On Their Own: Women, Urbanization, and the Right to the City in South Africa 9780773597587

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ON THE I R OW N

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mcgill-queen’s studies in urban governance Series editors: Kristin Good and Martin Horak

In recent years there has been an explosion of interest in local politics and the governance of cities – both in Canada and around the world. Globally, the city has become a consequential site where instances of social conflict and of cooperation play out. Urban centres are increasingly understood as vital engines of innovation and prosperity and a growing body of interdisciplinary research on urban issues suggests that high-performing cities have become crucial to the success of nations, even in the global era. Yet at the same time, local and regional governments continue to struggle for political recognition and for the policy resources needed to manage cities, to effectively govern, and to achieve sustainable growth. The purpose of the McGill-Queen’s Studies in Urban Governance series is to highlight the growing importance of municipal issues, local governance, and the need for policy reform in urban spaces. The series aims to answer the question “why do cities matter?” while exploring relationships between levels of government and examining the changing dynamics of metropolitan and community development. By taking a four-pronged approach to the study of urban governance, the series encourages debate and discussion of: (1) actors, institutions, and how cities are governed; (2) policy issues and policy reform; (3) the city as case study; and (4) urban politics and policy through a comparative framework. With a strong focus on governance, policy, and the role of the city, this series welcomes manuscripts from a broad range of disciplines and viewpoints. 1 Local Self-Government and the Right to the City Warren Magnusson 2 City-Regions in Prospect? Exploring Points between Place and Practice Edited by Kevin Edson Jones, Alex Lord, and Rob Shields 3 On Their Own Women, Urbanization, and the Right to the City in South Africa Allison Goebel

preface

On Their Own Women, Urbanization, and the Right to the City in South Africa

A L L I S O N G O EBEL

McGill-Queen’s University Press Montreal & Kingston • London • Chicago

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© McGill-Queen’s University Press 2015 isbn 978-0-7735-4589-2 (cloth) isbn 978-0-7735-4590-8 (paper) isbn 978-0-7735-9758-7 (epdf) isbn 978-0-7735-9759-4 (epub) Legal deposit fourth quarter 2015 Bibliothèque nationale du Québec Printed in Canada on acid-free paper that is 100% ancient forest free (100% post-consumer recycled), processed chlorine free. This book has been published with the help of a grant from the Canadian Federation for the Humanities and Social Sciences, through the Awards to Scholarly Publications Program, using funds provided by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada. McGill-Queen’s University Press acknowledges the support of the Canada Council for the Arts for our publishing program. We also acknowledge the financial support of the Government of Canada through the Canada Book Fund for our publishing activities.

Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication Goebel, Allison, 1963–, author On their own : women, urbanization, and the right to the city in South Africa / Allison Goebel. (McGill-Queen's studies in urban governance ; 3) Includes bibliographical references and index. Issued in print and electronic formats. isbn 978-0-7735-4589-2 (bound). – isbn 978-0-7735-4590-8 (paperback). – isbn 978-0-7735-9758-7 (epdf). – isbn 978-0-7735-9759-4 (epub) 1. Women, Black – South Africa – Pietermaritzburg – Case studies. 2. Urban women – South Africa – Pietermaritzburg – Case studies. 3. Urban blacks – South Africa – Pietermaritzburg – Case studies. I. Title. II. Series: McGill-Queen's studies in urban governance ; 3 hq1800.5.z9p53 2015

305.48'896068475

c2015-903829-4 c2015-903830-8

This book was typeset by True to Type in 10.5/13 Sabon.

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Contents

Figures, Tables, and Boxes vii Acknowledgments ix Introduction 3 1 Women, Housing, and Coming to the City 29 2 Housing, Urban Conditions, Health, and Well-Being in the “New South Africa” 57 3 Assessing the State’s Response: Housing Policy and Female Headed Households 80 4 Rights, Welfare, and Citizenship 103 5 “I don’t want any man in my life, I have no time for them”: Love, Gender Relations, and the “Crisis of Masculinity” 128 6 Protest, Governance, and the Ballot Box: Gender, Generation, and Race 148 7 Conclusions: Women and the Right to the City 178 Notes 193 References 203 Index 233

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Figures, Tables, and Boxes

FI G U R E S

0.1 0.2 0.3 0.4 0.5 1.1 2.1a 2.1b 2.2 2.3 2.4 2.5 2.6 2.7 2.8 2.9 3.1 4.1a 4.1b 5.1 5.2

Typical scene from Ambleton/France 17 Typical view in Peace Valley 2, home upgrading in process 17 Scene from Nthutukoville (1) 18 Scene from Nthutukoville (2) 18 Map of study areas in Msunduzi Municipality 19 Gertrude Mvubo. Photogragh by Cedric Nunn, 1987 51 Gogo N. with her family in Peace Valley 2 60 Gogo N. in her home 61 Sisi P. outside her home in Peace Valley 2 62 Family of Gogo M. in Ambleton must use the river for sanitation 67 Bucket system toilet located above house in Ambleton 68 Toilet in Peace Valley 2, 2006 69 Mama E. in her home in Peace Valley 2 72 Proportion of people 18 years+ working and not working 76 Household headship in eight neighbourhoods, Msunduzi Municipality 77 Gogo Z. Ambleton/France 78 Scene from Ambleton, March 2010 101 Gogo S. in her home in Ambleton 106 Gogo S. in her home in Ambleton 107 Mama T. with family and friends outside her home in Ambleton 134 Gogo L. in her home in Ambleton 136

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TA B L E S

2.1 2.2

2.3 2.4 2.5 4.1

Basic services in Msunduzi Municipality 2001, 2007, and 2011, by percentage of population 64 Basic services for low-income neighbourhoods compared to Msunduzi Municipality as a whole, percentages of population surveyed 66 Toilet types in Ash Road, Cinderella Park, and Ambleton 66 Selected health issues of female headed and other headed households 74 Selected socioeconomic data comparing female headed and other headed households 75 Employment status of male and female heads in seven wards in Msunduzi, 2006 105 B OX E S

1.1 2.1 2.2 2.3 2.4 4.1 5.1 5.2

The Story of Goodenough Ntombela 46 Peace Valley 2: Gogo N. 60 Peace Valley 2: Sisi P. 62 Peace Valley 2: Mama E. 72 Ambleton/France: Gogo Z. 78 Ambleton: Gogo S. 106 Ambleton: Mama T. 134 Ambleton: Gogo L. 136

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Acknowledgments

This book could not have been written without the welcome and support given by the University of KwaZulu-Natal, Pietermaritzburg campus, over more than ten years of visits to the city. Special acknowledgement is due to Trevor Hill, who co-initiated with me the Urban Ecosystems and Human Health Project from 2004–07, and who has become a dear friend and colleague. Rob Fincham became the official co-Principal Investigator of the project, and offered a warm welcome and many forms of support including an institutional home for the project in the Centre for Environment and Development (cead), invaluable contacts, thoughtful intellectual contributions, and many shared meals. Mary Lawhon played a key role in project design and implementation. Trevor, Rob, and Mark Dent also hosted numerous graduate students of mine over the years – we thank you! The Urban Ecosystems project was funded by the International Development Research Centre (idrc) of Canada (2004–07), as a partnership between Queen’s University in Kingston, Ontario and the University of Kwazulu-Natal. Other key contributors to the development of this first phase of the research in Pietermaritzburg are Julie Dyer, former Medical Officer of Health for Pietermaritzburg, Val Spearman, former Assistant Chief Planner for Pietermaritzburg, and Cameron Brisbane, Executive Director of the ngo Built Environment Support Group (besg). Cameron has remained a key advisor and friend over the life of the research. Belinda Dodson of the University of Western Ontario has been central throughout the project on government policy analysis, livelihoods, and gender issues. Bob McGraw and colleagues from Emergency Medicine at Queen’s University helped shape the health aspects of the research and assisted with questionnaire design. Abel

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Chikanda at the University of Western Ontario and John Cunningham helped with survey data analysis and Lungi Khumalo of cead assisted with background research on the South African Housing Policy Framework and government housing programs for women. Marc Epprecht advised on the historiography for Pietermaritzburg. At cead the project was assisted by the able and friendly administrative support of Philippa McCosh and Kerry-Ann Jordaan. At Queen’s, the project was housed at the Southern African Research Centre, directed by Jonathon Crush, and with administrative support by Maria Salamone. Support was also provided by the School of Environmental Studies. The second main phase of the research was (and is) supported by Queen’s University through the Gender and Housing in South Africa project (2007–10), and by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council (Canada) through The Right to the City in South Africa: FemaleHeaded Households, Housing and Protest project (2011–15). The Department of Geography at ukzn hosted me numerous times in this period, providing office space, administrative support, and always fun in the tea room. Special thanks to Shani Ramroop, Donovin de Vos, and Victor Bangamwabo for support and welcome, and to Brice Gijsbertsen for providing the map for the book, and much other support behind the scenes. The fieldwork for this phase of the research was done in collaboration with Cameron Brisbane and the Built Environment Support Group (besg), who provided the major research assistant, Nombuso Masinga. Ms. Masinga conducted the interviews in isiZulu, and translated and transcribed the interviews. besg also provided contacts to gain entry into Nthutukoville and Peace Valley 2, while Melanie Duplessis of the ngo Reach Out assisted with contacts in Ambleton/France to identify interview participants. Immeasurable thanks are due to the residents of Msunduzi’s townships, who patiently answered questions about their lives, their homes, and their dreams. The majority of the writing of the book was done while in Basel, Switzerland in the winter of 2013, where the Centre for African Studies at the University of Basel hosted me as a Visiting Scholar. Special thanks are due to Veit Arlt who managed the complicated bureaucracy surrounding an extended stay in Switzerland, and introduced us to his beautiful children and the lovely walks around the Jura Hills. Patrick Harries also welcomed us warmly, along with his partner Isobel. We would have been very lonely without you! My daughter Adriane Epprecht spent long hours as a research assistant for the book, and most heroically, prepared the manuscript for

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submission. My loving partner Marc Epprecht accompanied me many times to South Africa, provided a sounding board for ideas, and as always, someone to paddle and walk with when the writing would not come. Near the end of the writing, my darling first granddaughter Anne Frances was born – welcome Little Annie, this book is for you and your great grandmother, Anne Frances Mossey. Chapter two draws on “Urban Advantage or Urban Penalty? A Case Study of Female-Headed Households in a South African City” (Goebel, Dodson, and Hill 2010). The chapter is substantially updated with new data and the interview based research of the second phase of the project. Chapter three relies heavily on sections of “Housing and Marginality for Female-Headed Households: Observations from Msunduzi Municipality (Pietermaritzburg, South Africa)” (Goebel and Dodson 2011). Belinda has generously allowed the use of large parts of our article for this chapter, and I acknowledge her as co-author of this chapter. The chapter also includes significant new material not published elsewhere. Chapters four and six draw on sections of my article “‘Our Struggle is for the Full Loaf ’: Protests, Social Welfare and Gendered Citizenship in South Africa” (Goebel 2011). These chapters also include extensive additional material and arguments not included in this article. Permission has been granted for the use of these materials. Cedric Nunn has graciously given permission for the use of his photograph, “Gertrude Mvubo surveys her destroyed home in which her husband died in the political violence that engulfed the region. Mpende, Pietermaritzburg, KwaZulu-Natal, 1987.” Finally, thanks are owed to the anonymous reviewers with McGillQueen’s University Press, whose advice proved invaluable for revising the original manuscript.

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Introduction

ON THE I R OW N

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Introduction 3

1 Introduction

What is life like for low income African1 women in urban South Africa after apartheid? Does urban life offer new opportunities for personal development, equality for women, and freedom in the new South Africa? Are there new forms of marginalization and danger shaping women’s lives? Why are so many of them heading households on their own, and what does this mean for family, livelihoods, intimacy, and citizenship? Do women have equitable access to housing and urban services, as promised by the Constitution and government policy? How do women’s life histories, particularly experiences of violence and unrest in the period before 1994 shape their contemporary relationship to urban space, to their sense of place, home, and safety? This book explores these questions by navigating different layers of urbanization in South Africa, utilizing a gendered lens that illuminates the ways and processes through which women’s urbanization differs from men’s, and why this matters. The layers of urbanization examined include the micro level of family and intimate partner relations, household dynamics and personal stories; the meso level of housing policy and municipal services, livelihood opportunities, and patterns of health, education, and environmental quality; and the macro level of the broad forces of politics, history, and economics at the national and global scales. There is a large and divergent literature, as well as social movements and institutional practices related to urbanization in the global south generally, and in post-apartheid South Africa in particular. Among these, macro approaches map the larger processes of contemporary global rural-urban migration, the “second migration” (Saunders 2010), with subsequent rapid growth in the cities of the global south partic-

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ularly in the form of squatter and slum settlements. Cities are acknowledged as the key drivers of economic growth and cultural innovation, and often provide higher levels of human development (access to employment, education, better basic services, etc.) as compared to rural areas (un-Habitat 2010a). However, rapid urbanization brings profound social, economic, environmental, and governance challenges for nation states in the twenty-first century. These include heavy demands for infrastructure, housing and services, stretched health and education structures, increases in violence, injury and crime, and often a newly engaged and demanding citizenry pressing for democratic reforms and inclusion of the marginalized in the benefits of modern development. Urban studies is beginning to respond to these new realities, questioning, for example, the historical focus on the great cities of the west as the template for modern development, while cities in the global south are viewed primarily in terms of their “development” needs, not as modern in themselves (Robinson 2006). Robinson calls for “decolonisation” of urban studies, by which she means to decentre the west as the urban model and “owner” of the modern, and to allow instead the study of “ordinary cities,” like Durban in her case, understood on their own terms as participating in modernity not only as in need of “development.” Others call for understanding expanding African cities, including their suburbanization, on their own terms and in their own historical context (Mabin 2013). Other important responses to the rapidly urbanizing global south come from institutions like the United Nations that have suggested paths, for example the Sustainable Habitat Agenda of 1996, and promoted space for international discussion and debate, such as the World Urban Forum, which held its sixth annual sitting in 2012. The Sustainable Habitat Agenda calls attention to both socially and environmentally unsustainable patterns of development, including often deadly conditions created by poor sanitation, housing, and lack of other services in slum settlements. One of the key insights of the Habitat Agenda is the acceptance of the poor as permanent urban residents, and hence a call to end slum clearances and removals.2 Emerging strongly from these and other quarters is a “right to the city” narrative, taken up by progressive groups and scholars, including the Habitat International Coalition. This narrative centres on demands for equitable access to basic urban services, housing and space, as well

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as the right to democratic participation, environmental justice, and cultural and religious freedoms in urban spaces (Marcuse 2009, 247–8). The right to the city perspective also critiques the processes and effects of globalization which are seen to intensify livelihood crises among the world’s poor, decrease the ability and ideological commitment of states to deliver public goods, and decrease democratic space and rights (Harvey and Potter 2009; Davis 2006). Indeed, one of the most troubling aspects of the rapid urbanization and strong economic growth occurring in Africa is that they are accompanied by increasing gaps between the very rich and the rest of society, while corruption and poor governance remain unchecked (un-Habitat 2010b). Does the right to the city and related approaches such as the Habitat Agenda provide a good framing to understand gender and urbanization in South Africa? What would be the contours of the right to the city for women? While South African urban history, political economy, and physical environment are unique, can the South African experience contribute to these larger discourses being utilized in diverse places around the globe and in international fora? At the meso level, the book explores South Africa’s post-apartheid housing and municipal service delivery policies through a gendered lens. The South African government led by the African National Congress (anc) has made significant attempts to extend housing, electricity, and piped water to millions of urban dwellers since coming to power in 1994. What are women’s issues and specific needs in urban contexts? Have these been addressed by government policy? Are the gender equality provisions of the 1996 Constitution honoured? What are the impacts for urban women, especially female heads of households and their families? Housing is acknowledged as especially critical to women’s urban success, given the multiple needs it fulfills. What impact does government sponsored housing have for women? What role is played by self-help housing movements such as the South African Homeless People’s Federation, now the Federation of the Urban and Rural Poor (fedup), in which women have played such a predominant part in women’s urban opportunities and experiences? The book also explores the deeply gendered reliance of poor women and their families on the welfare provisions of the state. What are the implications for women’s citizenship, family dynamics, and gender relations? Again, there is a large literature on the urban challenges and realities of post1994 South Africa, addressing issues such as apartheid legacies of frag-

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mented and racialized urban space, housing, service delivery, and social welfare policy, socially and environmentally dangerous urban settlements, crime and violence, widespread unemployment, poverty and health issues, as well as the widespread and frequent urban protests, especially since 2006. This book engages with this large literature, highlighting how gendered analysis can contribute to contemporary debates on government policy, citizenship, welfare, and protest. Finally, at the micro level of gender relations, families, and households, there are a number of critical dynamics and themes raised by the extensive South African feminist and critical masculinities literatures. These include low rates of marriage and instability in conjugal relationships and subsequently high rates of female headed households; high rates of gender based violence; differentially high female unemployment, low wages, and poor educational levels; high dependence of women on the welfare state (especially as mothers and pensioners); very high rates of hiv and aids with subsequently high burdens of care on women as well as high rates of morbidity and mortality of women of childbearing age; and the oppression of women by patriarchal culture. There is also attention to the roles women played in anti-apartheid struggles, and the experiences and impacts of pre1994 violence and unrest for women. Histories of trauma and displacement are linked to the fraught nature of contemporary gender relations and family life, and often figure importantly in the journeys that brought women to cities. This book explores these issues through consideration of originally researched personal stories, as well as other personal stories and accounts available in the literature. The personal narratives are also interpreted through the relevant South African and international literatures. Does the state of gender relations and poor households in South Africa represent a social crisis? Can we trace the subjectivity and self-definition of the women themselves amid this “crisis”? How do women make meaning in their situations? How do they interpret their lives? THE C ON TE X T

South Africa is the most urbanized country on the African continent, with a level of urbanization estimated at 61.7 per cent for 2010 (unHabitat 2010a, 28). While the rate of increase is slowing, the scale and rapidity of urbanization remains a major challenge (sacn 2004).

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South Africa also displays among the highest levels of socioeconomic inequality anywhere in the world, manifested in stark contrasts in urban living environments (un-Habitat 2010b, 28). Well-off South Africans live in affluent suburbs, while a large minority live in informal settlements.3 Housing provision has been a major priority for the anc government since its election in 1994. The 1996 Constitution decrees the state’s responsibility for “progressive realisation” of “adequate housing” (Constitution of the Republic of South Africa Act, No. 108 of 1996, Section 28.1.c.). There has been a massive government program of low-cost housing construction, and the government reports that it had built more than 3 million houses for low income people by 2011.4 In addition, the government has committed to eliminating all slums by 2014 (Huchzermeyer 2006). Nevertheless, the country still faces a huge backlog in meeting the demand for low-cost housing in urban areas. Inadequate provision of housing and municipal services has been a major focus of public protest and critical commentary, with citizens challenging the government on its failure to meet Nelson Mandela’s famous promise for “a better life for all.” Conditions remain poor and even dangerous for many urban dwellers. Shack settlements face a high risk of fires, for example, while lack of access to clean water and sanitation carry well-known dangers of waterborne diseases. Even many of the newly built townships are already deteriorating due to shoddy construction and poor maintenance. In poorer neighbourhoods, residents also face high rates of crime and violence (Seekings 2000). Urban studies in South Africa post-apartheid have followed several main trends including analysis of segregation and fragmentation, sustainable urban development, urban poverty, issues of policy and political change, and protest (Seekings 2000). The legacies of segregation and fragmentation, particularly along race and class lines have proven stubbornly persistent, and are poorly addressed by the government’s housing program (Beall et al. 2002; Harrison et al. 2003; Huchzermeyer 2005; Lemanski 2006; Mabin 2005; Seekings 2000). There have been only minimal changes to racial residential patterns despite the lifting of legal prohibitions (Christopher 2001; Mabin 2005) and the strong desire of the state for spatial transformation. Most changes in racialized residential patterns post-1994 are seen for wealthier nonwhites, while the majority, who are poor and black, have little residential mobility. This is true even in the arguably best resourced and

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managed city in South Africa, Durban. Despite strong political will on the part of the municipality, Durban has been unable to overcome the corporate and elite interests that propel growth in the central city that excludes the majority, who are poor and black. Meanwhile, popular pressure to provide housing and services for this majority at an accelerated pace has meant most low-cost housing development for the poor has been on the city’s periphery, where the pressures of the market are low, and the poor already reside in informal settlements. Hence, racialized residential patterns remain mostly unchanged. The main success in challenging apartheid’s legacy of racialized settlement in Durban has been the settling of some of the so-called “buffer zones,” areas left undeveloped during apartheid to provide separation between racial groups (Schensul 2008). Later, in a more detailed analysis neighbourhood by neighbourhood, Schensul and Heller found that while the aggregate picture remained mostly unchanged, there were some transformations occurring in some neighbourhoods (Schensul and Heller 2011). Specifically, they found that one third of Durban’s neighbourhoods were experiencing new racial mixing. Blacks and Indians were moving into former white neighbourhoods in the urban core, and Africans were moving into some former Indian areas on the urban peripheries. Also, as services and infrastructure slowly improve in peripheral African areas, they are becoming more class diverse. Schensul and Heller suggest that analysis must be more nuanced and recognize that historical apartheid legacies of racialized urban geography are being slowly transformed, at least in Durban. The overall picture, however, remains characterized by enduring race and class patterns in contemporary cities. While many advocate densification of cities as one tool to promote integration across race and class lines, as well as to promote more environmentally sustainable urban development (Harrison et al. 2003), densification is severely challenged by rising land prices, the protection of private property, and the powerful role of large developers, who, in the absence of strong municipal urban planning, are the main drivers behind the pattern of urban development (Todes 2014). Rather than integration, intensified spatial patterns of segregation, especially in terms of class, are apparent as elites retreat to gated communities and upscale shopping and services districts, a phenomenon seen in many African cities today (Myers and Murray 2006). These developments lead Murray

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(2008) to call Johannesburg the “city of fragments,” while Bank (2011) utilizes the concept of “fractured urbanism” to describe post-1994 South African cities, where the black majority remains and continues to flood into townships and informal settlements of grossly inadequate infrastructure and services that have become “hyper-ghettos” of poverty, crime, and vigilantism. In terms of sustainable urban development more specifically, scholars point out that the urban poor share little of the blame for the fact that “South African cities rank among the most inefficient and wasteful urban environments in the world” (du Plessis and Landman 2002, 55), with the lion’s share of the blame going to the high consumption of the wealthy of land, energy, water, and wasteful and polluting practices of industry. However, the new urbanization of the poor through government programs could be an opportunity to build environmentally sustainable settlements, and government’s commitment to the Habitat Agenda suggests this direction for policy. Nonetheless, the government’s low-cost housing program has gone in the opposite direction, with massive greenfield developments on urban peripheries meaning not only the loss of that land to development, but also necessitating long commutes and new infrastructure that increases human impacts on the environment (Irurah and Boshoff 2003). 5 Overall, little attention has been paid to promoting sustainable urban development, and South African cities currently face severe challenges in relation to energy, water, and roads, particularly as the growing middle class increases its demands on this infrastructure (Todes et al. 2010). Indeed, South African policy and economy is still fundamentally organized around environment and development as contradictions, with development and growth usually trumping environmental concerns (Patel 2009). Pieterse, writing of Cape Town, emphasizes both the environmental and social justice aspects of the South African mode of urban development: Cape Town is heading for disaster and is already in deep crisis if one cares to look close enough … Cape Town’s grim future is born out of the confluence of the globalised economic and ecological collapse that is fast becoming the defining feature of the twenty-first century. It is manifested most starkly in the dire situation that faces the majority of the city’s residents, who are exclud-

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ed from the formal economy and must rely on substandard public services and their own makeshift shelters. (Pieterse 2010b, 13) The theme of urban poverty forms another key area of interest in the South African literature. Urban poverty as a topic has been neglected for decades by developmentalists, as it was often viewed as temporary, something that would pass as urbanites found their feet in the city; poverty was more generally associated with rural conditions (Beall et al. 2002). Urban studies now emphasizes the structural aspects of urban poverty in the economic context of neoliberalism and globalization that has created new and persistent forms of poverty for a majority of urban dwellers locked out of the formal economy (Allen 2006; Beall et al. 2002; Davis 2006). While urban areas grew, employment opportunities did not keep pace and poverty and inequality in South Africa’s cities increased (Beall et al. 2002; Marais 2011; un-Habitat 2010b). Urban poverty has come to be understood as much more complex than simply income levels, but consisting of “multiple deprivations” (Mitlin and Satterthwaite 2004, 12) that include physical living conditions, food insecurity, vulnerability to crime and violence, as well as neglect by institutions and political processes. Urban poverty often includes insecurity of tenure, vulnerability to flooding or fire, and poor services (like lack of clean water) (Beall et al. 2002). Research has also shown the importance of disaggregating the poor, noting that there are different levels of poverty wherein some are chronically poor, while others find ways to advance over time (Mitlin 2005; Seekings 2000). This also applies to low income urban women, a point that is especially important for this book (Speigel et al. 2005). Finally, research also examines the complicated strands of urban livelihoods in this context, wherein households build survival through multiple strategies including accessing government grants, informal sector activities, and social networks of family, friends, and charities (Murray and Myers 2006). A large area of urban studies in South Africa examines government policies and practices in “service delivery” – that is the promise of a “better life for all” for poor South Africans, especially in term of housing, basic services, and upliftment from poverty (Municipal Services Project (msp); Pillay et al. 2006). For this book, housing and welfare policies are especially important. In examining housing policies, the many contributions of Huchzermeyer, especially her work examining

