when women in the yard ‘add something to the pot’ in preparation of a midday meal for children and unemployed men, who filter into the yard at this time. In 2005, we found that the yards were still saturated with paraffin, largely because the municipality refused to legally extend electrical connections into the yards and also because landlords and landladies were charging exorbitant amount for illegal connection to backyard dwellings. The social networks associated with paraffin use thus continued to shape everyday social life in the yards. Paraffin, as I have argued elsewhere (Bank 2002), was a highly feminised commodity in Duncan Village. In the yards, paraffin proved to be a commodity which defined specific circuits of socialised exchange and established its own gendered regimes of value. Unlike other gendered commodities such as Lux soap, body creams and skin lighteners which celebrated women’s femininity and beauty, there was nothing particularly glamorous about paraffin. In fact, many women spoke disparagingly of it as a ‘dirty fuel’ that ‘ate up’ their time and limited their ability to run a ‘proper home’. But, despite its drawbacks, paraffin emerged as a medium through which women could construct feminised networks. In a township where formal political power lay in the hands of men, women nurtured their social networks, using the circuitry of paraffin to establish a sense of belonging, connectivity and power. The yards emerged as critical sites within which the social economy of paraffin was constructed and where particular ‘regimes of value’ were consolidated. Because men in Duncan Village generally rejected any direct association with paraffin, it was seen specifically as women’s fuel and, by extension, the activities associated with paraffin were viewed as women’s business, including the sale of paraffin. By using paraffin, women were able to maintain their pressure on men to supply them with money to maintain the household. Since men did not want to use paraffin, women would argue that it was better for them to do all the shopping and cooking and for men simply to provide them with a household allowance. With paraffin, the women in the yards also honed discourses of thrift and household management. Inside the yards in 2005, I encountered an ongoing tension between young and older women around saving and thrift. Older women were constantly instructing their daughters or grandchildren not to waste scarce household resources, especially paraffin. They spoke of the skill of saving leftovers and of managing on a very tight budget. Nomonde, a 50-year-old mother in one of the yards in Sandile Street, for instance, frequently scolded her two daughters for wasting food and paraffin. She said that one of the reasons for this was that her daughters did not know how to use fuel for more than one thing at a time; they did not think to leave the dishes to be washed with the hot water left over after making tea, or care if they used a whole litre of paraffin to make a pot of samp. Women

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like Nomonde often complained that their wasteful daughters did not fully appreciate the need for thrift when using paraffin. But it was not only in the circuits of domestic exchange that women socialised paraffin as a commodity. By embedding themselves in the paraffindriven domestic economy, women also connected themselves to the myriad spaza shops that cluttered every block in the township. There women would interact with others who would sell paraffin to them on credit or for cash. But the networks women created through paraffin were not only structured around spaza shops. Paraffin, food and other items exchanged between women in the yards (or in the names of women) would usually not have to be repaid immediately. Only in a few cases did we find that women who borrowed paraffin within the neighbourhood or yard would be asked to pay it back within a specified time. This only happened when the household from which the paraffin was borrowed did not have enough for themselves. It was also clear that paraffin was not given a specific status within these exchange networks. If paraffin was borrowed, there were no social rules specifying that the paraffin had to be returned. As a commodity it was lumped together with other basic-need items such as maize meal, soap, sugar and salt, and was subject to the same rules of exchange as all of these items. In this respect, the feminisation of neighbourhood networks was far more encompassing than the spaza social networks. One way in which women in the yards consolidated these relationships was through the communal cooking of imifino, a traditional women’s dish of vegetables and maize meal. The vegetables and herbs for the dish would be gathered by older women in the open veld and wooded areas outside the township. These herbs and vegetables would then be cooked on a paraffin stove in the shack areas or yard and shared among women. Making imifino was a thoroughly communal exercise for women that involved sharing various items like food, fat, paraffin, appliances and labour. The women would say that umfino is a dish for women and children. Men were never present at imifino gatherings. They claimed that imifino was women’s food and that, if consumed by men, it made them ‘lazy’ and ‘weak’, that it sapped their strength and masculinity. Men contrasted imifino to their preferred diet of samp and meat. It was, however, occasionally revealed that some men ate imifino that their wives brought home after these gatherings, but they would never admit to doing so. The association of paraffin with imifino reinforced the gendered construction of this fuel and implicated it in the closed and secretive social world of women’s neighbourhood networks. But imifino cooking did more than reinforce existing patterns of social interaction; it created new opportunities for women to expand their social and economic horizons. Through their involvement in the social networks associated with paraffin, urban mothers integrated themselves into their neighbourhoods in new ways. The idea of urban-born women participating in and even organising imifino cook-ups, which were understood to be a rural tradition, would have been unthinkable a decade earlier, when these women were more closely focused on their own households and reluctant to bond

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with rural women in the city. By allowing these events to take place in their yards, they created scope for new relationships with women of their age groups who came from a wide variety of places. This process of extending women’s social networks beyond the household and the yard also took the form of savings and grocery clubs, which were often discussed at imifino cook-ups. These clubs, better known as umgalelo, consisted of groups of women who decided among themselves to save a certain amount of money every week or fortnight or month. In Duncan Village these clubs were dominated by women and usually geographically bound in the sense that the members came from a particular neighbourhood or area. Club meetings frequently occurred in the yards, where women either sat in the open in the yards or in one of the member’s houses. Men were often anxious and suspicious about their wives’ club activities. They were concerned that large numbers of single women belonged to these clubs and that their wives or lovers were engaged in these clubs to make money that they could use to buy luxuries for themselves or to finance purchases of new furniture or electrical appliances as some club members did. To offset these criticisms, women in male-headed households constantly tried to assure men that they were participating in the clubs for the benefit of the household as a whole. In sum, women used paraffin, spaza shops, extra-household exchange, imifino cooking, and savings and grocery clubs to delimit spaces of ‘their own’ – loci of power within which they could devise more calculated and strategic intervention to undermine the dominant power relations at the neighbourhood level. Men, Violence and Alcohol If paraffin was a medium through which women tried to consolidate and extend their power and influence within and beyond the yards, alcohol, which was equally ubiquitous in these spaces and saturated social relations in the yards and the township as a whole, did much to unravel the coherence of yards’ relations. This is not to suggest that alcohol was somehow a male commodity while paraffin was a female one. Quite the contrary, women were as much involved in the consumption and sale of alcohol in the yards as men were. Indeed, beer and liquor often entered the yards with paraffin as part of imifino cook-ups or club meetings. Alcohol was also a primary commodity around which men and women interacted in the yards, especially at weekend when wages were spent on liquor and the intensity of gender interaction in the yards increased. My mapping of social relations in the yards revealed that it was particularly on occasions when alcohol was being consumed that some of the underlying tensions in yard relations – tensions between landlords and tenants, between men and women, and between young and older households – came to the fore. It was also at these times that the new feminised version of ‘yard socialism’, which had been consolidated since the 1990s and is described above, began to unravel, and some of the realities of unequal relations of power and difference created fissures and cracks in the cooperative circuitry of yard life. More specifically, alcohol was virtually

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always present in the social dramas of violence in the yards, where men were involved in reasserting their power over women, whether in their roles as landlords or as male tenants trying to intimate landladies, or simply as men calling their wives and lovers to order. In 2005, most tenants said that they understood that power in the yards now rested with the landlord and landlady, not the civic. They also reported that yard relations were generally not underpinned by excessive conflict. But it was also found that 70 per cent of the landlords and tenants did not exchange food or paraffin with each other, and that an equal number said that there was no sharing of childcare, or watching of TV in each other’s houses. The main form of social exchange between them was chatting. Tenants often said they went about their business without particularly seeking interaction with the landlord. These patterns reflect relations between landlords and unrelated tenants, and thus do not extend to family members in the yards, who obviously have much more to do with each other. It was also noted that those who had stayed in the yards longer often had a closer relationship with the landlord than those who came in later. In the stories collected, I found that alcohol was extremely prevalent in the yards and was virtually always implicated in conflict, violence and anti-social behaviour. Excessive alcohol use fuelled interpersonal violence, which was usually directed against women. This was the case in Sicelo’s yard. Sicelo was born in East London in the 1950s and was sent by his parents to live in a rural area near Cathcart in 1962. He later returned to East London and secured a house on Kese Street, where he runs a shebeen from the main house. Nontuthuzelo and Zolile are one of the couples living in his yard. Nontuthuzelo is 44 years old, unemployed, and receives a state disability grant. She stays with Zolile, her partner and head of the household. He is unemployed too. Nontuthuzelo and Zolile have a turbulent relationship. Zolile drinks a lot and becomes abusive. Nontuthuzelo said: ‘He abuses me whenever he gets drunk. He often says that I have committed adultery with Sicelo, the landlord, and called me a slut. He also said that I am a witch and that I have bewitched him.’ She reported that there was a common pattern of abuse and that Sicelo, the landlord, always takes Zolile’s side ‘because they drink wine together’. She said that his violence is often provoked after he has been drinking in the main house. The case study draws connections between alcohol and violence in yard relations and highlights the vulnerability of women to male aggression in the yards. It seems clear that, at some point, Nontuthuzelo had become intimate with the landlord after she had been abused by her husband. The landlord, Sicelo, took advantage of her vulnerability, but in the end protected and defended Zolile, who was one of his drinking partners. This pattern of male solidarity was recorded in other cases. In many of these cases, we found that it was a generally accepted rule in the yards that men did not interfere in other men’s domestic disputes. This sort of male solidarity is reminiscent of the earlier period where street committees, which were dominated by young men, virtually always ruled in favour of the male partners in yard disputes.

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Women would sometimes take cases to the street committees complaining of male abuse and violence. In my fieldwork in Duncan Village in the 1990s, I found that these cases were invariably resolved in favour of the men, who were seen to have the right to discipline their wives or lovers. In 2005, one of the most serious problems in the yards was the inability of older women to discipline young men. This was particularly clearly expressed in the case of ageing landladies, who had become tired of the disruptive and anti-social influence of disaffected young men in their yards and were keen to get rid of them. The young men were seldom prepared to take orders from the landladies. This is reflected in the case of Thombi, a 50-year-old landlady on Ford Street. She claims that she has had backyard tenants in her yard for over 20 years. The tradition was inherited from her parents, who both died in the 1980s. At the time of her parents’ death, Thombi took on two new tenants. One of the tenants was a single mother with two sons, Ntsiki, and the other a single migrant, Langa, from Butterworth. Langa quickly befriended Thombi, who felt weak and vulnerable after her parents’ death, and persuaded her to use her house to sell liquor. After several years of operating the business, Langa took over the management of the business and then demanded ownership of the house. Thombi was unaware of Langa’s moves until a local policeman came to warn her of her tenant’s plans. Thombi then contacted her brother, who was living out of town, to help her evict Langa. His eviction marked the end of the shebeen business and brought some normality to Thombi’s life. Throughout this period of turmoil, Ntsiki had remained in the yard with her two sons. Ntsiki had been appalled by the conditions they lived under, especially the heavy drinking and the fights. She spoke to Thombi many times about the bad influence it was having on her sons, but Thombi did not listen. Ntsiki says she considered moving many times, but stayed on in the hope that conditions would improve. By the mid 1990s, her sons were teenagers and had dropped out of school. She supported them on her domestic wages. But, as they grew older, they became more difficult to control and became involved in street gangs in the township. This was after the street committees had lost their power and there was a rise in crime in the township. By 2002, neither Ntsiki nor Thombi (now a reformed alcoholic) could control the young men and their friends, who now came into the yard late at night after spates of criminal activity in the township, to drink and share out the spoils. There were constant arguments and violence. The other tenants complained, but Thombi could not stop the young men, who said they had had to endure Thombi’s shebeen, and now she should tolerate their lifestyles. By 2003, Ntsiki could no longer live there and left the city to return to her home village in the Transkei. The lifestyle into which Ntsiki’s sons had been drawn was a product partly of their marginalisation as disaffected, unemployed youth, but was also due to the way they were socialised into a world of alcohol and violence in Thombi’s yard. Once again the destructive role of alcohol within yard relationships is clearly revealed, but it also shows how men, especially young men in the township, resisted the authority of women and refused to comply with their requests. This is further reflected in the case of Pruna, a landlady living in

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a four-roomed house on Florence Street. Her parents were originally from Mngqibisa Location in Chalumna and they moved to Duncan Village in 1959, where she was born in 1960. Both her parents have since died; her father in 1979 and her mother in 2002. Pruna inherited the house on her mother’s death. She is currently unemployed. She has two sons: the oldest is Mila, who is 19 and lives in one of the three backyard shacks in the yard, and the younger son is Hlumelo, who is 9 years old and in Grade 3. Pruna receives a child support grant for Hlumelo. The two grants and rental of about R200 received from two backyard tenants are the only source of income for the household. When Pruna took over the house in 1982, she inherited Zakhele and his sons. He had been living on the property since 1979. Apparently Pruna’s father had met him in a neighbourhood tavern and, discovering that Zakhele was from Mngqibisa in Chalumna (his home village), he invited Zakhele to build a shack in their yard. Pruna recalled that when she came home from school in 1979, she was amazed to see what was happening: We were young at that time, there were four people erecting a shack in my father’s yard and there was no way we could ask what was going on, we just went inside and got rid of our uniforms and then we went outside to watch. My mother arrived from work and she was amazed too to see what was happening. It was evident that she was unaware of the proceedings. I believe it was a deal negotiated under the influence of alcohol. Pruna says that she does not like Zakhele and would like to evict him. She says that on the morning of our interview she had summoned one of his sons to her house to discuss the possibility of them leaving the house. She feels that Zakhele and his sons are disrespectful towards her, that they are heavy drinkers and she cannot understand why they won’t leave their key with her when they are not available. She says that Zakhele’s sons are rowdy and rude and refuse to pay her more than R40 rent a month. She says that ‘when they get drunk they threaten me and say that they will never leave this yard’. They say that their father made a deal with my father and that it is not up to me to change that, it was an agreement among men. In another more extreme case, it was reported in the press recently that Nomvula Kalipa ‘an impoverished and wheelchair-bound Duncan Village woman, is locked in a battle with unwelcome tenants who she alleges have beaten her, slapped her mentally disabled daughter and refused to pay rent for over a year’ (Daily Dispatch 23 March 2005). The newspaper report states that the woman, a resident in a one-roomed municipal house, probably in Florence Street, went into hospital in 2003 to have her leg amputated. While she was away for 11 months, her mentally disabled daughter allowed two men into the yard to erect shacks. They agreed to pay R40 rent a month. When Nomvula returned from hospital she was shocked to find out what her daughter had done and asked the men to leave. They refused and did not pay any rent from January 2004. It was also discovered that one of tenants openly acknowledged that he had beaten Nomvula because she had ‘rudely’

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asked him to leave. Nomvula contacted her ward councillor several times about the incident and asked him to assist her with the eviction of the tenants. He did not respond, although he did admit to the press that he was aware of the case. Fearing for her life, Nomvula paid R600 of her disability grant to a lawyer to take action against her unwanted tenants. By March 2005, the lawyer had already issued two eviction orders to the tenants, both of which they ignored. When Nomvula spoke to the press, she said that if they ignored the latest letter she would pay for a bulldozer to come onto her site to flatten their dwellings. Some of the cases presented above highlight the ongoing power struggles in the yards. In the 1950s, the yards were dominated by male migrants from the rural areas, who often hired rooms as groups of amakhaya. By the 1980s, some of the migrants had moved out and had been replaced by people selected by the street committees. In the 1990s and 2000s increasing numbers of single women and female-headed households moved into the yards because of the rising crime in the free-standing informal shack areas, and because they preferred the protection of being in the yards. In 2005, we found that fully 59 per cent of the yard population in Duncan Village was female. This change in demographic profile, I have argued, has been associated with the increasing feminisation of the yards as sites where poor women in the township are attempting to rebuild their lives and consolidate social power and authority, albeit within discourses that embrace female domesticity. Indeed, there is much in my analysis that echoes Hellman’s early characterisation of the Johannesburg yards of the 1930s. For many women, the yards in Duncan Village functioned as ‘havens from the heartless world’, spaces of cooperation and sisterhood which ease the burden of everyday survival struggles. Here I have tried to show how women frequently attempt to transform what appear to be ‘defensive tactics’ into ‘empowering strategies’ in the backyards. But we should not romanticise these spaces and the survival strategies manufactured within them. They are places of poverty and violence that require redress and intervention. The research has shown that the yards of Duncan Village compress and hide a great deal of conflict and interpersonal violence. It is clear that alcohol and violence are closely connected and have become ‘domesticated’ in the yards, trapping women in a vortex of abuse and vulnerability behind township gates. There is also a disturbing invisibility and silence around interpersonal violence in the yards, which I find problematic and unsettling. One of the subtexts of this violence, as I have tried to highlight above, relates to the disenchantment of men, especially young men, with their sense of a loss of power and recognition, and their desire to continue to try to assert their own notions of power and entitlement in the yards. These aspects of yard relations require urgent redress and public scrutiny. Conclusion In his recent book, Planet of Slums, Davis (2006) argues that in the current global context of rampant neoliberalism there has been a re-emergence of

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slum landlordism. He suggests that the urban poor in Third World countries generally benefited in the 1970s and early 1980s from access to free or cheap public or state land on the fringes of cities. Today, Davis argues, urban shack dwellers are being propelled back into a situation very similar to that which existed in late nineteenth-century Europe, where slumlords have once again secured control of urban land and poor residential areas and are, to use his words, everywhere ‘monetarising their equity’ through the extraction of usurious rents. Davis notes that the popular and the scholarly literatures on informal housing have tended to ‘romanticize squatters while ignoring renters’ (2006: 154). He suggests that landlordism is, in fact, a fundamental and divisive social relation in slum life worldwide, which requires much more serious attention in our analyses of the urban poor. In this chapter, I have shown that in the 1950s urban landlords, and especially landladies (the famous urban matriarchs of the East Bank), led the way by charging usurious rents to vulnerable rural migrants who were desperate for accommodation. The ‘yard capitalism’ of the 1950s East Bank was based on precisely the kind of exploitative relations to which Davis (2006) alerts us, but it is interesting that, despite the prevailing neoliberalism in South Africa, rents in the backyards have remained low and many tenants have managed to assert their rights to stay in the yards. I would argue that this situation would be impossible to understand without a proper appreciation of the popular rejection of the neoliberal version of ‘yard capitalism’ in many townships, especially places like Duncan Village. The reason why the yards in Duncan Village are different from those of Mexico City or even Orlando in Soweto is because these yards have been historically constituted in a particular way. They are not the de-socialised spaces of market capitalism. The contemporary social logic of the yards continues to undermine and frustrate the development of impersonal market relations, which landlords would like to recreate. In their work on postsocialist societies, Mandel and Humphries (2002: 2) suggest that ‘there is no understanding of the market outside and beyond the particular forms of it that appear in historical circumstances in particular countries and cultures’. They argue that the ‘shock therapy’ capitalism of the 1990s that was introduced to overturn the centrally planned economy intersected with and had to adapt to a range of existing entrepreneurial traditions and profit-making practices, which socialised the market in particular ways. The same type of argument applies to the townships, which developed their own informal sectors (backyard renting, liquor trading, money-lending, taxis) with their own internal rules, practices and social contexts. In the case of backyard shacks, as we have seen, the selection of tenants occurred by word-of-mouth and social networking rather than open advertising, and the local history of yard relations shaped landlord–tenant relations in most instances. Moreover, raising rents or evicting tenants proved difficult because many backyarders lived in structures that they had built themselves, with their own materials. Tenants also appealed to past ideas and practices of ‘yard socialism’ to keep rents down. Some landlords and landladies worked their way around these constraints by charging tenants

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exorbitant fees for water, electricity and sanitation (as a form of hidden rent). Tenants were aware of this and tried to minimise these increases, while at the same time resisting any attempt to raise rents. I have argued that the yards of the 2000s remained ‘little communities’ within a large system of social relationships, power dynamics and social reproduction in the city. They constituted a particular residential niche, which, I have suggested, has been increasingly sought out by younger, single mothers in the post-apartheid period. Single women chose the yards because they were less crime-ridden than the free-standing shack areas, and offer a more congenial environment for raising children and building social networks. In the chapter I have shown how women took over the yards and developed and calibrated the ‘rhythms of the yards’ to suit themselves. They also used the solidarities established within the yard to broaden social networks and relationships. In this regard I highlighted the way in which women in the yards used paraffin, as an everyday commodity, to extend and socialise circuits of exchange and interaction. The social economy of paraffin lubricated various intra- and extra-yard relationships and reciprocities that proved critical to survival in the city. The use of paraffin was also a critical component of the imifino cook-ups that took place in the yards. But the yards were not havens from a heartless world. The anxieties, stress and tensions of the broader society also spilled into the yards and sometimes took on exaggerated forms in these spaces. One of the catalysts of periodic violence and conflict was the excessive use of alcohol in some yards. Gender and generational conflicts were often played out in the yards. Young men living together were a difficult presence and it was noted that, with township houses falling into the hands of old women who had outlived their husbands, there was often conflict between the ageing landlady and her younger male tenants. But violence and conflict in the yards was also common between the yard households, where couples clashed over the use of resources and expectations. Unemployed men felt emasculated and resented the way in which women invested resources in feminised networks and relationships, which reinforced a sense of powerlessness and inadequacy. When alcohol flowed in the yards at the weekend, these underlying currents of tension and conflict frequently led to the expression of interpersonal violence.

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9 Post-Apartheid Suburb or Hyper-Ghetto

On 22 August 2009, the new Minister of Housing in South Africa, Tokyo Sexwale, made an urgent visit to the Eastern Cape following media reports pointing to a crisis in government housing delivery in the province. One of the places Sexwale visited on his whistle-stop tour was Duncan Village, where he addressed a large crowd on issues of housing and service delivery. He told the crowd that Duncan Village had a distinguished history and identity as a site of cultural and political struggle in the Eastern Cape, and that the state remained committed to urban renewal and improved service delivery, and to the desire to transform townships in suburbs. However, he later told the press that Duncan Village was one of a handful of extremely marginal, vulnerable and volatile urban settlements, which included places like the notorious Joe Slovo squatter settlement in the Western Cape and Diepsloot in Johannesburg that posed serious development challenges for the government. In classifying Duncan Village in this way, Sexwale was acknowledging the rise of lawlessness and vigilantism in the township, and the lack of progress made in attempts at urban renewal. Major urban renewal plans and projects had been initiated in Duncan Village in 1994 and again in 2003. Although Sexwale did not use the words slum or ghetto, he presented Duncan Village as a place that existed outside the norm, a place that was out of alignment with national policy and the rest of the city in terms of development. This acknowledgment that Duncan Village, which had been a site of fierce anti-apartheid battles and home to many struggle-era heroes, was now a place of social exclusion and marginality was shocking in a context where the government and the media are keen to present townships as upwardly mobile suburbs-in-the-making. In the late 2000s, with the high-profile World Cup Soccer tournament headed for South Africa, the media and the government want good news from the townships, news of cultural vitality and economic development, of new shopping malls and micro-enterprises, of lively new tourist ventures, of taverns, music and entrepreneurship. They want these places displayed as culturally trendy sites of economic ‘empowerment’, where the post-apartheid working and middle classes are making new lives. The ANC wants the old negative images and discourses of poverty, marginality and matchbox houses, of long commuter trips to work, of police brutality and high crimes rates to disappear from public view. Even the sprawling shack areas on the fringes of townships are often presented by tour operators as colourful, friendly and intriguing sites of upbeat urban cultural styles. The problem since the mid 2000s, however, has been that these locations have once again hit the headlines for the wrong reasons, as sites of service 210

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delivery protests and xenophobic violence. The burning barricades on the streets of townships across South Africa, which have become increasingly common in the current recession, provide readers, viewers and potential tourists and investors with jolting reminders of the 1980s, of the old images of struggle, violence and marginality. The state counters these discourses by arguing that popular expectations have naturally been raised since democracy, and that the ANC government has already made a massive contribution to the eradication of historical backlogs in service delivery and infrastructure in township areas. For example, the ANC claims that it has funded the building of almost 3 million low-cost houses in South African cities since 1994. On the street, the talk is more of wasted resources, corruption, greed, poorly built low-cost houses and local government incompetence. It seems that under the presidency of Jacob Zuma shack chic has come face to face with realpolitik as the new regime tries to bridge the gap between township aspirations and the inadequacies of service delivery in the context of the un-redistributive nature of South African capitalism, which delivers growth that is widening the gap between rich and poor and adds very few unskilled and semi-skilled jobs to the economy (see Barchiesi, 2008; Seekings and Natrass 2005). In this final chapter, I want to take the Minister’s admission that urban development has failed in Duncan Village and explore the challenges that marginalisation and social exclusion pose for local residents in terms of the social meanings of place and identity. I want to start by invoking comparative sociological perspectives on advanced marginality, which highlight the impact of global economic shifts away from Fordist production, protectionism and import substitution on this process. I argue that the Eastern Cape and East London have been particularly vulnerable to global competition because many of the industries in the region were artificially supported during the apartheid years by industrial decentralisation subsidies that were removed after democracy. In the aftermath of the 1994 elections, many of the so-called ‘border industries’ collapsed, initiating widespread regional de-industrialisation. Although East London was not included as a border industry site, the ripple effects of business flight and industrial closures in the region had a knock-on-effect in the city, leading to the eventual collapse of the large textile industry in East London, especially in the last decade. Many thousands of unskilled and semi-skilled jobs have been lost, which only served to deepen the unemployment crisis in Duncan Village. Loïc Wacquant’s recent book, Urban Outcasts (2006), argues that when formal employment started to evaporate for the working class and unemployment levels start exceeding 40 per cent of the working-age population, then the ghetto is transformed into a hyper-ghetto. Wacquant defines the hyper-ghetto as a ‘downwardly-mobile, ethno-racial category and space of exclusion in the post-industrial city’, where de-industrialisation and deskilling has occurred among former workers, who are now denied access to regular wage employment and left to survive on minimum state welfare support in physically decaying and dangerous residential areas, outside the mainstream of society. In reflecting on the failed transition of Duncan Village

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from ‘township to suburb’, I invoke this comparative sociology of marginality, paying careful attention to the relationship between marginality and place, and how local actors have responded to the increasing indignity, poverty and shame associated with living in this township. In this discussion, I draw on Wacquant’s (2006) writing, as well on other literatures on the African city, which explore the role of spiritual insecurity and the occult in the African city and the power of the hidden worlds in the shaping of social agency (cf. De Boeck 2008). I argue that local responses to ‘the blemish of place’ in Duncan Village operate both at a material and a spiritual level. The dissolution of place opens opportunities for the redefinition of place and for its re-colonisation; and this is where my analysis leads – to an analysis of the vigilante violence which has engulfed Duncan Village in 2009. Economic Disconnection and Advanced Marginality In his book, Planet of Slums (2006), Mike Davis notes that there has been a worldwide trend towards urbanisation without economic growth. People are flooding into cities, which do not have the means of supporting them, and colonising the urban fringes on an unprecedented scale, creating everexpanding slums that are disconnected from the mainstream economy. He warns that these under-serviced and overcrowded slums contain huge numbers of surplus people who have little chance of ever being formally employed or socially integrated into mainstream society. They are destined to remain more or less permanently excluded from the increasingly exclusive neoliberal global urban economy. In this context of material deprivation, Davis argues that one of the ways in which the marginalised poor have addressed the cosmic challenge of their condition has been through a devotion to God and the Holy Ghost, and through the creation of the new churches of the poor, which deal with the evil of the world, preach a gospel of prosperity and create social networks of support that give people hope (see Davis, 2006). The allegation that new forms of marginality have emerged in the world of neoliberal capitalism is also embraced by Janice Perlman (1976, 2003, 2010), who argued in her classic urban study, The Myth of Marginality (1976) that the residents of Brazilian favelas were mistakenly defined as maladapted rural migrants and misfits who are marginal to the mainstream of society. She insisted that shack-dwellers worked long hours in both the formal and informal economy for little reward, developed strong and lasting social networks in their urban neighbourhoods and participated as best they could in urban politics. In 2004, she completely revised her position in view of the economic changes that had occurred in Brazilian society. She argued that deindustrialisation and the scarcity of formal sector jobs has ensured that urban economic integration for shack-dwellers in Brazil has remained a ‘massive challenge over the past four decades’ (2003: 187). She also suggested that the once socially vibrant favela neighbourhoods that she had studied in the 1970s have been transformed into places of fear, crime and violence run by thugs and drug-lords. By the late 1990s, she noted that ‘with the growth of the drug

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trade, the word marginal began to resurface in Rio’s press, popular music and common parlance, invested with new connotations’ (Perlman 2003: 189). In her book, City of Walls, Teresa Caldeira (2000) shows how São Paulo in Brazil has also become a segregated place of fear, with rich and poor neighbourhoods clearly cordoned off from each other. She notes that the middle classes vilify the spaces of the favela as spaces of crime and disorder: They seem to think that the spaces of crime are marginal ones, such as the favelas and cortices, and their inhabitants, potential criminals, are people from the fringes of society, humanity and the polity. They also see crime as a phenomenon related to evil, something that spreads and contaminates easily and requires strong institutions and authorities to control it. This control is seen as a labour of culture against the forces of nature. (2000: 53) In a review of recent literature on favelas, McCann (2006) suggests that one of the most significant developments in the Brazilian favelas since the 1980s has been the role of syndicated drug cartels in perpetuating crime and violence and undermining local forms of civic organisation. McCann (2006) notes that the most recent literature on favelas supports arguments of intensified social exclusion, violence and marginalisation, but also shows that there is still considerable variation in the conditions in different settlements. His work also shows that some of the most violent and marginalised favelas are located right next to middle-class and upper middle-class housing estates, rather than on the outskirts of the city. In Urban Outcasts (2006), Wacquant explores the coexistence of rich and poor areas, and what he calls ‘advanced marginality’ in Western cities like Chicago and Paris. He argues that while these cities are amongst the wealthiest in the world, they also contain some of the most marginalised and impoverished areas in their respective cities. Drawing on his own historical and ethnographic work on the South Side of Chicago, Waquant (2006) describes the transformation of this ‘black belt’ from a vibrant, communal ghetto in the 1950s into what he calls ‘the hyper-ghetto’ of the 1980s and beyond. He argues the South Side in Chicago, like many other inner-city black neighbourhoods, was characterised by economic and social diversity in the 1950s. Following William Julius Wilson (1987), he notes that during the 1960s and 1970s affirmative action programmes, and the flight of white middle-class families out of the inner city, created opportunities for middle-class and better-off working-class families to move out of the historic ghetto and into the surrounding residential areas (see Pattillo 2007). This development coincided with the collapse of the old-Fordist industrial economy in the northern cities like Chicago, which had created so many jobs for black workers before and during the Second World War.1 As unemployment grew, urban riots broke out against racism and harsh living and working conditions, which entrenched the economic and social marginality of the historic ghetto. By the 1980s, three out of four adults in the South Side were unemployed and the old civic, self-help culture and community

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spirit had disappeared. The ghetto was now dominated by criminality and a drug subculture. Wacquant shows that, as more young men spent time in the penal system, the codes, values and disciplines of the prison system were increasingly transposed back onto the ghetto, which entrenched existing patterns of violence, criminality and honour-based codes of masculinity. The new ghetto was characterised by de-proletarianisation, social exclusion and use of the police and the prison system to regulate and control the ‘urban underclass’.2 Wacquant states that ‘the most significant brute fact of everyday life in the fin-de-siècle (hyper-) ghetto is without contest the extraordinary prevalence of physical danger and the acute sense of insecurity that pervades its streets’ (2006: 54). He suggests that ‘the violence has acute experiential salience and its wide reverberations across the social fabric’ (2006: 55). He also argues that the outmigration of the better-off working-class and middle-class families has resulted in a decomposition of the working class. By the 1980s, the people who occupied the historic black belt of South Side were no longer predominantly members of the working class but belonged to what he calls the precariate, ‘an assemblage of temporary workers, the casually employed, the unemployed, welfare dependents and urban informal workers, both legal and illegal’. The precariate has to ‘hustle’ for survival in an informal economy which has become increasingly criminalised, violent and anti-social, dominated by street-level drug-trafficking and predatory violence that has crystallised into a ‘culture of terror’. This social category is endemically fragmented and disorganised, lacking a ‘repertoire of shared images and signs through which to conceive of a collective destiny and to project possible alternative futures’ (2006: 72). The precariat, Wacquant insists, has increasingly internalised the ‘forms of its subjectivity out of the objectification of others’ (2006: 73). The Dissolution of Place and Spiritual Insecurity In Wacquant’s (2006, 2008) analysis of advanced marginality he argues that ‘territorial stigmatization’, or what he also labels the ‘blemish of place’, weighs heavily on marginalised locales as residents start to internalise the identities projected on them by others. In a recent article, he expresses the relationship as follows: Rather than being disseminated throughout the working-class areas, advanced marginality tends to concentrate in insulated and bounded territories increasingly perceived by both outsiders and insiders as social purgatories, leprous badlands at the heart of the post-industrial metropolis where only the refuse of society would accept to dwell … When these spaces … threaten to become permanent fixtures of an urban landscape, discourses of vilification proliferate and agglomerate about them, ‘from below’ in the ordinary interactions of everyday life as well as from above in the journalistic, political and bureaucratic (even scientific) fields. A blemish of place is thus superimposed on the already existing stigmata traditionally

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associated with poverty and ethnic origin or post-colonial immigrant status, to which it is closely linked but not reducible. (2006: 67, original emphasis) Wacquant (2006) explains that territorial stigmatisation contributes directly to what he calls ‘lateral denigration’ and ‘mutual distanciation’. He argues that the ‘acute sense of social indignity that enshrouds the neighbourhood’ is attenuated by citizens of the ghetto ‘by thrusting the stigma onto a faceless, demonized other’ (2006: 72). This results in the dissolution of place, that is: ‘the loss of a humanised, culturally familiar and socially filtered locale with which marginalised populations identify, and in which they feel at “home” and in relative security’ (2006: 73). He also concludes that, as people become entrapped in the hyper-ghetto and experience the erosion of place, they also lose contact and connection with their social hinterland, the space and relations beyond the locale to which they are culturally, socially and economically connected. Wacquant (2006) argues that the ultimate expression of the dissolution of place is when local people start to deploy the negative stereotypes used to define them by outsiders to define themselves. We know that there is a long history of the stigmatisation and vilification of Duncan Village. In the early part of the century, we saw how whites expressed their fears about the growth of the East Bank location in biomedical terms, what Swanson called the ‘sanitary syndrome’, as a matter of hygiene and infection, of the spreading of actual and metaphorical germs from the black body into the white body politic. These representations intensified during the 1940s, when new waves of urbanisation were associated with industrial growth and encouraged overcrowding in the old locations. Concerns about the East Bank reached fever pitch in 1952 with the murder of Sister Aidan and the explosion of black anger on the streets of the East Bank location. Provoked by fears of a Mau Mau-style invasion, more and more whites argued that blacks had their proper and natural places in the rural areas and that their displacement from these ‘natural homes’ produced pathologies. In the 1960s and 1970s, the dominant image of the township changed to one of orderly urbanisation as the apartheid government embarked on converting the East Bank into a ‘respectable, well-managed township’, with ‘appropriate population controls and management strategies’. In the 1980s, white fears grew again as new informal settlements opened up in and around the township and on the fringes of the city more generally. The old discourse of the ‘septic fringe’ and the ‘irredeemable slum’ was now quickly revived. Duncan Village assumed centre stage as the worst area in the city, a site of infection, disorder and innumerable pathologies (see Chapter 3). At the end of the apartheid era, the people of Duncan Village had high hopes for a new beginning, for urban renewal and economic change. People looked to the state to help facilitate new jobs and higher wages, to improve education and training facilities and especially to provide new homes and services for the poor. The political unrest of the 1980s had left the township infrastructure in an appalling state, not only because the existing infrastructure

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had not been maintained, but also because key infrastructure facilities, such as buildings and electricity sub-stations, had actually been destroyed in the unrest of the 1980s. In 1994, immediately after the election, Duncan Village was one of a handful of townships to receive special Presidential funding to help rebuild and develop the community. The announcement of the funding entrenched feelings of hope and excitement that change was near. One of the first projects to be completed after the elections was the repair and extension of some of the old electricity infrastructure. The community was so elated by this intervention that they danced in the streets and partied all night to celebrate the lights being switched on. Local residents were also quick to make their aspirations clear when they rejected attempts by the municipality to move people out of the overcrowded shack areas onto an abandoned siteand-service scheme next to Duncan Village Proper, saying that they would not ‘move from one shack to another’. The derogatory terms that they used for shack settlements (such as chicken coops, imikhukhu, imijondolo) reflected the ways these settlements were seen. But hope soon evaporated as shack fires continued to ravage Duncan Village and the city council refused to electrify the shack areas (even as an interim measure), promises of infrastructure and new housing delivery came to nought and in-fighting within local political structures, especially between the ANC and elements of the old civic movement, made it virtually impossible to use the Presidential urban renewal funds effectively. To compound matters, the city’s industrial economy did not create significant numbers of new jobs for the residents of the township. In fact, it was during the late 1990s that a number of textile and small-scale electronics firms closed their businesses in the city. By the late 1990s, people were already claiming that the heroic struggle of the people Duncan Village against oppression and the sacrifices people had made now counted for nothing, because ‘nothing is being done’, ‘no-one cares about Duncan Village today’ (Daily Dispatch 15 April 1998). One shack, located on a prominent corner of the Douglas Smith Highway, the main thoroughfare through the township, said it all with the following slogan emblazoned in big black letters on the outside: “RDP: False Hope for the Hopeless” (RDP was the ANC’s post-election national Reconstruction and Development Programme). Women in the shack areas said that the government did not care about them because they allow us to ‘live in paraffin and burn in it’. More sinister stories also started to circulate at this time. One story that started doing the rounds was that the ancestors were deliberately punishing the people of Duncan Village because shacks had been built on an old grave site (Daily Dispatch 4 July 1999). There were also reports in the press of rising incidents of witchcraft accusations in the township (Daily Dispatch 13 April 2001). To ward off witches and misfortune shack-dwellers often laid wreaths of herbs over their front doors, or kept some muti inside to ward off evil spirits and protect them from shack fires (also see Ashworth 2005). Discourses about misfortune and the indignity of place intensified after the 2000 election, when no mention was made of further funding for urban renewal projects in the Village. But there were two specific events at this time that seemed

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to entrench the blemish of place. The first was a shack fire in June 2001 which claimed more than 400 shacks and the life of a young girl. It had been some time since a single fire had wreaked such devastation. The fire left a gaping black hole on a hillside in the dense weave of shacks in Duncan Village Proper. Local residents blamed each other for causing the fire and wanted to start a witch-hunt for those responsible, but were stopped from doing so by community leaders and police. Anger flared in the aftermath as residents reflected on how the failure of government to provide houses and allow electrical connections in certain shack areas had contributed to their misfortune. A year later, in August 2002, flash floods hit East London and washed away hundreds of shacks along the flood plain of the two streams that run through Duncan Village. The August rains caused the worst flooding in the city since the early 1970s. In this context questions were again asked about why Duncan Village was always at the heart of tragedy and disaster. Why did this place seem cursed and why did so many have to be displaced or die? Wacquant (2006) argues that as discourses of vilification proliferate from below, people start to turn these discourses on each other. Ferguson (1999) makes a similar point in his work on Zambia, where he notes that, by the 1980s, Zambians had begun to blame each other for their economic misfortunes rather than colonialism or neoliberal capitalism, and had begun to engage in popular discourses of self-depreciation and even self hatred (Ferguson 1997). In Duncan Village a similar process was beginning to take root by the early 2000s.

Photo 9.1  The author with Koko Qebeyi at the Sister Aidan memorial statue in Duncan Village, 2010 Source: Photo by Leslie Bank.