Introduction

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the efficacy of housing policy in helping the poor, are central to this analysis (see, e.g., 2001, 2003, 2005). In general, commentators agree that well-intentioned housing policy designed under the Redistribution and Development Programme (rdp) in 1994, and later improved by Breaking New Ground (2004), made some improvements in welfare for the urban poor. However, policy has failed overall to promote the major social and economic transformations needed to overcome the legacies of poverty and inequality of apartheid. This failure is partly due to the onset of intensified globalization occurring right at the time of transformation in the early 1990s, severely hampering government spending as the anc took power (Allen 2006). Others emphasize elite bargains made during transition behind closed doors that compromised socialist tendencies in the anc and forced a new dispensation that strongly favoured capitalist interests (Bond 2000). Whatever the analysis, the pro-poor based intentions of the rdp were severely curtailed, although not entirely without achievements. In the analysis of social welfare policy, a similarly contradictory picture emerges. Seekings documents the long history of social welfare programs in South Africa, including an extensive system of state funded pensions and other grants for the needy (Seekings 2002; 2005). Disbursements of social welfare grants have increased steadily since 1994, and often become the only or the most important source of income for many of the urban and rural poor (May et al. 2000). Given the contemporary structural conditions of high unemployment, however, these comparably generous welfare provisions have not mitigated the deepening levels of poverty and inequality. Finally, it is unsurprising that post-apartheid disappointments for the urban poor have generated a great deal of public protest, which has in turn attracted intense scholarly and media interest (Alexander 2010; Ballard, Habib, and Valodia 2006; Barchiesi 2006; Bond 2010; Desai 2002; Desai and Pithouse 2004a; Gibson 2006; Madlingozi 2007). Scholars debate the meaning of the protests, some seeing potentially revolutionary and anti-globalization gestures emerging, while others emphasize the call of an otherwise still loyal anc electorate reminding their government of its promises and obligations to them. The protests are a powerful lens through which to view a whole range of contemporary urban issues, from service provision to governance issues, from environmental justice to citizenship, from neoliberalism to the welfare state. All of these strands of urban studies in South Africa in-

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form this book and are taken up in more depth in the chapters that follow. CA S E ST U DY CI T Y : P I E TE R M A R I TZ B U RG

(MSUNDUZI)

Our case study city of Msunduzi is a medium sized city6 located approximately 80 kilometers inland (west) of the port city of Durban. Formerly known as Pietermaritzburg, the city was founded in 1838 and served as capital of the colony, later province, of Natal. The enlarged and renamed Msunduzi Municipality is now the provincial capital of KwaZulu-Natal (kzn). While not categorized as among South Africa’s eight metropolitan areas, it ranks high in the “secondary city” category, acknowledged as a highly important economic and cultural hub (John 2012). Industry includes manufacturing, retail, and business services, and the economic sector has picked up in the last ten years after an alarming, job shedding decline post-1994 (Caesar et al. 2013). Per capita incomes are higher than the South African average, but lower than those of the eight big metropolitan areas (John 2012, 15). 7 Its urban layout largely reflects the legacies of racial segregation from the colonial and apartheid eras. While the implementation of the Group Areas Act (1950) was somewhat haphazard and late in the city, this together with industrial development and related forced removals in the 1960s and 1970s entrenched racially segregated residential areas separated by “buffer zones.” Thus, the city was shaped to somewhat fit the common apartheid city model, although there are important departures from this (Epprecht 2008, and forthcoming). Today Msunduzi is a sprawling city of suburbs and townships (formal and informal), strongly marked with enduring social, environmental, infrastructure, and service inequalities along race and class lines. While there has been some desegregation in the former white suburbs, as well as in the urban core, segregated residential neighbourhoods persist and new black arrivals have not significantly changed the city’s racial geography. This complex context of race, space, and urban poverty poses difficult challenges to pro-poor and pro-black housing and service delivery. For example, while policy encourages densification in urban planning for new housing in order to address both racialized residential patterns and environmental concerns related to urban sprawl, as elsewhere in South Africa, most new develop-

Introduction

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ment of low-cost housing has continued to be on the urban periphery, often adjacent to apartheid era black townships. There are some black inhabited informal settlements located more centrally, usually close to places of employment. Msunduzi thus reflects common patterns in urban South Africa. These include recent and rapid expansion, inadequate municipal government resources and human capital, and a fairly robust “first economy” or formal sector, co-existing with a poorer “second economy” or informal sector. In some ways, Msunduzi appears to be relatively privileged compared to other areas of the country. In relation to housing and other services, for example, Msunduzi appears to be somewhat better serviced than the national average, with considerable expansion of housing and service delivery since 1994. Among urban areas Msunduzi is better serviced than the average for cities in KwaZulu-Natal and in comparison to other major urban centres in South Africa. For example, Johannesburg, Cape Town, and Durban (eThekwini) have much higher rates of informal housing than Msunduzi, the result of a proportionately much larger influx of migrants and larger historical housing backlogs. In other ways, however, Msunduzi seems to be even worse off than other major cities in South Africa. A recent survey of nine poorer areas in Msunduzi in relation to food insecurity, for example, found very high levels of food insecurity in the city (Caesar et al. 2012). In fact, the urban poor in Msunduzi were found to be more food insecure than those in Cape Town and Johannesburg, and may be even worse off than some other major cities in the southern African region. The study’s authors attribute this state to the fact that Msunduzi has only a very small informal food sector, so that the poor are almost completely dependent on supermarkets for food, making them highly vulnerable to increases in food prices. Indeed, increased food prices have led many poor households to go without important foods such as meat, milk, eggs, and fruit. In addition, the city has virtually no urban agriculture through which the poor can supplement household food supplies. There is virtually no rural to urban food transfers, and very little inter-household food transfers or sharing. Overall, the study found that the “majority of the urban poor regularly go hungry” (Caesar et al. 2012, 28), with female headed households, who are in the majority in the poor areas, more food insecure than others. Another important observation made by this study was that while Msun-

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On Their Own

duzi experienced a “mini-boom” in its economy which raised average annual household income from R 50,178 in 2001 to R 108,926 in 2011, annual average incomes for the poor fell as a proportion of this overall average from half the city average in 2001 to only a quarter in 2011 (Caesar et al. 2012, 10). Economic growth and new income opportunities have not included improvements for the poor; rather, these developments have increased the gap between rich and poor in the city. Indeed, the African Food Security Urban Network (afsun) survey found that in their research of poor areas a huge “61 per cent who were either unemployed and looking for work (35 per cent) or unemployed and not looking for work (26 per cent)” (Caesar et al. 2012, 9). The municipal boundaries of Msunduzi were expanded after 1994 to include former farmland, former tribal land, and other peri-urban areas, hence dramatically increasing the population under municipal jurisdiction, which has further rapidly expanded with rural-urban migration. Msunduzi retains legacies of some perhaps atypical pre-1994 improvements in urban services given its history of large, relatively well serviced, non-white townships such as Edendale, Ashdown, and Imbali (Epprecht 2008, and forthcoming). It also has a unique history of violence in the pre-1994 period with intense clashes between Inkatha and United Democratic Front supporters that require close attention. However, despite these particularities, it can be compared to most South African cities as remaining strongly racially segregated. Racial segregation is also associated with class inequalities and inequalities in housing and urban services. Like elsewhere in urban South Africa, the unevenness of urban infrastructure and services across the various wards and neighbourhoods is a major challenge for the municipal government. Despite persistent race and class based inequalities, however, service delivery improvements are apparent in Msunduzi, as they are throughout South Africa. This book describes these developments and their implications for sustainable urban development in general, as well as analyzes the gendered aspects as they are emerging in spatialized and socioeconomic terms.

Introduction

15

THE R E S E A RC H

The multi-method research to support this book was undertaken between 2004 and 2014. The initial stage was completed as part of the project “Urban Ecosystems and Human Health in South Africa.” 8 In this phase, we conducted survey research in Msunduzi. Two surveys of randomly selected households in wards with predominantly low income households were undertaken in 2006, the first in April and May (293 households in seven neighbourhoods in six wards) and the second in September (170 households in four wards). Survey 1 was undertaken in Wards 8 (Elandskop), 17 (Imbali), 18 (Ambleton/France and Mpumelelo), 23 (Peace Valley 2), 33 (Ash Road), and 34 (Cinderella Park). 9 Survey 2 was carried out in Wards 8, 18, 23, and 34. Our sample neighbourhoods were deliberately selected to ensure representation of the major types of low income housing in the city, including informal settlements, older African townships, in situ upgraded areas, new peripheral township developments under the post-1994 housing program, and semirural traditional homesteads.10 Our surveys included questions on a range of demographic factors, socioeconomic indicators, services and environmental risks, sense of place, belonging, safety, and support networks, along with questions about health status and health management issues for household members. Survey research findings are contextualized using national level survey research, such as the Census (1996, 2001, 2011), Community Survey (2007), surveys by the South African Institute of Race Relations, reports from the South African Cities Network (sacn), extensive government documents, media sources, and secondary scholarly research. Many questions emerged from this first stage of survey research. The most pressing for me was the need to explore further the deeply gendered nature of the findings. Especially stark were the differences we found between female headed households and male or jointly headed households, across a huge range of issues, from income levels, to health management issues, to access to services and housing (Goebel, Dodson, and Hill 2010; Goebel and Dodson 2011). These questions spawned the second main phase of the research, the core of which is qualitative interview research with twenty-nine female heads of households from three wards in Msunduzi conducted in 2010.11 In this research, the three neighbourhoods chosen were all different types of

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On Their Own

newer settlements. The first is the largest post-1994 government subsidized housing project in the city, colloquially known as “France,” a settlement of more than 5000 30m² houses built on former white owned commercial farms Ambleton and Shenstone on the periphery of Pietermaritzburg. The second is an informal settlement known as Peace Valley 2, an area along the Msunduzi River, close to industrial areas, transport to the city centre, and near to the older townships of Edendale, Imbali, and Ashdown. The third area is Nthutukoville, a small, densely settled area just outside of the central business district of Msunduzi. The neighbourhood consists of a mix of informal settlements and upgraded housing. Newer settlements were selected for the interview based research as I was interested in the stories of more recently arrived women; these areas also appeared to have higher rates of female headedness than more established, older townships. In 2012 a field trip was undertaken to focus on further historical and documentary research on issues emerging from the interview data, and in February 2013 and May 2014, short field visits were made to investigate the contemporary situation in municipal and national politics and housing projects.12 The set of twenty-nine interviews with female heads of households is used as a main lens through which to view the large and divergent literatures and issues surrounding urbanization in post-apartheid South Africa. While social surveys and broader literature on policies, politics, and history provide the trends and structures at play, interview based research allows us to see how these “trends” are lived by real people as experiences, reflections, perceptions, and subjectivities. There is huge analytic potential in the study of everyday life. As Dorothy Smith recognized in her path breaking feminist sociology, women’s everyday activities of domestic life reveal broader patterns and processes of social organization, ideology, institutions, and power from the perspective of those marginalized and often disadvantaged by those larger processes (Smith 1987). Domestic life and households are not private or separate spheres, but rather deeply connected to the state, the labour market, hegemonic culture, and history. The women interviewed are not famous, nor particularly remarkable beyond what they have been able to survive. As low income amaZulu women heading households in townships and settlements in Msunduzi, mostly middle-aged, they are quite ordinary, and their lives can speak to what may be the possibilities and constraints for making a life in urban

Introduction

Figure 0.1 Typical scene from Ambleton/France

Figure 0.2 Typical view in Peace Valley 2, upgrading in process

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On Their Own

Figure 0.3 Scene from Nthutukoville (1)

Figure 0.4 Scene from Nthutukoville (2)

Introduction

19

Figure 0.5 Map of study areas in Msunduzi Municipality. Designed by Brice Gijsbertsen, Department of Geography, University of KwaZulu-Natal, Pietermaritzburg Campus. Reproduced with permission.

South Africa after 1994.13 The window on the lives of these women forces us to ask bold questions about history, about men and masculinity, about health, and about families. The women’s words are striking in their assertiveness and pride in what they have achieved “on their own,” and offer often radical critiques of male dominated politics and culture. Feminist researchers have long turned to interviews and other personal narratives research such as life histories with women as a means to challenge dominant, patriarchal discourses of the social world, which have often excluded women and their views (Anderson et al. 1987; Harding 1987). Feminists in African studies have found personal narratives research particularly compelling and useful in making visible the lives of marginalized women often invisible to government and the wider world (Bozzoli with Nkotsoe 1991; Geiger 1986, 1992; Marks 1989; Mbilinyi 1989; Mirza and Strobel 1989; Shostak 1981,

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On Their Own

1989; Ndambuki and Robertson 2000). While the ethical dilemmas surrounding the often race and/or class differences between researchers and subjects remains an important terrain of power to be considered and negotiated, the problems of interpretations across cultures, languages, and classes is perhaps an even thornier issue: “What and how can we know as people talk about aspects of their lives, their selves, their memories, and the events and relations they experienced in various ways?” (Kratz 2001, 127). For me, there is no choice but to acknowledge researcher limitations, and to accept, hopefully humbly, any errors of representation. We can also work with local scholars and research assistants to help us navigate cultural, race, and class divides, and deepen our understanding of local lives.14 As scholars, we also commit to learning as much as possible from other researchers, popular sources, media and literature, and spending time in the context of the study. Nevertheless, the interpretive practices of the researcher will always remove the narrative “away from its moment and context of production, where it begins as communicative exchange and situated interaction” (Kratz 2001, 128). Also, interview data based on structured questions (even if open ended) such as those used for this book, will already be strongly shaped by the interpretation, analysis, and interests of the researcher, and hence will provide only truncated, and perhaps distorted representations of the women who are interviewed (Giles-Vernick 2001). Nevertheless, I remain convinced that interviews and other personal narratives research are among the best available tools to invite women to speak about themselves, to represent themselves, to explain what they mean, particularly in contexts where they lack opportunity to narrate and represent their own lives through written or oral forms to the wider world. If the exchange in an interview remains one of unequal power, it at least remains an attempt to engage across the deep divides or race, class, and culture. The interpretive frames used in this book produce urban South African women in particular ways. The two main frames used are feminist analysis and the right to the city approach, including an environmental justice frame. I deal first with the use of feminist analysis, and then address the frame of the right to the city. A feminist analysis foregrounds gender as a critical site of power relations, social organization, and subjectivity. Gender theory emphasizes how social meanings of hierarchical difference are ascribed to biologically sexed bodies, so that people are identified as either male

Introduction

21

or female, and designated different roles, responsibilities, characteristics, and power as a result. Gender differences are produced in historically and culturally specific ways, but universally appear to ascribe lower social status, poorer entitlement to material and cultural resources, and higher labour burdens to those identified as having female-sexed bodies. Feminist theorists such as Iris Young suggest that sex/gender systems not only produce differences that involve the exclusion of women from “privileged activities” (for example political or economic leadership) and various disadvantages in status and labour for women. Gender systems are also about the extraction of power from women by men: “Women’s oppression consists partly in a systematic and unreciprocated transfer of powers from women to men” (Young 1990, 50). These differences and the exploitation of women are commonly justified through ideology and social norms that naturalize and make moral claims about gender difference such as gendered divisions of labour (for example women’s near universal responsibility for child care as being “natural” and critical to the moral social order), or stereotypical characteristics (such as men’s supposedly biological need for sex meaning that men’s rape of women is frequently a highly contested moral field that often blames women for “enticing” men). Gendered regimes are kept in place through both acceptance of one’s place and role as culturally “right,” and the use of violence and coercion to discipline those who may challenge or deviate from accepted norms. Gender differences are also supported and reproduced by economic structures, such as the labour market that stereotypes work either for men only (as historically in southern Africa’s male migrant labour system), or divides the labour market by gender, assigning certain types of work for either men or women. Typically male wages are set higher than female wages, reproducing gendered economic inequalities and exploiting women’s labour even more than men’s. Gender norms also often locate women’s main roles and functions within the (presumed to be) private sphere of the home and family, while men are the main actors in the public spaces of politics and the economy. Government policy and programs frequently invoke gender norms of roles and responsibilities of men and women, such as targeting welfare payments to women as child care providers. This works to reproduce these gender norms. From the most micro levels of sex, intimacy, and family, to the public world of politics and governance, gender theorists argue that social norms and meanings of

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difference between men and women consistently disadvantage, exploit, and marginalize women. As such, feminist research that foregrounds gender is not only about a focus on women as subjects of research, but requires a systematic analysis of the wider social and economic processes, norms, and ideologies that produce the hierarchical world of gender difference. An eye towards both practical improvements in basic needs such as shelter, food, or livelihoods, or strategic and transformative change and justice for women such as shifts in ideologies, discriminatory labour practices, or laws, is often implicit or explicit in this work (Molyneux 1985). For this book, while the focus is mostly on women as subjects, it must be clear that feminist gender analysis is a relational concept that includes the study of men’s lives and the wider world of social relations, institutions, economy, and politics. Indeed, gender theory has allowed the flourishing of masculinity studies, which go beyond challenging how men have been the implied norm and subject of “the human” in both the social world and social theory (Harding 1987), to problematize and interrogate the production of masculinity within historically shifting forces of political economy and culture (Connell 1987). This book engages with critical masculinity studies in South Africa, and the production of dominant forms of African masculinity, especially in chapter five (Hunter 2010a). Feminist theory also offers tools to challenge sex/gender binaries, and introduces other axes of power and difference such as race, class, nationality, ethnicity, sexuality, and ability. Especially important for this book are the insights of Black feminism, that offer tools to disrupt “whiteness” as the implied norm for the female subject, as well as call for the analysis of how race interacts with gender and class to produce inequalities and identities. Patricia Hill Collins introduced the concept of “interlocking oppressions” to capture this idea (Collins 1991), which is currently more often deployed under the term intersectionality. The way in which women (and men) are socially produced and experience opportunity, oppression, private, and public life is shaped by race, class, and gender simultaneously; hence gender alone cannot explain women’s lives. Important here too are the contributions of third world feminists, who have also added to gender analysis by insisting that colonialism and contemporary unequal relations of the global political economy must be taken into account when understanding women’s lives in the global south (Mohanty 1991). These nuances strengthen gender analysis in its ability to iden-

Introduction

23

tify the social processes, institutions, and values that continually produce and reproduce gender differences in which clearly identifiable social categories labelled “men” and “women” exist in the social world, and in which those labelled “women” remain disadvantaged and exploited (Barrett and Phillips 1992). 15 Debates in African feminism are long and deep (Amadiume 1987; Arnfred and Ampofo 2009; McFadden and Abraham 1999; Meena 1992; Oyěwùmí 1997, 2005; Nnaemeka 2004) and South African academic feminism is particularly rich in theoretical and empirical complexity (Lewis 2001; Msimang 2002; Gasa 2007; also see the journal Feminist Africa). One key contemporary debate in South Africa that is relevant to this book interrogates the efficacy of “rights” discourses and laws, such as those flowing from the 1996 Constitution that guarantee gender equality rights (Hunter 2010a; Meintjes 2007; Lewis 2009; Gouws 2005). While many applaud the equality provisions of the Constitution as a clear advance for women as well as sexual and religious minorities, others caution that feminist politics in South Africa have been depoliticized and truncated through their absorption into the state apparatus. Women’s right to housing is guaranteed by both their constitutional equality rights, as well as the constitutional right to housing extended to all citizens of South Africa. Indeed these rights underpin the major government low-cost housing program and women as heads of households have benefited extensively as recipients of housing subsidies in this program. How do we analyse this right to housing and its realization through the housing program? The same discussion can be had about women as major recipients of state welfare grants, either as pensioners or guardians of children. Do these processes of becoming certain kinds of “subjects” of the state turn women into victims of structural marginality, fixing on them a certain definition of being a “woman” that fails to interrogate and challenge the gendered historical, political, and economic process that produce their situation? In other words, does the discourse of rights shift into a discourse of the “needs” of the vulnerable and marginalized, which limits women’s agency (Gouws 2005a)? Or, does the exercising of these rights and entitlements offer real opportunities for gender justice and transformation? These issues are engaged with further in chapters four and seven. Another critical point of discussion throughout the continent is analysis of African women as mothers. Seen as part of patriarchal oppression of women in western feminism, many African feminists have

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On Their Own

insisted that motherhood defines women in Africa in a positive way; it is empowering, political, and not conservative (Arnfred 2011; Gasa 2007; Nnaemeka 1998; Stevenson 2011). The political role of motherhood was especially evident in the 1980s township unrest, as discussed in chapter one. This question is linked to the issue of how to label and categorize women who head their households and do not live with adult men, except perhaps sons. Is “female headed household” an appropriate label for these households? Are inappropriate notions of family and conjugality implied by this term? A major task of this book is to interpret the social fact of very high prevalence of black African women heading their households, or put another way, a high prevalence of black African children residing with their mothers only.16 Are these households “missing a man,” and therefore somehow deviant of an imagined norm of a household headed by a man and woman in a conjugal partnership? In fact, these patterns in urban African families and households are not new having been observed since at least the 1950s (Argyle and Preston-Whyte 1978; Burman and Preston-Whyte 1992). Many urban African households have multi-generations of female kin, and have been called variously “matrifocal” or “female linked” by earlier social scientists (Preston-Whyte 1978). The implication of these realities is that female headed households must be appreciated as “normal,” and a household form with deep historical roots. If we add in the positive connotations of motherhood for African women, we begin to depart from the “missing man” view. Nevertheless, we must contend with the fact that state policies that target these families as well as hegemonic patriarchal culture more generally, continually imposes an ideal of the patriarchal, male headed, and male breadwinner family, even while pro-poor policies such as the housing subsidy may end up benefiting female headed households differentially because of their greater poverty. As such, our interpretive task is to trace the effects of the imposed ideological norm, while keeping in mind how reality deviates, with both positive and negative impacts for the women and their families. While I am attracted by the more overtly positive labels of “female linked” and “matrifocal” households, I choose to keep the term “female headed household” for this book. This is partly because it is used as a category by the South African Census. The term is also descriptive of households wherein the female head may in fact be married, perhaps as one of several wives. However, this type of marriage has broken down to the extent that the husband is not living in the home, nor making any kind of contribution to it. This

Introduction

25

kind of scenario appeared in our own sampling. These women are truly on their own, despite not necessarily being officially “unattached.” The term female headed is also retained despite the normality of male absence. This is because this absence and the gender relations of love, intimacy, and care can be hugely problematic in both economic and social terms for women and children. These issues are pursued throughout the book, especially in chapter five. Finally, for this section on the concepts of feminist analysis, some African feminists have in fact questioned whether gender is a critical site of women’s struggles at all, insisting that age is far more important in producing social hierarchies of power (Amadiume 1987), or that gender inequality is trivial in contexts where racism, colonialism, and international political economy act on both women and men to create poverty, dispossession, and persistent structural inequality. These debates are thoroughly documented elsewhere, and need not be recited in full here.17 Important for the purposes of this book is to acknowledge feminist gender analysis as contested space in African studies, but one which nonetheless remains vibrant and vital in South African scholarship. I share the position of Sheila Meintjes who after decades of research and activism, strongly claims “gender remains the defining difference in the life chances of women and men” (2007, 365). At the same time, feminist studies in southern Africa have long acknowledged the importance of race, class, colonialism, and political economy in the gendered production of inequality, poverty, political subjectivities, employment patterns, migration, health issues, and so on (Walker 1990). The position in this book is that all of these things matter profoundly, but for poor urban women, the fact of being a woman is clearly of critical importance. It shapes their life histories in terms of mobility and exposure to violence; their roles as nurturers of children; the nature of their relationship to the state and citizenship; their economic and educational opportunities; and their subjectivities and sense of self. This book intends to contribute to feminist scholarship in southern Africa, not only insisting on the importance of gender in social analysis, but also resisting the depoliticizing of gender as a category that has occurred through the “mainstreaming” of gender analysis both in government machinery and the development industry (Arnfred and Ampofo 2009; Lewis 2009). Gender is about power and violence, it is about profound emotional and physical entanglements and abandonments, it is about home and family, love, intimacy, and despair. As a major analytical category for this

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book, gender is consciously invoked to produce and reveal a certain kind of urban subject; another scholar may find a completely different way to talk about urban life that would better reveal another set of issues. However, I am heartened that an important recent book on urban development in South Africa also argues for the centrality of gender and women’s experiences in understanding the history and contemporary dynamics of cities: “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” (Bank 2011, 17). The interpretative frame of the right to the city allows us to contextualize the South African story within the broader trajectories of the urbanization of the global south, and the wider ideological debates regarding globalization, neoliberalism, human rights, and environmental justice. Global scale transformations and processes of human habitation and survival within alarming conditions of environmental stress and economic crisis require our urgent attention. These pressures and dynamics converge with particular intensity in the cities of the global south. What is clear is that the urban poor are in the city to stay, and attending to the housing, energy, sanitation, employment, political, and welfare needs of expanding city populations in a sustainable way is one of the major tasks for this century, both in South Africa and throughout the global south. The right to the city and the environmental justice perspectives remind us that the looming urban crisis is both social and environmental; it is spatial and material; it is about social justice as well as basic needs. Indeed, expanding cities present the whole gambit of critical challenges facing the world today: energy, water, waste, shelter, employment, and democracy. As Pieterse, a leading South African scholar says, “Nothing about cities in the twenty-first century is insignificant” (Pieterse 2008, 1). The right to the city is about equitable access to the material basis to live and thrive (housing, food, work, and so on). It is also about belonging and citizenship. Who has legitimate access as belonging to the city (Lefebvre 1996; Murray 2008, 26–7)? Do women and the poor belong? Are the unemployed and those in informal housing or shacks legitimate citizens? Who has the right to participate in the culture and economy of city life, and who can participate in governance? The French philosopher and sociologist, Henri Lefebvre, who coined the

Introduction

27

concept of the right to the city in the 1970s, called this to “inhabit” the city (Lefebvre 1996, 109). Many poor urban South Africans do not appear to fully inhabit the city, as they may be evicted from slums, denied access to clean water, energy, and work, and barred from areas of the city through vagrancy laws or gates. In this book, the right to the city framing is used both to insist that the gendered story of urban women must be included in and allowed to inform the wider considerations of urbanization, and to anchor the pursuit of gender justice within the broader struggles for urban environmental justice and the right to the city for the poor. We asked questions about the gendered experiences of exposure to urban environmental health risks, access to housing, sanitation, energy, and water, access to governance structures, and the impacts all of this has on gendered experiences of citizenship. C HA P TE R OU TL I N E S

Following this introduction, chapter one traces the historical antecedents to the contemporary context of urban South Africa, especially the gendered processes of mobility, settlement, and livelihoods and the impact of these on marriage, family, and gender relations. The chapter also outlines the historical context of gender and urbanization in the case study city, including discussion of the civil war in KwaZulu-Natal in the 1980s and early 1990s. Finally, the chapter discusses the stories of particular women interviewed about coming to the city. Chapter two outlines the major social and economic patterns for low income African households in contemporary urban South Africa. The main purpose of the chapter is to illustrate prevalent conditions for low income urban South Africa, and critically assess the measurable improvements in basic housing and services provision. Have improvements brought by the state had significant positive impacts on people’s health and well-being? The chapter also highlights the large proportion of low income households headed by women, and the ways in which they are differentially disadvantaged from other households. Chapter three considers housing policy in relation to the constitutional obligation to ensure both “adequate shelter” and gender equality, in light of what we now know about the gendered dynamics of low income households. South Africa provides a context of progressive constitutional provisions and deliberate gender “mainstreaming” in many policies and programs, including in housing. For this chapter, we

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On Their Own

evaluate the merits of the policies themselves as responses to conditions on the ground. Have these policies improved women’s lives? Chapter four details the gendered relationship between women and the state within the overall social and economic context of livelihoods, families, and gender relations. We also venture into the debates about rights and citizenship, considering how government policy produces women as certain kinds of subjects of the state. Based on constitutional rights, housing policy interacts with poor women as entitled citizens. Pensions and welfare grants also address women’s fundamental socioeconomic human rights to survival. Are these state provisions and the conceptualization of women, especially female heads as rights bearing citizens to be considered progressive and empowering for women, or does this type of citizenship limit and truncate women’s opportunities for justice and equality? Chapter five delves into the everyday aspects of gender relations for female heads, especially their disappointments in “love” and men. While gender relations in this context could be read as a “crisis,” there are also deep experiences of positive emotional and psychological transformation at play that resonate with a feminist understanding of female challenges to patriarchal power, violence, and abuse. The chapter is grounded in our interviews with twenty-nine female heads understood in the overall context for women and gender relations in South Africa, and engages with the wider feminist and critical masculinity literature on contemporary gender relations, love, intimacy, and identity. Chapter six engages discussions about the numerous public protests in South Africa, which have attracted intense scholarly and media interest. This chapter considers how a gender analysis of the protests raises new questions about the relationship between citizens and the state, and particularly how gender, race, and class are important elements in understanding the political subjectivity of the urban poor. Chapter seven considers the concept of the right to the city and how it may be fulfilled in the South African context. How do constitutionally protected rights influence the pursuit of the right to the city? What are the possibilities and limitations of rights based protests and struggles? How does consideration of gender issues contribute to or transform the debates about rights as a radical strategy under liberal democratic regimes? The chapter also offers overall conclusions for the book, discussing the implications of the research for urbanization in South Africa, discourses on the right to the city more generally, and African gender studies.

Introduction 29

1 Women, Housing, and Coming to the City Question: Was it difficult as a female household head to get access to this dwelling? I didn’t have a husband then so it was very difficult to fight to get a house. (France, #20) I never thought I would get it; before women were not considered to get houses. (Nthutukoville, #2)

I N TROD U C TI ON

Throughout modern South African history, women have faced cultural, legal, and economic barriers in their attempts to leave rural areas and settle in urban areas. This chapter traces the historical antecedents to the contemporary context of urban South Africa, exploring the gendered processes of mobility, settlement, and livelihoods and the impact of these on marriage, family, and gender relations. As such, we start with the most fundamental aspect of women’s right to the city, simply the right to arrive. This discussion reveals the deep past of issues that are often treated as fairly “new” contemporary dynamics such as fraught generational and gender relations, pervasive gender based violence, high rates of female headed households and teenaged pregnancies, poor urban living conditions, gang violence, and so on. This chapter draws on research on KwaZulu-Natal, as well as urban areas in other provinces of South Africa, to describe the relevant broad historical dynamics. We then turn to a more detailed discussion of the case study city, Msunduzi (formerly Pietermaritzburg), including particularities of early urban development, and the devastating civil war between Inkatha and United Democratic Front (udf) in the 1980s and 1990s.

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The rural economy in southern Africa, before the disruptions of Dutch and English incursion, was a homestead based agrarian system combining agricultural production and livestock herding. This was a profoundly gendered system, with women and girls responsible for reproductive and domestic tasks as well as most agricultural labour, while men owned cattle, the most important asset that could be accumulated, which were cared for by boys. According to Jeff Guy, the system succeeded on the basis of the control and extraction of women’s labour, which was accessed by men through the exchange of cattle (Guy 1990). So critical was women’s labour to the system that culture developed complex norms and rules to proscribe women’s and girls’ autonomy and mobility. This background helps explain the profound upheaval caused by women’s later migrations to mission stations and urban areas. In the case of KwaZulu and Natal (now KwaZulu-Natal), Benedict Carton (2000) looks back to the nineteenth century for the roots of generational and gender discontent so evident in contemporary urban life. Generational conflict, especially in the form of youths rebelling against parents and patriarchs, was already extensive in the late nineteenth century, Carton claims. While this is not the place to recite the complex history of the Zulu and related peoples and colonial incursions of the nineteenth century, Carton makes an important point to link the severe economic strain on the African rural economy with the emergence of generational and gendered disruptions that turned out to be central to processes of urbanization, as well as in numerous subsequent political conflicts and uprisings in the twentieth century. More specifically, land appropriations by white settlers, severe droughts, the devastating cattle disease rinderpest, and the extraction of male youths’ labour for white owned farms and mines all contributed to the erosion of rural livelihoods. This effectively decimated the material base of patriarchal power in rural homesteads, in that household heads could not provide the basis of household survival through land, cattle, and labour. Subsequently, they struggled to garner respect and obedience from male youths and daughters. Male youths migrated for waged labour, and as early as the 1880s, they began to pay their own bride price or ilobolo in isiZulu, further undermining patriarchal and extended family power (Carton 2000, 45). “Faction fights” of rival male youth groups, breaking out at wild beer parties, and often featuring fights over women, were already common

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by the late nineteenth century, and youths increasingly and openly challenged their elders by the early twentieth century (61–4). For girls and women, the bonds of the traditional, patriarchal family, also came under strain in this period. In the hierarchical and patriarchal family, girls and most women held subordinate positions entailing a great deal of labour and the need to show respect to all above them in the hierarchy. In exchange, they were fed, sheltered and protected, and married in a culturally appropriate fashion. Carton suggests that as the crisis hit the rural economy, especially the widespread loss of cattle, marriage prospects for girls diminished, and their futures looked bleak. Many fled to mission stations in the nineteenth century, which often proved stepping stones to domestic labour positions in white urban households. Mission education, which promoted Christian values such as monogamy and personal rights, helped along the cultural shifts taking place. There were also political and legal pressures on traditional marriage coming from the white administration in Natal, particularly the 1869 Marriage Law. This brought in provisions to protect girls from forced marriages and put limits on bride price payments. These legal impositions helped support the shift towards youths choosing their own marriage partners, which was already underway as a result of the male migrant labour system (Carton 2000, 66–87). Overall Carton argues that the crisis in the nineteenth century rural economy set in motion the erosion of the traditional family and culture of respect for elders and patriarchs, a process that was then intensified throughout the early twentieth century through the forces of urbanization, industrialization, and imposition of white administration and laws. Central to these dynamics was the emergence of rebellious youths and “disobedient daughters and discontented wives” (66), heralding shifts in gender and generational relations that would continue into the future. The 1920s and 30s saw the entrenchment of the link between male wages, ilobolo, and marriage, and the emergence of what Mark Hunter (2010a, 37–47) calls “provider love” or the concept of masculinity that rests on the husband’s ability to provide a home and livelihood for a wife and family. These effects of capitalism and waged labour were also supported by Christianity, Hunter argues, which was not only against polygyny, but promoted notions of romantic love and “choice” in marriage. At the same time, the notion of male entitlement to multiple romantic partners seems to intensify in this period, and young

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women also seemed to have many boyfriends, with “thigh sex” still a prevalent way to express intimacy with relative safety. As such, new notions and practices of intimacy and love are linked to the political economy and geography of male and female migrancy (36–7). These new behaviours and values of the youth profoundly disturbed both Zulu patriarchs and white officials. Shula Marks documents the collusion between Zulu leaders and colonial officials from the early twentieth century to try to increase “traditional” control over women and youths migrating to urban areas (Marks 1991). Women in particular were blamed for the “moral degeneration” found in urban townships, high rates of venereal disease, and widespread premarital pregnancies (219–28). From the perspective of Zulu patriarchs, women should adhere to precapitalist Zulu norms where a wife was subordinate to her husband’s family and household, and her reproductive work of childbearing and rearing, caring for the sick and elderly, and her productive work in crop production was critical to the rural economy. Natal administrators also saw the importance of keeping women in the rural areas to reproduce the male labour increasingly important to white mining, farming, and other industry (226). Indeed, the 1923 Urban Areas Act specifically attempted to keep women out of urban areas by requiring either signed permission from a guardian or for her to be a relative of a man who had worked for some years in the town. Urban housing for African workers was typically limited to male only hostels, servants’ quarters at white homes, or informal or squatter settlements. As a result, many women were illegal urban residents over the following decades, creating insecurity and vulnerability to the authorities (Todes and Walker 1993). There was alternating stricter and looser implementation of these rules when the need for women’s labour changed as in the 1930s when increased industrial production drew on women’s labour. So while women’s presence in urban areas increased, they remained vastly outnumbered by urban African men. Urban Natal in 1936, for example, reportedly contained 90,400 men and 37,600 women (Marks 1991, 220). Overall, Marks argues, the outcome was that women were increasingly willing to defy fathers and brothers through urban migration, remaining unmarried and flouting other aspects of “traditional” behaviour and roles. As such, “[it] was in the position of African women that the forces of conservatism found a natural focus” (225), and the promotion of traditional gender relations and family became a critical plank in the conservative Inkatha move-

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ment in the 1920s. Inkatha was a cultural movement formed to protect and promote Zulu ethnicity, culture, and business interests. It was to reemerge in the 1970s, led by Chief Buthelezi, and play a critical role in anti-apartheid conflict in Natal. We return to this issue later in this chapter. An extraordinary early “urban anthropology” of a Johannesburg “slum yard” in the 1930s supports the points about migration patterns and shifting gender relations in that city (Hellman 1948). The study of Rooiyard noted that Johannesburg had seen a rapid increase in “natives” in urban areas in the 1920s and 1930s, specifically noting a 50 per cent increase in women coming to town. Increasingly, husbands and wives were migrating together, leaving rural homes where livelihoods were no longer sufficient to meet contemporary cash needs for schooling, clothes, and food. Hellman studied one hundred “nuclear” family households in Rooiyard, which included both formal and informal unions, many of the latter involved partners from different ethnic groups. Of the one hundred male heads in these families, eighty-nine had regular employment, six were unemployed, and five engaged in various forms of irregular employment. While some of the women worked as domestic servants in white homes, almost all of the women in the yard were beer brewers, and this was by far the most lucrative form of income generation open to them. Indeed, income from beer brewing enabled some women to live in town without male partners. Rooiyard was a well-known place to go drinking in the central Johannesburg suburbs, and the women’s businesses were profitable, despite frequent police raids and the highly laborious process of brewing. Indeed, it was this lucrative beer business, not only men’s access to workplaces in town, that made African families so reluctant to be relocated to the ostensibly “better” accommodation in the new townships being built by the state at the time, such as Orlando. Rooiyard and other such slums were indeed cleared and people relocated to townships in the years after the study. The study reveals the 1930s as characterized by a gendered division of economic responsibility in households, with men often paying set bills like rent and school fees, and handing over part of their salaries to their wives, and women buying food and other household necessities from their own brewing incomes. Couples commonly planned on big purchases (such as furniture) together. Despite these complementary economic roles, adultery was commonplace and marriages were highly unstable.

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Many married women had “back-door husbands” (nyatisi), who provided them with cash presents every month in exchange for sex, while many men had wives in home rural areas, plus informal unions in town. Teenage pregnancies were common and rates of syphilis extremely high. Hellman observes teenage girls in the yard turning to boyfriends to meet the new urban needs especially of clothing: “Young girls make, what amount to, unreasonable demands upon their parents in their desire for fine clothing and, where their parents find it impossible to give them the money they require to gratify their wishes, they turn to lovers for such monies” (Hellman 1948, 27). Hellman notes that teenaged boys felt entitled to sex with the girls: “The young men demand compliance of the girls as their right” (77). When pregnancies occurred, the boys often disappeared, and despite cultural disapproval of “illegitimacy,” the girls were usually welcomed by their mothers to stay and raise their babies in the family. Young people also expressed their right to choose their own partners and challenge traditional marriage norms such as ilobolo. In some cases, teen girls were encouraged by their beer brewing mothers to be “compliant” with customers. These observations from the 1930s Johannesburg indicate the long history of contemporary urban gender relations, and challenge any tendency to imagine a more traditional or conservative recent past. However, Hellman also notes that many families kept strong ties with rural kin, especially through sending children to grow up in the rural areas rather than to stay in what was thought of by mothers as the morally corrupting slum yard. However, children were mostly sent to the mother’s kin, rather than the father’s, partly because of cross ethnicity in marriages which rendered linkages with the husband’s family weak, and patrilineal interest and control of children seemed to be on the decline. Families also often hosted unemployed members of their extended family. At this time, some aspects of the “safety net” of the traditional family still seemed to be functioning. In the 1940s, urban administrators increasingly saw the informal settlements in and around towns and cities as a problem, and the 1950s and 1960s saw government programs to build housing in formal African townships across the country (Todes and Walker 1993 on Durban; Lee 2009 on Cape Town; Posel 2006 on the Witwatersrand area). Access to public housing, however, was officially restricted to married men with urban employment lucrative enough to pay rent

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and rates, hence imposing both ideals of the western nuclear family as well as class restrictions on the “accepted” urban African population (Todes and Walker 1993; Ndinda 2006). The state worried about “informal unions” among urban Africans, and sought both to promote a more stable and moral social order, as well as better living conditions through its public housing programs (Posel 2006). In the Durban area, this push to move people from informal settlements to public township housing negatively affected many women who differentially relied on informal housing and the economic activities available to them there (Todes and Walker 1993, 42). However, Todes and Walker also found that women were not necessarily barred by officials from renting public housing or buying these houses in the 1980s when the state began to sell them off. However, in practical terms women’s lower employment levels and wages prevented more than a small proportion of women from owning or renting formal housing in their own names. The largest proportion of female heads of households owning or controlling their own homes remained in informal settlements (Todes and Walker 1993). A similar pattern has been noted for an African location in East London, where strong matriarchs who ran their households and economically viable informal businesses such as renting out backyard shacks and beer selling in the 1950s, were displaced by township policy in the 1960s that banned women’s economic activities and allotted township housing only to married men (Bank 2011). Bank also notes that apartheid planning envisioned the “proper” urban African family as nuclear, with a male breadwinner and homemaker wife, a family form that was thought to discourage Communism, and encourage obedience to state laws. An early 1960s anthropological study of East Bank location in East London somewhat complicates these claims. Pauw found in his sample that of the twenty-six families living in rental municipal housing, eighteen were male headed and eight were female headed (Pauw 1963, 155). He also mentions that a municipal official claimed that female heads would not be barred from renting municipal housing in the location. A more likely reason for proportionally lower rates of female headed households than in the location overall (two fifths of his sample) was the higher costs of rent in the municipal houses that were affordable mostly by those in white collar work, predominantly males (Pauw 1963, 154). Interestingly, Pauw not only found that female headed households (what he calls “matrifocal” households, which could be

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multigenerational) were more likely to be found in the wood and iron section of the township, but they were more likely than male headed households in this area to own their home (ibid). As such, while the overall pattern of predominantly male headship in formal municipal housing from the 1960s forward seems to hold true, there are likely many deviations from this pattern due to uneven administrative practices, special considerations made, and so on. Certainly in our survey data from Pietermaritzburg in 2006, the main municipal rental housing township built in the 1960s, Imbali, has higher rates of male headedness than most other intown sampled areas, and a higher rate than the overall sample. Female heads are still in a small majority but this may indicate slow transformation over several generations since the 1960s (Urban Ecosystems and Human Health Project 2006). To return to our historical overview, in Cape Town, officials enforced influx controls more strictly than elsewhere in the 1950s and 1960s and many unmarried women were forced out (Lee 2009). Only married women or those otherwise legally dependent on a legal urban man were able to get a pass to reside in Cape Town, and council or public housing built in the 1950s and 1960s was allocated to married couples (Lee 2009). In many urban areas, these new restrictions and enhanced surveillance by the state of African relationships led to widespread “house marriages,” engaged in by couples who sometimes had never met before applying for housing (Posel 2006; Todes and Walker 1993). Deborah Posel’s extraordinary research on “the practice of The Hats” illustrates this trend in the 1950s and 60s. The Hats was a process through which officials and urban Africans colluded to ensure that the latter qualified for state housing. Africans came to the Native Commissioner’s office, with men entering first and placing their hats on the table within, and then filing out. Women followed, selecting one of the hats. They were then issued a marriage certificate with the owner of the hat, and the couple was awarded a house (Posel 2006). While the irony is apparent in this seemingly casual approach to marriage by state officials ostensibly concerned about “informal” unions and social stability, Posel argues that both men and women saw advantages in the practice which secured them houses and legal urban residence they otherwise could not access. Single or widowed women who were found occupying a township house were vulnerable to eviction, and their other options for urban accommodation were few and

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much less appealing. Hence unmarried women were especially motivated to practice “house marriages” (Posel 2006, 68–9). Single women also saw the advantage of escaping the social stigma of being unmarried in a context where customary marriages had become very expensive and increasingly rare (71). While “house marriages” could be expected to be especially unstable, Posel argues that they were no more so than other unions of the time that were plagued by male infidelity, drunkenness, or desertion, and that many house marriages endured and resulted in children (72). Many Africans themselves developed ideals of township life in the 1950s and 60s as a form of urban respectability centred around a (usually Christian) male head of household earning a wage and owning the house, who cared for a resident wife and a small number of children (Bank 2011; Hunter 2010a). This ideal was increasingly hard to meet with the economic downturn and high rates of retrenchment of male workers in the 1970s and 1980s (Bank 2011; Hunter 2010a). In 1970s Natal, educated and often Christian women increasingly worked themselves as professionals, especially in teaching and nursing, but were still barred by the Natal Code from owning property. In 1981, however, they were given the right to own a house, and women even bought plots and built their own houses in the 1980s (Hunter 2010a, 74–6; Todes and Walker 1993, 43). Urbanized areas in Natal such as Durban and surrounds, often abutted homeland areas (areas under traditional African authority), where many women were also able to access housing in their own right in the 1970s and 80s, despite their status as legal minors (Todes and Walker 1993, 42). In Cape Town, African women’s precarious position in the city and dependence on male earnings in the 1950s and 60s improved for those who were granted permanent access to council houses in the 1970s. Women built their security on these houses, which they often used for income generation such as renting out rooms or backyard shacks, and built up social networks of survival in their neighbourhoods, while maintaining links with the extended family in rural areas (Lee 2009, 45–55). Lee traces the development of matrifocal households from this period, when men were increasingly unemployed, unreliable, and absent, and women ran the household and family, often on their wages as domestic workers (59). Many of the children of this first generation of urban women in Cape Town were sent to family in rural areas in the 1970s during the student unrest, strikes, and boycotts, but then re-

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turned to stay at their mothers’ houses, subsequently raising their own children there as part of multigenerational, female headed and focused households (Lee 2009, 56–9). Deborah James (1999) traces another female centred pattern in her account of Sotho female migrants to the Reef from Lebowa or Northern Province from the 1960s onward. These women typically migrated to work as domestic servants in white households, and while some were joining husbands already working in mines or other industries, many were single women, motivated to migrate in order to contribute to their natal homes “like sons.” In many cases, fathers or brothers in natal homes failed to bring in the migrant earnings critical for survival in rural areas, and daughters fulfilled this duty, in the process increasing their status in the home and often never marrying, although they often had children who were incorporated into the natal home. In town, some of these single women formed vibrant dance groups in the kiba style formerly the preserve of men. The groups carefully guarded their independence from men, and created and promoted powerful ethnic identities and visions of “home” expressed in song, dance, and clothing. From the 1950s there was growing resistance to the pass laws and other unjust aspects of apartheid. The African National Congress Women’s League and the Federation of South African Women, organizations that championed both women’s equality and the struggle against apartheid became increasingly active in 1950s (Gasa 2007a; Hassim 2006b). Women at the grassroots were also active in large numbers in protests, including the 1956 march in Pretoria against the pass laws in which 20,000 women participated (Gasa 2007a). Women were highly involved in struggles for urban housing, including squatting on vacant land to form informal settlements that later became formalized, often strategically using the fact that they did not need to carry passes themselves to seek jobs and housing in urban areas. Some of these women also joined trade unions (Gasa 2007a; Hassim 2006b). In fact, it was this political activity in the 1950s, in part, that alarmed the state regarding unattached and economically active women in the cities, contributing to the changes in township policy in the 1960s that attempted to make municipal housing available to women only as wives of working men (Bank 2011). The 1970s and 1980s brought brutal crackdowns by the apartheid state on the mostly youth activists and their families, and again,

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women were at the forefront of township protests at funerals, marches, petitions, organizing lawyers for those arrested, and sheltering and feeding young activists (Cherry 2007). While feminist scholars have long debated whether acting as “mothers” protecting “their children” is radical or conservative, Cherry and Gasa argue that while women saw their actions in the struggle as an extension of their domestic roles of nurturing and protecting the children, these roles were highly politicized and concretely articulated as a fight against state oppression (Cherry 2007; Gasa 2007a). Hassim also suggests that women were politically motivated to support the nationalism project through their roles as women rather than through a feminist consciousness (Hassim 2006a, b). Judith Stevenson echoes this point in her work with Nkapi Mokowe, a woman activist during the 1980s from Munsieville, a black township outside of Johannesburg (Stevenson 2011). Stevenson notes that the anc had politicized motherhood in this period, and encouraged women to act publically to defend their children as “mothers.” Women responded to this call, and also saw no role contradiction in publically protesting issues such as education and policing that were negatively affecting their children. Stevenson suggests that post-1994, while the anc valorized certain elite women as “Mothers of the Nation,” the party stepped away from a more generalized, politicized role for women and mothers: After liberation many of these women were remarginalized, essentially disappearing as political actors and receiving little other than local glory for their politicization. Elite women like Winnie Madikizela-Mandela, Albertina Sisulu, and Lilian Ngoyi were held up as the people’s Mothers of the Nation … The appropriation of motherhood as a mega-identity enforced the politicized discourse around motherhood, but also contributed to contradictory ideologies of women’s roles in public and private contexts. (Stevenson 2011, 142) In Bank’s study of Duncan Village, a major township of East London, the economic downturn of the 1970s brought women back into informal sector activities, such as renting out backyard shacks and selling goods in spaza shops, but the 1980s youth activism brought the “Comrades” (young anc supporters) into control of the township. Under their rule, residents were forced to allow many new urban mi-

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grants to build shacks in their backyards, and rents were kept low to support “the struggle.” The ensuing erosion of township infrastructure, along with the high levels of violence, compromised the quality of life in the township and negatively impacted women’s income generation (Bank 2011). In 1986 influx controls laws were repealed, there was more support for self-help housing and there was the sale of council housing to home owners, including some women (Todes and Walker 1993, 43–5). People poured into cities, so there were also large increases in shack settlements. Women continued to find their best access to their own homes in informal settlements; for example in a Durban study in the early 1990s, 40 per cent of informal houses were found to be owned by women, and 33 per cent were jointly owned by a husband and wife (Todes and Walker 1993, 48). However, shack settlements came with high burdens for women including inadequate water, sewerage, and energy provisions, high levels of violence, and vulnerability to warlords and gangs (50). Sheila Meintjes (2007) documents the sometimes desperate measures women took in the period to secure housing in the city in her discussion of the “naked women’s protest” of July 1990 in Soweto. In this case, women living in an informal settlement stripped and protested against being forced to have sex with councillors in order to get formal housing in the township. The case shows the critical importance access to urban housing held for single women; it also shows how quickly women mobilized around a common cause in the period, but also how quickly they can return to “normal” once a battle has been won (Meintjes 2007). For East London, Bank (2011) observes that after the violence and increasing rates of informal unions of youths in the 1980s, the 1990s saw a reemergence (that is, going back to the earlier pattern of the 1940s and 1950s) of female headed households setting up in backyard shacks and new shack settlements, although they remained extremely vulnerable to male violence and poverty. Overall, these are the historical conditions prevailing for women and urban housing on the eve of democratic transformation in 1994. While legal and policy barriers to women’s access to housing had largely fallen away, they still faced multiple challenges in establishing secure residence in urban areas.