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The Ancestors and the Quest for Redemption The meaning and significance of place and history was brought into sharp relief in Duncan Village in the late 1990s with the initiation of a land restitution case, where several thousand families, who mainly lived in Mdsantsane, were claiming compensation for the properties they had lost in the 1960s when the old location was demolished. Communities were called at this time to expand and verify the list of land restitution claimants and at these meetings questions of history and heritage were openly discussed. A group of old-timers led by the likes of Twaku and Meine told stories of the old location as a place of community cohesion, intergenerational respect and social tolerance, a place far removed from the anti-social crime-ridden Duncan Village of today. These nostalgic public narratives initiated a flood of letters to the press and even a weekly newspaper series of articles on the ‘good old days’ in 2000. In the discussion the question of Sister Aidan’s death was raised several times. It was in this context that former comrade and local community leader, Koko Qebeyi, who was interacting closely with the old-timers from the East Bank and the restitution claim, came up with the idea of building a memorial to Sister Aidan in the grounds of the St Peter’s church as a gesture of reconciliation. It was a very interesting project because it was the first and, as far as I know, the only case where a black community has mobilised to apologise and seek forgiveness for their treatment of a white person. There are very few similar cases where whites have voluntarily and spontaneously asked for forgiveness for the way they treated blacks in South Africa. My interest in this case, however, is less in the racial politics of reconciliation than in the manner in which the Sister Aidan initiative became connected to the dissolution of place and the desire for social healing and urban renewal in Duncan Village. In 2001, Qebeyi explained his interest in the Sister Aidan affair in a pamphlet he produced and distributed in the township. I grew up in the heart of East Bank location in Duncan Village not far from Bantu Square, where Sister Aidan Quinlan was brutally murdered. As I grew up I became very much familiar with the 1952 incident [when the police opened fire on the East Bank community] also the death of Dr Elsie Quinlan. My curiosity was mainly and mostly on the death of Sister Aidan, as [her] death was spoken [of] throughout, till this day. Everybody that knew her was saying: ‘If this lady nun was alive, Duncan Village would not be like it is today’, if she was given more chance to live. I therefore attribute [the hardship in] my life, the way I grew up, with the incident of 1952 … I believe that there’s a curse above us all in East London. (Daily Dispatch 15 October 2001) In elaborating his vision, he went on to suggest that the misfortunes in the history of the township over the past 50 years – the misery of forced removal, the floods of the 1970s, the necklace murders of the 1980s, the persistent and deadly shack fires, the many lives lost during the struggle, and the unbroken

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thread of poverty and desperation that have been associated with the place – were connected to the murder of Sister Aidan. He claimed that it was not just the death, but the ‘barbaric manner in which she was murdered’ that angered God and the ancestors. He concluded that the ‘black cloud of smoke’ generated by the burning car and charred flesh had never cleared and still hung over Duncan Village like a pall of shame and despair. In 2000, Qebeyi began to popularise his vision through pamphlets and speeches and gradually won the support of local political and religious leaders for the idea of commissioning a statue to be made and then ceremonially unveiled in the grounds of St Peter’s church in Duncan Village on the occasion of the 50th anniversary of Sister Aidan’s death. He later argued that the devastating fire that claimed over 400 shacks in 2001 was related to the anger of the ancestors. Again, during the floods of July 2002, he saw the rising waters and the havoc they wrought in the community as related to the impatience of the ancestors. The Catholic Church agreed to Qebeyi’s plan, as did various other groups in the city, which provided support and funds to help transform his idea into a reality. Amongst those who actively supported the initiative was a group of land claimants from the old East Bank location. Most of the claimant group were residents of Mdantsane, although a small number also came from the so-called ‘Coloured communities’ on the Buffalo Flats. Qebeyi received particularly strong support from the latter, many of whom were Catholics and some of whom had been members of the St Peter’s congregation at the time of the nun’s murder. Qebeyi realised that his own constituency in the township, especially the people of Ward 7 where he lived, were less interested in Catholicism than in ensuring that the ancestors were appeased. He told them that he had received a vision on the road to Grahamstown, a sign that the ancestors approved of his plan. I had been thinking about the event in the car, of the commemoration. I was wondering how to communicate with the ancestors when out of the blue a narrow sheet of rain came across the road and then quickly disappeared, leaving behind a glowing rainbow in his path. This was a sign from the ancestors that they approved of the event.3 Qebeyi was not known as a religious leader, but as a trusted former Comrade and one who had worked to improve the community. At one level, the Sister Aidan Commemoration was just another community project that involved a combination of social networking, fundraising, political mobilisation and community support. However, the event was made more complex because it needed to be constructed in such a way that it would both satisfy the Catholic Church, whose authorities had for years spoken of a ‘trust betrayed’, and appease the ancestors whose anger produced the black cloud, the disasters, the blemish of place. If the community was cursed, and God and the ancestors had punished them for their actions, it was clear to Qebeyi and his committee that it would be inappropriate for the ritual to address only the concerns of the township’s

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Christian community. After all, it was not they who had consumed the body of the nun and were most in need of redemption. A ritual that only addressed one part of the community would never bring unity, peace and prosperity. Without bringing the ancestors into Duncan Village, ‘nothing would be achieved’. This posed a practical difficulty. The rules made it illegal to herd or slaughter livestock in the township precincts. For the ancestors to be called and for the people to be fed and satisfied, however, it was necessary – said Qebeyi – to bring at least half a dozen beasts into the township and ritually slaughter them. Their bellows needed to be heard by the ancestors far and wide. Thus, along with arrangements for an appropriately Catholic ceremony to be held in the grounds of St Peter’s church, Qebeyi applied for permission from the Buffalo City Council for a herd of cattle to be brought into the township and slaughtered on the day of the ceremony, for ‘the blood of the cattle to be spilled near the place where Sister Aidan was murdered’. Once approval was granted, a decision was made to conduct rituals at two separate sites in the township – one at St Peter’s church, where a plaque and statue would be unveiled, and the other at the old Welsh High School, where 8 cattle and 40 sheep would be slaughtered.

Photo 9.2 Bishop Michael Coleman of the Dominican Order of the Catholic Church (of which Sister Aidan was a member) gives praise at the monument at St Peter’s, with the Premier of the Eastern Cape, Raymond Mhlaba looking on Source: Photo by Koko Qebeyi.

At the ceremony, many local politicians and clerics gathered to recall the history of apartheid and role of the church in the struggle. They spoke of the moment of hysteria and madness that had led to the death of Sister Aidan

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and of the way in which her life and service to the community served as an everlasting beacon of hope for the future. The Catholic bishops were moved by the gesture of the community to organise and initiate the commemoration, hailing it as a special and unique expression of reconciliation. At the formal ceremony at St Peter’s, Qebeyi spoke of the curse and the vision that he had on the road to Grahamstown. As he spoke, a light drizzle fell on the church, which he interpreted as a sign that ‘the Christian and African Gods had come together’ and ‘lifted the curse on the place and its people’. As the audience contemplated the coincidence of the rain clouds and the vision of the lifting of the historic ‘black cloud’, there seemed to be a compelling moment of redemption.

Photo 9.3 Women dressed in traditional Xhosa attire wait to perform at the feast at the old Welsh High School Source: Photo by Koko Qebeyi.

The crowd of several thousand then made their way down the hill from St Peter’s and into the grounds of the former Welsh High School, where many of the leaders of the 1950s had studied as young men. The hall was packed as traditional dancers and musicians performed while food was served, first to the large contingent of invited guests and then to the very large group of Duncan Village residents who had gathered at the hall. It was here that the ancestors were more directly invoked to preside over the events of the day and to accept the request for forgiveness by the people of Duncan Village. As the celebrations went on well into the evening, many of those down at the High School spoke of their hopes for a new beginning for Duncan Village where crime and violence would abate, where children would get a decent schooling,

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where they would have access to proper housing, where there would be jobs for all. They also spoke of their regret that more had not been said about the people of Duncan Village who had died in the 1952 riots and about the ills that the whites had brought to the township through their apartheid laws and forced removal programmes. One man who sat near the front of the hall said that the biggest curse of all that the school that now replaced old Welsh High School – which was the pride and joy of the East Bank and had produced exceptional scholars, political leaders and musicians – was now barely functional. It had to endure the shame of being one of the Eastern Cape schools with a 0 per cent pass rate at matriculation level in the previous year. Although space does not permit a more detailed analysis of Qebeyi’s prophecies and their reception in Duncan Village, it is clear that his primary quest was to restore dignity of place and community. His aim was not to redeem any particular groups of people nor to denigrate the youth or the tsotsis, nor to blame the poor and vindicate the educated elite of the 1950s who had quickly distanced themselves from the actions of the ‘crazed youths’. Instead Qebeyi sought reconciliation and redemption for Duncan Village as a whole, as a place, and for all those who lived in it. He wanted to ensure that the people could again be treated with respect and could start anew with pride and dignity, without a ‘black cloud of shame’ hovering over them that reinforced notions of Duncan Village as ‘social purgatory’ or ‘leprous badlands’. In order to do this, Koko sought spiritual retribution by bringing God and the ancestors into the place of purgatory and asking them, not only to forgive the people of Duncan Village, but also to reside peacefully among them in their place. In some ways Qebeyi’s construction of the problem of place was not dissimilar to the much more widely publicised ideas of Nicholas Tilana Gcaleka, a Transkeian healer and entrepreneur who had visions that told him that the ANC post-election promises of Reconstruction and Development would be stillborn in the Eastern Cape as long of the head of the slain nineteenth-century Xhosa king, Hintsa, was not re-united with his body. Hintsa’s head had been severed and taken as a trophy by British troops in the midnineteenth century as proof that they had killed the great Xhosa chief. Gcaleka claimed that his visions showed him that the head was located in England and that he was being asked to find it. In March 1996, he publicly declared that he had found the skull in a Scottish monastery, only to be embarrassed when tests on the skull revealed that it was neither male nor African in origin (Lalu 2009). Like Qebeyi, Gcaleka placed issues of spiritual balance and the appeasement of the ancestors at the heart of the development equation. He suggested that real development could not occur as long as there was cosmic insecurity and uncertainty. Both sets of prophecies were underpinned by a moment of reconciliation, where God and the ancestors would restore harmony to a world out of kilter with itself. In addressing the nature and experience of urbanism in Duncan Village, Qebeyi’s vision addressed the materiality of floods, fire and poverty, but also spoke, albeit indirectly, to the creation of a new order in the spiritual world.

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Ashworth (2005) and De Boeck (2008) both argue in different ways that spiritual insecurity and a ‘knowledge of the hidden’ are a fundamental part of the urban condition in Africa. In this book, I have avoided being drawn too deeply into a description and analysis of this urban ‘shadow world’, preferring instead to focus on the everyday material and social struggles of urban residents for survival, identity and settlement in the city. I have tried to emphasise the desire among urban residents for a place in the city, and the lengths to which they will often go to defend it, while at the same time drawing critical connections between everyday life, witchcraft and interpretations of misfortune in the making of shack areas and in formal neighbourhoods. In dealing with the indignity of place, I believe that Qebeyi wanted to ensure that he addressed the material and the spiritual simultaneously, where social health and well-being could be achieved while economic and material development ensured that there was ‘a better life for all’. At a personal level, he articulated a romanticised version of the old post-war, cosmopolitan ghetto, the place of his birth, where people were supposedly tolerant of each other, where great music played in the streets, where children still respected their parents, and where open and lively political debate took place in halls and at meetings. New Housing Estates: Conversions in Place In her writing on urban renewal in America, Mary Pattillo (2007) argues that in most instances urban renewal in the ghetto has meant ‘Negro removal’. This is exactly what it has always meant in Duncan Village. In 2003, almost 40 years after the township plan was implemented, the city council announced that a new master plan for the redevelopment of Duncan Village Proper had been developed and that R250 million (US $35 million) would be made available initially for urban renewal in Duncan Village. A Swedish architect, Per Winstrom, attached to an international donor agency, drew up an innovative plan for Duncan Village Proper, which placed three times as many houses in a given area as the old township-style development model. Where the standard low-cost housing model had 15 houses, his model had 46, with a mixture of freehold and rental units. Smaller units were attached to homes as workshops, spazas and business areas, with space for cafes and meeting places. The model presented interplay between public and private space, with kitchens and workshops overlooking recreational and play areas. Enthusiasm for the scheme was fuelled by the erection of a number of demonstration houses in the heart of Duncan Village. The model houses raised expectations and hope that positive and progressive change was on its way. The problem was, however, that before anything could be done thousands of shack residents would have to be cleared to help realise Per Winstrom’s dream of the perfect high-density, work-and-play, pedestrian neighbourhood. It was an impressive version of high-density new urbanism for the urban poor which had one central fault: it could only be implemented once large areas of the township had been cleared of shacks (cf. Daily Dispatch, ‘Live and Work Suburbs’, 15 April 2004).

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By 2005 there was still much talk about implementing the master plan after thousands of families had been removed from the Village permanently or temporarily to places like Reeston and Berlin, where cheap land was available for resettlement. The chief problem for city planners was that, every time they moved a group of families out of Duncan Village to Reeston or elsewhere, the shacks that were left behind did not disappear. Even if they were knocked down (which was rare), it would not be long before other shacks were erected in their place. So when I returned to the field in 2005 to see how the master plan was getting along, there was still no evidence of the much anticipated new high-density, work-and-play residential environments of the master plan. The only evidence of new residential developments in Duncan Village was the existence of two small housing estates built on RDP principles on either side of the Mdantsane bypass that cut around the township. The first development was located on the Braelynn (Indian Area) side of the bypass, between the old Indian Group Area and the township sewage plant. The housing estate was created in 1998 with around 100 one- and two-roomed RDP houses, which were allocated to families from shack areas in Duncan Village Proper. The second settlement, known locally as ‘Toilet City’, was located on an old site and service scheme next to C-section (with toilets on a vacant site). It was developed in 2002. I visited both areas several times in 2005 and interviewed some 20 households in each, which provided enough material for some preliminary observations about the shift from shack life into formal housing in these two areas. In Braelynn Extension, I was immediately struck by how many women had managed to get houses there. Almost 70 per cent of the new home-owners in Braelynn Extension were women, many of them young mothers. This was exactly the opposite of what would have happened during the apartheid years when only male breadwinners were given homes. I was told that rules were broken by male officials who had ‘their favourites’ in the allocation process. This angered residents, who said that some women got into the scheme without even being on the original housing lists. More in-depth investigation revealed that the women of Duncan Village used exactly the same strategies as had their mothers and grandmothers in the old East Bank location. They were prepared to do virtually anything to ensure that they could get their hands on a title deed. They used cash, ‘nice thighs’ and other forms of bribery to get chosen. The gender distribution of new home-owners was more even in the Toilet City scheme, suggesting that there were fewer breaches of trust and agreed procedure there. The owners of the houses were thankful at having been able to move out of the shack areas. As one woman in Toilet City explained: I am a very happy person, because I now live in a brick house like other urban residents. When I was staying in C-section, I honestly did not feel like a complete urban-dweller as it seemed like a temporary place. I am proud that I can now give someone directions to my house, using street names, I have a proper address, which is something I could not do when

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I was living emagalini (in a shack). There is also space now between our houses and it looks beautiful when the township is orderly and regular like this as compared to the many shacks over there in C-section that are very close to each other and do not even have yards. The sense of relief of the women in the Braelynn Settlement at having acquired houses outside of the shack settlements in Duncan Village was also enormous. They spoke passionately about the privilege of having more space, on-site sanitation, being away from the immediate threat of violence and danger, and especially the everyday fear of fire. In several cases I recorded, the move from the shack areas to the new housing estate was associated with ideas of spiritual liberation and religious conversion. One older woman, who had lived a hard life in the yards, explained that she had interpreted her selection to move to Braelynn as a sign from God. She spoke of her shack life as ‘polluted’ and felt the need to join the local New Apostolic Church on arrival in the new housing estate to help ‘cleanse herself’ of her past life, associations and sins. Nkosazana, a middle-aged woman who lived on her own, also reported that she had started going to church three times a week since she had moved to Braelynn Extension. She explained that she received a disability grant because of the ‘pains in her legs’, but that her legs had felt much better since her move away from the shack areas. Nkosazana believed that she had undergone a process of healing since moving away from the shacks and that her church was helping her realise a new life. By undertaking conversion, these women claimed they had broken the patterns of their past and they were determined to make a new start, as one put it: ‘to leave behind that world that had eroded my self-respect’. In these women’s narratives the past was often compressed into a notion of lost time and the present into a version of progress since conversion. With such loaded discourses of change and progress, women converts were often very motivated to illustrate and demonstrate change on a continuous basis. I found their notions of temporality significantly different from, say, those of the single women in the yards, who tended to express life experience more in cyclical terms, linked to the rhythms of the yards (see Chapter 8). The idea that moving required some kind of purification ritual or process of personal renewal affirmed the general sense that Duncan Village, and especially its shack areas, were polluted places that were best left behind. Even where women did not have dramatic conversion experiences, many of them displayed Christian images and symbols in their homes as if to indicate that they wanted their houses to be blessed and protected by God in the way that a Red migrant would put a wreath of herbs or the skull of a sacrificed beast outside his shack to ward off evil spirits and call on the protection of the ancestors. These Christian symbols indicated a kind of quest for salvation and signposted the intentions of the home owners to be godly in their new homes. The idea of godliness and cleanliness were closely associated in women’s minds and, wherever such symbols were present in homes I visited, the homes were generally spotlessly clean, despite in some cases having virtually no

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furnishing. Women also spoke of the idea of ‘domestic duty’, which meant that they were duty bound to keep the home clean and neat. As one woman explained: ‘We learnt this from our mothers, they taught us that the house was our responsibility.’

Photo 9.4  Communities of the Saved: conversions in Braelynn Extension, 2004 Source: Photo by Leslie Bank.

But while many in the new housing estates were poor and only had limited material possessions, there was a strong desire in both these estates for home-owners to convert their houses incrementally in a material sense as well, making their houses into ‘homes’. The pride that women took in their new homes spoke to a history of denial, which had been entrenched by the patriarchal proprietorship of the apartheid era. The fact that women now owned homes in their own name seemed almost unbelievable to them and, for the most part, they spoke of the desire to prove themselves worthy of the citizenship that such ownership had bestowed on them. In the 1950s, many working-class and middle-class blacks adopted a demeanour of respectability that imitated colonial middle-class etiquette and fashions, and showed deference to conservative Christian values and outlooks. The quest for respectability was political and was meant to prove that racism and racial discrimination were unfounded. In a similar way, many new homeowners in the estates were trying to send a message that, given the chance they too could live decent respectable lives and build families and neighbourhoods worthy of modern citizens. In the mid 2000s, women who had long been left

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out in the cold were trying to show that they were worthy of the privilege of receiving and owning a house, and that they were committed to converting their homes into suburban-style dwellings. In the new neighbourhoods, single and married women were the custodians of respectability. Men who acquired houses did not project the same sense of gratitude, and also made much less effort in trying to distance themselves from the life and ways of the areas from which they came. Some men openly complained that they felt hemmed in by the excessive domestic and civic pride of the wives and lovers. They felt that they were forced to do too many tasks around the house to satisfy their wives’ sense of house-proudness. One man said that he was made to feel like a young makoti, a new wife, being bossed around by a mother-in-law. The house-proud attitude of new residents in Braelynn and the unfortunately named, Toilet City was also reflected in their decision to ban shack erection in the backyard of any house. This proved to be a very tricky matter, as some families claimed that they needed to extend into the yards with wood-and-iron structures to accommodate their kin. There was great resistance to this from the committees and most home-owners, who said that once they accepted this sort of behaviour both estates would be awash with shacks and they would be back where they started, in a slum that no-one could be proud of. One of the problems, however, was that rates and service charges came to almost R150 a month ($20). Some families did not have this kind of cash to spare and wanted to earn extra income by erecting shacks in their yards and renting them out. At the same time, they acknowledged that this would transform the character of the settlement away from what most home-owners wanted. One committee member explained: ‘Some people want to put profit before dignity and we cannot accept this because our lives have been compromised for too long in the shack areas.’ Nonthemba’s house is in Braelynn Extension. She was proud to be photographed inside her house and in her front garden. The fence, the path with bits of lawn on both sides and the open front door were significant. In the old township the back door was often the point of entry for visitors. Nonthemba’s house faced the street and even had a small concrete strip along the front that could be used as a verandah of a kind. There was an openness to the street which had not been seen in the location since the 1950s, as well as a sense of pride in allowing others to look in and see what she had achieved. In some other houses, the owners had replaced the small steel windows with larger wooden ones, which was a sign of wealth and upward mobility. The other outward sign of upward mobility was the acquisition of an engraved, solid wood front door to replace the basic steel doors that came with the houses. The plastering and painting of external walls was also commonly carried out, to improve the look of the house. The aim of most owners was to try to get the outside of the house looking decent before addressing the inside. Nonthemba’s reception room was always meant to be the show-piece, the front stage of her home for public view and perusal. This is why the front door was sometimes left open, to allow selected others in the neighbourhood