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P IE TE RM A R I T ZB U RG / M S U N D U Z I : C A S E STU DY A R E A

In the case study city of Pietermaritzburg (pmb), now Msunduzi, the provincial capital of KwaZulu-Natal, the gendered historical patterns of women’s urbanization are similar, despite some peculiarities of the city’s past. Located 80 kilometres northwest of Durban, the area was long, if sparsely occupied first by hunter-gatherers from about half a million years ago, then by Stone Age people, Iron-Age, and then by more settled cattle herders and farmers, the latter for at least 1300 years before the first whites came to the area (Maggs 1988). When the Voortrekkers arrived in the late 1830s, there were small and scattered Zulu related Chiefdoms that they easily defeated. The Boers established the new town, laying out their characteristic grid pattern that still defines the city centre today, and made it the capital of the newly set up Republic of Natalia (Haswell 1988; Wright 1988). Only a few years later, the British imposed control over the Voortrekker outpost and by the 1850s British colonial governance of the town and province was well established (Benyon 1988). While the Port of Natal (which became Durban) grew much faster and emerged as an economic centre of the region, Pietermaritzburg retained its role as colonial administrative centre, including the provincial parliament and a large military base, and also began to grow as an economic centre. A unique aspect of pmb’s history is the establishment of a freehold, black settlement, which came to be known as Edendale, only 10 kilometres from the city centre. In 1851, Reverend James Allison, a Presbyterian Minister, bought a large farm on which he settled his multiethnic African followers as a Christian, agricultural community. In the early decades, the farmers were prosperous, selling much of their produce to white settlers in nearby pmb. However, drought and cattle disease hit the group hard, as elsewhere in the area at the end of the century, and by the 1920s, most households in Edendale relied on waged labour in pmb or a few local industries (University of Natal 1951, 1–10). In fact, Edendale became the main residential area for Africans working in pmb as urban accommodation for them was limited to an inadequate number of barracks (one built in 1877 and another in 1890), single sex hostels (men’s built in 1914 and women’s in 1924), and some onsite housing for domestic workers in white homes (Wills 1988, 40).

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As early as 1882 Edendale requested municipal status, but was turned down by the colonial government, who also refused a similar request in the 1930s (Meintjes 1988, 67). In light of the 1923 Urban Areas Act, the village posed administrative conundrums for colonial officials, as not only did Africans own land, but the community was mixed raced as a significant Indian population had moved in to farm and set up businesses, and white missionaries also resided in the area (University of Natal 1951, 13). Originally under a trust administered by the Wesleyan Church, the area eventually came under provincial control of the Natal government in the 1940s, and a body called the Local Health Commission took charge (Epprecht, forthcoming). The lack of proper administration contributed to the declining conditions of housing and sanitation, as did the eroding prosperity of the community. By the 1930s and 1940s, the original fired brick houses and pit latrines of the Christian settlers had transformed into slum conditions that produced an unhealthy and dangerous environment. Residents depended on contaminated wells and streams for water, and there was no electrification (University of Natal 1951, 237). In the 1940s there were very high rates of tuberculosis, venereal disease, malnutrition, infant mortality, and “illegitimate” births (34–40, 193–203). An extensive social survey carried out in 1950 revealed that two thirds of the African household heads then living in Edendale were not born in the town, having migrated from elsewhere in the province. Most African households were headed by a male wage earner, although around 10 per cent had no male wage earners or resident working age male, and in these, women’s wages supported the household. Even in households with male earners, however, many women also worked and contributed wages, mostly from domestic and laundry service in pmb, work that earned them about a third of typical male wages in industries and other enterprises (University of Natal 1951, 158–85). Unmarried daughters with children typically stayed in their natal homes, cared for by parents (185), a pattern we noted earlier for 1930s Johannesburg (Hellman 1948). African households typically spent about 75 per cent of their income on food, while fuel and transport were other significant expenses and most households carried significant debt (University of Natal 1951, 186). The Local Health Commission made some attempts in the 1940s to improve conditions, building a few hundred formal houses in a township named Ashdown in 1943 into which some families moved from dangerous houses, and brought in some reticulated water, improved clinics, and

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schools. However, these efforts were tiny compared to the vastness of the problem, and most people continued to live in deplorable conditions (University of Natal 1951, 237). While Edendale provided the vast majority of homes for Africans working in the white city of pmb, the 1923 Urban Areas Act provided the legal basis upon which the first African township on city land was established in 1928. The “native village,” later known as Sobantu, began with one hundred formal brick houses that were electrified. Residents had bucket toilets, but access to communal taps and ablution blocks. Located near the city dump in a seeming case of environmental racism, the township had the strong advantage of close proximity to the central business district where most employment was found. The homes were designated to married, city workers, and government employers often targeted people from Sobantu for jobs. The township grew rapidly in the 1940s and 1950s. In the 1950s, however, rates and rents continued to rise, and the apartheid government banned further growth, suggesting its location was in violation of the Group Areas Act, and even suggested people may be removed. All these tensions, in addition to rising political frustration for residents who wanted more participation and control in local governance, led to riots breaking out in Sobantu in 1959. By the 1980s, there was the same number of formal houses as in the 1950s, although backyard shacks had proliferated. In 1965, the second “native village” was established at Imbali, next door to Edendale, providing more formal housing for urban based Africans, but outside of the city limits (Peel 1988, 82–4). The 1980s also saw extreme violence emerge in the city and surrounds driven by the conflict between Inkatha and the United Democratic Front (udf), which supported the anc and the Congress of South African Trade Unions (cosatu). This is explored in the next section. THE

“ N ATA L

WA R ”:

E F FE C T S ON U R B A N I Z ATI ON A N D G E N D E R R E L ATI ON S

Question: Please explain your own story about how you came to live here. I was born and raised in Mkhambathini [KwaZulu rural area between Durban and Pietermaritzburg]. I then got married (traditionally) and lived with my husband there for many years, we raised our children there. When the

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violent attacks started, we all fled the place and never returned. However, my husband ran off elsewhere and left us, we never saw him ever again … I moved to Maritzburg where people who know me from Mkhambathini told me about this area (Nthutukoville), and they said I must come and build my own little shack here. We were all hoping that help was going to come soon, and we would get houses and free basic services. The mothers of the children (my children) left me, so I had all these grandchildren to look after on my own. (Nthutukoville, #3)

In the African homeland of KwaZulu and the white province of Natal (later joined as the province of KwaZulu-Natal in 1994), violent clashes erupted between supporters of Inkatha, led by Chief Mongosuthu Buthelezi, the Prime Minister, and head of police of KwaZulu, and supporters of the udf. Inkatha has been subjected to extensive historical analysis, too complex to recite here (see Maré and Hamilton 1987; Maré 1993; Minnaar 1992). Briefly, however, starting out as a cultural organization in the 1920s, which also promoted the participation of Africans in capitalist business ventures, it revived in the 1970s as a movement to promote Zulu nationalism (within the apartheid homeland system), and Zulu business interests (Maré and Hamilton 1987, 10). While Buthelezi promoted himself and his movement as part of the struggle against apartheid, most scholarly accounts suggest he collaborated with the apartheid state in the continued oppression of Africans through the Bantustan homeland system. He broke with the anc in 1979, and promoted himself as the rightful future African leader of South Africa, as leader of the largest ethnic group and part of an ancestral line of Zulu kings (Maré and Hamilton 1987, 217–20; Beinart 1994, 207–8). Supported by police resources in Natal, Buthelezi violently put down school and consumer boycotts (Maré and Hamilton 1987, 10; Bhebe 1996, 36). In the civil war which erupted in the later 1980s, evidence suggests police turned a blind eye to Inkatha gun stores, while confiscating udf arms, failed to arrest Inkatha perpetrators of violence, while making widespread arrests of udf supporters, and provided support in clashes where Inkatha was weak (Kentridge 1990, 52–5). The udf formed in 1983, a response throughout South Africa to the violent state crackdown best represented by the response to the 1976 Soweto uprising (Bhebe 1996, 1). The udf supported the exiled anc

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and cosatu. In KwaZulu and Natal, there was a discernible trend for udf support in urban areas and Inkatha adherence in rural villages. Since Chief Buthelezi had split with the anc, this political stance put udf members and supporters in conflict with Inkatha. As most Africans in the region were of Zulu origin, whether they supported udf or Inkatha, this political tension pitted neighbour against neighbour, village against village, and Chief against Chief (Beinart 1994, 249; Campbell 1992). Bonnin (2000) describes how one township, Mpumalanga, became divided into territories of both sides, with vicious attacks including rape, murder, and vandalizing of homes occurring at the borders and through raids from one side into the other. The violence rendered both public spaces of streets, schools, and churches, as well as domestic spaces of homes as unsafe and politicized. There was extensive brutality and violence among Zulu people throughout the region, the worst and most deadly violence occurring in Pietermaritzburg and surrounds (Aitchison 1991; Butler et al. 1993; Denis et al. 2010, 2011; Kentridge 1990; Maré and Hamilton 1987; Minnaar 1992). In 1988, it was estimated that there were around 20,000 refugees in the greater Pietermaritzburg area alone (Kentridge 1990, 237). Research a few decades later suggests that about 12,000 people died in the war between 1985 and 1996 in Natal and KwaZulu, with thousands of people victims of rape, torture, injury, property damage, and displacement (Denis et al. 2010, 5). Schools were frequently targeted for attacks, as were bus depots, buses full of passengers, and people’s homes, causing massive disruption to everyday life, including for children (Smith and Khumalo 1992; Bonnin 2000). Indeed Denis and his team estimate hundreds of thousands of refugees in the province in the period, and the many traumas have left a trail of social and material destruction in terms of broken and lost families, legacies of child abuse, gender based violence, addictions, and mental breakdown (Denis et al. 2010; 2011). The story of Goodenough Ntombela, documented in the 1990s, illustrates many of these points. In addition to legacies of violence and death, the disruption of schooling, livelihoods, and family life, the Inkatha/udf conflict produced political and cultural identities. According to Maré: “For Inkatha, the 1980s can be summarised as a period of regional consolidation. It was characterised by blatant and dangerous ethnic political mobilisation … [the enemy was anyone] who rejected the version of

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Box 1.1 The Story of Goodenough Ntombela Goodenough Ntombela was an ordinary young Zulu woman living with her parents in Pietermaritzburg in the 1970s. She only started school when she was twelve years old because she had to live with her grandmother and assist her with housework. She completed primary school at Willowfountain School in Pietermaritzburg and proceeded to Amakholwa High School. As she was about to start Standard Eight, her parents sent her away to stay with a distant relative and his pregnant wife in Georgedale. They wanted her to help the wife as she was close to delivery. She had to change schools but did not complete Grade Eight as she was kidnapped by a Minister from the Faith Mission Church and a prophet whom she was forced to marry and who made her pregnant. They lived in Umlazi. She ran away back to Pietermaritzburg, where luckily her parents took her back. As a single mother she lost her chance for school, and turned to domestic cleaning jobs. She married in 1982 but her husband lost his job. They lived on Goodenough’s salary, and had four more children. In 1989 she bought a house in the Table Mountain area under Chief Maphumulo who was keeping the place peaceful during the violence, and many people from Pietermaritzburg were settling there. In 1990, however, Inkatha attacked and wanted the territory. In 1991 the fighting got worse and Chief Maphumulo was assassinated. Men were often killed, so many left the area. Women locked their houses at night and slept in the mountain to avoid being killed. People were considered to belong to whichever political group controlled the area, regardless if they were neutral. As such, Goodenough was considered to be a supporter of the udf. She left for Pietermaritzburg again, and all her possessions were lost when her house was burned. The loss of her possessions, including furniture which she was still paying for, was hugely traumatic. She was only able to recover because of her parents’ help (based on Malinga 2000, 29–45).

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politicised ethnicity propounded by the Inkatha leadership and the Zulu King” (Maré 1993, 60). Chief Buthelezi, along with the Zulu King Goodwill, promoted the deliberate production of “Zuluness” that included hierarchal chains of respect, and allegiance to the homeland rulers. The school syllabus for KwaZulu was changed in the late 1970s to include the “Inkatha syllabus” that taught these proper roles and the ideology of “Zuluness” (Maré 1993, 68–86). Indeed, according to Marks (1991, 216–9), while Zulu nationalism and culture, based in a powerful military history and the largest ethnic population in the region had been strong since the nineteenth century, ongoing creation and production of Zuluness was still required into the twentieth century given the onslaughts of white rule, industrialization, and urbanization: “twentieth century ethnic consciousness has been the product of intense ideological labour” (Marks 1991, 217). This labour was also undertaken by the colonial state, both in early times in the classic “divide and rule” strategy of narratives of tribalism that emphasized ethnic differences among Africans, and encouraged territorial conflicts among Chiefs, and later to explain the “black on black” violence of the 1980s in Natal and KwaZulu in tribal and ethnic terms that released white government from any responsibility for the war (Marks 1991, 215–16, 232). In this highly gendered cultural ideology of Zuluness, women were identified as mothers, who must show respect, ukuhlonipa etiquette (Marks 1991, 229; Dlamini 1998, 475) to all above them in the hierarchy, but also play the role of teaching and controlling children who may challenge Zuluness. Mothers, for example, were to be responsible for disciplining children who did not show respect to elders, or joined udf (Maré 1993, 68–86). People identified as not supporting Inkatha, were not only political enemies, but also accused of not being “Zulu” (Bonnin 2000, 306). For Dlamini, Zulu ethnicity in this context “has to be understood as one used to consolidate people in relation to certain political affiliations” (1998, 475). A major strand in Inkatha’s ideological attacks against udf/anc supporters as non-Zulu, was the disapproval of udf/anc tactics that directed youth to engage in actions that challenged their elders, such as forcing people not to go to work by taking them physically out of their cars (484). For Inkatha, these kinds of actions were intolerable signs of “disrespect” in Zulu cultural terms, and such youths could not be called “Zulu.”

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Maré acknowledges that for many Zulus, including women, Inkatha provided a positive cultural identity and sense of community, in times of confusing, complex, and contradictory cultural and economic currents including Christianity, capitalism, and racism. For some prominent examples, six out of ten women profiled in a 1978 publication on “Natal’s Leading Blacks” (Deane 1978), who were predominantly teachers, nurses, and community leaders, were Inkatha members, some even key organizers. The Inkatha Women’s Brigade formed in 1977 acted directly as an “arm” of Buthelezi’s ideological program, promoting women’s traditional roles as mothers protecting and running their homes (Maré 1993, 71). Shortly after his release, on 25 February 1990, Nelson Mandela made a desperate plea to a crowd of 125,000 in Durban, for the warring sides to “throw their weapons into the sea” (Kentridge 1990, 242). Attempting to promote peace, Mandela praised Buthelezi and Inkatha for their opposition to apartheid. Mandela’s efforts had little immediate impact however, and Inkatha launched a huge offensive against udf strongholds in Edendale and Vulindlela (both in the Pietermaritzburg area) in March 1990, after which the violence slowly started to subside (242–4). As part of the anc’s attempt to quell the violence in kzn, and to dampen the politicization of ethnic identities in the politics of transition to majority rule, Buthelezi and Inkatha, (which became the political party Inkatha Freedom Party (ifp) in the transition period) were accepted to have won the province of kzn in the 1994 elections (despite widespread irregularities in the voting), and Buthelezi was brought into the Government of National Unity as the Minister of Home Affairs (Herbst 1997, 98, 608). A “top-level peace process” followed, and leaders claimed the conflict over in mid-1996 (Rupert 2002, 474). However, tensions remained high in kzn. One source states that 1,500 people were killed between 1994 and mid-1996, as warlords pursued revenge killings (Berkeley 1996–97). Indeed, horrific incidents of violence continued including the Shobashobane massacre on 25 December 1995 where nineteen anc supporters were killed by a large number of ifp attackers, and their bodies mutilated (Rupert 2002, 476–78). There were major flare-ups of violence until the late 1990s in places such as Richmond (35 kilometers from Pietermaritzburg) and Nongoma (close to KwaZulu capital Ulindi) (Rupert 2002). Despite high-level claims of peace, then, violence was rife

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throughout the 1990s, largely, Rupert claims, because the 1980s violence was never adequately dealt with through prosecutions, or the Truth and Reconciliation (trc) processes, and both sides remained highly militarized and armed. The 1999 elections saw reduced support for the ifp at provincial level, and a coalition government with the anc. The 2004 elections completed the process, with the anc winning the province. While this history is important in and of itself, the relevance for this book lies in the enduring impacts the violence and disruption had for women seeking lives in urban areas. The civil conflict in kzn affected women’s migration to urban areas, gender relations, household forms, political subjectivities, and many other aspects of life. Like Rebecca Walker in her “anthropology of everyday violence” in Sri Lanka, I suggest it is appropriate in this case of KwaZulu-Natal to speak about violence as having been endured, “rather than say to resist, be resilient to, or even to contain” (Walker 2013, 3). The insights of Scheper-Hughes regarding human resilience as a response to trauma and violence also seem appropriate here (Scheper-Hughes, 2008). While the experiences of the women in this study, and indeed of women throughout South Africa at times seem unendurable, women survive and even show strength and pride: “human frailty is matched by a … capacity for resilience” (Scheper-Hughes 2008, 52). The women in my study survived the experience of violence, but it has marked them and the society around them in critical ways. In a case study of the township of Mpumulanga1, where she did research in the early and late 1990s, Bonnin describes the shifting gender relations linked to the Inkatha/udf violence (Bonnin 2000). Fathers’ authority in the family was eroded in the context, Bonnin claims, as youths openly rebelled against elders through their politicization and engagement in violent clashes. At the same time, the role and authority of mothers increased, as they were called upon to protect and shelter their children in the face of raids by police and political opponents in their homes. Women also led numerous public protests against the police and other authorities (Bonnin 2000, 302, 311–14). Women were also increasingly taking on the role of breadwinner in families. As one of Bonnin’s informants stated: “Traditional values were affected because, as we have said, women have become breadwinners in Mpumalanga. They have become engines of the family. Now we have seen that men in Mpumalanga are numb. So the

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people who have risen are the women, but traditionally it is not supposed to be like that. Men are no longer taking decisions” (quoted in Bonnin 2000, 315). The women in Bonnin’s research complained that their men had become afraid to speak out in public, as this could make them into targets of violence, as well as become increasingly useless in their domestic, traditional roles. udf politics had the effect of sidelining older men, Bonnin claims, elevating the youth and pushing mothers into politicized roles. Among youth, gender relations were also being transformed. While boys were initially the targets of interrogation regarding political affiliation, soon girls too were subject to questions and threats about family alliances. Girls and female teachers were raped at school, and streets became terrifying spaces where Inkatha warlords appeared in cars for drive by shootings, and abducted girls to be used for sex. Violence and rape also characterized gender relations within political groups: “Boys across the political divide expected girls to be sexually available on demand. Reluctantly many girls acquiesced, concerned about the effect of a refusal on the safety of the family home” (Bonnin 2000, 308). Girls also often played the role of “sister” to “comrades” (udf youths), whether they were their real brothers or not, washing their clothes or preparing food for them if they sought shelter in their homes (309). But as one of Bonnin’s informants suggests, this sisterly role could at any time be swept aside by rape or violence: “It changed the boys in so many ways. They became wild animals. Even my brothers, I was scared of them … always they were talking about killing, killing. So we were scared of them because we thought maybe they would kill even us … my Mum was scared of them too” (quoted in Bonnin 2000, 309–10). Writing in the midst of the township violence in KwaZulu and Natal, Catherine Campbell (1992) suggests that political and domestic violence are linked to a crisis in masculinity. High levels of unemployment stripped males of a positive identity as breadwinners. However, male youths often gained their mothers’ and girlfriends’ approval and admiration through activism as udf supporters, and engaging in violence, whether as political actors or against girlfriends, which provided a different identity of masculine power. Campbell also suggests that domestic violence was widespread so that male youths also learned violence against girls and women at home. Politics and violence came to define masculinity in this period of few other options for Zulu youth.

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Figure 1.1 Gertrude Mvubo surveys her destroyed home in which her husband died in the political violence that engulfed the region. Mpende, Pietermaritzburg, KwaZulu-Natal, 1987. Cedric Nunn. Reproduced with permission.

C ON TE M PO R A RY C ON TE X T A N D C A S E STU DY

This historical background helps set the stage for understanding the contemporary situation of gender and urbanization. This background clarifies the gendered obstacles that faced women seeking urban housing and the right to the city; it also helps explain today’s urban gender relations, love, intimacy, and the prevalence of women heading households on their own without male partners. The scale and brutality of the war marks many people’s personal histories, whether as a cause for their migration to the city, losses of partners and family members, or legacies of trauma. The intensity of the historical negotiation around Zuluness, especially as it created “friends and enemies,” and identified highly gendered roles and norms for men, women, and youth, also has left marks on urban dwellers’ perceptions of community, safety, and gender relations. The intensified roles for women as mothers, breadwinners, and guardians of culture alongside diminished roles for men, also set the stage for greater independence for women as migrants and heads of households in the urban areas. These topics are covered in subsequent chapters.