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(but not thieves and gangsters) to gaze in admiration at the extent of her domestic achievement. The signs of success included a well-appointed lounge cabinet with television, ornaments, family photographs and a pot plant on top. Indoor plants were used in new houses to create an ambience in the lounge once the other basic units, such as television and cabinet, were in place. The other clear sign that Nonthemba was making progress with her home was the construction of internal walls in her house. To cut costs at the time of construction, many of the houses were built with no internal walls. The segmentation of floor space into bedrooms and lounge and kitchen space was seen as desirable and necessary by many owners, but it required money to make these alterations. Those who were unable to divide their domestic spaces into specialised areas or zones, or did not wish to, were said to be either unsophisticated, rurally oriented people or just very poor.4 The other tell-tale signs of success were kitchen stoves, fridges and vinyl on the kitchen floor. The shiny pots on the kitchen cupboard were a symbol of domestic pride and indicated that Nonthemba kept her kitchen clean and tidy. The only notable absence in her package was the lack of a hi-fi system in the lounge cabinet. Music systems were more common in male-headed households, however, and were less frequently seen in the homes of single women. As I watched the domestic etiquette of housewives and mothers in the new housing areas, I noticed that the relations in the housing estate were strangely formal. They deliberately broke with the informality of the shack social world: they insisted that visitors introduce themselves at the front door and insisted that they come to the front door rather than wander in at the back. Gardens were carved out of the hard soil and most owners preferred to have their yards fenced, with a garden gate that led up a path to the front door with little patches of lawn on either side. This process of home-making created a distinct and discrete domestic and living space which was very different from shack life, where everyone lived on top of each other. New home-owners cultivated and protected that distance, and I found that owners were not always close to their neighbours, unless they had children of the same or equivalent ages. Children would move between houses, seeking out those with good television sets or other activities to relieve their boredom. They would also play in the streets and made the social contacts that encouraged parents to get to know each other. If children were the conduits for sociability inside the housing estate, it was the men who invested the most effort in retaining links with their former neighbourhoods. In Toilet City I interviewed quite a number of unemployed men who had moved from the old C-section, but they said that they did not really like the new housing estate and that they found it to be boring and sterile. It is a place where our ‘women do their thing’. One man explained: I find that there is nothing to do here at Toilet City and I go back to the old neighbourhood whenever I can. I have friends and things to do, we chat, play dice, hang out and socialise. It is much better than here but I sometimes

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stay here during the day because of the crime problem. Crime is high in this area and I have to watch the house sometimes when my wife is at work. So the quest for a dignified new address and for neighbourhood respectability was often set against a background of criss-crossing strategies of moving in and out of shack areas. Quite a number of the new home-owners I spoke to retained their shacks in Duncan Village, which they used to raise rents. Others went back into the Village all the time to do business, to sell cooked food to schoolchildren or residents, or other basic goods items. One woman even continued to run a shebeen from the Village shack while she lived in her new house. She said that she did not want to move her shebeen to Braelynn because ‘there are too few people here’ and ‘the people do not like to drink as much on this side’. If they want to drink, she continued, they generally go back to the Village. The advantage of living across the road from Duncan Village was that owners could be both part of and apart from this social world. On the one hand they wanted desperately to get out and distance themselves from shack life, while on the other they needed the income that could be generated in the informal economy there to stay alive. This created a situation where many claimed that they hated a place that they visited everyday to make their livelihoods. Dead Bodies and ‘New Comrades’ At the beginning of this book I quoted Appadurai (1996) on the topic of place-making, where he argued that the re-making of place and the creation of a new locale often required a moment of colonisation, where violence was used to assert power and announce the arrival of a new regime. In this book, I noted that the violence of the 1952 uprising was the moment at which the social regime of the East Bank started to dissolve and the drift into the apartheid era of racial modernism became inevitable. Later I suggested that the changes that had been occurring in Duncan Village from the early 1980s were consolidated in the uprising of 1985, which finally placed the township out of the reach of the apartheid authorities. This was the moment when the triumph of the Comrades as the de facto rulers was announced. In concluding I want to reflect briefly on the events of April and May 2009, which saw four criminals murdered in Duncan Village by self-proclaimed vigilante groups, and consider whether these dead bodies do not speak of a new moment of transition, away from the government-led control of the township to a reassertion of new forms of people’s power. Since the collapse of the old street committees of the 1990s, crime has increased in Duncan Village in an exponential fashion, with the number of cases of theft, assault, murder and rape steadily increasing. In some instances, popular anger at the actions of criminals has led to outbursts where the community accuse the police of failing to do their job and threaten to take matters into their own hands. In other cases, it has been reported that the police have intervened in the nick of time to prevent residents from administering

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popular justice to alleged criminals. In 2002, for example, 20 alleged vigilantes from Duncan Village abducted three alleged criminals in the township and tortured them before the police intervened, saving the hostages from certain death. Similar sorts of cases were recorded during the mid 2000s, reflecting the growing dissatisfaction with the crime situation in the township. In 2006, schisms in the Duncan Village ANC leadership led to increasing criticism of the city leadership and its management of the former township. The ANC Youth League in Duncan Village, for example, demanded the immediate resignation of the mayor (Daily Dispatch, 12 September 2006). Although there were hints of the rise of vigilantism and the consolidation of an alternative system of authority in the former township during the 2000s, no concrete and lasting alternative centre of power developed until a group of youths from the Pefferville location over the road from Duncan Village mutilated the body of a 16-year-old youth, Cedric Exford, with machetes on Easter Monday in 2009. Exford later died in hospital. Duncan Village residents immediately went to the police, indicating that they knew who was responsible for the murder and asking the police to take action. They alleged that some youths, who belonged to gangs, were hiding in shacks in Pefferville, and had also been responsible for numerous attacks and robberies in Duncan Village. The police ignored the residents’ call. The community then asked for a meeting with the police on 28 April 2009 to air their grievances about the state of policing in the township and seek a way to resolve the situation. The meeting was held. And at the meeting the police were asked by the community to accompany Duncan Village residents on patrols of high-crime areas. It was arranged that police and community members would rendezvous at a particular point, but the police never turned up. Community leaders then sent an ultimatum to the police saying that, if they did not respond to their calls, Village residents would have to take matters into their own hands. The leader of the Duncan Village Crime Prevention Forum, Revd Odwa Tyeni, urged the community to give the police another chance. He condemned vigilantism as a solution to the crime problem in the area. But the community insisted that ‘there was no visible policing in the Village’, that ‘the police in Duncan Village do not do work and if they do, they are not working at Duncan Village’. One resident explained: ‘The police have failed us as a community because they knew all along about the crime in the area, but did not act, even when the community asked for assistance’ (Daily Dispatch, 5 May 2009). On Sunday 3 May 2009, after the police failed to respond, community members took matters into their own hands. An angry mob of around 300 people went on the rampage, following a meeting about the situation, and attacked and killed an alleged robber in Duncan Village. The police intervened while the attack was in progress and saved a second suspect from being killed. On Monday 4 May, the vigilantes met again and another suspected criminal was hunted down and killed. The police tried to stop the vigilantism by conducting a ‘blue light’ raid of Duncan Village on the same day, targeting shebeens, taverns and crime ‘hotspots’, and made use of ‘blue lights’ to increase police visibility (Daily Dispatch, 5 May 2009). The intervention

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had little impact. On Tuesday 5 May, the vigilantes met again and killed another two suspected criminals. In three days the mobs had killed four alleged criminals in the Village. At a meeting at the community centre on Wednesday 6 May the community vowed that it would continue with what they called ‘a cleaning out of the area’ (Daily Dispatch, 11 May 2009). One of the vigilante leaders, Ernest Songoni, explained to the press that the community was ‘tired of watching these people destroying us, while we sit and watch’. He said that it was time to take up arms and do what the police were unable to do, track down and punish the criminals. ‘We are tired of living in fear, being victims of ill-discipline and lawlessness’. On Tuesday 12 May, a week after the killings, a crowd of 3,000 people gathered to carry forward the action against criminals and to protest against the inertia of the police. To prevent the crowd from carrying out mob justice on a wide scale, the police moved with stun grenades and rubber bullets. Police spokesman Stephen Marias said that the crowd had become aggressive and had started attacking the people, which made it necessary for them to retaliate: ‘The police asked them nicely in isiXhosa and in English to stop what they were doing, but they started throwing stones at us.’ After the mob was scattered one Duncan Village woman, who did not want to be identified, said that the attacks were getting worse, with some people in the mob taking advantage of the situation. In one incident they ransacked a house and stole drinks and snacks from the fridge. This is bad because it is affecting the parents because they are not the ones who send the children out to rob. This is the mentality of the 1980s and people need to get it out of their minds. (quoted in Daily Dispatch 12 May 2009) Others agreed, saying that it would not be long before the vigilantes became too powerful and turned into thugs themselves. Many stated that they would prefer the police to do their job rather than have alternative law enforcement structures in the township. The similarities between the emerging situation in Duncan Village today and the situation that prevailed in the 1980s are interesting. In the 1980s Comrades wrested control of the township from the apartheid state and instituted their own system of patriarchal control in the streets, yards and Village neighbourhoods. They set up their own systems of justice and presided over people’s courts that meted out punishment to all those who committed crimes and disobeyed the rules of the Comrades. In August 1985, these courts supported the ‘necklacing’ of three women on the hill next to St Peter’s church. In the late 2000s, there were divisions in the ANC over the politics of service delivery and crime prevention in the township. There has also been a rebellion within the local ANC structures, where the ANC Youth League and others members distanced themselves from those who were loyal to the former President Thabo Mbeki and declared their allegiance to Jacob Zuma. But this factionalism was not behind the vigilantism of 2009, which appeared to be led by former member of the civic who had

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run the township disciplinary structures in the 1980s and early 1990s. These men were hardened street warriors who did not take kindly to the grip that small-time street criminals had over the township. Nor did they care much for the self-serving political elites on the city council, many of whom were their former comrades. What they seek to institute is a return to the old order, where streets are run by street committees, areas by area committees, and where the comrades of old could come out to show people how the community can be properly managed with instilling discipline and respect. By declaring that rapists were among their prime targets, the ‘new Comrades’ expressed the desire to institute a new regime for the management of gender relations, one in which women would know their place but would not be violated by wantonly violent and undisciplined youths. It was precisely this agenda that the woman who did not want to be identified was referring to when she warned that those who now claim to protect them will also want to dominate them. For many women, the idea of returning to the people’s courts of the 1980s was unthinkable, and this is why they wanted the police to do their job and institute a system of law and order that entrenched women’s rights rather than to return to the tyranny of the 1980s. Conclusion In September 2009, it was announced that several hundred low-cost houses in Reeston were finally ready to accept shack-dwellers from Duncan Village. In terms of the original plan 1,400 shack families would move to Reeston to open up space for the Duncan Village redevelopment project to go ahead. There was great excitement that the project would finally get off the ground. But before the first families had even reached Reeston, their houses had already been occupied by locals in that area, who argued they had a prior right to the houses. Councillor Qebeyi from Duncan Village confirmed that the houses had been occupied illegally and families were forced to return to their shacks in Duncan Village empty-handed; some of their shacks had already been demolished. This situation is, of course, not unique to Duncan Village or East London. The illegal occupation of new low-cost houses has occurred in other cities, including Cape Town, where illegal occupancy is a constant source of tension on N2 housing projects. The problem for Duncan Village is that redevelopment is predicated on the combination of removals and land clearance, which is simply not occurring because of the slow delivery of substitute houses (in places like Reeston) and the reluctance of those who are removed to destroy their shacks. Over the past decade, groups of shackdwellers, usually fire victims, have been moved out of Duncan Village in dribs and drabs – some say several thousand individuals have been given the opportunity to move – but without having any significant impact on dedensification and the reduction of the shack population in the village. In fact, it is well known that many of those who move hold onto their shacks to rent

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them, or even sell their newly acquired RDP houses to return to the Village, if they cannot make a living in the housing estates on the outskirts of the city. The xenophobic violence which gripped the townships in 2008 was in no small part related to the illegal sale of RDP houses. Foreign Africans, who fear the high levels of crime and violence in the township and feel a natural sense of vulnerability, have been desperate to get out of these environments by renting or buying houses elsewhere. One of the easiest options open to them has been to take advantage of the poverty of new housing beneficiaries, who are often willing to sell off their new assets when they run into difficulties with debt. Under the law, low-cost houses are not to be sold by beneficiaries for eight years after construction, but since the law was not being enforced and foreigners were prepared to pay good prices to take houses without title deeds, many transactions were concluded. The sight of Zimbabweans, Kenyans and Nigerians occupying government houses that were meant for South Africans was, to my mind, one of the major causes of the explosion of xenophobic violence in 2008. In Reeston, fewer houses were sold to foreigners than in other cities, but the failure of the redevelopment plan to come to fruition deepened the sense of despondency in Duncan Village and the belief by local people that their neighbourhoods and lives were doomed. In this chapter I have focused on local responses to the dissolution of place in Duncan Village associated with the transformation of the apartheid township into a hyper-ghetto of escalating poverty, crime and violence. Although Duncan Village lacks the syndicated crime and drug scene of a Brazilian favelas or inner-city slums in big US cities, life in the former township has changed radically since the late apartheid days, when employment levels were still fairly high and law and order was maintained, first by the South African police and then by the street and area committees of the DVRA. Without active policing from the new South African Police Service, and with the collapse of the anti-apartheid civic structures in the 1990s, the Village has become a dangerous and lawless space where petty criminals and street thugs rule the roost. It is also a place where fewer and fewer people have stable formal sector jobs and, if they do, it is often their desire to move away from their old neighbourhoods. Instead of making the transition from township to suburb, I have suggested that Duncan Village has descended into the category of the advanced marginality of the hyper-ghetto, despite the offer of considerable funds by the Presidency to lift the township out of poverty. In this chapter I have highlighted local-level responses to Duncan Village’s fall from grace by exploring different spiritual and material conversions of place and identity. First, I explored the apocalyptic prophecies and practices of Koko Qebeyi, who called on God and the ancestors to restore spiritual balance, dignity and a sense of pride in the place with a distinguished history. Second, I turned to an analysis of the attitudes and strategies of new home-owners in post-apartheid housing estates on the fringes of the historic township, and the ways in which they adjusted their lives to recover a sense of pride and meaning in their new houses. Finally, I concluded with a discussion of the recent violence and vigilantism in the Village, which I also related to the

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dissolution of place and the quest for local urban renewal, and men’s desire to again use redemptive violence as a means to remake Duncan Village as a new kind of patriarchal place. As I conclude this book and reflect on the post-apartheid changes in the township, I continue to be struck by the lack of resistance from the provincial and local political elites to neoliberal policies which have brought the industrial economy of the city and the region to its knees. I am also appalled by the lack of foresight and ingenuity on the part of local planners who envisioned urban renewal in Duncan Village, and the inertia and corruption of the system of local government that has failed to transform real opportunity into meaningful changes in people’s lives. The fact that over 300 people still have to share a single toilet in this place, despite all the funds that have been made available for urban renewal, is nothing short of criminal. There are very few other townships in South Africa, or ghettos elsewhere in the world, that have squandered the kind of opportunities that were presented to the leadership of Duncan Village, the city and province in the form of the Presidential projects of 1994 and 2003. These generous offers will not recur in South Africa soon, and the struggle for a better future will have to continue to be fought from below. Like the ruined arcades through which Walter Benjamin wandered and tried to re-imagine Paris, so too will the residents of Duncan Village have to use their ruin on the urban landscape as a vehicle through which to re-imagine and press for a better future.

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Conclusion

The Heart of Redness I started this book with a quote from Townsmen or Tribesmen where the Mayers argued that the cultural distinction between Red and School was immediately evident to anyone who travelled into the countryside in the Eastern Cape. The two styles of dress, bodily deportment, and cultural expression, they noted, were starkly evident in every Xhosa village and rural location they visited. The oppositional nature of these styles seemed to them to be central to the cultural drama of the region. Philip and Iona Mayer choose the African townships of East London as the ethnographic canvass on which to map out and explore the social and cultural contours, meanings and content of this division. In retrospect, and especially given the Mayers’ fascination with the Red style, it is perhaps surprising that they did not choose to work in a remote village. Nevertheless, there can be no doubt that rural communities across the Eastern Cape were culturally divided in the ways that the Mayers suggested. Mark Gevisser (2007) reminds us of the salience of this divide in everyday life in Transkei in his biography of former South African President, Thabo Mbeki. He recalls how the Mbeki family settled in Mbeluweleni location in the 1940s: Govan and Epainette Mbeki built their homestead on a hill at the entrance to the qaba (Red) side of the village, looking across the dry river bed to the corrugated zinc school room and the gqoboka (School) homesteads beyond. They were thus at the frontier of Western civilisation and traditional Xhosa culture, directly between the School – the last outpost of civilisation to the west – and the ‘Red’ people to the east. (2007:50) Gevisser’s detailed narrative of social life in Mbeluweleni in the 1950s through the childhood years of Thabo Mbeki stresses the social salience of Red/School for everyday life and social organisation at the village level. Archie Mafeje, the Eastern Cape anthropologist from the Engcobo district of Transkei, wrote a Masters’ thesis on the significance of Red and School in his home village and adjacent settlements in the mid-1960s. He endorsed these categories as real and powerful in his fieldwork context, but criticised the Mayers for essentialising Redness. Mafeje felt that the Mayers under-estimated the capacity of Xhosa-speaking people for modernity and change. This led Mafeje to assert that they made too much of the Red style and exaggerated its importance in the city. This is a conclusion I have endorsed in this book based on my own detailed restudy of social life and cultural style in the East London’s locations in the 1950s. 2 35

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However, while indicating that the Red-style was perhaps less influential in East London in the 1950s than the Mayers suggested, it is important not to dismiss the significance of Redness as cultural style in the Eastern Cape during the late twentieth century. In his careful ethnography, Patrick McAllister (2006) has shown how apartheid policies and the migrant labour system allowed Red identities and outlooks to be reinvented and entrenched in parts of the former Transkei. He argues that throughout this period Redness was deeply embedded in everyday social practice in rural areas and existed as a set of unconscious practical dispositions, a habitus in the Bourdieuan sense, linked to the project of building the umzi (homestead) as a particular kind of social, cultural and economic project (McAllister 2006: 51-61). Migrant remittances and gendered influx control helped rural patriarchs to continue to build the umzi under apartheid. The Mayers predicted that de-agrarianisation and proletarianisation in the homelands would destroy the commitment to Redness. In their model, as in that of McAllister, there is a direct correlation between the robustness of peasant agriculture and the survival of Redness. Mayer projected this model onto the city. I have argued that Redness was always something different in town. It was removed from its rural habitus and was thus more open, pliable, and performative. Reds had to fight for a space and survival in the city and had organise themselves accordingly. Following Ferguson (1999), I have argued that, to be Red in town, depended on the ability to convincingly perform this cultural style and persuade others of an authentic sense of belonging to it. In town, Reds built new traditions, social networks and institutions based on a commitment to their ancestors, their homesteads and their rural lifestyles. In my analysis I suggest that as Redness weakened in the countryside it appeared to strengthen in the city because the apartheid state actively set out to defend Red migrants there, as well as their versions of patriarchy and their ethnicised cultural styles, creating in the migrant hostels a space for the reinvention of Redness. The book has clearly shown how this process of reconstruction occurred in East London and how a conservative Red migrant culture became entrenched and was able to reproduce itself in relative isolation of changes in the countryside. The moment of truth for the survival of Redness in the city, however, came when the state converted single sex hostels into family units in the late 1990s, thus stripping away the primary site of Red cultural production in the city. While hostel dwellers scattered into the shacks and other areas and men with similar outlooks and values still stuck together and drank beer, Redness collapsed as a distinctive urban cultural style in Duncan Village in the 2000s, although the masculinities around which the style was constructed still linger on. So if the Red style, as I have argued, is no longer influential in the township, what has happened to the politics of Red and School, which reached its apogee during the 1990s when hostel dwellers and township residents clashed across the country and almost derailed the transition of democracy. My suggestion here is that the political drama has now been displaced to the countryside where cultural styles are being politicised in the struggle for