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As described in the introductory chapter, women heading households were interviewed in three of the newer low income neighbourhoods in Msunduzi (Pietermaritzburg) in order to get a sense of the stories and patterns for families settling in the city in the late 1980s or 1990s. These neighbourhoods are Nthutukoville (mix of informal housing and ngo assisted formal housing near the city centre), Ambleton or “France” (the new rdp settlement on the city periphery), and Peace Valley 2 (mostly informal settlement on the banks of the Msunduzi River on the edge of Edendale). (See figure 0.5 in the introduction.) Twenty-nine women were interviewed, with an average age in 2010 of about fifty-four years, ranging from twenty-four to eighty-two years. In 1990, in the midst of the violence, this group would have had an average age of thirty-four years, ranging from four years old to sixty-four years. Of the group, twelve mentioned fleeing the Inkatha/ udf-anc violence, either in Table Mountain, Elandskop, or elsewhere in or near the city, as a main reason that they sought new homes in the city. Seven of those who mentioned escaping the violence were from Nthutukoville. This neighbourhood was started in 1990, when people began to settle there as a safe place to escape the violence in Table Mountain. There was a mass exodus from Table Mountain around 1989, when the local Chief aligned himself with the anc and his village was attacked by ifp warriors. Chief Maphumulo was killed during the attack, and the women and children took refuge in Pietermaritzburg (as seen in Goodenough’s story, box 1). Nthutukoville is a small, densely settled area just outside of the central business district of Msunduzi. The neighbourhood lies between a railway line and the former “coloured” suburb of Woodlands. The majority of original settlers were single mothers, either having been separated from their children’s fathers during the chaos, or coming from their natal homes where they were staying with their children. Many reached Nthutukoville only after a series of rental accommodations and fruitless attempts to find employment in town under harsh, late apartheid conditions. The city council tried to evict the “squatters,” but residents, mostly women and their children, took a strong political stand in mass demonstrations, blocking entry to the community with cut gum tree poles. The Built Environment Support Group (besg), a housing advocacy ngo, assisted the community from the beginning, helping to defend them from police and dogs that tried to clear people out. besg

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received council approval for the community to stay and develop the area. Twenty-three households had to be moved to make way for water borne sewage pipes and roads. These households were assisted by besg to build new formal houses with the support of Oxfam Canada in 1994. Some residents were given opportunities to be trained in selfhelp house building, laying sewer pipe, and other skills.2 “France,” too, originally began as a refugee camp in the early 1990s. The two farms Ambleton and Shenstone had been acquired in 1991 by the Natal Provincial Administration for the purposes of future urbanization. Around this time people were brought from Mpopomeni where there was a great deal of violence, and provided with tents. The site was contested by the anc early on as replicating apartheid planning for racially segregated and peripheral settlement for blacks (the area was 10 kilometres from the city centre of pmb). Nonetheless, settlement did continue, and various ngos and charity groups brought some services and assistance in the period. The area was known for its peacefulness in this time of trouble, with both anc and ifp supporters living in the area, which hence became known as “Mpumelelo” or “success” (Harvett 1994). In many ways, the establishment of the new rdp township of over 5,000 houses from mid-1994 can be said to be simply an extension of this already existing apartheid era plan for urban expansion for pmb, 3 with many of the negative results that might be expected. This will be detailed in subsequent chapters. Peace Valley 2 seems to have grown mostly as a result of its relatively good location, close to transport, industries, and on the edge of Edendale, the most populous black area of the city. The small community is squeezed between the Msunduzi River, an oil refinery, and the old Edendale Road. According to local informants, the anc/udf controlled the area near the end of the war period (it is across the river from Ashdown, one of the early black townships, and was associated with anc support in the 1980s). As such, interview participants mentioned that the anc gave them the permission to build homes there. Today, it is comprised primarily of mud and wattle informal houses, although some attractive cement block houses have been built by better-off residents. The area has been scheduled for an upgrade by the city for many years, but an environmental assessment and bureaucratic bungling have delayed the process. Approvals for the upgrade have recently been finalized, but no action has yet been taken and the community endures horrific sanitation conditions (Brisbane 2013).

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For those from all three areas who were not specifically pushed to migrate because of the violence, reasons for leaving former homes in rural areas included being pushed off white owned farms, the need to seek more and private space for self and children, breakups with men or a husband’s death, or because they were looking for work. Another common thread in the stories is going from place to place within the city, often to and from expensive and tiny rented rooms and shacks, or with various relatives before arriving in the current dwelling. Here are a few examples: France I was born in Machibiza [an informal settlement in Edendale], then I went to live in Ladysmith with my gran. She passed away so I went to live in Nadi (Elandskop). I left there after a while later because of the violence. Then I came to live in Willowfontein for a long time with my aunts. I eventually got an rdp house and came to live here. (France, #16) Peace Valley 2 I am originally from eMvoti. We were living on the Sappi plaza, until they wanted us out so we left and went to live in oZwathini; we had to leave there as well because of the violence, and went to live in Edendale. Then we eventually came to live here. (Peace Valley 2, #28) Nthutukoville I was born in Table Mountain where I was raised and went to school. I started working there, but we were forced to leave the area due to crime and violence. We then went to rent a place in Loop Street in 1989, then in 1991 we moved to Northdale; we were also renting there. Then we moved here in 1993, I think (when Chris Hani died). It wasn’t developed then only during 1994–1995, besg started working with us to build the houses. (Nthutukoville, #1) At the time of the interviews in 2010, the women considered themselves settled permanently. Twenty-eight owned their home, and no

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one paid any money to reside there (i.e., no mortgage, taxes, etc.). While many complained about the lack of land for gardens or crops, and the small size of their house compared to former homes in rural areas, overall urban life was considered better than what they had left behind. Nearly all of the women said that their situation had improved in the following areas: access to services such as water, electricity, and sanitation (despite many having deplorable pit latrines); access to jobs or other income earning activities; access to schools, church, or other organizations; access to clinic or other health facilities; and proximity to family and friends. Most of the women also said they experienced improved safety and better freedom from crime and violence, despite many experiencing fear of rape of themselves or the children living with them. When asked specifically about feeling unsafe in the neighbourhood, in fact, most of the women identified issues such as thievery, especially around Easter and Christmas holidays, and rape of unprotected children. Conditions in the new rdp settlement, Ambleton (France), seem particularly troubled. As one woman explained: “Our neighbour raped one of my grandchildren when he saw that there were not adults in the house. People use every opportunity they get to commit a crime” (France, #20). The overall sense of improvement in living conditions, safety, and livelihood opportunities, then, must be contextualized within the brutal history of violence and systematic disruption leading up to the transition to democracy in 1994. It must also be considered within the context that while the residents themselves perceive an improvement, the objective conditions of living are actually risky and unsafe. As later chapters will show in more detail, low income people in the city often live in mud houses prone to damp and flooding, or in poorly built rdp houses already cracking or leaking in heavy rain, have access to only horrendous pit latrines, live in neighbourhoods choked with uncollected garbage, and are exposed to numerous other environmental risks such as mosquitoes, flies, rats, and dangerous indoor air quality. The fact that they feel this is an improvement, only speaks to the level of deprivation left behind. This is illustrated by the following remarks from a woman in Nthutukoville on her “improved” life in the city: “At Mkhambathini I was living in a mudhouse, here I have a brick house. I am able to go to the dumps of shops and pick up foods that they have thrown away, so that I can feed my family. It wasn’t possible to do that in Mkhambathini, as there weren’t many shops. Most of all, in the rural area, we had land

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to plough and plant vegetables to feed our families, there isn’t enough land here” (Nthutukoville, #3). C ON C LU S I ON S

This chapter traced some of the major patterns associated with women coming to urban areas in kzn since the late nineteenth century, with reference to patterns elsewhere in the country. Often facing obstacles from rural, patriarchal family concerned about losing control of their labour and sexuality, they also faced barriers from colonial law and state policies that made it difficult for women to find housing and work in urban areas. Despite these obstacles, women have long travelled to urban areas in search of a better life, including increased freedom from traditional, patriarchal controls, better livelihoods, or opportunities for their children such as education. Their urbanization has gone together with broader transformations in gender relations and culture, strongly linked to the shifting political economy of industrialization, declining rural livelihoods, and the forces of urbanization themselves including new forms of youth culture and independence, increased sexual freedom, and declines in formal marriage. Our own survey research in Msunduzi in 2006 revealed that the majority of low income urban households are headed by African women who are not in unions with men. This trend is national in scope. The implications of this are pursued in later chapters. In addition to these broad patterns of history and political economy, the war in kzn in the 1980s and early 1990s added an extra layer of brutality and disruption with significant effects on women’s migration to urban areas, and on gender relations, sexuality, and intimacy that appear to endure today. These issues are pursued in subsequent chapters. In the next chapter we turn to a detailed description of socioeconomic, health, and environmental conditions of contemporary urban life for female headed households.

Introduction 57

2 Housing, Urban Conditions, Health, and Well-Being in the “New South Africa”1 Question: Please explain how this home is either an improvement or is worse than where you lived before. In all the previous places, I was living in one room with my children. Although we are still squashed, we are better off here because we own the place. (France, #13) At Mkhambathini we had land and we didn’t have as many problems as here, like rape. We are also too close to our neighbours, no space which creates a lot of jealousy. (Nthutukoville, #2) At Bulwa the clinic was too far, you had to hire a car to get to the nearest one, or you would walk for hours. We also had to walk distances to get to a place to pick firewood. Here we have electricity. (Peace Valley 2, #21)

I N TROD U C TI ON

This chapter traces the broader social, economic, and environmental patterns for low income African households in contemporary urban South Africa. Using Msunduzi (pmb) as a case study, the chapter also considers national trends as revealed by the Census and other largescale survey data. The chapter explores housing types and other environmental conditions, employment patterns and livelihoods, education, household size and types, and health issues. The main purpose of the chapter is to illustrate prevalent conditions for low income urban South Africa, with consideration of conditions for people living in a large range of housing types including informal settle-

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ments, older township housing, semirural peri-urban “traditional” dwellings, insitu upgraded housing, and the newer post-1994 rdp housing developments. The chapter also highlights the large proportion of low income households across most of these housing types to be headed by women, and the ways in which they are differentially disadvantaged from other households. These considerations are at the core of the material aspects of the right to the city. Does the city offer women equitable access to “a better life”? The chapter draws primarily on quantitative data, but is illustrated by vignettes from the interviews with female heads, adding faces and real life details buried beneath the aggregate numbers of survey research. South Africa faces huge challenges in urban development. While the initially rapid growth in urban areas in the 1990s has slowed somewhat (sacn 2004), cities continue to grow from in-migration as well as natural increase. This growth is highly uneven, with cities in Gauteng and the Western Cape provinces growing much faster than others. Johannesburg grew by more than a million people between 2001 and 2011, while Msunduzi gained about 70,000 new residents in this period (Statistics South Africa 2012c, 5). 2 Perhaps more significantly for housing provision, the city grew by more than 30,000 households, a product of both population increase and decreasing household size. The number of households grew from 130,292 in 2001 to 163,993 in 2011. Household size shrank from an average of four people per household in 2001 to an average of 3.6 people per households in 2011 (Statistics South Africa 2012c, 30). The trend of decreasing household size and increasing household numbers was already apparent in the period from 1996 to 2001. This is attributed to decongesting of overlarge households, a likely change in migration patterns wherein urban households are becoming more permanent, the effects of a young population wherein new households are quickly forming, and the “unbundling” of households to strategically access more government housing subsidies per family (Pillay et al. 2006, 8–9). The increase in demand for low-cost housing is also attributable to continued rural to urban migration, but not significantly to overall population growth (Hunter and Posel 2012, 290; Lemanski 2011, 60; Pillay et al. 2006). Housing provision has been a major priority for the anc government ever since its election in 1994, and a major subsidized housing program was a key part of the Reconstruction and Development Pro-

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gramme (rdp) introduced in 1994. The 1996 Constitution supports people’s right to shelter, decreeing the state’s responsibility for “progressive realisation” of “adequate housing” (Section 28 1.c). The government reports that it had built more than 3 million houses for low income people by 2011.3 In addition, the government committed to eliminating all slums by 2014 (Huchzermeyer 2006). Recently the government claimed that: “By June 2011, the formalisation of 206 informal settlements had been completed. Of the 2,700 informal settlements countrywide, 1,100 of had been identified for upgrading and a further 335 targeted for formalisation.”4 While many watching the housing sector remain highly critical of government actions, and there has been a very high rate of public protests around issues of municipal services including inadequate housing, as we shall see in subsequent chapters, the state has clearly been highly active on the housing file. Despite government efforts, the country still faces a huge backlog in demand for low-cost housing in urban areas. The reality is that many continue to live in unsafe and unhealthy conditions in informal settlements and backyard shacks. Even in some of the new townships, many of which are ill serviced, housing is poorly maintained and already beginning to deteriorate. High rates of unemployment, poverty, illness, violence, and crime also create conditions of vulnerability, risk, and social exclusion for urban dwellers (Seekings 2000). This is especially true for urban women like Gogo N., resident of Peace Valley 2, a primarily informal settlement.5 Although the area is slated for housing development by the municipality, this has long been delayed and residents remain in mud houses built in the early 1990s or have begun building new homes with somewhat better materials. Gogo N. had initially built a wattle and daub house but “it got washed away.” She then saved her pension money, and “cut out on food” to buy materials to build her current cement block house. “I always have problems,” says Gogo N. “I’m always asking neighbours for food when I run short of it” (Peace Valley 2, #21). Others remain in mud/wattle and daub houses like Sisi P., improving their houses as best they can. Improvements in housing, water provision, access to electricity, and sanitation are clear at the aggregate level in South Africa, and are documented in the Census data in 2001, the large-scale Community Survey conducted in 2007, and Census 2011. The Community Survey

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Box 2.1. Household Profile and Field Notes: Peace Valley 2 #21 (Interview, 22 March 2010): Gogo N.

Figure 2.1a Gogo N. with her family in Peace Valley 2

This family lives in a larger cement block house with corrugated roofing. The mortar between blocks is quite messy. There are several bedrooms around a courtyard. Inside cement floors are covered with linoleum. There is a TV, stereo, and nice lace curtains. It is a very neat and clean home with nice furniture. The smell of the oil refinery is noticeable here. The ladies were eating their porridge when we arrived! The rafter beams do not look very strong – looks like scrap wood. The electricity unit has been burned and is in bad shape. The head is the grandparent in the household and they all speak Zulu; there are four people living in the house. The head is sixty-four, she never went to school, receives her pension grant, and has high blood pressure and diabetes. Other people living in the house are: a twenty-three year old who is the head’s granddaughter, she completed grade twelve and is unemployed; a fourteen year old who is the head’s grandson,

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Figure 2.1b Gogo N. in her home

he is doing grade ten and is receiving the child support grant; and a twelve year old who is also the head’s grandson, he is doing grade six and is receiving the child support grant. The approximate household income per month is between R 0 and R 1,499, which comes only from grant money. They spend approximately R 600 on groceries, R 280 on transport, R 60 on pocket money, and R 50 on electricity.

from Statistics South Africa outlines the government’s commitment to widespread basic improvements: Housing is one of the basic human needs that have a profound impact on the health, welfare, social attitudes and economic productivity of the individual. It is also one of the best indicators of a person's standard of living and of his or her place in society. In achieving the Millennium Development Goals, South African Government Policy is to ensure that its citizens live within good housing conditions. In order to achieve this goal, the government

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Box 2.2. Household Profile and Field Notes: Peace Valley 2 #27 (Interview, 22 March 2010): Sisi P.

Figure 2.2 Sisi P. outside her home in Peace Valley 2

The home is a mud house with a few rooms; a TV, stereo, stove, fridge; lounge suite; and an orange tree in the yard. A teenage boy is doing his ironing in the kitchen. Sisi P. is looking after her siblings. The head is the child (over eighteen, she is twenty-four years old) in the household, there are 8 people living there and they all speak Zulu. The head is twenty-four years old, she has completed grade twelve and is unemployed. Others living in the house are: an eighteen year old who is the head’s sister, she has completed grade twelve and is unemployed; a twenty-five year old who is the head’s brother, he has also completed grade twelve but is unemployed; a twenty-two year old who is the head’s brother, he’s also completed grade twelve and is unemployed; a thirteen year old who is the head’s sister, she is doing grade eight and is receiving the child support grant; a fourteen year old who is the head’s sister and is doing grade nine, she is also receiving the child support

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grant; a sixteen year old who is the head’s sister, she is doing grade ten; and a eighty-four year old who is the head’s grandmother, she never went to school, receives her pension grant, has high blood pressure, and she was the head of the family until she became very ill. The approximate household income per month is between R 1,500 and R 2,499 from the grants (pension and the two child support grants). They spend approximately R 1,200 on groceries, R 80 on transport, R 600 per year on education, and R 150 on electricity per month.

wants to eliminate all informal dwellings, bucket type of toilets, and ensure that all citizens have access to electricity for lighting, and access to clean, safe water within a reasonable distance. (Statistics South Africa 2008a, 18) Despite persistent race and class based inequalities, service delivery improvements are apparent in Msunduzi, as they are throughout South Africa. The Community Survey 2007 and the Census 2011 show that in Msunduzi, access to most basic services, including formal housing, electricity, improved toilet facilities, piped water, and refuse removal, has indeed improved since the 2001 Census, and conditions compare favourably to provincial and national level rates. These data do paint a hopeful picture. One of our research questions was to assess whether such improvements in basic conditions result in improvements in a measurable outcome such as health status. We discuss our findings on that question below. Our research also raised questions about how aggregate findings can mask the realities of inequality on the ground. Ward level data are very important since major inequalities exist between wards within cities, given the history of racial segregation and profoundly spatialized inequalities in apartheid cities. Data from the 2001 Census, for example, illustrate stark inequalities among wards in Msunduzi in relation to services and socioeconomic status of residents. Data from our own surveys in low income neighbourhoods illustrate the existence of pockets of seriously compromised environmental health conditions, as well as indications that improvements in services may not be sustainable, or are already eroding.

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Table 2.1 Basic services in Msunduzi Municipality 2001, 2007, and 2011, by percentage of population6 Service

2001

2007

2011

Live in formal housing Live in informal housing Use electricity for lighting Use electricity for cooking Use electricity for heating Use pit latrine Use bucket toilet Have no toilet Have flush toilet connected to sewerage system Have access to piped water (in house, yard, or outside yard) Have piped water in dwelling Have refuse removal Have refuse removal once a week

69.1 12.5 85.6 69.2 66.5 38.4 0.5 2.6

75.5 2.9 91.2 87.1 84.5 21.4 0.3 1.0

73.7

52.3 93.7 38.3 60.1 59.5

91.9

51.6 95.3 47.9 72.4 53.2

Source: Statistics South Africa 2008a, 2012c.

Aggregate data can also hide how the potentially positive effects of physical improvements in housing, energy, water, and sanitation may be hampered by social determinants of health and well-being at the individual and household level such as income levels, employment status, education levels, safety issues, differential vulnerability to hiv and aids, and household structure and composition (Ambert et al. 2007; Harpham 2009). In addition, effects at the neighbourhood level are important, such as overall economic status of a neighbourhood, access to social networks, and access to health services (Harpham, 2009; Montgomery and Hewett, 2005). As such, to understand the spatial distribution and social dynamics of environmental health in urban South Africa, local level studies are critical (Thomas et al. 2002, 256). As described in the introduction, we conducted two surveys of randomly selected households in wards with predominantly low income households in 2006, the first in April/May (293 households in seven wards) and the second in September (170 households in four wards).

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Neighbourhoods were selected to ensure representation of the major types of low income housing in the city including informal settlements, older African townships, in situ upgraded areas, new peripheral township developments under the new post-1994 housing program, and semirural traditional homesteads (see map, figure 0.5 in the introduction). Our surveys included questions on a range of demographic factors, socioeconomic indicators, services, and environmental risks, along with questions about the health status and health management issues for household members. One challenge we faced was the lack of spatialized health data for the city. While health providers do keep records, patients’ home addresses are usually not recorded, and people also often travel some distance to access preferred health services. Hence, there were no local health data we could use to link environmental conditions of the home and neighbourhood with health outcomes. We therefore gathered the health data ourselves. Another challenge is the high prevalence of hiv and aids in the city7, which confounds other health conditions, including respiratory and diarrhoeal illness. This makes it difficult to associate health conditions with environmental causes such as housing conditions and access to services. In the next section, the major trends in services and health conditions are presented. S E RVI CE S A N D HE A LTH C ON D I TI ON S

Msunduzi’s poorer neighbourhoods have a fairly high rate of access to piped water. In our first survey of 293 households in seven wards, 77 per cent had access to piped water in their dwelling, and 21 per cent had access to a communal standpipe. Only four households reported accessing water from a spring, stream, river, or other source. Electricity access is also fairly high, however, the relatively high cost of electricity means only 67 per cent use it for cooking, 78 per cent for lighting, and 56 per cent for heating. Paraffin and wood, both dirty fuels, are the more common cooking fuel alternatives used. For toilet type, nearly half the sample had access to some kind of flush toilet, and 8 per cent had a pit latrine with a vent. However, 36 per cent of households still used an unvented pit latrine, 4 per cent used the bucket system, and 4 per cent had no toilet. For housing type, 68 per cent of households had formal housing, 29 per cent informal, and 10 per cent traditional. Finally, in terms of waste removal, 57 per cent of households reported

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Table 2.2 Basic services for low income neighbourhoods compared to Msunduzi Municipality as a whole, percentages of population surveyed8

Service 2011

Live in formal housing Live in informal housing Use electricity for lighting Use electricity for cooking Use electricity for heating Use pit latrine Use bucket toilet Have no toilet Have access to piped water (in house, yard, or outside yard) Have refuse removal

Urban Ecosystems Survey in Low Income Neighbourhoods, 2006 Msunduzi

Community Survey 2007, Msunduzi as a Whole Census

68 22 78 67 56 44 4 4

75.5 2.9 91.2 87.1 84.5 21.4 0.3 1.0

98 57

95.3 72.4

73.7 91.9

34 >1 2

Table 2.3 Toilet types in Ash Road, Cinderella Park, and Ambleton9

Type of Toilet

Ash Road informal settlement (Ward 33, N=32; % of informants)

Cinderella Park, in situ upgrade (Ward 34, N=35; % of informants)

Ambleton, RDP Township (Ward 18, N=41; % of informants)

Flush Pit latrine None

0 90 9.4

80 17 3

32 67 2

Source: Urban Ecosystems and Human Health Project, Survey 1, 2006.

this service, while 43 per cent had no waste removal. When travelling in the neighbourhoods there were many unsightly and dangerous domestic waste piles, waste burning, and (illegal) dumps of industrial and other waste in close proximity. Table 2.2 summarizes these data and compares them to those reported for Msunduzi as a whole in the Community Survey 2007 and the 2011 Census. Table 2.2 clearly demonstrates that except for access to piped water, low income neighbourhoods are poorly serviced compared to

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Figure 2.3 This rdp house in Ambleton had an onsite flush toilet but it has failed. Since neighbours will not let them use their toilets, this family of fifteen headed by Gogo M. must use the Slanspruit River area (Ambleton, #20, 12 March 2010).

the municipality as a whole. Spatial analysis is therefore critical in understanding environmental health in the city. This is especially evident when differences between the different neighbourhoods are identified. For example, there are large variations in toilet type for households in the different neighbourhoods we studied. The poorest toilets are found, as expected, in one of the informal settlements in our study, Ash Road, where most residents share pit latrines without vents with as many as seventeen others. Improvements are noticeable in the upgraded areas, for example Cinderella Park. Very concerning, however, is that in the new rdp township in our study, Ambleton (France), on-site flush toilets had been installed, but breakdowns were already common, and people were resorting to building their own pit latrines, or emptying buckets into vacant areas. In Ambleton, additional concerns surround the steep slopes and shale geology, making drainage for the on-site flush toilets and pit latrines problematic.

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Figure 2.4 This rdp house never had a flush toilet. Here, a bucket system toilet is located above the house. Buckets are dumped in empty lots (Fieldnotes, Ambleton #11, 11 March 2010).

It is clear from our surveys that differences in access to basic services are not only related to income level, but are spatially distributed in specific ways. The municipality faces large challenges in delivering services where infrastructure was neglected historically, in a context where persistent poverty and unemployment make it impossible for many of the poor to pay for those services, either directly or indirectly through taxes. Our research sought to add to these basic observations of access to services in low income areas by attempting to link these to health and well-being indicators. We found that improved (that is, formal) housing, and particular aspects of electricity and water use are associated with some basic improved health and wellbeing indicators. As expected, for example, lower rates of bloody diarrhoea are associated with clean water and use of a refrigerator.10 However, there was surprisingly little variation in relation to health outcomes across the different neighbourhoods and housing types that we studied. This may be partly a result of low overall reported rates of illness and disease making variability difficult to detect, confounding variables such as hiv and aids, because conditions are not different

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Figure 2.5 In Peace Valley 2, the sanitation situation is acute. Rickety and terrible smelling, the pit latrines impose health and safety hazards, and are a great blow to people’s dignity.

enough across the neighbourhoods, or that the improved housing, such as in situ upgrades and new rdp townships have not been around long enough to make an impact. While we found some associations between formal housing (including electrification and water access) and better economic status, as well as some improved health outcomes, overall there were no striking correlations between housing type (formal, informal, and traditional), or different low income neighbourhoods selected, and health outcomes. Much more important, is that our data show that large inequalities remain in the delivery of and access to improved basic services to low income areas as compared to the overall municipal rates. Many low income households continue to live in poor and risky environments across the various housing and neighbourhood types available to low income people, and wide gaps exist between these households and the wealthy of the city who live in first world conditions.