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access to development. In his recent acclaimed novel, In the Heart of Redness, Zakes Mda (2000) predicted that the politics of Red and School would rise again in the Eastern Cape after apartheid with the intrusion of foreign capital and neo-liberalism into rural areas, where such intrusions would ignite anger and resentment amongst the custodian of tradition. However, foreign capital has not come pouring in to the Eastern Cape and former Red families and communities no longer blindly resist modernity and development. In fact, the struggles in the Eastern Cape countryside today are over the uneven and limited commitment of the post-apartheid state to rural development, which seems only to penetrate former School areas. Tensions and conflicts exist between elected government officials and traditional leaders across the region are often undergirded by old Red and School divisions. Traditional leaders claim that they have been ignored and their subjects are being discriminated against simply because they come from poorly educated families. Chief and headmen say that most elected-ANC officials are from old School families and favour those in their own networks. The politics of development has thus reignited sensitivity to Red and School as a social division in rural areas. It appears now that building the ndlu (the house), the site of service delivery and family consumption, has replaced the older agrarian project of building the umzi. In the countryside Red and School appear today more as politicised ethnicities than as different life orientations and forms of rural habitus. The Myth of Rurality Leonie Sandercock (2003: 33) once poignantly remarked that: “Cities, like nations, keep their shape by moulding their citizens’ understanding of the past, causing them to forget those events that do not accord with a righteous image, while keeping alive those memories that do”. She wrote in a later book that for cities to reinvent themselves to change their ‘core stories’ to embrace new possibilities (see Sandercock 2003). In a similar vein, Milan Kundera (1980) reminded us in his novel, The Unbearable Lightness of Being, that the struggle of people against power was often a struggle of memory against forgetting. Indeed, if part of the challenge of rebuilding African cities is the need to discover new narratives of place, then I believe that East London needs to find its cityness and contest representations of the city as a ‘rural backwater’, a place of Redness, where local engagements with modernity and change are necessarily shallow and insignificant. In fact, I have argued throughout this book the alleged ruralness of Duncan Village, projected through the Trilogy, forms part of the ‘blemish of place’ that haunts attempts at successful urban renewal and development in the city. One of the challenges for the recovery of place in the city, I believe, is to dispel the pervasive and powerful myth of ruralness that limits certain versions of the history of place and with it possibilities for change in the future. Representations of the gruesome murder of Sister Aidan have fed into constructions of the East Bank as rural and politically unsophisticated. Twenty years after Townsmen or Tribesmen, Tom Lodge wrote the Pan African

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Congress (PAC) flourished in East London in the early 1960s because it tuned into the rurally-orientated, migrant Africanism in the city. My own research clearly shows, firstly, that the PAC was never a powerful political force in East London and, secondly, that it won support mainly from urban youths (many of whom were former gangsters) critical of the lack of radicalism and political urgency of the ANC at this time. The assumed ‘rural otherness’ of East London has been further entrenched by recent cultural histories of the region that see rural areas as dominated by a subaltern political imagination, which rejected the enlightenment and modernity (see, for example, Crais 2002; Redding 2006). What such studies tend to ignore is that the rural hinterland of the Eastern Cape was also littered with mission schools, teacher training colleges, nursing colleges and, of course, Fort Hare College that produced some of the leading African politicians and intellectuals of the post-war years. For those involved in these circuits of learning and advancement, East London was a city of great significance, a place to engage new cultural styles and political ideas. Marshall Berman (1988) defines modernity less as a stage of development than as a social experience of something new, of change, of a world in flux. Brenner (1998) argues that modernity marks a unique type of temporary consciousness, a reflexive understanding of time that stresses the newness of the present era and its qualitative transcendence of the past. It was this consciousness and excitement rather than the weight of tradition that swirled through the streets of the East Bank in the 1950s. I argued that the location was dominated by an enormous excitement about the possibilities of positive change. In this period the image of the country-bumpkin was scorned by the street smart urban youth and intellectuals, who turned to the ANC to champion their demands for civil and political rights. The proximity of East London to all the good mission schools ensured that many of the political luminaries in the African National Congress and Eastern Cape African middle classes spent time in East London. Student leaders at the University of Fort Hare, like Nelson Mandela, Walter Sizulu and others, frequently came to East London for weekends and for political meetings and education. The African National Congress regarded East London as ‘their campus at the coast’, where they could test political ideas and strategies and launch the campaigns of the strong and robust ANC Youth League. Given the centrality of East London as a place of recreation and activism for Fort Hare students and the amount of political education and mobilisation that took place there, it is surprising the East London is often written out of the political biographies of prominent Eastern Cape activists. In these accounts, such as Mandela’s Long Walk to Freedom, the Eastern Cape is primarily constructed as a space of rural authenticity, a repository of African tradition, which is later contrasted with the urbanity of the big city and the Reef townships of the 1940s and 1950s. What so many of these accounts omit is the extent to which this leadership and middle class more generally tasted post-war urban life and optimism, with its music, sports and politics in the Eastern Cape, before they reached the City of Gold. In this book, I have argued

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that the East Bank emerged as a regional equivalent of Sophiatown. I take issue with constructions that deny East London it’s urbanity and dislocate that sense of cultural excitement and dynamism to a handful of self-selected metro-urban places, like Sophiatown and District Six. One need only remember that, as early as the 1930s, East London was home to the Africa’s largest African labour union, the Independent Industrial and Commercial Workers Union led by Clements Kadalie, a regional headquarters of the ANC and home to many of its founding fathers and intellectuals, like Dr Walter Rubusana, who hosted Monica Hunter during her stint of fieldwork there in 1932. Indeed, if part of the challenge of rebuilding African cities is the need to discover new narratives of place, then I believe there is a deep well of hidden history waiting to be unearthed in East London. The images and text in this book provide glimpses of powerful and poignant alternative histories of the city that offer new role models and an enchantment with life and identity that could help to drive the city forward. Our failure to adequately recognise and acknowledge alternative urban histories of engagement and struggle in South Africa feeds into contemporary development discourse, which constructs the Eastern Cape as a rural place of poverty, hopelessness and tradition. As new chieftaincies are created and kingdoms recognised in the post-apartheid period, few seem to remember that in the 1950s, the Eastern Cape was arguably at the epicenter of African intellectual and cosmopolitan cultural innovation in South Africa. In their search for a new future, the people of Duncan Village desperately rediscover and rewrite their own illustrious pasts – and not only remember the shameful moments, such as those associated with the murder of Sister Aidan. Gender and the Feminist City Another key line of argument in the book has been around women’s agency and the discovery of what might be called the feminist city. I have analysed gender in this book in an attempt to challenge the obsession with race in the historical and sociological literature on the apartheid city. I agree with Belinda Bozzoli in her characterisation of apartheid as a system of ‘racial modernism’, as a planning regime that recast racial subjectivities and deepened the racial divide in urban areas, but I have also found Rabinow’s notion of middle modernism instructive and illuminating. For Rabinow, middling modernism differed from high modernism by virtue of its focus on the house and the housing estate rather than the city centre. For him domestic social engineering was at the core of middling modernism, which involved tearing down old neighbourhoods and rebuilding them from scratch. I have argued that urban apartheid planning was centrally about the township house. It was predicated on forced removal, slum clearance, the destructions of pre-existing neighbourhoods and the reconstruction of Africans families in uniform state rental houses. In Duncan Village resettlement did not go exactly to plan, as we have seen, leaving traces of the social fabric in the new township. But a

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new social order was implemented that not only enforced racial segregation and control but reconstituted patriarchy. In the East Bank, older forms of state-assisted patriarchy focused on extradomestic control. Educated African men advised white city fathers on the control and management of the public affairs. There was little attempt to interfere with African urban home life before apartheid. As long as taxes were collected and lodgers controlled, the city fathers were happy. This situation created spaces for women, especially independent women, to infiltrate and dominate the location economy and by extension streets and neighbourhoods. Their homes and business, folded into one, slipped out of male control. They used their control of property to good effect, claiming a large share of migrants earning by renting rooms, selling food, liquor and sex. By the 1950s, men had lost control of women’s bodies and earnings, and this generated great anxiety for the state and for African patriarchs. One indicator of the emergent feminist city was the extent to which women participated in political life and street protest in the East Bank. Despite not holding leadership positions in the African National Congress, independent women were radicalising agents within city politics as they fearlessly confronted the state (see Mager 1999). To crush women’s growing power the state had to physically destroy their homes and reconstruct a township along middling modernist lines where the state enlisted African male industrial workers to control their wives and daughters. In this sense, apartheid planning was as much about the reconstitution of patriarchy as it was about the reassertion of racial division. This is a critical insight because it identifies patriarch as the social glue that held the system together, as the invisible staircase that connected different racial and social layers in a divided society. It was the connective tissue of racial modernism. Once the new patriarchal platform of middling modernism had been firmly established, the main conflict in the township was no longer between married men and location matriarchs, or between country bumpkins and city slickers, but rather between different generations or categories of men. The structural aspects of the generational divide are again well documented by Bozzoli (2004) in her work on Alexandra, but in this book I have focused specifically on gender relations and changing masculinities, how different categories of men, from hostel-bound Red migrants to new industrial workers struggling to fulfill their new roles and responsibilities as household breadwinners. I have also explored continuities and change in youth identity politics in the township, explaining the rise of the Comrades more as a cultural style than simply as a political formation. I showed how domestic forms, like ‘living together’, became a badge of generational freedom and social independence, how the densely settled shack areas emerged as residential spaces of choice for young men and backyard shacks for single mothers. But I also show how the demand for patriarchal power and control was clearly reflected in the politics of liberation and how men sought to control women, through controlling consumption and banning spaza shops and shebeens. By the 1990s and especially with the change of government and the affirmation of women’s rights in the new constitution, township women finally managed to turn

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survival tactics back into purposive strategies. They once again took matters into their own hands, creating new families without men, controlling yard spaces and pursuing options in the informal economy. With de-industrialisation, I have shown how many urban mothers and daughters preferred to be ‘married to the state’ through welfare grants and foster care money than to their unreliable and errand township men, who were no longer breadwinners anyway. This book explores these and other strategies as women now seek to recover the feminist city of their grandmothers’ generations. I reflect on the difficulties of this project in the post-apartheid context and I highlight the tenacity of women’s desires for better lives and their daily struggles for dignity, respect and power in the post-apartheid context where these hopes have been dashed due to the failure of urban renewal. Back to Fractured Urbanism In the introduction of this book I invoked the concept of fractured urbanism and would like to return to the concept briefly in conclusion. Urban political economists like to polarise the capitalist city into the marginal and privileged zones, arguing the neo-liberalism has deepened this social and economic divide, segregating and excluding people in new and complex ways (see Davis 2006; Waquant 2008; Low 2003). I have embraced these perspectives, arguing that the residents of Duncan Village remain socially marginal and economically excluded today, sixteen years after apartheid. I have suggested that post-apartheid urban renewal programmes have failed to date and that de-industrialization has destroyed the old township working class, which now looks more like Waquant’s precariate than the old apartheid black proletariat. But I have not suggested that, as so many of those who write from this perspective do, that all we see at the margins of the post-apartheid city is social breakdown, violence and dissolution. My central story is not about people who have lost all hope and now bury themselves in salvage Christianity, or in the shadow world of occult obsessions. My interest has been in the everyday rationalities, meanings and struggles that have shaped place-making, power and identity in the apartheid and post-apartheid township. It is a story in which ordinary people are not simply vectors of larger social and economic processes, but are active agents in their own lives and settlements, claiming and reclaiming control of their homes, yards, streets and neighbourhoods, infusing the city with their narratives, meanings and inscriptions. I have evoked the concept of fractured urbanism to develop a more complex understanding of the space of the post-apartheid township as socially compact, culturally complex and internally diverse. I set the concept up against the idea of splintering urbanism, which Graham and Marvin (2000) developed to refer to new urban communities structured around decentralised urban infrastructure located beyond the infrastructural grid of the conventional city. Technological innovation and privatisation, they argue, has allowed infrastructure to disperse spatially and communities to emerge outside the city that are still highly connected to the urban and global economy. My

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idea of fractured urbanism focuses on the poorer parts of the city where the old social and physical infrastructure has become overloaded and hopelessly over-stretched as new waves of urbanization and settlement infiltrate and overlay older social layers, communities and infrastructural grids. As the pressure mounts so crack and ruptures begin to appear. I suggested that the process of fractured urbanism has created a new urban social ecology comprised of diverse socio-spatial communities and niches on the fringes of the city with their own characteristics and social dynamics. The social processes involved seem to be the opposite of those associated with splintering urbanism. Fractured urbanism implies a clinging and cloying onto existing urban infrastructure and growing competition for access to it, rather than breaking away. It is centrally underpinned by a desire for greater rather than less dependence on the state and usually involves social compression rather than technological innovation. Fractured urbanism encourages what Geertz called social involution, a tendency towards inwardly-looking social elaboration and cultural complexity among poor communities entrapped within confined spaces, but it also encourages individuals and households to make connects beyond the space of the township in their struggle for survival. In the way I have presented fractured urbanism in this book there are clearly tensions between spatial and social compression, on the one hand, the clinging onto urban spaces and opportunities, and the desire for mobility, on the other. Cracks and fissures occur in the township social fabric and template as new residential areas engulf older ones and new shack areas sprout up alongside and in-between formal houses. This creates new cracks, splits and seams in an intertwined, but fluid environment. Social fluidity and physical movement, which reshuffle people in confined spaces, is central to fractured urbanism. In Duncan Village this movement was often driven by domestic decompression and fragmentation associated with social pressures and structural forces, such as fires and floods. Where cracks emerged, social webs of connectivity knit together the torn social fabric. Kinship networks plastered over fissures and cut across residential boundaries and borders, as did social clubs allegiances and other networks. My analysis shows that there was also nothing linear about household fragmentation and regrouping, no simple path from social cohesion to disintegration. Domestic groups were fluid and constantly being made and remade. Sometimes youths left their parents’ homes to move into the shack areas only to return home after running out of money. In other cases, young women moved out and came back when they had children, setting up house in the backyard, only to move off again later. There was also active movement between town and country as many township residents tried to retain access to networks and resources outside of Duncan Village in their struggle to avoid entrapment. Fire contributed to the fear of over-committing to the township The fracturing urbanism encourage new political dynamics as the earlier forms of management and social control have dissolved and powerful civic organisations have collapsed, creating spaces for new players and brokers to enter the scene. The political vacuum has allowed deal makers, patrons

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and brokers to weld constituencies and clients together in new formations. In the previous chapter, we saw how Koko Qebeyi pulled people together across the township with his prophecies and quasi-religious narratives of change. This laid the foundation of him being elected as a councilor. Similarly, street gangs and vigilante groups’ tussle for power within and beyond their local areas, struggling with the police and officials for control of parts of the location. I disagree with Simone (2004) who argues that urban Africans tend to avoid place-making because their lives are always so precarious and mobile, and that they have an aversion to fixed places. I have contested this idea by suggesting that urban place-making in townships are ongoing processes that often involves hidden and subtle forms of spatial inscription, where local people define, reclaim and connect spaces against the grain of dominant discourses. A classic example of this process was the way people in the East Bank gave their own names to different parts of the old location, ignoring official designations and definitions. They conjured up Tsolo section, named after the district of Tsolo in the former Transkei from whence many inhabitants came, Moriva, the place of the Moravian church, Gomorra, the hotbed of shebeens and vice in the location, Thulandiville, meaning ‘quite I have heard’ where people hid from the police, Mxamabeni, which derived its name from the Xhosa word amaxamba, literally meaning sugar pockets, indicating stolen sugar. There was also Mekeni, named after the first African police sergeant in the area, Majombozi, named after a well-known local teacher, and New Bright after the New Brighton location in Port Elizabeth (see Reader 1960; 24). In the 1980s, a similar process on ‘spatial inscription’ occurred when residents took the township back from the apartheid state and created their own street, area and branch committees with specific names and identities. Since the end of apartheid, conflicting spatial regimes have collided and people have now devised new terms and names for areas. This process of spatial inscription was, as I have argued, not confined to the naming of places and areas in public, but extended to redefining homes and domestic space. In the apartheid era, the state built lifeless functional homes which working class families re-inscribed with their own personal identities and cultural aspirations – and how this process has continued into the post-apartheid era. These processes of inscriptions can be seen as counter-works. They were struggles for recognition and meaning at the margins of the city. But there were also other more public attempts at spatial reclamation and inscription. In the previous chapter, I explored the ways in which local residents, in the face of disappointment, betrayal and stigmatisation devised narratives and strategies to reclaim space and redefine place by slaughtering beasts and calling the ancestors into the township and by praying to God for removal of the ‘black cloud’. I would like to end by suggesting that fractured urbanism, as I have defined it, provides critical insights into the current service delivery protests and xenophobia that has swept through South African cities in the past five years. I would argue that it is difficult to understand the dynamics of service

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delivery protests in South Africa without realising how people have became entrapped in marginal places and developed place-based identities and notions of deprivation, which they draw on in protest action. The realisation that different zones in the urban ecology have differential access to services has set housing classes and social categories against each other in the struggle for development. The politics of relative advantage and unexplained disadvantage fuels anger. The realities of fractured urbanism across South Africa might not cause service delivery unrest but they sharpen these protests and define their content and political horizons in specific cases. In a similar way, fractured urbanism has fuelled xenophobic violence. The inability of the state to ensure clear rules of access and control over distribution of services has allowed individuals and brokers to open up secondary markets in public goods and services. Foreign Africans with money buy RDP houses from poor South Africans and secure access to electrical connections and other public infrastructure to which they are not necessarily entitled. Local people who see ‘outsiders’ taking ‘their’ services and jobs get angry and resort to violence. I would propose that a better appreciation of the dynamics of fractured urbanism across South Africa’s townships would certainly deepen our understanding and analysis of service delivery protests and xenophobic violence in South Africa.

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Notes

1  Towards an Anthropology of Urbanism   1. Sally Falk Moore’s review of African anthropology (1994), which created a heated debate between herself and Archie Mafeje for the way it ignored scholarship written by Africans (such as himself), was a case in point. The book presented a very positive review of the Copperbelt studies before lambasting the Mayers for their highly conservative and frankly unacceptable essentialisation of African tribal identities.   2. It is interesting to note that Archie Mafeje, who so strongly criticised the use of Red and School, used these very distinctions as the primary organising device in his own 1963 Master’s thesis on the nature of leadership and village politics in his home districts in Thembuland. Here Mafeje contrasted the leadership styles and orientations in the predominantly ‘School’ village of All Saints and with that of the predominantly ‘Red’ village of Gubenxa where he grew up. His thesis confirmed the social and cultural salience of these categories within rural communities, despite the fact that different factions of the same family or clan might have different social and cultural orientations.

2 The Xhosa in Town Revisited   1. To demonstrate their right to restitution, all claimants had to produce documentation proving that they were residents of East Bank. These documents include pass books, site permits, lodger’s permits, utilities bills and often photographs as well (Bank and Maqasho 2001). In undertaking the research, I encouraged claimants to bring photographs from the ‘old days’ and started to scan all photographs into a database, which has become the FHISER Hidden Histories Collection. Slowly we built up a large collection of personal and studio photographs which documented social life and events in the old locations of the 1950s. Through these photographs, I was confronted not by historical or anthropological writing, but by the ‘appearance of history itself’ (cf. Sekula 1999). And it was not a visual or a pictorial history that reproduced the dominant views of urban Africans in bourgeois culture. I had access to a ‘subaltern archive’ of self-representation. The images presented traces of an intense and engaging social and cultural lifeworld that was largely ignored, just not represented or adequately communicated in the trilogy. They spoke of a complex, hybrid, novel and self-conscious, confident engagement with modernity and cosmopolitanism. To deepen my understanding of the photographs and what they meant ethnographically, I organised many discussions with claimants around the photographs, where I would place about half a dozen or more carefully selected images on a table and start asking questions about what they meant to old residents, what claimants thought of the people, places and styles depicted in the images, and how they prioritised the activities and relationships they saw. I listened intently as they excitedly spoke about their pasts, their friends and the things that made them happy. I used this technique of ‘photo elicitation’ among the claimants to clarify my own understanding of the cultural meaning of the 1950s from a vantage point that stood outside the work of the trilogy. In our discussion I also constantly asked questions about what they understood the difference between ‘Red’ and ‘School’ to mean, and how it impacted on their lives as East Bank residents. These discussions gave me a very good sense of the dynamics of cultural politics in the old location for this particular sociocultural grouping (young urban-oriented men and women). Most of the claimants were in their 60s and 70s and would have been in their 20s in the 1950s. Most of them had grown up in the city, and quite a few were born there too.