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F E M A L E HE A D E D HOU S E HOL D S

While comparing housing types and different low income wards revealed some important patterns, comparing female headed households (fhh) with other headed households11 (ohh) produced the starkest variations among the population sampled. This section presents some of these patterns, including socioeconomic indicators such as income and expenditures, educational status, employment status and utilization of grants, incidences of and coping with illness and death, health care seeking behaviours, and social networks. Unlike many of the indicators studied, fhhs are not less likely to live in formal housing, nor less likely to own their own homes than ohhs. This may be an early indication of the success of the Department of Housing’s policy to ensure equal if not preferred access of female household heads to houses under the government subsidy program (Department of Housing 2003b). This is discussed further in the next chapter. However, some differences emerged between the types of households in relation to health issues. Data from Survey 2 (N=170) in four wards in Msunduzi show a trend towards more incidences of disease and illness in fhhs compared to ohhs. Taking all types of recorded illnesses and diseases for all age groups in households,12 107 incidences were reported for seventy-one fhhs (rate of 1.3 incidences per household), while eighty-two incidences were reported for eighty-six ohhs (rate of .95 per household). In terms of dealing with either a case of minor diarrhoea or worrisome chest pains, either for themselves or for someone under their care, respondents from both types of households have a suite of preferred options. The most frequently mentioned was to go to a clinic or hospital. However, fhhs were more likely to mention self-treatments: 47 per cent of fhhs said they use self-treatments compared to 25 per cent of ohhs. This finding suggests a gendered dynamic to the broader point in the literature that identifies high levels of self-treatments and “over the counter” remedies sought in low income urban neighbourhoods resulting from poor access to professional services (Harpham 2009, 111). Our data also show fhhs as more likely than ohhs to seek the services of a traditional healer among their group of first choices of treatment: 18 per cent of fhhs mentioned this, while only 8 per cent of ohhs listed traditional healers. We found a high level of morbidity among the female heads we interviewed in 2010. Out of twenty-nine interviewees, twelve were ex-

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periencing serious health issues. In all, there were five cases of arthritis, two of heart conditions, four of diabetes, eight of high blood pressure, one of stroke and one of severe stomach problems (this woman died a few days after the interview). About half of these women suffered more than one condition, such as Mama E. from Peace Valley 2. From our Survey 2, a similar proportion of fhhs and ohhs had experienced a death in the household in the last year (19 per cent of fhhs and 21 per cent of ohhs). However, there appears to be a difference in the causes of death between the two household types. For ohhs, 85 per cent of deaths were attributed to illness, while in fhhs only 57 per cent of deaths were so attributed. For fhhs 14 per cent of deaths were caused by old age. This is related to the fact that fhhs are more likely than ohhs to have older relatives living with them. In addition, more deaths in fhhs are happening at home compared to ohhs. For fhhs 57 per cent of deaths occurred at home, and 43 per cent at hospital. For ohhs, 70 per cent of deaths were reported to have occurred in hospital, and only 25 per cent at home. A similar proportion of both types of households reported that someone in the household had suffered a serious illness in the last month (32 per cent of fhhs and 35 per cent of ohhs). Both types of households use a range of strategies to manage the serious illness of a member, with both most likely to say that a nonworking adult member would stay home to care for the ill person. However, there were some differences that emerged. fhhs were more likely to say that a child would stay home from school to look after the ill person. fhhs were also more likely to say that an adult working member would stay home. In both types of households, having a community volunteer worker come to the house was the least likely strategy, indicating that for all households, the burden of care remains primarily a family affair. This is particularly concerning for local health officials who put much effort into training community health volunteers (Dyer, personal communication 2007). Taken together, these data on incidences of illness and disease, death, and serious illness point to higher burdens of care for fhhs. These findings are echoed in other South African literature. In particular, while many poor households are burdened with the sick and the dying, women carry a higher burden in caring for sick people in the family (Ndinda et al. 2007). Ndinda et al. argue for targeted grants for home caregivers in this context of high rates of hiv and aids. Our re-

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Box 2.3. Household Profile: Peace Valley 2 #29 (23 March 2010): Mama E.

Figure 2.6 Mama E. in her home in Peace Valley 2

Three-plus rooms, mud house; pit latrine in yard; walls are quite deteriorated; interview in bedroom with linoleum, double bed; curtains; kitchen (stove, fridge). The head is the parent in the household; there are three people living there and they speak Zulu. The head is fifty-four years old; she completed primary school, is unemployed, and has high blood pressure and arthritis. Others living in the household are: a fourteen year

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old who is the head’s son, he is doing grade seven and is receiving the child support grant; and a thirty year old who is also the head’s son, he completed grade twelve and is working in the informal sector. The approximate household income is between R 0 and R 1,499 from the child grant and the elder son’s contributions. They spend approximately, R 500 on groceries, R 30 on transport, and R 50 on electricity per month.

search suggests that such grants should be especially targeting female headed households with ill people at home. The literature also identifies mental health stresses associated with high burdens of care. Harpham (2009, 111) notes that studies typically find common mental disorders such as depression and anxiety at double the rates for women compared to men. While we did not measure mental health, it is clear that this is an area of potential concern that should be investigated. Adding to the stress on fhhs is that female heads and their households have lower incomes and monthly expenditures, lower rates of employment, lower educational achievement, and higher dependency on government grants than male heads of ohhs.13 fhhs therefore have less resources to cope with health and death issues, and are more likely to become even more vulnerable than before as a result. Of course, we must keep in mind the overall poverty and unemployment for low income people, both men and women. In our sample, more working aged people were not working than working. These data illustrate the highest nonworking group in Elandskop, the peripheral formerly traditional area. This is expected given the high proportion of retirees in this area. The best rates for working are found in Ash Road and Cinderella Park, the areas closest to a heavy industrial zone, and characterized by informal dwellings and upgraded areas. Both Peace Valley and Ambleton have very high levels of nonworking people compared to working people (see fig. 2.7). It is within this overall grim picture, that the differential poverty of female headed households and women generally must be contextualized. This disadvantaged position is not a new finding (Kehler 2001).

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Table 2.4 Selected health issues of female headed and other headed households14 Female headed households

Other headed households

Average number of disease incidences per household

1.3

.95

Preferred treatment options for diarrhoea*

Hospital: 40% Clinic: 76% Self-treatments: 47% Traditional healer: 18%

Hospital: 21% Clinic: 69% Self-treatments: 25% Traditional healer: 8%

Preferred treatment options for chest pains*

Hospital: 51% Clinic: 69% Self-treatments: 40% Traditional healer: 17%

Hospital: 41% Clinic: 52% Self-treatments: 23% Traditional healer: 7%

Death in the household in the last year (percentage of households)

19%

21%

Cause of death

Illness: 57% Old age: 14% Accident: 7% Murder: 7% Other: 0% Don’t know: 14%+

Illness: 85% Old age: 0% Accident: 0% Murder: 10% Other: 5% Don’t know: 0%

Location of death

Home: 57% Hospital: 43%

Home: 25% Hospital: 70%

Member with serious illness in last month

32%

34%

Management of the serious illness* Non-working adult stays at home: 67% Child stays home from school: 53% Working adult stays home: 40% A relative from away comes: 35% A friend or neighbour comes: 35%

Non-working adult stays at home: 65% Child stays home from school: 37% Working adult stays home: 30% A relative from away comes: 34% A friend or neighbour comes: 25%

*These figures add up to more than 100% as people were asked to list all of their preferred options to deal with the problems. We have not listed some of the less preferred choices. +Adds up to 99% due to rounding. Source: Urban Ecosystems and Human Health Project Surveys 1 and 2, 2006.

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Table 2.5 Selected socioeconomic data comparing female headed and other headed households Female headed households

Other headed households

Head employed in formal sector

22%

39%

Head is unemployed

40%

24%

Working age (18+ years) members 12% of household employed in formal sector

29%

Working age (18+ years) members of household unemployed

55%

32%

Head receives a welfare grant

42%

17%

Head has no schooling

35%

27%

Mean monthly expenditure of household (Rands)

R 1,058

R 1,408

Source: Urban Ecosystems and Human Health Project, Survey 1, 2006. N=293 households: 159 female headed households (54.3%), and 134 other headed households (45.7%)

Current research links the phenomenon to both historical patterns of patriarchy and apartheid, and contemporary macroeconomic conditions and government policies that continue and deepen the “feminization of poverty” (Benjamin 2007; May 2000).15 However, the point needs to be continually remade, with emphasis on the need to incorporate these empirical realities within theories and practices of urban policy. While Spitzer (2005) writes about the Canadian context, it is striking how applicable her approach is to South Africa: “Economic inequalities, evidenced by income, employment and the demands of domestic labour, appear to underpin gendered health disparities most broadly. Economic status has significant impact on health and well-being and as gender figures prominently in income generation, health effects are decidedly gendered” (Spitzer 2005, S84). Of specific concern for a study of urban South Africa is the emerging situation for female headed households in the new rdp townships. While our sample as a whole had a higher proportion of fhhs than ohhs, our sample rdp neighbourhood of Ambleton had the highest proportion of fhhs of all (nearly 70 per cent). 16 Figure 2.8 also dis-

76

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Not working

70.0

Percentage (%)

60.0 50.0 40.0 30.0 20.0 10.0 0.0 All Wards (n=800)

Elandskop (n=179)

Peace Valley (n=113)

Ambleton (n=127)

Ash Road (n=69)

Cinderella Park (n=75)

Figure 2.7 Proportion of people 18 years+ working and not working: overall and selected wards. Source: Urban Ecosystems and Human Health Project, Survey 1, 2006

plays data from Acacia, a lower middle class subsidized rental complex in Ward 10 which we included in Survey 1 for comparison across class. Ambleton was also the poorest in terms of household expenditures. While on the one hand this can be read positively as the government housing subsidy program successfully targeting the poorest of the poor (fhhs), on the other hand, the overall socioeconomic status of a neighbourhood has been shown to have health and other social impacts beyond those associated with the individual and household status. Greater neighbourhood heterogeneity means more potential help from wealthier neighbours, and potentially better neighbourhood services as a result of lobbying and other activities of wealthier households (Harpham 2009; Montgomery and Hewett 2005). Locating the poorest of the poor in new townships on the urban periphery is not only occurring in pmb, but is common throughout South Africa, ensuring their spatial marginalization, as they are far from jobs, services,

Housing, Urban Conditions, Health, and Well-Being

77 Female Male Joint

90.0 80.0

60.0 50.0 40.0 30.0 20.0 10.0

E la nd sk op

a ci

M pu m el el o

ca A

Im ba ll

R oa d A sh

Va lle y Pe ac e

C in de re lla

A m bl et on

0.0 O ve ra ll

Percentage (%)

70.0

Figure 2.8 Household headship in eight neighbourhoods, Msunduzi Municipality. Source: Urban Ecosystems and Human Health Project, Survey 1, 2006

and the cultural life of the city, and face prohibitive transport costs. These conditions make it difficult for these households to improve their situations. Research shows too, that while better-off people may respond well to relocation, having the resources to adapt and adjust, poor people “often suffer a calamitous drop in income, risk increased rates of depression and family violence and struggle to access schools, clinics, policing and so on” (Pithouse 2009, 7). The profile of Gogo Z. is illustrative of conditions and households in Ambleton/France. No one is working and the household relies on a pension and child grants. The head suffers from diabetes and is in poor health (see box 2.4). Other households we visited in Ambleton for interviews were even more deeply concerning. One household headed by a grandmother of eighty-two years, who suffers from high blood pressure, housed nineteen people, mostly children sixteen years and younger. No one in the house was working, but many child grants and a few pensions made up the household income (Ambleton, #18).

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Box 2.4. Household Profile and Field Notes: Ambleton/France #12 (11 March 2010): Gogo Z.

Figure 2.9 Gogo Z. with her daughter in her home in Ambleton

The head of the household is the mother and grandmother, Zulu is the language that is usually spoken, and five people live in the house. The head is sixty-five years old, she has never been to school, is receiving her monthly pension grant, and is diabetic. The other people that live in the house are: a twenty-five year old who is the head’s daughter, she went to school only up to grade eleven, and is unemployed; a sixteen year old male who is the head’s other relative, he is currently doing grade eight; a two year old female who is the head’s grandchild, she is receiving the child support grant; and lastly another two year old who is female and is also the head’s grandchild, she is also receiving the child support grant. The approximate household income per month is between R 0 and R 1499 coming mainly from the grants (pension and child support grants times two). They spend approximately R 700 on groceries, R 100 on transport and R 100 on electricity, and R 130 on the burial society contributions per month.

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C ON C LU S I ON

In general, our case study of Msunduzi Municipality suggests that while aggregate statistics indicate an improvement in overall urban services at the national, provincial, and municipal levels, marked spatial differences persist in access to basic services and healthy urban environments, and these are linked to enduring racialized economic inequalities. Conditions for the poor often continue to be dangerous and unhealthy. Furthermore, persistent poverty and unemployment hamper the ability of such service delivery improvements that are made to significantly improve health and well-being. Failure to address the profound inequalities of urban South Africa will continue to hamper efforts to improve urban conditions through the extension of housing and other municipal services. Indeed, the research presented in this chapter suggests that it is unwise to assume that formal housing, electrification, sanitation, and water provision will automatically lead to improved health and well-being. In addition, serious consideration needs to be given to the gendered social conditions that mediate the arrival of these benefits. In particular, female headed households, whether they are in informal settlements, older townships, or the new rdp settlements, face differential challenges and hardships in relation to poverty, illness, care-giving, and access to health services. It is also alarming that, at least in the case of Msunduzi, the worst health, social, and economic conditions appear in the new townships being built under the government housing program. The government’s low income housing program may be creating tomorrow’s slums, populated mostly by fhhs isolated and marginalized on urban peripheries. As such, these households have only a marginal and truncated hold on the material aspects of the right to the city. Some progress and improvements over previous homes is evident, but serious problems remain, especially in terms of sanitation, housing quality, and work. In the next chapter, this discussion continues by directly analyzing the government’s low-cost housing program and policies through a gendered lens.

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3 Assessing the State’s Response: Housing Policy and Female Headed Households1 with Belinda Dodson Question: Was it difficult as a female household head to get access to this dwelling? Yes, we had a fight with my husband then he left so I had nobody to help me fight to get a house. (France, #13) No, I had all the documents they wanted. (France, #14) Yes, I didn’t have birth certificates for my children at the time, so I had to get them first; we had to walk for long distances with our children to get to the registration stations. (France, #16)

I N TROD U C TI ON

This chapter assesses how well housing policy fulfills the constitutional obligation to ensure both “adequate shelter” and gender equality, and how well policy addresses the circumstances facing urban women, especially female heads. South Africa has both progressive constitutional provisions and deliberate gender “mainstreaming” in many policies and programs, including housing. Our research shows some successes in government policy reaching female headed households, but many remaining challenges in terms of the structural and other

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obstacles that these households and their heads face. For this chapter, the merits of the policies are evaluated as responses to conditions on the ground. This is not to ignore the political context of implementation, but only to insist that good policy does matter. The next chapter tackles more critical ground, considering how government policy including housing and other social welfare provisions, produces women as certain kinds of subjects of the state. Are these processes effective in pursuing gender justice for women? Do they enhance women’s right to “inhabit” the city as full citizens? As we have seen in chapter two, housing provision has been a major priority for the anc government since its election in 1994, but the country still faces a huge backlog in demand for low-cost housing in urban areas mostly because of continued in-migration, and the breaking up of households into smaller units. In addition, in our Msunduzi case study, new housing construction and upgrading projects have been stalled since the early 2000s because of various problems in municipal governance (Brisbane 2013). Furthermore, while there have been significant improvements in the provision of safe drinking water, electricity, and the building of new formal low-cost houses, urban conditions remain extremely poor for many who live in informal housing, and even the new rdp townships. Recent government information reports significant dissatisfaction with the quality of rdp housing across the nation (Statistics South Africa 2012c, 3). As female headed households are receiving the majority of rdp housing, they are especially affected. The national housing policy and programs have recognized some of the particular challenges faced by poor urban women, including female heads. These are addressed in the government’s key policy document Breaking New Ground (Department of Housing 2004a) and the follow-up policy document Mainstreaming Gender in the Housing and Human Settlement Sector, launched in 2006 (Centre for Scientific and Industrial Research and Department of Housing 2006). Within this national policy context, this chapter considers our case study of low income women’s housing experience in Msunduzi. This includes both the subsidized contractor built housing (rdp “matchbox” houses given to people free) and a case of (state and ngo assisted) self-help housing. The evaluation of policy centres on both women’s access to housing and the impacts this has. Is access to government housing actually providing the hoped for socioeconomic upliftment expressed in national housing policy discourse?

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T H E N ATI ON A L HOU S I N G C ON TE X T: P OL I C Y A N D C R I TI QU E 2

Housing was a priority in the anc’s national Reconstruction and Development Programme (rdp) when the party came into power. A Housing Summit was held in 1994, and a White Paper on housing was finalized that same year. Analysts point out that the White Paper contained a combination of market based, welfare based, and self-help approaches to housing. The market was involved through engagement of the private sector as contractors in public-private partnerships and, as was hoped, in offering loans and credit to the poor. Welfare approaches were reflected in the focus on providing housing specifically for the poor by means of a government housing subsidy to qualifying low income households. It was also hoped that these new homeowners would be able to turn their homes into financial assets and thus climb out of poverty. And finally, self-help approaches appeared in the encouragement of community participation in housing processes, with state subsidies provided to assist self-help projects (Huchzermeyer 2001; Jenkins 1999). This pattern of parallel and sometimes contradictory strategies occurs in other key policy documents of the time, including the rdp itself and the 1996 Constitution, in part reflecting the anc’s own multiple and competing ideological strands as it transformed itself from a liberation movement to the governing party of a modern liberal state. Whatever the criticisms, there have been undeniable successes in the government’s housing program. The program has been significantly better than pre-1994 approaches at reaching the poor, especially the urban poor, although the impact on poverty itself is less clear (Charlton and Kihato 2006). Furthermore, women’s housing needs have been directly addressed. As we have seen, like poor women around the globe, South African women are differentially affected by unemployment and poverty; have less access to credit, training, and other resources; carry more parental and other family responsibilities; and experience greater lack of access to land and housing (Beall and Todes 2004; May 2000; McCarney 2006; McEwan 2003; Ndinda 2003). The Department of Housing (now the Department of Human Settlements) recognized quite early on that women face certain difficulties in securing ownership of housing (Charlton 2004). For example, while in many instances women are recorded in the National Database as beneficiaries of housing subsidies, their male partners are often recog-

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nized as the official homeowners. For this reason, provincial departments have been mandated to ensure that title deeds for housing be registered in the name of the applicant and his or her partner (Mabandla 2003). The government program of new low-cost housing also explicitly included female headed households as eligible for the housing subsidy, in keeping with the equality provisions in the 1996 Constitution and addressing historical laws and processes which had denied women access to home and land ownership. For most of the apartheid era, married men received preference in allocation of public housing, and even once women were permitted to own or rent public housing, from 1979 onward, so few new houses were built that the effect on women’s home ownership was negligible (Todes and Walker 1993).3 Since the advent of the anc government’s subsidy based housing policy, more than 50 per cent of housing subsidies have gone to female headed households (Department of Housing 2003b). Statistics from 2011 show that today 15.3 per cent of households live in rdp housing, with fhhs more likely than others to receive the housing subsidy in the rdp process (Statistics South Africa 2012b, 3). Applicants for the housing subsidy must satisfy the following qualifying criteria: •

•

•

•

•

Married or financial dependants: An applicant must be married or constantly be living together with any other person. A single person with proven financial dependants (such as children or family members) may also apply. Residents: An applicant must be a citizen of the Republic of South Africa, or be in the possession of a permanent resident permit. Competent to contract: An applicant must be legally competent to contract (i.e. over 21 years of age, or married or divorced) and of sound mind. Monthly household income: An applicant's gross monthly household income must not exceed R 3 500. Adequate proof of income must be submitted. Not yet benefited from government funding: An applicant or anyone else in the household must not have received previous housing benefits from the Government. Except in the following: æ An applicant that qualifies for a Consolidation Subsidy æ Disabled persons

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First time property owner: An applicant may not own or have owned a house previously. (Department of Housing 2005; our italics)

Since female headed households are differentially poor, and often care for dependent children, there may be a structural bias in their favour as recipients of the housing subsidy. At the least, in being both propoor and pro-family, housing subsidy policy has been de facto biased in favour of female recipients, especially those who have family dependants. Other government initiatives also support women’s engagement in, and benefit from, the provision of housing. The Department of Housing (doh) partnered with a nonprofit Section 21 company,4 “Women for Housing,” through one of its housing units, the National Urban Reconstruction and Housing Agency (nurcha), to provide information, networking opportunities, and support to women in the field of housing (Charlton 2004). Within the Black Economic Empowerment (bee) framework, the doh, through the National Home Builders Registration Council (nhbrc) set up a training program for emerging contractors to enhance the delivery of low-cost housing and promote the participation of women in the construction industry. By 2006, nhbrc had trained 1,740 emerging homebuilders of which 610 were women (Sisulu 2006, 7). In addition, the doh has improved the access of female contractors to housing projects by earmarking 30 per cent of each provincial housing department’s allocations for projects undertaken by women contractors (ibid.). Despite these successes for women’s interests, many problems with the housing process had already become clear in the 1990s, including some that are not specifically gendered. There have been market failures in relation to lending, credit, and the creation of low-cost houses as assets (Tomlinson 2006). For example, critics argue that freehold tenure deals inadequately with the dynamics of poverty, and that some of the urban poor would be better served by rental accommodation, which the private sector is hesitant to develop (Seekings 2000). New settlements have continued to place poor and low income black households on urban peripheries where land prices are low, far from jobs, and services (ibid.). New houses and their associated infrastructure (such as sewerage services) are often of poor quality, and in many cases are rapidly deteriorating (Huchzermeyer 2001). Finally, according to recipients, the so-called “rdp houses” are too small even after

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the main model was increased to a minimum of 30m² in 1998 by the Department of Housing (ibid., 306). They are still smaller than apartheid era “matchboxes,” or two roomed bungalows, that were typically 40m². Dissatisfaction with these factors has led a significant minority to sell or rent out their rdp houses and move back to informal settlements closer to their places of employment or other economic activities. The cost of transport from the new townships to jobs and income generation activities is the single biggest financial factor encouraging this type of action (Bauman et al. 2004; Huchzermeyer 2001). In the overall context of low income housing, matters were made worse by evictions and demolitions carried out by the state, including in our case study city of Pietermaritzburg (Centre for Applied Legal Studies 2007).5 More than fifteen years after the end of apartheid the housing situation is bluntly summarized by Menguelé, Khan, and Vawda: Spatial peripheralization, sterile living environments, public sector under-investment in essential infrastructure in new settlements, unabated financial sector red-lining of impoverished localities, and rising poverty and unemployment were a few of the ingredients of a lethal cocktail that stymied the activation of housing markets in old and new residential settlements. Subsidised housing as an assetaccumulation vehicle and wealth generator for the poor and an instrument for spatial restructuring – being key objectives of the 1994 housing intervention – were beyond the reach of the poor and the state. (Menguelé, Khan, and Vawda 2008, 182) The government responded to challenges to its housing policy, including those from analysts, popular protests, and court challenges, making some significant changes to housing policy after the first post-apartheid decade. The new housing policy Breaking New Ground (bng), released in September 2004, demonstrates openness to low-cost housing approaches beyond new peripheral developments built by contractors, which had been the main approach adopted hitherto. In the document itself, the Department of Housing sets out the objectives of bng as follows: • •

accelerating the delivery of housing as a key strategy for poverty alleviation; utilising provision of housing as a major job creation strategy;

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ensuring property can be accessed by all as an asset for wealth creation and empowerment; leveraging growth in the economy; combating crime, promoting social cohesion and improving quality of life for the poor; supporting the functioning of the entire single residential property market to reduce duality within the sector by breaking the barriers between the first economy residential property boom and the second economy slump;6 utilizing housing as an instrument for the development of sustainable human settlements, in support of spatial restructuring. (Department of Housing 2004a, 7)

This is a broad agenda, with strong implicit assumptions, and indeed commentators have described bng as “both underdeveloped and highly ambitious” (Pieterse and van Donk 2008, 60). The anc government admitted in the bng that it had failed to deliver constitutionally enshrined social and economic rights such as housing. There is also some recognition in bng that the welfare goals of the 1994 Reconstruction and Development Programme (rdp) were compromised by the more market oriented approaches to development brought in by the government’s shift in macroeconomic policy to Growth, Employment and Redistribution (gear) in 1996. The housing policy set out in bng can be seen as part of the government’s shift, in keeping with global trends, towards the new governance agenda, in which the state, private sector, and civil society work in concert to achieve development and other goals. The same shift in thinking and strategy underlies the 2006 replacement of gear with Accelerated and Shared Growth Initiative for South Africa (asgisa). asgisa acknowledges the limitations of passive democracy and encourages “deep citizenship,” whereby people are directly engaged in development planning and decision making, especially at the local level (Menguelé, Khan, and Vawda 2008).7 As bng also recognizes, the economic logic underpinning the first decade of (1994–2004) housing policy was flawed. The thinking had been that subsidized houses, owned outright through title deeds, would become an asset for poor people to begin to leverage themselves out of poverty. Although the original Housing Code banned the sale of rdp houses in the first five years of ownership, the idea was

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that eventually the houses would acquire market value that could be realized by the owners (Lemanski 2011). Evidence to date suggests that while there have been some transfers of rdp houses, usually through informal mechanisms, overall the houses have not functioned well as assets. Among the more important reasons for this, according to Lemanksi, is that as most rdp houses have been built on urban peripheries far from economic opportunities and community services, they have not become desirable on the housing market. Secondly, the rdp houses are not valuable enough on the market to enable a seller to “move up” to the next rung on the housing ladder, which would be older township housing closer to city centres, and so owners are reluctant to sell. In cases where desperately poor people have sold their rdp houses (usually at values much below what government invested to build them), the sellers have ended up back in informal settlements in worse conditions. Finally, the idea that rdp house owners could use their homes as collateral for loans that might finance new businesses has not been realized, both because banks have been reluctant to lend to the poor, and the poor themselves have shied away from taking on loans in a climate of risk that could lead to the loss of their homes altogether. For Lemanski, the rdp subsidized housing program has not worked to provide a way out of poverty. Indeed, new costs associated with home ownership such as the requirement to pay for electricity and water in some cases, as well as the already mentioned increased costs of transportation, at times means new rdp dwellers are worse off financially than before. The main success of the program, Lemanski argues, is that it has succeeded in ensuring long term shelter and tenure security for the poor, with the most important value of the homes to people being social and symbolic – that is allowing a sense of belonging as permanent urban citizens (Lemanski 2011).8 Bank makes a similar observation regarding rdp developments in his East London case study, where the vast majority of new residents were female heads of households (Bank 2011). Despite lack of economic opportunities and marginal location, for these women having a formal and permanent address, proper sanitation, as well as a new home to furnish and decorate provided a huge sense of pride and sense of belonging that often went together with increased civic pride and religious commitment. Overall, however, the poor have remained marginalized economically, socially, and spatially, unintegrated into the first economy through housing or any other

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mechanism. Within an overarching neoliberal policy framework, the state has proved unable, and the private sector unwilling, to bridge the gap. bng at least recognizes the first decade’s structural shortcomings and failure to overturn the unequal political and spatial economy of the apartheid era, still so evident in Msunduzi and other cities. Amongst other policy shifts, bng encourages a new approach to informal settlements, or shack dwellings, with stated support for in situ upgrading projects wherever possible, rather than evictions and demolitions (doh 2004).9 bng also contains an enhanced commitment to the “people’s housing process” (php). On paper, support for local people’s initiatives has existed in housing policy since 1994 (Huchzermeyer 2001). However, very little was actually done on the ground, as the government concentrated efforts on the large-scale rollout of new, state subsidized, contractor built housing developments. Critics suggest that even the deepening commitment to php represents only a partial adoption of the self-help process, primarily concerned with capturing “sweat equity” from the poor, in a sector of the housing market from which the private sector has withdrawn (Khan and Pieterse 2006). It certainly appears that the official support for php and subsidized upgrading projects has not translated into much increase in these activities, despite a tradition of self-help housing movements and institutions such as the South African Homeless People’s Federation (now fedup)10 (Landman and Napier 2010). Landman and Napier suggest that the steamroller of the massive subsidized contractor built homes has been too efficient to allow much room for other approaches in the low-cost housing arena. By 2002 only 1 per cent of state-supported houses were built as state aided self-help housing (Landman and Napier 2010, 301). Furthermore, the poor themselves have become motivated to wait for a “free” house built by the state rather than engage in time-consuming and onerous self-help initiatives. In addition, rising land values make it increasingly difficult for groups of the poor to access suitable land for self-help housing projects, with land invasions often being the only (often dangerous and risky) option (Landman and Napier 2010). Others, who have worked long and hard in the selfhelp sector, identify institutional rigidities in the state that have not changed to accommodate the people centred approaches of php (Bradlow et al. 2011). Indeed these authors claim the government is in debt to the uTshani Fund, the mechanism that manages fedup’s savings and subsidies, for pledged housing subsidies: “Reasons for this range from

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bureaucratic misuse such as those related to house inspections and title deed conveyance, to different understandings at local government levels of fedup’s relationship with the national ministry, to willful incompetence” (Bradlow et al. 2011, 271). fedup also suggests that corruption, wherein councillors and developers receive cuts in the massive rdp style projects, mean that key local actors often resist php approaches (Bradlow et al. 2011). Others suggest that at times there is a lack of planning in fedup projects that inhibits the installation of infrastructure such as roads and sewerage pipes, and at times quality control of housing construction is lacking. These issues cause problems between fedup and local officials (Brisbane 2013). However, Brisbane of besg in Msunduzi identifies institutional rigidities and lack of commitment to php projects at work in Msunduzi that have severely delayed local php projects spearheaded by besg in support of communities seeking upgrading (Brisbane 2013). Given the predominance of women in the self-help movement such as fedup, this lack of followthrough on stated commitments to php projects on the part of government could be identified as a negative gender bias against poor women. One of our study sites, Nthutukoville, is an early example of a php process that illustrates some of the benefits and limitations for women involved (Ndinda 2003; Charlton 2006; see figures 0.3 and 0.4 for scenes from Nthutukoville). We have already described how the settlement began in 1990, when people settled there after having fled the Inkatha/udf violence in the Table Mountain area. The majority were single mothers, either having been separated from their children’s fathers during the chaos, or coming from their natal homes where they were staying with their children. The city council tried to evict the “squatters,” but residents, mostly women and their children, took a strong political stand in mass demonstrations, blocking entry to the community with cut gum tree poles. besg intervened on their behalf starting in 1991, assisting them to win emergency services. Later besg, in a community driven manner, helped the community access housing subsidies in 1994 and upgrading including waterborne sewage and electrification. Some residents, including women, were given opportunities to be trained in mutual self-help house building, laying sewer pipe, and other skills. Ndinda found that women were mostly involved as unskilled labour in the building of the new homes, with more skills training, such as in construction, going to men in

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the community (Ndinda 2003). While the ideals of participatory housing include learning skills that may later be used to generate incomes, this did not seem to occur very extensively for women involved in Nthutukoville, although a community maintenance program, in which women were the majority of workers, was a spinoff (Charlton 2006). However, even men who received training in construction through the project struggled to apply these skills outside of the community as their generally low literacy rates hampered the winning of contracts (Ndinda 2003). Overall, for Ndinda, who did her field research with the community in the year 2000, the “empowerment” impacts for women were firstly their tremendous accomplishment of securing permanent tenure and home ownership as female heads of households in the city. The impact of this is impossible to quantify. Secure homes became sanctuaries that allowed the women to begin to recover from the trauma they had fled. Their success in this, plus their participation in building better quality homes also gave them confidence in themselves as people who can do something. One woman in Ndinda’s interviews says: “Women build houses … Women don’t sit down” (Ndinda 2003, 37). These aspects of empowerment also have a gendered aspect, with women comparing themselves favourably to men in the community: “Women build houses. Men drink the whole day” (ibid.). However, Ndinda also notes the limitations of this “empowerment.” Skills and experience learned by the women have not led to new economic opportunities. Indeed the poor and insecure incomes of women have been a major stumbling block in even finishing planned home improvements in many cases. Finally, Ndinda observes that women’s participation in all of these processes has not significantly transformed gender relations in any of its structural aspects. In our interviews in 2010, ten years after Ndinda’s work, the story of Nthutukoville shows a trajectory where women were highly active in claiming the land and active in taking up self-help and training opportunities that came with besg’s intervention. They are also clear beneficiaries of changed state housing policies and programs after 1994 that recognize female heads of households as legitimate recipients of housing subsidies. Nonetheless, there still appears little permanent “empowerment” in this process in terms of access to nontraditional jobs, or changes in women’s relatively disadvantaged economic position. Our interviews included five women who had

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been trained in the besg project. In their cases, they learned how to build a whole house through the project; however, only two of them used these skills after the project, one to help build another person’s house, and a second to extend her own house. One positive economic development we found that was not mentioned by Ndinda, however, was the ability of some women in Nthutukoville to rent out rooms or backyard cottages that did provide extra income. Indeed, rental income appears to be the important quantifiable outcome of this php project, an effect of the relatively good location of the community close to the centre of town. Finally, though, our work echoes Ndinda’s to suggest that the most striking effect of women’s experiences struggling for land and participating in building their own houses lies in the unquantifiable impact of deep interior transformation and self-regard among women. In our interviews, women were proud of their achievements: “I am proud of myself. I have managed to raise children on my own, and they are doing well at school, regardless of the living conditions at home. I also see myself as a strong woman” (Nthutukoville, #3). These issues are pursued further in chapters four and five. Besides increased support for php (at least on paper), other analysts see bng as a shift away from market led approaches and back towards more welfare based approaches, as the state responds to the realities of market failure in the low-cost housing sector (Ruiters 2006; Tomlinson 2006). Indeed, there is renewed state commitment to larger subsidies, bigger budgets, extension of government programs to middle-income households, new minimum standards for housing in the Housing Code, and consideration of location in terms of access to social amenities, services, and economic opportunities (Tomlinson 2006). bng at the very least represents a significant shift in policy terms. As Pithouse (2009) suggests, it has provided a basis for progressive developments in some places where a strong social movement of informal settlement dwellers exists that can call local governments to account on these new provisions, such as in Durban with Abahlali baseMjondolo, the AntiEviction Campaign in Cape Town, and the Landless People’s Movement in Johannesburg. However, Pithouse continues, these progressive opportunities under bng coexist in a context where many of the political elite support and conduct coercive (and often illegal) slum clearances, evictions, and criminalization of the poor. In reality, government has systematically failed, “at all levels of government … to implement

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the substantive content of bng” (Pithouse 2009, 1). This is certainly true in Msunduzi, where besg has faced consistent delaying tactics on the part of the municipality to implement upgrading projects. We have already noted the long delays for upgrading in our case study neighbourhood of Peace Valley 2 and in another local case, a long-standing plan for an upgrading project in the North-East Sector 2 area near Bishopstowe, which is finally going ahead after years of unnecessary delays caused by local government. In addition, a new project for subsidized housing in rural Vulindlela to be built by contractors violates many tenets of bng and php (Brisbane 2013). Following the release of bng, there also came a renewed and more substantive official commitment to gender awareness in the housing process. Most important is the policy document Mainstreaming Gender in the Housing and Human Settlement Sector (mghhss) (csir/doh 2006), which sets out guidelines for integrating gender into all aspects of housing policy and its implementation. In mghhss, the government’s own housing policy and record are subjected to rigorous and critical gender scrutiny. In her foreword, then Housing Minister Lindiwe Sisulu reiterated the constitutional commitment to provide adequate housing to all South Africans: “Our mandate as entrenched in the constitution is to provide adequate housing to all South African residents and take reasonable measures to ensure that we progressively realise this fundamental right” (Sisulu 2006, 5). She also referred to the National Gender Policy Framework to highlight the particular needs of women in regard to housing: “housing offers women a sense of security, comfort and space to bring up families, to set up small and micro businesses, to rest and feel a sense of community belonging” (Sisulu 2006, 5). Significantly, she asserts that “gender concerns cannot be regarded as an added on approach but need to be mainstreamed in our policies, projects and programmes,” referring explicitly to the legacy of apartheid, “where access to housing was influenced by unequal race, class and gender relations” (ibid.). mghhss is critical of existing housing policy, including that set out in Breaking New Ground, for seeking to be gender neutral. mghhss points out the limitations, in gender terms, to the housing subsidy approach: “What it fails to acknowledge is the pre-existing situation of inequality between men and women, both in access as well as need. By applying the very wide brush of the housing subsidy on the housing backlog canvas, the subsidy overlooks difference and diversity,

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sometimes to the detriment of the beneficiaries involved or to the overall success of the goals” (csir/doh 2006, 9). Using the established distinction in gender analysis between practical and strategic needs (Molyneux 1985), mghhss argues that current housing policy fails to accommodate either of these categories. One example of women’s practical needs that are identified as a serious omission in the current strategy is the failure to adapt settlement and house design to suit women’s multipurpose uses of domestic space. Many women’s home based activities combine household chores and family responsibilities with income generating activities such as producing goods for sale or providing services such as childcare for neighbouring families – functions ill served by standard design, small sized dwelling units. In terms of women’s strategic needs, the lack of any policy mechanism to track possible changes in gender relations as a result of housing allocation is identified as a problem with “policy stop[ping] just when gender relationships might become visible in communities – that is, after the subsidy has been delivered” (csir/doh 2006, 9). mghhss goes beyond critique, to lay out guidelines for mainstreaming gender at all stages of the housing process, i.e. before, during, and after housing delivery. Among its primary recommendations in terms of gender mainstreaming in the housing process are the following: • • •

• • • •

consumer education material targeted at women from diverse backgrounds policy requirement that both parties to a marriage or cohabitation agreement sign the subsidy application form specific procedures to accommodate cases of inheritance, divorce and separation, with the principle that place in the housing queue should be retained more flexibility in subsidy eligibility criteria to allow for a variety of household types alternative approaches to affordability, such as allowing a self-build option improved policy for housing the indigent allowing households to request neighbouring plots through linked applications (csir/doh 2006, 10)

Significantly, the document takes as one of its guiding principles the “unconstitutionality of either direct or indirect discrimination on

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the basis of gender” (csir/doh 2006, 11). Along with its recommendation to mainstream gender in all housing policies and programs, this demonstrates the clear linkage of the right to housing with the right to gender equality, and the identification of that linkage as providing a strategic entry point for housing allocation and delivery. Also significant is mghhss’s recognition of the increase in the number of female headed households (fhh). While women’s right to housing cannot be reduced to the needs of female headed households, our own and other research, as outlined in chapter two, suggests that fhhs in South African cities are indeed the poorest and most vulnerable, suffering more acute poverty and experiencing higher levels of ill health, personal violence, and domestic insecurity. F E M A L E HE A D E D HOU S E HOL D S A ND H OU S I N G I N M S U N D U Z I M U N I C I PA L I T Y

Msunduzi along with South Africa in general, has seen overall improvements in basic urban conditions such as housing, electrification, sanitation, and piped water availability since the first post-apartheid Census in 1996 (see table 2.1 in chapter two). However, Msunduzi still faces serious challenges in regard to housing and services delivery. In its Integrated Development Plan (idp) for 2007–08 (published 2006) it is indicated that there were 13,796 registered applicants on one official housing waiting list, although there are other waiting lists that need to be added to this (Msunduzi Municipality 2006, 179). Meanwhile, the Council had closed waiting lists for the poorest applicants (those making less than R 3,500 a month) on 31 March 2000, since there were not enough projects in the pipeline that could hope to accommodate more people in the near future. The 2006 idp also reported that there were fifteen informal settlements in the municipality, sheltering approximately 70,000 people in over 17,000 households. The most recent idp posted by the municipality utilizes Community Survey 2007 data to calculate its housing backlog. It estimates 18.16 per cent of households living in housing not up to at least rdp standard, meaning primarily informal settlements (Msunduzi Municipality 2012a, 29). The most recently posted Annual Report from the municipality reports the near completion of their Housing Sector Plan, and mentions the new low-cost housing development underway in the peri-urban area of Vulindlela, and many other smaller projects in various stages of ap-

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proval (Msunduzi Municipality 2012b, 63–4). This indicates that after a long lull, housing projects may be slowly moving forward in the city. The municipality also faces extensive backlogs in relation to water and sanitation services. The 2006 idp further notes that most of the new housing built under the national government subsidy program, that is Ambleton/France, has been built next to a historically African area (Edendale), leaving apartheid legacies of spatial segregation and poor access to services unchanged. The 2010/2011 Annual Report mentions a plan for “Ambleton City,” a node of services and shops to be built next to the large rdp settlement, but its realization remains to be seen (Msunduzi Municipality 2012b, 78). “Adequate shelter” has to take account of factors beyond material housing supply. There is general recognition in the urban planning literature (Turner 1976) as well as by un and other international bodies that housing is more than a roof over one’s head, access to water, sanitation, and energy (un-Habitat 2003). Rather, it includes a number of key social, economic, and quality of life parameters that are as much about successful urban living as they are about shelter per se. This resonates with the broad set of material, social, and symbolic values captured by the concept of the right to the city. There is also broad academic and policy consensus that for women, there can be particular issues with regard to access to adequate housing. There may be institutional, legal, and cultural barriers to women’s access to housing. Women have less access to formal employment than men, earn less income than men, and are thus less able either to save money or to secure credit or other financial services. Women are further vulnerable in the sense that their rights to property are often obtained via marriage or cohabitation with a male partner, and many women find themselves trapped in situations of domestic violence or other forms of spousal abuse for fear of losing their accommodation. Women’s housing needs also reflect their particular social position and roles. For example, the “burden of care” for children, the elderly, and the sick usually falls largely on women, and the domestic setting is thus a site of various types of reproductive and often also productive labour. Many of these issues were evident in the Msunduzi case study as we saw in chapter two, and each has implications for the design and implementation of gender sensitive housing policy. Distinctions amongst women also need to be drawn, at minimum between women who are members of male headed or male centred

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households and women who are themselves heads of their household units, often without any adult male members, except for perhaps adult sons or grandsons. As we have seen, female headed households (fhh) certainly formed the majority in our sample of poorer neighbourhoods in Msunduzi. At the aggregate national level they comprise more than 40 per cent of all African households (South African Institute for Race Relations 2012, 77). The greater poverty of fhhs in South Africa has been identified by numerous scholars, including Dungumaro (2008) and Armstrong, Lekezwa, and Siebrits (2009), who report 2006 data showing that 45 per cent of all female headed households, compared to only 25 per cent of male headed households, lived below a “lower bound” poverty line. Scholars have also already drawn attention to the increase in the number of fhhs in other southern African contexts such as Botswana and the former homelands of South Africa (Posel 2004; Jackson 2007; Moore 1994; Timaeus and Graham 1989), as indeed in other parts of the world. Along with these scholars, we therefore suggest that female headed households should be viewed not as in some way “deviant” or “lacking” a male head, but rather as an emerging norm, especially in poorer sectors of urban society. This is not to deny or downplay the constraints and challenges facing all poor women in urban South Africa, whether or not they are members of a fhh. Focusing on fhhs, however, provides a useful conceptual lens for understanding housing in its broader social context. It also provides a strategic entry point in policy terms, automatically targeting poorer households while simultaneously addressing issues of gender inequality. Chapter two has already presented the starkest findings that emerged in our survey research in relation to female headed households as compared to others, in terms of employment, incomes, educational levels, and various health issues (see tables 2.4 and 2.5 in chapter 2). Here the discussion turns to further elements differentiating fhhs from others relating specifically to housing issues emerging from the survey and interview based research, before going on to suggest how the whole range of characteristics of fhhs might inform the development of more gender appropriate, gender equitable housing policy and planning. Household composition revealed both similarities and differences between female headed and other households. There was no difference in the average size of households, and male and female household heads were equally likely to have their children living with them. One striking difference was that female headed households were more likely to include people in the category of “other relative,” such

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as adult siblings, cousins, nephews, or nieces (i.e., relatives other than children or parents). Almost a quarter of the people living in fhhs fell into this category. In addition to being an indication of women’s caring role for extended family, this also suggests the emergence of various nontraditional, composite household forms. Somewhat surprisingly, our survey found female household heads to be more likely than male household heads to be the owners of their homes: 57 per cent of female heads but only around 25 per cent of male heads. Where they were not themselves the owners, female household heads were more likely than male household heads to be living in a home owned by their mothers (18%). Other relatives (16%) or people not related (8%) were the further main categories of ownership listed by fhhs. For male heads who were not themselves the owners, the main categories were spouses (27%), fathers (15%), other relatives (19%), or people not related to the respondent (12%). If these figures are accurate, then they suggest that the government housing subsidy and allocation process has been successful in reaching women. Indeed, while we were not able to obtain gender disaggregated housing subsidy data at the municipal level, provincial level data confirm that in all categories of subsidies, women make up the majority of recipients, and that all of the subsidies granted to women are recorded as going to women who are household heads (doh 2009a; doh 2009b), a trend that has continued in the most recent data available (Statistics South Africa 2012b). Those wards in our sample that had high rates of subsidized housing also had the highest rates of female headship, but other wards also showed this trend, with all areas reporting more than 40 per cent female headship. This underlines the point that matrifocal or female headed households are not a phenomenon produced by the subsidized housing program, but exist as a major form everywhere in the low income urban community, and the housing subsidy simply mirrors this by targeted the poorest households. With historical restrictions on women’s home ownership and access to township housing eliminated, they become visible in new ways as the “norm” for household heads in poor communities. Also evident from the survey findings is the importance of multigenerational, often matrilineal families, many with no male adult members, as a household form. Noteworthy too is the small but significant proportion of both male and female headed households who live in homes owned by nonrelatives, indicative perhaps of an emerging rental housing market.

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Home ownership and tenure security are important beyond the immediate advantages of having a roof over one’s own and one’s family’s heads. In a context of extreme economic insecurity and vulnerability to serious health problems, including hiv/aids, knowing that household members will be able to stay in the home should the owner pass away is a source of comfort and security in the broader psychosocial sense. Over 80 per cent of both male and female household heads believed that if they were to pass away, other household members would be allowed to remain in their homes. However, in our survey, only 23 per cent of respondents said they had drafted wills. According to the former assistant chief town planner, official policy requires subsidy recipients to sign wills, and policy is to allocate the house title to dependants if the owner dies (Spearman 2005). A closer look at our data indicate that for the sample in the new subsidized housing township (Ambleton), those respondents who were owners of their houses, and who had applied through an application to the municipality, were indeed likely to have made wills. However, there were a larger number of respondents who were homeowners who had obtained their houses through other means, either through the ward councillor, through another municipal officer, or arranged privately. In these cases, they had not made wills. Given the evidence around the country that rdp units are changing hands, often through informal transactions, any initial tenure security through will writing is likely lost. In our interview research with twenty-nine female heads in 2010, only one out of twenty-nine had made a will, and this woman was living in Ambleton. Of the twenty-nine, twelve admitted not knowing if family members would be able to stay in the house if they themselves passed away, while nine thought they would be able to, and eight that they would not. Another issue is that if house owners pass away and leave minor children, a will does not necessarily protect their tenure security. Child headed households, if comprised of minor children, will be subject to other policies under the welfare department, which would require removal of minor children from these situations and transfer to institutional care (Spearman 2005). The Built Environment Support Group (besg), the major ngo in the municipality working on low-cost housing issues, reports anecdotal evidence in Msunduzi regarding the particular vulnerability of children under twenty-one left by deceased parents, noting that they are often left homeless or dispossessed by extended family claiming succession rights through customary practices. besg also suggests that people known to be hiv

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positive are sometimes chased away from their homes by relatives before they pass away (besg 2009). Clearly, will writing or some other method of securing tenure for chosen inheritors will have to become much more widespread and culturally accepted before policy can truly said to be successful in this regard. In addition to material and socioeconomic security, attachment to one’s place of residence also provides a sense of belonging. As we have seen from Lemanski’s 2011 study, rdp housing as a financial asset appears weak; however, the social and symbolic value of homeownership in the city, no matter how peripherally located, is very high. In our survey research in Msunduzi, most respondents expressed a strong sense of belonging in their homes. Among respondents, however, female household heads were even more likely than male household heads to express this view: 67 per cent compared to 59 per cent. All of the twenty-nine female heads interviewed in 2010 expressed this view. Given the higher incidence of home ownership amongst women, this suggests a strong link between home ownership and feelings of attachment or belonging. Together with secure inheritability, this is a powerful argument in favour of home ownership, one possibly overlooked by proponents of rental housing as the solution to the country’s housing crisis. Arguably, home ownership is especially valuable to female headed households, with their deeper poverty and less secure livelihoods. While a house may not provide a step out of poverty, it at the very least prevents a slide into the even worse precariousness and environmental conditions of informal settlements. Indeed, even though informal settlements often have some advantages, especially better location in relation to livelihood opportunities, these opportunities remain extremely marginal and survivalist (Hunter and Posel 2012). Also important beyond the immediate dwelling structure are the existence of social and community networks. The vast majority of people in our survey sample (95%), including in newer townships, not only know their neighbours but most share food, money, or labour with them. Almost three quarters of households reported such neighbourly exchanges. Moreover, around 50 per cent of households have extended family living in the neighbourhood. Family was especially important to those who had moved to a new location within the last year. In times of crisis or difficulty, whether related to ill health, injuries, housing, or financial difficulties, both male and female headed households turn first and most frequently to family members and second to neighbours. Compared to male headed