24 5

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246   home space s , s t re e t s ty l e s   2. Kahn makes a distinction between the ‘high or avant garde modernism’, associated with sophisticated aesthetic and intellectual elites – the educated middle classes – and what he calls the ‘popular modernism’ embraced by ordinary people, which is mediated through the entertainment industry and modern social movements. Kahn (2001) highlights the mass appeal of popular modernism but insists that this should not be mistaken for a lack of critical content.   3. Monica Hunter’s East London field notes are included in the Wilson family archive at the University of Cape Town (UCT). I have gone through the East London field notes carefully and have written separately on this issue (Bank forthcoming).   4. Walter Benson Rubusana was born in Mnanadi in the Somerset East district in 1858. He attended Lovedale College and in 1884 was ordained in the Congregational Church and became a minister in the East Bank location. Rubusana played a significant role in the early politics of the ANC and remained active in ministry and politics until his death in East London in 1936 (Daily Dispatch, 10 June 2001).   5. Consultation of Monica Hunter’s fieldwork notes from East London reveals that the young anthropologist was quite profoundly influenced by the ageing ANC stalwart and religious leader, Walter Rubusana, then almost 70 years old. Rubusana, who was something of a traditionalist, was deeply concerned with the moral decay and family disintegration associated with rapid urbanisation and the loss of traditional values in the city. Rubusana’s concerns fed into Monica Hunter’s own Christian liberal critique of the moral consequences of rapid ‘detribalisation’. The moralist tone of Hunter writing on the urban family and the loose morals of the urban youth in particular seem to have derived as much from her own moral compass as they did from the ageing Rubusana, who was increasingly disillusioned with the youth (also see Bank forthcoming).   6. Monica Hunter had worked with an older woman interpreter, Mary Soga, in Pondoland prior to arriving in East London. She was the African wife of a local white trader and well-known and respected in the area. Hunter benefited a great deal from this relationship and, clearly, saw Mrs Rubusana playing a similar role in East London. But Mrs Rubusana came from a class position and social category that encouraged certain kinds of associations and restricted others. My argument here is that the kinds of networks that Mrs Rubusana and other associates and friends opened up in East Bank did not lead Monica Hunter into male-dominated yards and ‘qaba’ precincts. By contrast, I would argue that the Mayers specifically sought out these spaces in their study of East Bank 25 years later, because Philip Mayer had already decided that qaba life was what interested him (see Bank forthcoming).   7. The presence of Mrs Rubusana is clearly evident in her field notes. Consider the following note: Dances most Saturday and Friday evenings. Not by invitation. When hear music come along. No dance clubs but social services league and sports clubs give the dances. Each one gives more than one a year. Some churches oppose this. Mrs Rubusana says nothing. (Wilson Papers, East London field notes, UCT)   8. Kenny Jegels, interview, East London, 20 March 2000.   9. I met Philip Mayer at his home in Woodstock in Oxford in 1994 and conducted a short interview with him about his Eastern Cape work. It was very preliminary as I had not yet really begun work of my own in the Eastern Cape. We were constantly interrupted by Iona, who thought I was just another anthropologist out to discredit their work. I later returned to Oxford in 2003 where I met frequently with Iona. William Beinart facilitated many of our visits and it was during this time that we discussed the Xhosa in Town work in more detail. 10. This is, of course, not to suggest that Red and School were not fundamental categories in the classificatory schemes of migrants and urban residents in East London in the 1950s. 11. The term ‘Red’ comes from the old Xhosa practice of using red ochre on the body and to dye cloth for clothing. Reds were called amaqaba, which literally means ‘the smeared ones’, by School people. Older people still use the term as a means of self-identification, but when used by non-Reds it is a derogatory term meaning uncouth, backward and unsophisticated (see McAllister 2006: 57).

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n ot e s  247 12. Mitchell expressed his dislike for door-to-door urban fieldwork when he said that, unlike the villages where access to people’s domestic spaces could easily be negotiated through the headman, in the towns ‘each visit to a hut means the same battle – the same suspicion, etc. The refusal rate is high’ (quoted in Schumaker 2001: 177). 13. Interview, East London, 10 September 2000; also see Crouch (1998: 145–67). 14. Cieraad (1999) argues that the emergence of window prostitution in Holland was a product of women asserting their agency through the space of the window to solicit men outside. 15. Group interview, East London, 30 May 2001. 16. Mr Foster, interview, East London, 20 October 2000. 17. Interview, East London, 18 November 1999. 18. Group interview, East London, 14 May 2001.

3 Modernism, Space and Identity   1. Ronnie Meinie, group interview, East London, 12 November 1999.  2. Ibid.; Pule Twaku, interview, East London, 21 August 2000.   3. See Cape Archive, 3/ELN, Boxes 1150–1165, Correspondence, Location General, 1947–1956 for an account of the debates about African housing in the city and the NBRI materials supplied to the city by Pretoria.   4. See the Thornton and Welsh Commissions of the 1930s and 1940s, appointed to investigate socioeconomic conditions and housing needs in East London’s locations; see also Reader (1960: 15–20).   5. The Native (Urban Areas) Consolidation Act, No. 25 of 1945.   6. Maria Ramokazi of house 1020 in the new municipal housing estate, for example, was instructed to vacate the house after the death of her husband. The eviction order was enforced in 1954. The location superintendent said that he opposed the ‘scourge of fatherless households’ in the city. See correspondence between the East London attorney P.R. Schneider and the location superintendent, November 1958, in Cape Archives, 3/ELN, File 50/1487/3.   7. Compare the Welsh Commission’s report on the ‘juvenile delinquency problem’ in East London. It is interesting to note that the Mayers shared official concerns about the moral degeneracy of the urban youth, referring to them as ‘riff-raff’ in Townsmen or Tribesmen (Mayer with Mayer 1971 [1961]: 21–29). Also see Chapter 5 below.   8. By 1958 it was estimated that there were more than 7,000 ‘illegals’ in East Bank alone. Officials also estimated that ‘illegals’ were now entering the city at a rate of more than 1,000 a year (see Atkinson 1991: 185).   9. Pauw surveyed 77 households in two zones in Mdantsane (Pauw 1973 [1963]: xv). 10. A classic British sociological critique of comprehensive planning is provided in Wilmot and Young’s (1957) urban ethnography on Bethnal Green in London; for a similar analysis of the restructuring of working-class districts in Middlesbrough see Glass (1948, summarised in Parker 2004: 58–59). Taylor (1998) provides a general overview of this genre of work. 11. For fuller discussion, see Mager (1999: 47–67) on the creation of Zwelitsha township outside King William’s Town. 12. According to Reader (1960: 61–2), approximately 80 per cent of men and 36 per cent of women in the East Bank location were employed in 1954. 13. For a social history of boxing in Duncan Village and Mdantsane see Qamarwana and Bank, ‘Golden Gloves and City Slums’, Daily Dispatch, 21 March 2001. 14. Amakhaya refers to people from one’s home place, khaya meaning ‘home’. 15. One interesting cultural indicator mentioned by Pauw (1973 [1963]: 211) in relation to matrifocality in the Mdantsane township was the tendency of female household heads to communicate with ancestors who were their matrikin rather than patrikin. 16. Interview, East London, 10 September 2000. 17. Interview, East London, 15 September 2000. 18. Compare Bonner (1990, 1995); also see Glaser (2000: 95–110) for a discussion of government policy in relation to unemployed youth in Soweto during the 1960s.

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248   home spac e s , s tre e t s t y l e s 19. Interview, East London, 21 September 1999. 20. Modernist planners generally rejected earlier notions of the ‘corridor street’, which was associated with walking, browsing, shopping and socialising. They viewed modern streets as axes for movement, where form followed function. In the modern city it was important for streets not to be cluttered, noisy and dirty so that they were suited for their intended use – in this case surveillance and the ferrying of workers to and from the factories (see Atkinson 1991; Fyfe 1998; Holston 1989; Jackson 1998; Robinson 1998). 21. Interview, East London, 30 May 2001. 22. Ngqika succeeded Mlawu as the paramount chief of the Rharhabe at the end of the eighteenth century and is seen as one of the founding fathers of the Rharhabe royal house, which later found representation in the newly constituted Ciskei homeland. See Switzer (1993: 204). 23. See Maqasho and Bank (2001) for further discussion.

4 Rebellion, Fractured Urbanism and the Fear of Fire   1. The information presented here was supplied by Mtetelele Pobane, Joe Jordaan and Mandisi Jekwa in a group interview at the DVRA offices on 14 August 1995. Further accounts of the events of August 1985 were presented at the Truth and Reconciliation Commission’s East London hearings in 1997.   2. Duncan Village Proper stands on the old 1960s location and includes some of the old buildings that were not demolished; Duncan Village Extension was created after the removals, on land beyond the old location site.   3. These were the terms used by DVRA representatives in their discussions of the Gompo Community Council.   4. This theme is explored in greater detail in the next chapter and will therefore not be dealt with at any length here.   5. See Reintges (1992) for a fuller discussion of the various official initiatives to re-plan Duncan Village between 1985 and 1992.   6. This case was never reported in the local press, although it is one of the most famous incidents in local oral accounts of the social and political history of Duncan Village over the past decade.   7. ‘Civics’ were the residents’ associations set up in the townships and rural areas in the 1980s in opposition to the official apartheid neighbourhood structures, tribal authorities and administration boards. They were democratic structures and had elected officials from the street level upwards. The civics also set up people’s courts and other structures for the day-to-day administration of residential areas. The popular democracy of the civics gave way to newly elected town councils after 1994.

5  The Style of the Comrades   1. Youth are not dealt with as a specific social category in the trilogy. It was only after the completion of these studies that the Mayers took an active interest in youth socialisation and identity politics, which emerged as their major research interest in the late 1960s and early 1970s. In 1972, they produced a two-volume report, ‘Report on Research on Selforganisation by Youth among the Xhosa-speaking Peoples of the Ciskei and Transkei’, for the Human Sciences Research Council. These volumes were not published at this time probably because of the heavy criticism levelled against their earlier work, but they nevertheless contained very valuable descriptions and analyses of the rural youth’s social life and organisational forms.   2. Mager (1999) also analyses the changing position of rural youth in the former Ciskei, but is less concerned with the categorical distinction between Red and School than with issues of sexuality, gender oppression and entrenchment of patriarchal power in rural locations in the Eastern Cape during and after the 1950s.

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n ot e s  249   3. Welsh High students were exposed to organised sports training, music and choir lessons, and learnt debating and other skills that enabled them to excel in their different fields of interest. The skills this cohort of youth learnt were transferred to the location streets, enabling youth in general to domesticate the broader cultural influences. Also see Chapter 2.   4. Interview, East London, 13 January 1999.   5. Interview, East London, 5 October 2000.   6. Interview, East London, 10 February 2000.  7. Ibid.   8. Interview, East London, 20 June 2000.   9. Interview, East London, 26 September 1999. 10. Interview, East London, 10 September 1999. 11. Mbuti Adonisi explained that ‘while some people supported the action of migrants, saying that the youth in the location were getting too big for their boots, the majority of our parents [that is, of urban-born youth] felt that discipline was a family matter and disagreed with the action of the migrants.’ Interview, East London, 14 May 2001. 12. Interview, East London, 8 June 1996. 13. Interview, East London, 14 April 2002. 14. Glaser (2000: 108) defines the Reef ivies as follows: The ‘ivy’ style was clean cut and dandyish, even prissy; it emphasised, for instance, particular makes of aftershave and deodorant. ‘Ivies’ were heavily influenced by elite American fashion and saw themselves as more classy than the ‘clevers’. ‘Clevers’, with their particular brand of urban machismo, generally regarded the ivies as ‘good boys’ and ‘sissies.’ 15 16. 17. 18. 19. 20. 21. 22.

23.

24. 25. 26.

Term used to refer to the police, special branch and other apartheid structures. Interview, East London, 12 December 1997. Interview, East London, 10 October 2001. Interview, East London, 5 July 1996. Interview, East London, 18 July 1996. Interview, East London, 15 March 1996. Interview, East London, 12 April 1998. In 1995–1996 the power of the Comrades was on the wane, but the people’s courts that they had set up were still very active in the township and meted out severe beatings, and even death, as punishment. The Mayers note that ukushweshwa or ‘staying-together unions’ were quite common in East Bank in the 1950s. They ‘involved town unions in which the woman comes to stay with the man without being married to him, and they live in a room as one domestic unit’ (1971 [1961]: 257). Ukushweshwa is therefore an older term for what is today normally called ukuhlalisana. The main difference between the practice of ‘staying together’ in the 1950s and that of today is that in the 1950s the practice was mainly confined to married migrants who already had country wives, while today it is dominated by unmarried youths (see Mayer with Mayer 1971 [1961]: 257–61 for details). Interview, East London, 18 July 1996. For a detailed discussion of fatherhood in Duncan Village in the 1990s see Bank (1998). Direct evidence of domestic violence was noted in approximately a third of the 20 detailed case studies undertaken with youth households during 1996 and 1997. My findings were documented in the evidence collected by my ISER research assistant Linda Qambata in Duncan Village in 1998.

7 Re-modelling the House   1. Monica Wilson East London Field Notes 1932, Monica and Godfrey Wilson Collection, Archive and Manuscripts Department, University of Cape Town.   2. Interview, East London, 20 August 2000.   3. Interview, East London, 30 May 2001.

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250   home spac e s , s t re e t s t y l e s   4. Interview, East London, 10 September 2000.   5. The Bantu Trade and Advertising Fair was a moving trade fair introduced after the Second World War and moved around the African townships to encourage consumerism, hygiene and suburban-style domesticity. The BAT visited East London annually, around the time of Guy Fawkes, and set up on the sports fields at Rubusana Park in the East Bank.   6. Interview, East London, 10 September 2000.   7. Interview, East London, 30 May 2001.   8. Interview, East London, 21 August 2001.  9. Ibid. 10. Interview, East London, 10 August 2001. 11. Interview, East London, 30 May 2000. 12. Interview, East London, 10 October 2000. 13. Interview, East London, 30 May 2000. 14. For comparison with women’s responses to new forms of socialist domesticity, see Crowley and Reid (2002). 15. Interview, East London, 15 April 2000.

9 Post-apartheid Suburb or Hyper-ghetto   1. For an excellent analysis of this process, see Thomas Sugrue’s The Origins of the Urban Crisis: Race and Inequality in Post-War Detroit (1998). Some of the processes which Wacquant glosses over in his more theoretically orientated account are explained in rich empirical detail in Sugrue’s book. Also see Beauregard (2006) for an account of the economic collapse of the northern cities and the simultaneous drive towards suburbanisation in the context of economic decline in the north.   2. Wacquant (2006) does not use the term ‘underclass’ without qualification. He argues that it has become an alibi for the middle classes and the media to blame the poor for their predicament, by associating poverty with certain social and cultural traits (see Pattillo 2007; Wacquant 2006).   3. Interview 20 May 2006.   4. In 2008, I heard a presentation from a housing NGO worker from KwaZulu Natal, who reported that the construction of houses without internal walls was proving to be highly problematic in the areas in which he worked, and contributed to high levels of domestic violence and rape. He argued strongly that the government should fund the construction of internal walls in RDP houses as a strategy against rape and domestic violence. It was an interesting argument which I had not encountered in Duncan Village.

Conclusion   1. Milan Kundera The Unbearable Lightness of Being. (London: 1980)   2. I would like to thank Setha Low from City University New York for suggesting this term.

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Historical Interviews (East Bank Restitution Project) Adonisi, M. by M. Qamarwana and A. Nicholas, East London, 14 May 2001 Bam, M. by L. Bank, L. Maqasho and M. Qamarwana, East London, 30 May 2001 Bata, Z. by L. Bank and L. Maqasho, East London, 26 September 1999 Bottoman, C. and Ms Ncunyana by L. Bank, Y. Mniki and L. Maqasho, East London, 7 October 1999 Cangu, T. by L. Bank and L. Qambata, Mooiplaas, 18 June 1998 Chibba, Mr by M. Qamarwana and A. Nicholas, East London, 18 March 2002 Dlwani, T. by L. Bank, East London, 15 April 2000 Dodo, L. by L. Bank and L. Qambata, Mooiplaas, 17 June 1998 Dumisane, Mr by L. Bank and L. Qambata, East London, 5 July 1996 East Bank Restitution Committee, East London, 21 January 2000 Exford, J. by B. Mrawu and L. Maqasho, East London, 25 January 1999 Falase, T. by L. Bank and L. Qambata, Mooiplaas, 12 August 1998 Foster, Mr by L. Bank and M. Qamarwana, East London, 20 October 2000 Gabelana, E. by M. Qamarwana and A. Nicholas, East London, 17 March 2000 Group Interview by L. Bank and L. Maqasho, East London, 14 May 2001 Group Interview by L. Bank and L. Maqasho, East London, 2 October 2000 Gxasheka, T. by M. Qamarwana and A. Nicholas, East London , 18 November 1999 Hans, S. by L. Bank, L. Maqasho and M. Qamarwana, East London, 30 May 2001 Hopa, Revd by M. Qamarwana and A. Nicholas, East London, 14 May 2001 Jabu, B. by L. Bank and L. Maqasho, East London, 15 September 2000 Jegels, K. by L. Bank, East London, 20 March 2000 Jegels, K. and P. Twaku, by M. Qamarwana and A. Nicholas, East London, 8 August 2001 Jekwa, M. by L. Bank and L. Qambata, East London, 15 March 1996 Jokazi, A. by L. Bank, L. Maqasho and M. Qamarwana, East London, 10 July 2001 Joubert, M. by L. Bank, East London, 21 August 2000 Labans, M. by L. Bank, East London, 15 November 1999 Macanda, H. by L. Maqasho, East London, 22 September 1999

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b i b l i o g r a p hy   2 63 Madyaka, M. by M. Qamarwana, East London, 21 August 2001 Majavu, Mrs by L. Bank and L. Maqasho, East London, 18 November 1999 Majola, T. by B. Mrawu and L. Maqasho, East London, 20 June 2000 Mandisi, Mr by L. Bank and L. Qambata, East London, 12 April 1998 Marais, S. by L. Maqasho and M. Qamarwana, East London, 26 June 2000 Matebese, N. by L. Bank, East London, 10 September 1997 Mbane, M. by L. Bank and L. Qambata, Mooiplaas, 10 June 2001 Mdingi, X. by L. Bank and L. Qambata, Mooiplaas, 15 April 1998 Meinie, R. by L. Bank and L. Maqasho, East London, 10 September 2000 Meinie, R. by L. Bank, East London, 12 September 2000; 10 April 2001 Mgojo, C. by L. Bank and L. Maqasho, East London, 14 September 1999 Momoti, N. by L. Bank and L. Maqasho, East London, 10 September 1999 Morolong, D. by M. Qamarwana and T. Muller, East London, 5 September 2000 Mthimba, E. by L. Bank and L. Maqasho, East London, 28 January 1999; 21 August 2001 Naidoo, D. by M. Qamarwana and A. Nicholas, East London, 2002 Nathaniel, Mr by L. Bank and L. Maqasho, East London, 8 September 1999 Ndaleni, D. by B. Mrawu and L. Mrawu, East London, 20 April 1999 Nel, Mr by L. Bank, East London, 2 June 1996 Ngcebetsha, T. by L. Bank, East London, 10 February 2000 Ngqika and Nyikana, Messrs. by L. Bank and L. Maqasho, East London, 6 October 1999 Nolindile Kwane, K. by L. Bank and L. Qambata, Mooiplaas, 22 July 1998 Nonkwelo, C. and De Wet, S. by Y. Mniki, B. Mrawu and L. Maqasho, East London, 29 September 1999 Ntamo, B. by B. Mrawu and L. Maqasho, East London, 13 January 1999 Qamarwana, M. by L. Bank, East London, 10 October 2001 Radu, K. by L. Bank and M. Qamarwana, East London, 5 October 2000 Ratshi, T. by L. Bank , East London, 8 June 1996 Sam, M. by L. Bank and M. Qamarwana, 14 April 2002 Skolweni, P. by M. Qamarwana, East London, 24 March 2001 Sontji, N. by L. Maqasho and M. Qamarwana, East London, 20 August 2000 Spogter, R. by B. Mrawu and L. Maqasho, East London, 14 January 1999 Temmers, J. by L. Bank, East London, 16 August 2000 Temmers, J. and Badenhorst, W. by L. Bank, East London, 21 August 2001; 14 September 2001 Thimba, T. by B. Mrawu and L. Maqasho, East London, 20 April 1999 Tjali, J. by L. Bank and L. Maqasho, East London, 10 September 2000 Tjali, N. by L. Bank and L. Qambata, Mooiplaas, 6 May 1998 Tofu, Z. by L. Bank and L. Qambata, Mooiplaas, 13 June 2000 Tofu, W. and Tofu, Z. by L. Bank and L. Qambata, Mooiplaas, 15 July 2000 Toko, Mr by L. Bank and L. Maqasho, East London, 14 June 2000 Tom, Mr by M. Qamarwana and A. Nicholas, East London, 10 August 2001 Tops, Mr by L. Bank, East London, 18 July 1996 Twaku, P. by B. Mrawu and L. Maqasho, East London, 21 September 1999; 21 August 2000; 14 May 2002 Vuka, Mr by L. Bank, Chalumna, 12 December 1997 Xabanisa, N. and Ms Seti by L. Bank and L. Maqasho, East London, 8 October 1999 Zokile, J. by L. Bank and L. Qambata, Mooiplaas, 20 July 1998 Zwakala, T. by L. Bank, East London, 10 October 2000

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Index Page numbers in italics refer to photographs

abafana (young men) 115 abakhaya 47, 117–8, 130, 139, 140, 143–8, 150, 151, 153, 154, 157–8, 160–1, see also home-mates abantu ababomvu, see Red people abantu basesikolweni see School people abanqwakuzi (political opponents) 127 Abu-Lughod, Janet 2 active migrants 150, 154–6, 158 Adonisi, Mbuti 51, 239 Afesis-Corplan survey of 1993, 97–8 African National Congress (ANC) 16, 28, 40, 41, 60, 64, 89, 91, 96, 210, 211, 216, 222, 230, 231, 238 African traditionalism 44 Afrikaner nationalism 24, 43 age-mate/s 79, 98, 151, see also intanga, and/or iintanga alcohol men and violence 203–8 social circuitry and networks associated with 192, 196, 203–9 Alexandra 47, 63, 93, 192, 193, 195, 240 Allen, J. 191 Althusser, Louis 10, 36 amaginsta (gangsters) 129 amajoina 82 amakhaya (people from one’s home place) 237, see also home-mates amakazana, see also single mothers tsotsis women 153 Amalinda 66, 94 amanene (gentlemen) 122 amapansula style 124, 125 amaqaba culture 142 domestic patterns 142 amaqabane 97, 111, 112, 121, 122, 124, 148, 149, 195, see also Comrades amashipha (lapsed migrants) 153, 155 amasinala (educated youth or senior students) 116 amatsotsikazi (female tsotsis) 116 amaxamba 243 Amin, A. 19, 191–2 ANC Defiance Campaign (9 Nov. 1952) 63, 92 ANC Youth League 41, 43, 230, 231, 238

ancestors and quest for redemption 218–23 Anderson, D. 65 Ansell, Gwen 41–3 anthropology of urbanism, towards an 1-34, 235 apartheid urban restructuring of East London’s locations 60–86 Appadurai, Arjun 19, 54–5, 229 Appiah, K.A. 16 Arcades project 13 Ashworth, A. 216, 223 asinamali 121 Atkinson, D. 61, 70–1, 85 attitudinal information 46 attitudinal surveys 46 Attwell, D. 11, 35 authoritarian township model 33 backyards 22, 33, 49, 53, 58, 74, 90, 92, 93, 98, 99, 101, 111, 115, 164, 185, 198, 207, 208 backyard shacks 31, 92, 97, 98, 99, 147, 153, 194, 198, 206, 208 Bam, Mavis 174, 175 Bank, Leslie 217 Bantu Education 119, 128 Bantu Square 43, 60, 61, 63, 64, 84 Barchiesi, F. 28, 211 Bata, Zinzi 118 Baudrillard, J. 158 Beall, J. 182 Bebelele 129 Beinart, W. 10, 21, 35, 41, 115 Benjamin, Walter 13, 69, 234 Berlin 224 Berman, Marshall 17–18, 29, 238 Bethnal Green 1 Bhabha, Homi 12, 56, 57 Bhaca hostels 146–7 Bhaca migrants 150 B-hostel complex (Duncan Village) 32, 71, 81, 92, 111, 139, 145, 146, 147, 148, 149, 150, 151, 152, 153, 154, 156, 160, 147 Bhaca workers 145 cooking groups 148 Gcaleka workers 145

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in d e x   2 65 black male power 25 Black Sunday 61, 64, 66 Black, J. 22 bodily deportment 235 Bona 42, 171, 179 Bonner, P. 112 Bonnin, D. 164 Borer, M. 15 Boston West End 2 Boulonnois, Louis 67 Bozzoli, Belinda 23, 25, 62, 63, 190, 239–40 Braelynn 224, 225, 227, 229 Brazil 16, 212, 213, 233 Brenner, S. 13, 238 Bruner, E. 2 Buffalo City Council 220 Buffalo Flats 36, 83, 219 Bundy, C. 10, 21, 41, 112 Burke, T. 171 Butterworth (Transkei) 182 Buur, L. 66 Cairo 2 Caldeira, Teresa 28, 213 Campbell, Catherine 112 Canclini, Garcia 12, 170 Cape Town 17 low-cost houses, illegal occupation of 232 Card, Donald 64 Carter, C. 112 Catholic Church 219 Catholicism 219 Cato Manor 47 Chalumna 123–4, 206 Chapman, Michael 42 child support grants 186–7 Christianity 4, 29, 73, 144, 241 Cieraad, I. 52, 53 Ciskei 7, 21, 22, 26, 41, 61, 62, 70, 75, 84, 85, 94, 114, 123, 131, 182, 194, 238 city rhythms 191 cityness of East London 237 Citizen and Subject 139 city/ies 11–15 Colonial 27 dual 27, 29 post-industrial 27 City of Walls 213 civic organisations 193–4, 238, 242 Clowes, Lindsay 175, 178 Coleman, Bishop Michael 220 collective male violence 124 collective violence 128 colonial imitation 57 colonialism 8, 10, 36, 41, 48, 56, 61, 217

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Coloureds 36, 83, 86, 117, 153, 219 malau 153 youth 117 Comaroff, J. 105, 106 Community Centre 52, 53, 173, 231 Comrades, UF amaqaba 19, 97, 111, 112, 121, 122, 124, 148, 149, 195, 240–1 changing youth styles and rise of 119–24 culture 47, 142, 144, 146, 147, 149, 150, 160 domestic patterns 142 fragility of power 114 migrant subculture 160, 161 migrants 47, 141, 144, 149 new, and dead bodies 229–32 red Xhosa 145 style 112–37, 148, 238–9 Com-tsotsis 136 masculinity and rural youth 124–30 conflict gender 131 inter-tribal 161 Congress of South African Students (COSAS) 121 conversions 225, 225–6 cooking groups and red revival 144–8 kin-based 151–2, 161 migrant, in hostels 139, 146 Coombs, A. 24 Coplan, D.B. 43 Copperbelt studies 8, 47, 235 cortices 213 cosmetics 133, 171–4 cosmopolitan cultural forms 44, 55 influences 41 styles 55, 59 cosmopolitanism 16–17, 28, 41, 235 country bumpkins, see imixhaka Crais, Clifton 4, 20, 61 creolisation 55 crime (2002) 230–1 Critique of Everyday Life 191 cross-generational relationships 132 Crowley, D. 24 cultural appropriation 55, 57 cultural dynamics 32 East London locations (1930s) 38, 40, 44, 46 new Duncan Village 87 of location life 37 of urbanisation in East London 58 of youth identity politics 112 regional 3 urban 37

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26 6   home spac e s , s tre e t s t y l e s cultural expression 235 cultural models family 142 of house 33 cultural reproduction 145–8 cultural style 9, 32, 62, 75, 113, 124, 135, 161 black 41 comrades 32, 112, 137 cosmopolitan 59 Red 100, 141 School 141 shared 136 urban 210 youth 112 cultural transmission 46, 148 curfews 148–9 customary power 25, 113, 139 Dakar 29 Dambisa Fisheries and Trading Store 83 dance halls 37, 43, 58 circuits of connection 19, 48 cultural dynamics 46 Davies, B. 22 Davis, Mike 29, 190, 207–8, 212 De Boeck, F. 12, 190, 191, 212, 223 De Certeau, M. 177 De Wet, C. 10 de-industrialisation and welfare dependence 182–7 Deliwe, D. 115, 122, 145 Department of Social Welfare 185, 187 De Pontes, Peet 94, 95 desire new families and politics of 170–5 detribalisation 40, 236 Devisch, R. 11 Dimbaza (Ciskei) 182 Diepsloot 210 dissolution of place and spiritual insecurity 214–7 Duncan Village 233 District Six 239 Dlwani, Tombi 181 domestic desire, gender and politics of 163–89 duty 226 social engineering 239 space 59, 69, 228, 237 violence 106, 134, 135, 196, 239, 240 domesticity different forms 141 fire and social fluidity 106–9 red migrant culture and, in 1950s 141–4 urban 191

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Dourish, P. 15 dress styles 235 Drum 41, 42, 49, 171, 175, 178, 179 culture 44 dual city model 29 Duncan, Sir Patrick granite plaque 14 Duncan Village 62 1985, revolt of 136 1985–95, 89–111 2004, 27 aerial photograph (1965) 78 civic activism 91–5 density and complexity of 14 dissolution of place 233 fire statistics 1986–92, 102 historical ethnography of social and cultural change in 7 political awareness 91–5 population growth between 1985–95, 97–8 population influx 92–5 rebellion 91–5 rent boycotts 91, 92, 95, 195 resettlement and new 78–84 ruralness of 237 urban renewal 234 vigilantism 233 violence 233 violence – Aug 1985, 89–90 violence – Jan 1990, 95 welfare support 185–6 Duncan Village Crime Prevention Forum 230 Duncan Village C-section (Juliwe) 14, 62, 72, 79–81, 86, 87, 92, 95, 96, 119, 146, 147, 224, 225, 228 crime in 1970s 80–1 houses 79 physical layout of 79 residential densification 92 transit housing zones 147 unemployment 81 windowless transit houses in 80 Duncan Village D-Section 81 transit housing zones 147 Duncan Village Extension (Zipunzana) 14, 62, 79, 86, 87, 179–81, 238 new 51/9 houses 72 social dynamics 81–3 Duncan Village Proper 90, 96, 102, 109, 110, 111, 187, 194, 198, 216, 217, 223, 224, 238 informal settlement 96 residential densification 92, 96 social dynamics 81–3 survey (1995) 90, 97

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i n d e x   2 67 Duncan Village Residents’ Association (DVRA) 89–93, 95, 101–2, 106, 109, 110, 120, 123, 125, 126, 127, 136, 149, 194, 195, 233, 238 street and area committees of 233 East Bank destruction of Meine family house on Fredrick Street, Tsolo 23 historical ethnography of social and cultural change in 7 location 7 revisiting 37–44 riots (1952) 60–1, 63–4 to Duncan Village (1963) 77 view in 1950s 22 East Cape Development Board (ECDB) 91, 92 East London 1 after trilogy 20–3 apartheid and post-apartheid period 20–3 cityness 237 map 6 Mau Mau and politics of dead bodies 62–7 middling modernism in 67–73 Ebenezer Majombozi Qaqamba High 119 economic disconnection 212–14 Elder, G. 26, 87 Elkins, C. 65, 66 employment 87 boom 43 casual 111, 155 formal 211 increased levels – 1950s, 57 male 33, 100, 188 part-time casual 28 patterns in East London locations 5 wage labour 28 women 100, 167, 181, 196 Englund, H. 16 Epstein, A. 8, 46, 47 Eriksen, T.H. 8, 35 ethnography 1, 7, 17 home-made 19, 44–7 europeanisation 39 exclusion 33 architecture of female 190 comparative sociology of 33 female 154 social 210, 211, 213, 214 space in post-industrial city 211 spaces of 30 Exford, Cedric 230 factionalism 231 family structure 73, 101, 130, 168

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favelas 16,12, 213, 233 Fawas, M. 26 Fazzie, C.J. 41 female-headed households 107, 109, 111, 118, 167, 207 comparison by household types (1954 and 1995) 99 disadvantages experienced by 107 in Duncan Village 98, 100, 188 in Duncan Village Proper 198 in East Bank 167 in Mdantsane 77 feminisation of citizenship 164 of neighbourhood networks 202 of yards 33, 197, 207 feminist city and gender 239–41 Ferguson, J. 8, 9, 16, 113, 124, 170, 217 FHISER Hidden Histories Collection 235 fieldwork practice 37 fire/s domesticity and social fluidity 106–9, 242 Duncan Village Proper 109 Duncan Village, statistics 1986–92, 102 fear of, and rebellion and fractured urbanism 89–111, 238 role in desegregation of larger domestic units 106 shack 90, 91, 97, 101, 102, 108, 110, 216, 218 social force of shack 101–6 Flint, A. 17 flooding 242 Dutch cultural history 90–1 flash, in Aug. 2002, 217 folk dress, see traditional dress forced removals 7, 32, 61, 62, 72, 79, 94, 120, 193, 218, 222 impact in Mdantsane 73–8 Fortes, Meyer 47 foreign Africans illegal sales of RDP houses 233 foreign capital 237 Fort Hare College 238 fractured urbanism 241–2 rebellion and fear of fire 89–111, 238 free-standing shack areas 31, 90, 91, 93, 99, 101–5, 107, 108, 109, 110, 155, 194, 209 Freund, B. 24, 178 Friedan, Betty 163, 165 gambling 38–9 Gandy, M. 28, 29 Gans, Herbert 2

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26 8   home space s , s tre e t s t y l e s Gcaleka, Nicholas Tilana 222 Gcalekas 85–6 migrants 150 gender 145, 155, 169, 194, 209 and politics of domestic desire 163–89 and the feminist city 239–41 balance among landlord households 198 conflict 131 contamination 25 distribution 224 dynamics 31 equality 166 identities 26, 138, 175 inequality 109 oppression 238 relations 7, 17, 26, 114, 154, 171, 232 tension 131 gender politics of witchcraft accusations in Duncan Village 106 Gevisser, Mark 235 Giles, Judy 18, 163 Glaser, C. 43, 112, 113, 124, 128 Gluckman, Max 8, 9, 47 Going for Gold 138 Golden Gloves Boxing Club (Mdantsane) 75 Gomorrah 48, 243 Gompo (Duncan Village) Community Council (GCC) 91, 92, 95 Gompo Town 91 historical ethnography of social and cultural change in 7 Gotz, G. 15 governance township 32 urban 62 Graham, S. 28, 30 grant money 186, 189 Green, P. 79, 85 Greer, G. 163 Gwentshe, A.S. 41 Hammond-Tooke, W.D. 20 Hannerz, U. 43, 47 Hans, Sybil 83, 171, 172 Hansen, K. 13–14, 55 Harrison, P. 15 Harrison, S. 15 Harvey, D. 30 Havana Hotshots 54, 56, 116 Hayden, Dolores 68 Hellman, Ellen 17, 38 hetero-patriarchal model 33 Heunis, Chris 94 Highway Bottle Store 81 Hintsa (Xhosa king) 222

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Hirsch, A. 79, 85 hlonipa 40 home, remodelling 163–89 home-making/house-making 3, 7, 33, 164, 178, 228 remodeling 163–89 home-mate groups 9, 79 home-mates 4, 23, 47, 98, 100, 142, 145, 150, 152, see also abakhaya Hooper, B. 25 Hopa, Rev Thozamile 51 hostels 7, 31, 33, 62, 71, 79, 82, 92, 93, 97, 139, 149, 160 cooking groups 147–8 fuel-use strategies within 150 Kentani 146, 147 male in Duncan Village 71, 85, 139, 140, 145, 147, 148 migrant cooking groups in 146 single-sex migrants 14, 23, 32, 145, 160 single-sex municipal 86, 87, 100 house/s circuits of connection 48 C-section houses 79 emergency houses 72 family dwellings (51/6 and 51/9) 68, 70, 71, 72, 92 re-modelling 239–240 technical plan of the new township house 69–70 household fission 107 household types/models comparison by (1954 and 1995) 99 female-centred entrepreneurial 33 female-centred, matrifocal 33 hetero-patriarchal 33 youth 32 housewives 165, 171, 172, 176, 177, 178, 179, 182, 185, 187, 188, 189 apartheid 178 domestic etiquette of 228 wanna-be and changing township masculinities 175–81 housing 67–8 housing estates 1, 111, 188, 226, 233 built on RDP principles 224 conversion of place 223–9 family 85 in Duncan Village 84 in Duncan Village Extension 81, 86–7 low-cost 27 middle-class 213 municipal 142 Hubbard, Phil 1 Humphries, C. 208

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i n d e x   2 69 Hunter, Monica 5, 7, 17, 58, 101, 164, 167–8, 236, 239 account of cultural dynamics of East London locations (1930s) 37, 38–41, 44–5 hybrid sociability 12 hyper-fluidity African urban spaces in terms of 15–6 hyper-ghetto 210–35, 240 identity 11–15, 18, 19, 31, 32, 60–88, 109, 112, 121, 124, 211, 223, 233 community 11 Comrade 124, 129 cultural 9, 12, 88 definition according to Papastergiadis 12 Duncan Village 210 expression of 172 gender 175 generic ethnic 85 hybrid urban–rural 84 iqabane 124 markers of 172 migrant 8, 100, 139, 156, 159, 161 modernism, space and 60–88 older male migrant 32 powerful narratives for, in city 13 pre-existing form of 12 self 165 social 9, 32, 173 socially-constructed collective gender 128 struggles 12 tradition and city 11–15 transforming 87 transitions in 32 urban 13 urban youth 112 urban-rural 84 identity formation 8, 12, 13, 14, 20, 88, 112, 159 African urban 9, 36 migrant 159–60 youth 129 identity politics 31, 85 African urban 16 dynamics of youth 112 in city 13, 45 local 61 migrant 159 new 84–6 rural 136–7, 140 urban 62, 162 youth 122, 124, 125, 130, 135 igungqayi (those with rural outlook) 129, 130

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iikati (cats) 120–5 iingxungxu (those with temporary jobs) 115, 120, 121 iintanga 98, 146, 148, see also age mate/s ilulwane 76 imifino 202–3, 209 imixhaka (country bumpkins) 49, 115, 124, 129 impucuko yesilungu (Western ways and lifestyles) 122 incipient class formation 169 Independent Industrial and Commercial Workers Union 239 indlavini (rascals) 115, 122 industrialisation 21, 57, 171, 182, 193 de- 11, 13, 28, 211–12 industrial parks 21, 182 influx rebellion and ‘septic fringe’ 91–6 informality African urban spaces in terms of 15–16 inhavu 115 inkomo yokuthwala 131–2 intanga 46, 79, 118, see also age mate/s intercultural hybridisation 12 International Boxing Club (Duncan Village) 75 In the Heart of Redness 237 intlombe groups 115, 122, 123 involution 242 iseti beer-drinking groups 46, 76, 80, 143–4, 146–7 Italians 43, 50 ivies (Ivy Leaguers) 120–5, 239 ixakatho neck-scarf 131 izibonda 147, 149–52 izifebe (womanisers) 120 Jabu, Banzi 80 Jack, Bongani 84 Jacobs, Jane 17, 19, 29, 81 Japha, D. 68, 69 Jekwa, Mandisi 127, 238 Joe Slovo squatter settlement 210 Johannesburg 28–9 Johnson, L. 163 Jokazi, Audrey 176–7 Juliwe, see Duncan Village C-section juvenile delinquency 105, 169, 237 Kadalie, Clements 40, 239 Kahn, Joel 36 Kalela Dance 46 Kallman, D. 171 Kapila, Nomvula 206–7 Keiskammahoek 115

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270   home spac e s , s tre e t s t y l e s Kentani hostels 146–7 Kentani migrants (2004) 157 Kenyans illegal sales of RDP houses 233 Khalana 115 khaya (home) 237 Kikuyu Mau Mau, see Mau Mau kin-based cooking groups 151–2, 161 kin-based networks 151, 242 Kinshasa 11 parcelle 190–1 kinship 1, 2, 19, 76, 107, 132, 151, 169 Kolb, D. 14, 16 kokomvu 52 Koolhaus, Rem 29 Kundera, Milan 237 Kuper, A. 8 Kwa-Lloyd 63, 168 KwaThema 69 Kwelera 123 Kwinana Cash Store 83 labour unionism 85 labour unions 26, 41, 46, 139 La Hause, P. 112 Lalu, P. 222 land restitution claims 36, 218 landlordism 196, 208 Langa 9, 205 lapsed migrants 150, 153–5 Latin America 12 law (umthetho) 114, 127 Lee, Rebecca 17 Lefebvre, H. 19, 20, 89, 163, 191 Lengisi, J. 41 Lewis, Oscar 2, 3, 84 Lloyd, J. 163 localism 15–20 local urban renewal 234 Lodge, Tom 41, 46, 112, 237–8 Long Walk to Freedom 238 love potions 133 Lovell, Stephen 24 low-cost houses illegal occupation of 232 sale of 233 Luanshya 47 Mabin, A. 68 Mafeje, Archie 8, 9, 45, 235 Mager, A. 10, 47, 60, 64, 79, 116, 167, 238 Magubane, B. 8 Majola, Tumi 118 Majombozi 243 Makambi Hall 116 Makatala, Vuyelwa 49

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Makeba, Eddie 95 Malkki, Lisa 90 male-headed households comparison by household types (1954 and 1995) 99 male migrant/s 16, 17, 23, 32, 40, 98, 99, 101, 138, 156, 168, 194, 198, 207 Malkki, Lisa 90 Mamdani, M. 25, 113, 137, 139, 140, 159 Mandel, R. 208 Mandela, Nelson 238 Manhattan 17 Manona, C. 131 Maqasho, L. 86 marginalisation 205, 211, 213 Bhaca and Gcaleka workers 145 women’s struggles against 33 marginality 31, 33–4, 210–12 advanced 213–14, 233 comparative sociology of 212 economic disconnection and advanced 212–14 new forms of 212 social 213 Marvin, S. 28 masculinity/ies 17, 18, 113, 132, 135–6, 138, 161, 178, 202 black 178 Com-tsotsis and rural youth 124–30 honour-based codes of 214 migrant 159–60 reconstituting 154–7 rural youth, Com-tsotsis and 124–30 street 129 struggle 128–9 wanne-be house-wives and changing township 175–81 youth 129 Massey, D. 18 matriarch/s 168, 187 East Bank propertied (1950s) 169 entrepreneurial 101 propertied 169, 169 styles and strategies of urban 166–70 township 101 matrifocal family 76, 166–70, 185, 188 matrifocal household/s 33, 47, 98, 111, 135, 165, 167, 170, 173 matrifocality 47, 77, 100, 101, 167, 168, 169, 170, 237 Mattera, D. 43 Mau Mau (Kikuyu) 64–6 Mayekiso, Moses 93, 112, 192, 193 Mayer, Iona 1-3, 5, 9, 35, 44, 46, 53, 58, 74, 100, 101, 115, 117, 131, 138, 141, 239

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i n d e x   2 71 Mayer, Phillip 1-3, 5, 7, 9-10, 21–3, 35–6, 44–7, 53, 58, 62, 74, 100, 101, 115, 117, 131, 138, 141, 147, 154, 236, 237, 239 Mbeki, Epainette 235 Mbeki, Govan 235 Mbeki, Thabo 231, 235 Mbeluweleni 235 Mbembe, A. 16, 28 McAllister, P. 10, 11, 115, 122, 145, 236 McCann, B. 213 McClintock, A. 24 McDowell, L. 164 Mda, Zakes 10–11 In the Heart of Redness 237 Mdantsane 61, 62, 70, 71, 72, 79, 81, 84, 86, 87, 91, 94, 107, 219, 224 cultural orientations 75 female-headed households 77 impact of relocation 73–8 iseti beer-drinking groups 76 Red and School in 75–6 unemployment 74 Meinie, Ronnie 48 Mekeni 79, 86, 243 menudo chowder 11 men violence and alcohol 203–8 Merrifield, A. 13 Mexico City 2, 208 Meyer, K. 191 Mgujulwa, Eric 180–1 Mgxaji, Happyboy 75 migrancy migrants without 157–60 migrants active migrants 150, 154–6, 158 changing cultures of 138–62 consciousness 139, 161 conservative 33, 70, 92, 100, 139, 159 cooking groups 139, 146 identity 8, 32, 139, 159, 161 identity formation 159 labour 8, 178 lapsed migrants 150, 153–5 masculinity 159 without migrancy 157–60 migration 17, 19, 150 female out- 138 mine 138 out- 214 rural-urban 10 youth out- 160 mimesis 57 mimetic appropriation 57 mimicry 57

Bank T01319 01 index 271

Minkley, G. 47, 60, 64, 70, 78, 154, 168 Mitchell, J. 8, 46, 47, 237 Mkhala Cash Store 83 Mlaba, Raymond 220 Mlomo family 150–1 Mandi 150–1 mlawu 86 mobility 15–20 African urban spaces in terms of 15–16 Model Dairy 148, 151 modernism 60–88, 237–8 apartheid 32 avant garde 236 high 67, 236 middle 239 middling 23, 87, 88, 239–40 middling in East London 67, 70, 81, 86, 87, 88 popular 36, 37, 41, 43, 236 racial 23, 25, 30, 31, 61, 62, 78, 229 sophisticated 42 subversive narratives of 43 modernity 1, 8, 10, 11, 13, 18, 29, 49, 57, 75, 88, 158, 163–4, 176, 191, 235, 238 according to Attwell 35 authentic 163 domestic 176 enter and leave 12 Garcia Canclini on 12 global 29 urban 11, 44 Momoti, Ndyebo 119 money desire for 38–9, 48, 82, 151, 167, 173 gambling 38–9 money-lending rackets 152 Moodie, Dunbar 138–40, 144 Mooiplaas 102, 123, 126 Moriva 86, 117, 243 mother–child households 98 comparison by household types (1954 and 1995) 99 Mount Ayliff 155, 122 Moyake, Irene 49 Mpondo people 21 msebenzi (worker) 121 msebenzi wehlabathi (worker of the world) 121 Mumford, Lewis 3, 13 Murray, Martin 28, 90 music 36, 39, 41, 42, 52, 53, 54, 75, 86, 116, 117, 120, 125, 223, 228 popular choruses 121–2 Mxamabeni 243 Mxenge, Victoria 89, 92

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272   home space s , s tre e t s t y l e s N2 housing projects 232 Nassua, Peter Ray 50–1 National Building Research Institute (NBRI) 69, 237 National Mineworkers Union (NUM) 138 Ndatshe, V. 138, 139, 144 ndlu (house) 237 necklacing 104, 128, 218, 231 Nel, E. 61, 67, 70 neo-liberalism 237, 241 neoliberal policies 234 New Bright 243 New Brighton 48, 86 Newlands 123 news 110 Ngcebetsha, Thenjiwe 118 Ngqikas 85–6 Nielsen, F.S. 8, 35 Nigerians illegal sales of RDP houses 233 nkokheli (leader) 121 Nono, Phumeza 102, 103 Nonthemba 227–8 North Sumatra 2 Ntamo, Ben 116 Ntsebeza, L. 115 Nuttall, S. 16, 28 Nxarhuni 123 Nyaskusa 38 occult, see witchcraft O’Connell, P. 115, 122 old formal rental enclaves 31 oobrighty/s (fashion-conscious youth) 49, 115, 120, 121, 122, 125, 126, 127, 135, 136 oolaytis 49 oomabotshwecelani (shoes with laces at the side) 120 Ortner, S. 17 Pan African Congress (PAC) 237–9 Papastergiadis, N. 12 paraffin safety 106 social circuitry and networks associated with 192 , 201–4, 209, 216 parcelle 190–1 parental control 99, 101, 130 Paris 13, 213, 234 Park, P. 1 parliaments 115 parsimony 153 patriarchal proprietorship 25, 138, 140, 144, 152, 156, 158, 226 patriarchal state 24

Bank T01319 01 index 272

patriarchy 25, 149, 166, 240 domestic 88 forms of 18 hetero-sexual 165 rural 167–8 Pattillo, Mary 213, 223, 240 Pauw, Berthold 5, 36, 44, 45, 47, 58, 59, 62, 73–7, 79, 87, 97, 101, 111, 164, 166–7 Peacock Hall 49, 52, 53, 56, 116 Pefferville 86, 230 Peires, J.B. 4 Pellow, Deborah 190 people’s courts 32, 106, 123, 127, 128, 195, 196, 231, 232, 238 people’s power 229 Perlman, Janice 16, 212–13 permanent urbanites 40 physical movement 242 place definition 15 dissolution of 33, 214–17 narratives of 239 politics of 32 place-making 14, 15, 17, 18, 20, 31, 34, 229, 243 contested 20 discontinuities in 14 in African cities 17, 18 politics of 20 strategies 34 tendencies 31 urban 13, 15, 243 Planet of Slums 207, 212 Plassart, M. 12, 190, 191 political consciousness 161 political violence 44, 60, 152 Duncan Village (Aug. 1985) 89–90 Duncan Village (Jan. 1990) 95 Pondoland Butchery 83 Pondo people 38 popular choruses 121–2 popular justice 106, 123, 230 population influx, in Duncan Village 92–5 post-apartheid city 27–31 housing estates 233 suburb/s 210–35, 240 postcolonial Africa 11 postmodern urbanism 1 potsoyi 123 poverty 1, 15, 21, 28, 29, 36, 74, 77, 78, 81, 87, 109, 111, 183, 185, 198, 207, 210, 212, 215, 219, 222, 233 power 15–20 Presidential funding 216 Presidential projects 234

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i n d e x   2 73 prostitution 39, 48, 237 public spaces circuits of connection 48 impact of closure 88 push-push schemes, see pyramid schemes pyramid schemes 175 qaba 40, 236 Qamarwana, Mcebisi 125 Qambata, L. 123 Qebeyi, Koko 217, 218–23, 242 Quinlan, Dr Elsie 60–1, 64, 66, see also Sister Aidan Rabinow, P. 23, 67, 71, 239 racial modernism 23–7, 239 Radu, Kulile 118 Ramokazi, Maria 237 rape 127, 128, 229, 240 Ratshi, Tlali 120 RDP houses 224, 233, 240 housing enclaves 31 illegal sales of 233, 244 Reaction to Conquest 5, 35, 37, 41 Reader, Desmond 5, 90, 97, 98, 99, 141–4, 176, 192–3, 195 on 1952 riots 63–4 rebellion fractured urbanism and fear of fire 89–111, 238 in Duncan Village 91–5 influx and ‘septic fringe’ 91–6 Reconstruction and Development Programme (RDP) 216, 222, see also RDP houses housing enclaves 31 Red migrants 236 cultural life 73 culture 33, 139, 141, 236 culture and domesticity in 1950s 141–4 subcultures 145–6 Redness 236 Red people cultural distinction between School and 235 identities 35 lifestyles 35, 236 origin of the word ‘Red’ 236 people 3-5, 9, see also abantu ababomvu revisited 8-11 revival, and cooking groups 144–8 women 3 youth 3 youth associations 115 Red–School divide 10, 36

Bank T01319 01 index 273

Reef townships 43, 113 Reeston 224, 232, 233 Reid, S. 24 rent boycotts 91, 92, 95, 195 rented rooms 58, 179 resettlement and new Duncan Village 78–84 Rhodes Livingstone Institute (RLI) 8, 46, 47 Robinson, J. 2, 13, 29, 238 Roosens, E. 159 Rosaldo, R. 46 Rubusana, Dr W.B. 39–41, 236, 239 Rubusana Sports Grounds 53, 84 Rubusana Park 43, 53, 116, 240 rugby in 1950s 54 rural identities 117, 136, 139, 140, 161–2 rurality, myth of 237–239 ruralness of Duncan Village 237 rural youth 123 Com-tsotsis and masculinity 124–30 identity politics 124 in 1950s 114–19 in 1970s 122 in 1980s 123 Sam, Mtelele 120 Sandercock, Leonie 60, 237 Sandile Street 102, 104, 201 fire 104 sanitary syndrome 215 Schadelberg, Jurgen 41 Schama, Simon 90–1 Scheld, S. 29 School people cultural distinction between Red and 235 cultural styles 141 migrants 4, 142, 144 people 3-5, 9, see also abantu basesikolweni revisited 8-11 subcultures 62 youth 3 School-Red divide, see Red-School divide Schumaker, L. 46, 47, 237 Sebe, Chief Lennox 95 Second World War 8, 21, 41, 42, 101, 213 Seekings, J. 112, 211 Sekula, A. 235 Sennett, R. 29 service delivery protests 243–4 sexual fidelity 132 sexuality 132, 133, 135, 169, 175, 238 Sexwale, Tokyo 210 Sexwale shack communities 33

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274   home spac e s , s tre e t s t y l e s shack/s fires 90, 91, 97, 101, 102, 103, 108, 110, 216, 218 fringe 90, 97 settlements 101, 216, 225 statistics of 1995 Social Survey 97 Shixini 122–3 Simmel, G. 1, 39 Simone, A. 15, 28, 242–3 single mothers 47, 153, 170, 173, see also amakhazana Sister Aidan, see also Quinlan, Dr Elsie Commemoration 219 memorial statue (Duncan Village) 217 murder of 60–1, 64, 66, 237 Sizulu, Walter 238 Sitas, A. 112 slumlords from, to yard socialists 192–6 Smit, D. 68 Smith 20, 166, 216 social anthropology 2, 35 social composition 31 block residents 151 of backyard residents 33 socio-residential niches 90 yard populations 187 social dislocation and reinvention of tradition 148–53 social exclusion 210, 211, 213, 214 social fluidity 242 fire and domesticity 106–9 social identity, see identity, social socialisation youth 32, 46, 114, 130, 135, 238 socialism 23–7, 32, 164 racial modernism, house and 23–7 yard 192, 195, 196, 203, 208 sociality 69, 87 forms of 67 of city 2, 29 of slum/s 29 Social Survey (1995) 96–101 socio-spatial dynamic 47, 93, 94 Soja, E. 12 Solo, Indonesia 13 Songoni, Ernest 231 Sontji, Nomathemba 168 Sophiatown 42, 43, 239 South African Allied Workers Union (SAAWU) 121, 140 South African Police Service 233 Soweto 79, 113, 124, 125, 129, 136, 208, 237 space 60–88, 237–8 appropriated 89, 178

Bank T01319 01 index 274

definition 15 dense spaces 14 diluted spaces 14 dominated 89 feminised 25, 29 politics of 32 spaces of representation 20, 90 spatial circuits 48–51 spatial inscription 243 spatial stigma 33 spaza shops 108, 183, 184, 184, 185, 186, 202, 203 Spiegel, A. 187 spiritual insecurity 212, 214–7, 223 sport 36, 37, 39, 41, 42, 43, 49, 53–5, 74, 86, 116–7, 128, 173 State of Emergency (June 1986) 89, 93, 125 Stevenson, D. 13, 18 stigmatisation, see territorial stigmatisation St Peter’s church memorial to Sister Aidan 218–20 street/s circuits of connection 48 corridor 238 masculinity 112, 114, 125, 129 styles 48–51 structured household interviews 46 struggle masculinity 128, 129 sub-suburbanisation 178 Swilling, M. 74, 78, 79, 85, 91 Switzer, L. 95, 238 Tankard, K. 61 tea parties 174–5 temporality 31, 90, 225 temporary urbanites 40 territorial stigmatisation 214–15 textile industry 13, 211 Thabo 184, 184–5 The Black Man’s Portion 5 The Culture of Cities 3 The Death and Times of Great American Cities 17 The Embarrassment of Riches 90 The Feminine Mystique 163, 165 The Ghetto 2 The Heart of Redness 10 The Myth of Marginality 16, 212 The Second Generation 5 Themali Cash Store 83 Themba, C. 43 Thobela, Eric 81, 188 Thomas 64, 240 Thornton Commission (1937) 169 Thrift, N. 19, 191–2 Thulandiville 79, 243

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i n d e x   2 75 Tjali, Audrey 79 Tjali, Joyce 171, 172 Toilet City 224, 227, 228 Tops 183–4 township model 23, 31, 33, 68–9 townswomen 116, 154, 159 Townsmen or Tribesmen 2, 3, 5, 7, 8, 11, 17, 35, 46, 58, 73, 100, 117, 237 tradition 11–15 social dislocation and reinvention of 148–53 traditional dress 115, 173, 174 traditional leaders 237 transit housing zones 147 Transkei 7, 10–11, 21–2, 26, 33, 62, 84, 85, 94, 114, 115, 122, 145, 147, 149, 153, 182, 194, 197, 205, 238 tribal consciousness 161 tribal rituals 39 tribalism African 10 Tshabo 45 Tsolo 60, 86, 117, 243 tsotsis (crimical youth) 49, 80, 115–16, 119–22, 125, 129, 222 tsotsism 119, 129, 169 Turino, T. 57 Twaku, Pule 49–50, 56, 82, 218, 237 Tyeni, Revd Odwa 230 ubuntu 195 ufinya-futhi lamps 143 ukhongo (enlightenment) 115 ukuhlalisana (living together outside marriage) 114, 185, 187 and politics at home 130–6 households 183 ukungwakuza 122 ukunxibisa (dressing up) 121 ukurhabulisana 121 ukushweshwa (staying-together unions) 239 ukuthwala 131–2, 136 ukwakha (to build) 158 umdlwembe (spies) 122, 127 umfazi uyanyamezela (to tolerate hardship of marriage) 134 umlilo (fire) 103 umtshotsho 115, 123 Red 115, 122 umzi (homestead) 145, 149, 154, 156, 169, 170, 236, 237 University of Fort Hare 238 United Democratic Front (UDF) 89, 91, 123 urban domesticity 191 farming 158

Bank T01319 01 index 275

home-making 164 house 164 households 38, 110, 186–7 housewife/ves 83, 172, 176–7, 182, 187 immigration 22, 90, 101 marginality, advanced 33 place-making 13, 15 settlements 15, 210 theory 1 urban matriarchs 83, 165, 170, 208 styles and strategies 166–70 Urban Outcasts 211, 213 urban youth 43, 44, 112, 120, 122, 123, 124, 129, 130, 136, 194, 236, 237 culture construction 117 identity 112, 113, 124–5 in 1950s 114–19 political culture 113 politics 112 urbanism 1-3, 5, 7, 13, 29, 31, 81 amorphous 28, 29 anthropology of 16, 19, 33, 235 apartheid 69 as defined by Wirth 1 cosmopolitan forms of 29 distressed 28 forms in Duncan Village 73, 91 fractured 30, 27–31, 241–2 fractured and post-apartheid city 27–31 fractured and rebellion and fear of fire 89–137 high-density new 223 historical anthropology of, in East London 14 in Duncan Village 222 male-centred 73 post-apartheid 7 postmodern 1 socialist 24, 31 splintering 28, 30 towards an anthropology of 1-34 Van Binsbergen, W. 12, 140, 158 verandah/s and beyond 51–6 circuits of connection 48, 51–3 Verdery, K. 24 Verkaaik, O. 13–4 vigilantism 210, 230–1, 233 Vikings 43, 50, 56, 82 villagisation 11 violence collective male 124 domestic 106, 134, 135, 196, 239, 240 Duncan Village (Aug. 1985) 89–90 Duncan Village (Jan. 1990) 95

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276   home spac e s , s tre e t s t y l e s violence continued interpersonal 33, 204, 207, 209 men and alcohol 203–8 redemptive 234 xenophobic 211, 233 volksmoeders (folk mothers) 24 Wacquant, L. 33, 211, 213, 214, 215, 217, 240 Wacquant’s (2006) model 33 Walker, C. 18, 164 Ward, P. 23 Watts, M. 29 welfare dependence and de-industrialisation 182–7 grants 185–6, 189 welfarism 63 Wells, J.C. 18, 164 Welsh Enquiry (1949) 169 Welsh High School 57, 75, 116, 220, 221, 222 Werbner, R. 164 West Bank location 7 Western feminists 163, 164, 165 Westernisation 4, 144 white male power 25 Williams, Raymond 159 Wilmot, Peter 1, 5 Wilson, Monica 5, 9, 38, 45, 47, 236, 239 Wilson, William Julius 213 Winstrom, Per 223 Wirth, L. 1, 2 Witbank 69 witchcraft 103–6, 134, 168, 216, 223 accusations 105, 106, 134, 216 implicating women in 105–6 occult 212 Xhosa beliefs 103 women, see also matriachs dress code of young 134 gender and the feminist city 239–41 male attitudes towards 154 moving into hostels 155 property ownership 168 remodelling home 163–89 tension over access to hostels 154 towns- 116, 154, 159 women’s struggle against marginalisation 33 changed roles 128 World Cup Soccer tournament 210

Bank T01319 01 index 276

xaba 40 Xaba, T. 112, 128 xenophobia 243 xenophobic violence 233, 234, 243–4 Xhosa in Town trilogy 2, 5, 22, 35–59, 114 revisited 35–59, 235–7 Xhosa people 235 Eastern Cape – Mayers on 3-5 Hintsa (Xhosa king) 222 traditional attire 221 traditions 147 witch beliefs 103 yard/s capitalism 192, 208 committees 193 feminisation 199–203 populations 194, 195, 197 reconstituting 196–9 relations 192, 195–6, 203–5, 207–9 rent charged 197 rhythms of 190–209 selection of tenants 197 space 191, 195 yard socialists feminisation of 199–203 from slumlords to 192–6 reconstituting 196–9 rhythms of 190–207 Young, Michael 1, 5 youth 238, see also urban youth; rural youth culture, Red 115 domesticity 114 households 32, 136, 239 identity formation 129 identity politics 112, 122, 124, 125, 130, 135, 240 political activism 130 styles, changing and rise of Comrades 119–24 zadruga state 24 Zambia 12, 217 Zambian Copperbelt 8 Zimbabweans illegal sales of RDP houses 233 Zipunzana/ Ziphunzana, see Duncan Village Extension Zonk 42 Zukin, S. 30 Zuma, Jacob 211, 231

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