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households, female headed households were more likely to turn to churches, ngos, and other community based organizations in addition to neighbours and relatives. For all households, however, access to various forms social networks clearly provide important safety nets, supplementing or even substituting for services provided by government. We should remain cautious about overstating this however, and remember the “neighbourhood effect” mentioned in chapter two. In communities such as Ambleton, where most are desperately poor, there are severe limits on how much people are able to help one another. We can also recall the findings on food security in Msunduzi reported in the introduction, which painted a bleak picture of widespread food insecurity in the municipality, with little inter-household transfers and virtually no rural-urban transfers of food (Caesar et al. 2013). Nonetheless, the fact that most households mention at least occasional sharing of food, money, and labour with others in the community, and the high importance of family to most households, should be an important aspect to consider in housing policy. In sum, our research indicates the importance of home ownership for female heads, but that home ownership nevertheless remains insufficient to address their marked differential poverty and family burdens. Tenure security, while addressed by housing policy, remains inadequately protected because the policy of will writing for subsidy recipients has incomplete reach, and also may vanish after one transfer of a house on the informal market. In the particular case of the new subsidized housing units, the peripheral location of the new townships contributes to the continued social and economic isolation of fhhs. The rdp housing in Ambleton on the urban periphery included the highest proportion of fhhs in our sample – a positive sign in terms of fhhs being able to access government subsidized housing, but with negative implications for those households’ longer term, socioeconomic wellbeing. As an illustration, the cost of a round-trip fare to the centre of town was about R 20 (cdn 3) in 2006, a significant cost for many households and a severe constraint on access to livelihood opportunities. Furthermore, the poor quality of these houses predicts the future erosion of adequate shelter. As we saw in chapter two, toilet systems in Ambleton are already breaking down, forcing people to dig pit latrines or dump buckets in vacant areas. Residents complain of walls that get very damp in rainy weather, and some roofs already leak. Waste removal is also sporadic, posing potential for seri-

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Figure 3.1 Scene from Ambleton, March 2010

ous environmental health problems. The female heads of Ambleton may be fortunate homeowners on the one hand, but their neighbourhood may be tomorrow’s slum in the making. C ON C LU S I ON S

While our findings regarding fhhs are concerning, there are some hopeful elements. Housing policy actively recognizes, and to a certain extent addresses, gender based inequalities, with practical as well as strategic benefits for women. If appropriately designed, located, constructed, and assigned, housing can give women the physical and metaphorical space in which to meet their wide-ranging social and economic needs and obligations. Appropriate housing enables women to better raise their children, care for other family members, and engage in remunerative economic activity when conditions are right. Indeed, in Nthutukoville, the best located of the communities we worked in, female heads gained significant extra income from renting out rooms or backyard cottages to people working in town. Such opportunities are

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not available to those living in peripheral locations. A home also provides owners with a sense of security and belonging, an important aspect of the right to the city. These issues are especially important for female headed households who face multiple challenges in social and economic terms. Poorly designed housing in badly located settlements, by contrast, makes it harder for women to perform the range of productive and reproductive tasks they usually undertake to look after their families, and can exacerbate and entrench gendered inequalities and hardships. The gender mainstreaming strategy set out in mghhss does address some of the needs of urban women. It identifies how housing can better serve women’s practical as well as their strategic needs, and suggests that gender conscious and appropriate housing policy can be a means of female empowerment as well as of broader transformation of gender relations. mghhss is an improvement over Breaking New Ground, which is gender neutral. Nevertheless, as our case study demonstrates, daunting obstacles remain in translating gender sensitive, pro-poor housing policy into the actual delivery of sufficient, adequate, and appropriate housing on the ground. Housing design, construction, and location have all been shown to be deficient, entrenching apartheid era racial segregation and marginalizing the urban poor – amongst whom are many female headed households – both spatially and socioeconomically. Housing policy and its implementation should pay attention to factors beyond quantitative housing supply and administration of the housing subsidy, such as livelihoods options, family needs, and issues of inheritance. Stated commitment to self-help initiatives through the People’s Housing Process has also had weak follow through. Finally, while women have been relatively advantaged in South Africa’s housing subsidy process, at least numerically, women remain significantly socially and economically disadvantaged, even when compared to men in the same local context. Fundamental forces of gender discrimination clearly persist, keeping women poorer, less powerful, and more likely to depend on state assistance in acquiring adequate shelter. This makes it all the more important that gender mainstreaming in the housing sector is effectively implemented, but also that such mainstreaming should acknowledge that its transformative potential is limited without more fundamental social change. The next chapter develops this argument further by considering the gendered relationship between women and the state in this context of very high dependence on social welfare.

Introduction 103

4 Rights, Welfare, and Citizenship1 Question: If social grants were to end, what would be your main strategies for survival? We would die, I guess I would pick up food from the streets (especially Retief) *laughing out loud*. We can’t even ask from relatives because they themselves are poor. (France, #13)

I N TROD U C TI ON

Female heads and their households are differentially reliant on state assistance, whether it is through the subsidized housing program as discussed in chapter three, or other welfare provisions such as old age pensions and social grants. In this chapter, we detail this gendered relationship with the state within the overall social and economic context of livelihoods, families, and gender relations. We also venture into the debates about rights and citizenship, considering how government policy produces women as certain kinds of subjects of the state. If the right to the city is fundamentally about citizenship, what kind of urban citizens are women? Based on constitutional rights, housing policy interacts with poor women as entitled citizens. Pensions and welfare grants also address women’s fundamental socioeconomic human rights to survival. Are these state provisions and the conceptualization of women, especially female household heads as rights bearing citizens progressive and empowering for women, or does this type of citizenship limit and truncate women’s opportunities for justice and equality?

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S O C I A L W E L FA R E A N D S U RV I VA L

Economic opportunities are few for women, including female heads of households (fhh). Children’s fathers and their extended patrilineal families rarely offer support (Goldblatt 2005). The labour market is poor, but particularly for women who have lower rates of participation and lower average wages than men. The informal sector offers some opportunities, but these are also scarce and characterised by poor returns and lack of benefits such as health insurance and pensions. At the national level, recent figures suggest that of those people who are employed, around 32 per cent of men and 42 per cent of women are working in informal employment situations (even if they are in the formal sector) (Statistics South Africa 2008b). Our work in Msunduzi revealed little participation in the informal sector by women. In the 2006 survey of 293 households, 55 per cent of households were female headed and 45 per cent male or jointly headed. Of these 40 per cent of female heads were unemployed, compared to 24 per cent of male heads. Further, only 22 per cent of female heads worked in the formal sector, and 20 per cent in the informal sector. For male heads, 39 per cent worked in the formal sector, while 29 per cent worked in the informal sector. In our 2010 interviews with twenty-nine female heads, only one woman was employed in the formal sector, four in the informal sector, and twenty-two identified as unemployed. In our 2006 survey, we also found that other working age members of female headed households were more likely to be unemployed than members of male or jointly headed households, meaning more people were relying on fewer income earners in fhhs. In this context, the best, and most consistent, means for survival is often the state social welfare system in the forms of old age and disability pensions, child support grants, and foster care grants.2 As Bank, in his engaging style puts it: “With the dream of black suburbia well and truly shelved, the best hope for ageing township housewives and mothers … is to get their hands on as many welfare grants and backyard rents as they can and hold on for dear life” (2011, 189). Mosoetsa studied two KwaZulu-Natal townships between 1999 and 2004, Mpumulanga, which is 30 kilometres from Durban and Enhlalakahle, which is close to Greytown. Her study puts the situation in starker terms, claiming that there is a “crisis of social repro-

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Table 4.1 Employment status of male and female heads in seven wards in Msunduzi, 20063 Female headed

Percentage in survey of female and male Employed in formal sector Employed in informal sector Unemployed Other Total employment figures

Male or jointly headed

55%

45%

22% 20% 40% 18% 100%

39% 29% 24% 8% 100%

Source: Urban Ecosystems and Human Health Project, Survey 1, 2006

duction” among the poor in South Africa (Mosoetsa 2011, 1–2). While households attempt to survive on meagre grants and odd jobs in the informal sector, many are not making it and will not survive (ibid., 50–3). The state welfare system, she claims, allows only some people to live hand to mouth, with inadequate resources for essentials such as electricity, school fees, or water. The meagre size of the grants implies the assumption that recipients have alternative sources of livelihood and networks of support, and live in harmonious, sharing households. To the contrary she found fractious and often violent households, where only the grandmothers showed an ethic of sharing and care, while children and grandchildren were often disrespectful and selfish (ibid., 138). She found households to be highly unstable, often changing in membership or dissolving as individuals move between branches of extended family in rural and township areas (ibid., 130). In our 2006 Msunduzi survey we found that 69 per cent of fhhs received one or more social grants, compared to 47 per cent of other headed households (ohh). Our data for Msunduzi reflect the realities in South Africa as a whole (Cole 2009). Three times more women than men collect the old age pension in South Africa, likely because women are entitled at the age of sixty years, while men have to wait until sixty-five to collect (Razavi 2007). As most poor children are cared for by female heads, the means tested Child Support Grant (csg) started in 1998 most often goes to households headed by women (Goldblatt 2005). The relative importance of grants to poor households also means that those who do not qualify are yet another

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Box 4.1 Household Profile and Field Notes: Ambleton #15 (11 March 2010): Gogo S.

Figure 4.1(a and b) Gogo S. in her home in Ambleton

Here we found an older woman, full of fun and life, holding her bible; she has a stereo (didn’t see stove); she uses firewood to cook outside; one room open, but divided into sections; floor with peeling linoleum; older lounge suite; some house pride evident with a flag, plastic flowers, clock; some piles of newspapers in house (don’t know why); she said a small pack of mealie meal and oil are all she has left right now; she wanted a very serious picture taken, with her arms crossed over her chest and a serious face – although she laughed and joked through the interview! The head is a grandparent in the household, the language that they speak is Zulu, and there are two people living in the household. She did mention that her husband comes and goes as he pleases but he doesn’t contribute anything in/to the household. The head is fifty-seven years old, went to school up to standard six and is unemployed. She doesn’t receive a grant

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but she was really wishing that government would reduce the qualifying years, as she has no source of income in her home and is too old to go and work. She is living with her grandson who is fourteen years old and is currently doing grade nine. She said when things get bad she sends him off to his mother. The approximate household income per month is between R 0 and R 1,499, but it isn’t much as she only gets it from washing for people and doing their gardens. She spends approximately R 30 on groceries and R 20 on electricity. Most of the time she has to walk to town to go beg for food and money.

step deeper in poverty and vulnerability. Gogo S., for example, from our interviews in France, is too young to receive a pension, but too old to find work. At fifty-seven years old, she collects one child grant for her fourteen year old grandson who lives with her, but this is not enough to sustain them. She is forced to go to town to beg for food on a regular basis.

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The case of Gogo S. raises the question about grant eligibility criteria. The age requirement of sixty years for women and sixty-five years for men to qualify for an old age pension means that many middleaged men and women can be left near destitution. In addition, some commentators worry that once the current older generation of pensioners dies, the decreasing life expectancy caused by the hiv/aids pandemic will mean that fewer people will reach pensionable age, and the massive role that pensions currently plays in keeping families from destitution will fade (Marais 2011). The child grant favours women, as we have seen, since most children are cared for by their mothers, grandmothers, or other women who have taken them in as orphans. This leaves young men without any way to qualify for social assistance (except perhaps through disability claims). In the context of very high unemployment for young adults, this has sparked debate on a Basic Income Grant (big), or guaranteed minimum income for which all would qualify. A government commission called in 2000 and reporting in 2002 recommended a big, but it has not found much traction in government (Seekings 2002)4. Ferguson points out that a big policy departs from Keynesian style welfare that targets “needy” individuals, and actually adopts some aspects of neoliberalism. The policy is neoliberal in that it seeks to empower individuals to take charge of their own welfare in the new economy, which has very high levels of structural unemployment, through encouraging entrepreneurship and engaging with the market through having money to purchase goods and services (Ferguson 2011). Despite this resonance with neoliberalism as well as the proven efficacy of direct money transfers in poverty alleviation, however, Ferguson also sees a big as unlikely in South Africa. In a later paper Ferguson suggests that lack of support for a big likely comes from ideological reluctance to detach the state welfare from its historical origins as a targeted response to the needy, who are always assumed to be the exception to the rule of employed and self-supporting individuals and families (Ferguson, 2013). Another case from Ambleton/France illustrates an issue common to households on the very edge of survival: lack of identity documents (France, #14). The head of this household was the grandmother and about fifty years old, but was very sick during the interview and died before we returned with photos to give back to the family. Two grown daughters with their children lived there, but the daughters did not

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have identity documents, so were not able to obtain child grants for their children. This problem is widespread in South Africa, with nearly half of births going unregistered (Goldblatt 2005). The home in France was the poorest we visited, with almost no furniture, no fridge, little food, and perhaps most importantly, little know-how on how to approach government agencies to obtain the documents needed for social grants. The small children there had the orangey hair of the malnourished. Luckily we were able to alert a charity that would assist them with the bureaucratic processes required, including getting a death certificate for their mother. This case illustrates that while living on social grants is to live in poverty, the grants in many cases are preventing a slide into real destitution and extreme hunger. South Africa has the most extensive social welfare system in Africa except for Mauritius (Seekings 2002; Devereux 2007). The roots of this system go back to at least the 1920s when South Africa introduced its first social assistance grants for poor whites (Devereux 2007). At the time officials were also concerned about the poverty and deprivation of blacks, especially in urban areas (Posel 2005b). These sentiments continued into the 1940s, when South Africa participated in debates occurring elsewhere and which subsequently led to welfare state systems in the west. Universal, non-contributory old age pensions and disability grants were introduced for all races in 1944 in South Africa, and while the apartheid government discussed rescinding these for non-whites after 1948, this was never done (Seekings 2005). Post-1994 South Africa thus inherited a distributive system in which the rich were taxed to fund a welfare system that benefited the poor. The new government deepened and extended this system with the rdp and new policies and programs throughout the 1990s and 2000s (Seekings 2002). So while South Africa bent to neoliberal pressures in critical aspects of economic policy in the 1990s and beyond, social welfare provision nonetheless consistently grew (Hassim 2008; Lund et al. 2009).5 By 2006, one quarter of South Africans received one of the three main social welfare grants: 6.98 million children received a Child Support Grant (csg), 2.25 million people received an old age pension, and 1.3 million people collected a disability grant, for a total of 10.53 million people on grants (Lund et al. 2009). By 2010, 14 million people were receiving social grants, and with the extension of eligibility for the csg to 18 years with the 2010 budget, those receiving csg were expected to

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increase from 9.1 million in 2010 to 11.5 million in 2013.6 The most recent available Annual Report from the South African Social Security Agency (sassa) shows continued growth in disbursement of all grant categories except the war veteran grant, and a slight decline is noted in the disability grant disbursement (sassa 2012). The 2011/2012 Annual Report states that more than 2.75 million people received the old age pension, and more than 10.9 million people received the csg in 2011/2012 (sassa 2012, 18). Clearly, South Africa’s commitment to providing social welfare grants remains steadfast. In her Preface to the sassa 2011/2012 the Minister of Social Development, Ms. Bathabile O. Dlamini, states: “In conclusion, the success of any society is to a great extent determined by how far it has gone in alleviating the plight of the most vulnerable of its members and not by how it continues to sustain the inequalities obtaining in the country. The protection of the weak and vulnerable, the promotion of social cohesion and the preservation of the family remain the anchor of our efforts to a better life for all” (sassa 2012, 2). South Africa’s social welfare system appears extraordinary for a “developing” country, especially in Africa, and can be convincingly explained by its unique history. However, scholars note support for social welfare provisions by the strongest proponents of neoliberal structural adjustment under the “Washington consensus,” including the World Bank from at least the early 1990s. Rather than a retreat from neoliberal policy, this signals recognition of the unacceptable social effects of structural adjustment on sections of the poor, which, if left unmitigated, are potentially destabilizing of the broader globalization agenda (Razavi 2007). Indeed, it may be tempting to view South Africa’s extensive welfare system as little more than pacification of the potentially disruptive poor. However, given its deep historical roots, and the noted successes of the welfare system as an effective poverty alleviation strategy, the system requires more careful analysis. The evidence suggests, for example, that direct, non-conditional transfers, such as pensions and social grants, have been the most effective government poverty alleviation program that South Africa has undertaken, much more successful than others such as public works and income generation projects (Cole 2009; Goldblatt 2005). Pensions are especially effective in reaching poor women, as well as supporting an important role for senior women in multigenerational households (Razavi 2007). Pensions are also shown to improve food security, support vulnerable children, and improve physical health in poor households (Devereux

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2007). Child Support Grants have proven to improve the nutritional status of children in homes where the grants are received (Goldblatt 2005). Pensions and grants also in effect recognize, albeit still inadequately, the unpaid care work of women, whether in child care or care for the sick and the elderly (Razavi 2007). Moreover, receiving social grants does not necessarily decrease looking for work or breed “dependency,” although the relationships between social welfare and job seeking are complex (Meth 2004). South Africa’s official approach recognizes the structural aspects of poverty, rather than attributing it to moral failings or laziness of the poor. As such, social welfare is (officially) seen as an entitlement of citizenship, an issue of social justice rather than an act of charity, and many civil society organizations in South Africa that advocate for the poor frame their demands on the state in these terms. However, this progressive view is continuously contested by more conservative strands within government, including the anc (Hassim 2008). Demeaning treatment and illegal demands on social welfare applicants by the civil servants tasked with processing claims are reportedly widespread (Cole 2009; Goldblatt 2005). Stereotypes and negative attitudes towards single mothers circulate freely among social welfare officials and society at large (Goldblatt 2005). Clearly, social welfare is critical to the livelihoods of the poor, and especially to fhhs. As a result, social welfare also has a powerful impact on the relationship of these households to the state. How can this relationship be defined? Answering this question requires discussion of the context of employment, welfare provisions, and gender relations. The state has not delivered jobs for either men or women, nor the wider sociocultural transformation that is needed to emerge from the deep malaise of history and political economy. South Africa has incrementally become a welfare state, and while a commitment to grants is positive, the scale and uptake, for example of the csg, is worrisome: “given its expanding scale and scope, [this indicates] that something may be seriously wrong with South African society” (Cole 2009, 71). Clearly more than social assistance is required to achieve economic and social justice. Despite its positive focus on the poor, social welfare has done little to nothing to address the massive problems of race and class inequality (Hassim 2008, 104). The gap between rich and poor, and the differential poverty and unemployment of blacks compared to whites, have all worsened in South Africa since 1994, despite the rapid growth of a black middle class. Indeed, even the overall relative well-being of

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the poor in South Africa compared to other countries as measured by the United Nations Development Program’s Human Development Index (hdi) appears to have declined since the anc came to power in 1994 (Hassim 2008, 104–5). Of course, the impact of hiv and aids, which cannot entirely be blamed on the state, despite its notorious foot-dragging on the roll out of antiretroviral medicines, has caused life expectancy to drop dramatically, not only in South Africa but in the southern African region as a whole, which has also suffered a decline in its hdi ratings since 1990 (undp 2011). The minister of social development states the main role of her department is “The protection of the weak and vulnerable, the promotion of social cohesion and the preservation of the family” (sassa 2012, 2). With so many in need of social assistance, is there something fundamentally wrong with “the family”? Social welfare, from its conception in the 1940s, has been built on assumptions about the family, and the relationship between family, the state, and employment (Lund 2009, 4). The family was assumed as nuclear with a breadwinning male and a wife to care for the social reproduction of the family. The state’s role was to assist when for some reason the breadwinning male lost employment. Provisions were also in place, such as workplace compensation for injury, employer supported pensions, and so on, that meant that businesses also played a role in social welfare goals. In contemporary South Africa, Lund argues, the conception of social welfare has shifted, with less and less of the burden shared by the business sector due to the high rates of unemployment, and more and more loaded on to the state. But what about the role of “the family”? Here we turn to the task of exploring the relationships among gender relations, rights, welfare, and citizenship. G E N DE RE D L I V E S I N U R B A N S OU TH A FR I C A

Question: Does the father of the children living here have any contact or provide any support for the children or you and your family? No support, no contact, my children don’t even know him [their father] anymore. We separated during the violence, he never came back. (Nthutukoville, #1)

Definitions of “household” and “family” – central social science concepts – are notoriously difficult to apply in southern African contexts.

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African families have undergone dramatic transformations with the onslaughts of missionary activity, colonialism, industrialization, urbanization, and apartheid (Argyle and Preston-Whyte 1978; Lindsay and Miescher 2003). “Household” and “family” in contemporary urban South Africa are often not the same. As we have seen in chapter one, many people migrated from rural homes, often decades ago, leaving extended kin behind, making (often unstable) domestic arrangements in town. And while urban Africans usually live with relatives, conjugal linkages are relatively weak due to late, low, and decreasing rates of marriage (Kalule-Sabiti et al. 2007); high rates of male desertion of partners and children; and pressures of labour migration (Amoateng and Heaton 2007). Female rates of migration have also increased, contributing to low marriage rates and the formation of informal settlements near urban areas (Hunter 2010b). Conjugal ties are also weak because they are relatively unimportant in the African family; much more important are kinship systems predominantly expressed through agnatic relationships and patrilineal descent (Russell 2003), but also strong ties with extended natal family. While nine out of ten white children under twelve years live with their parents, only about half of African children do. Often, African children are fostered by relatives due to work needs of the parent(s), health, or other pressures, a relationship that may be reciprocated in some way in the future, helping to cement extended family interdependencies (Amoateng and Heaton 2007; Bray and Brandt 2007; Chichello 2003; van der Stoep 2008). In addition, a first birth usually precedes marriage for African women, and 50 per cent of mothers (women with children eighteen years or younger) are unmarried (Palamuleni et al. 2007). These patterns in urban African families and households are not new; they were observed by social scientists in the 1950s and 1960s (Pauw 1963) and seemed to intensify in the 1970s and 1980s (Argyle and Preston-Whyte 1978; Burman and Preston-Whyte 1992). As such, the nuclear family model predominant among white South Africans and historically in western societies7 does not reflect African realities, nor is it likely to in the future (Russell 2003). Indeed, as we have already seen in previous chapters, the trend is decidedly different, with all national level surveys showing an increasing proportion of children living only with their mothers, and an increased proportion of households being identified as female headed. For unmarried mothers, links with their natal families typically remain strong. Indeed, a

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common type of urban African household comprises three or even four generations of female kin, a “matrifocal” or “female linked” pattern already strongly evident in the 1970s in South Africa (PrestonWhyte 1978). With high rates of death from hiv and aids, matrifocal households headed by grandmothers but missing the middle generation are now increasingly common too (Amoateng et al. 2007). “Households,” then, are often distinct from “families.” Hence the social science definition of household (used by Statistics South Africa, the United Nations, and other major data gathering bodies) emphasises co-residence and sharing of resources for daily living rather than family relationships. It is in this context that we need to consider fhhs. Ties to non-resident, extended family kin, for example, can be critical in times of financial, health, or other crises. And while fathers of children might reasonably be thought of as “family,” they are often not resident or even involved at all with the household where their children reside. This suggests that fhhs should not be understood predominantly or only as “missing a man,” as this is to impose an expectation of a “norm” of a household where a conjugal couple co-resides and pools resources to jointly support dependants (the nuclear model). The relative poverty of fhhs is of course partly explained by the absence of male earnings, given the disparity of male and female earnings in South Africa.8 However, benefits from wages (especially migrant wages) earned by husbands or fathers of children in informal unions, have long been unreliable for women in southern Africa (Murray 1981), and even in rural areas have become less important to livelihoods than pensions and grants in South Africa (Casale and Desmond 2007; Cole 2009; May et al. 2000; Budlender 2000). Indeed, some research suggests that having a man in the house can be detrimental. A Johannesburg study found that children were less likely to be hungry in fhhs than if the father or male lover was living with them (Morrell et al. 2003). Drawing on research on food insecurity throughout southern Africa, researchers conclude that while fhhs are typically poorer than other households, they tend to achieve better food security and nutritional health for children than other households (Dodson et al. 2012). In our interviews with female heads in Pietermaritzburg, some women expressed strong views about men as taking from, rather than adding to the material security of the household: “Men are untrustworthy, they use us, they can find you with a lot of things but leave you with nothing at the end of it all” (France,

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#11). Another woman in France held an even harsher view: “I hate men, they are all the same, you can’t even trust them, they steal from you even if you are their partner … I would be fine even if the world only had women” (France, #13). This is discussed further in the next chapter. Overall, there is consensus in most literature that the majority of poor children in South Africa grow up without their fathers either living with them or making any consistent financial or emotional contribution to their well-being, and often with little support from the father’s family as well (Posel and Devey 2006; Morrell and Richter 2006). This was certainly the case in our interviews with female heads in Msunduzi. Furthermore, cultural practices of marriage and lineage appear to be eroding. Our interviews found that nearly half of the twenty-nine women had former husbands or partners who had paid at least some ilobolo (a series of payments from the husband or his family to the wife’s family signaling a traditional marriage process and links between the two families). However, while this meant that in most cases the children of these unions did take the surname of the father’s family, and in that sense culturally “belong” to their father’s family, this had not resulted in any sustained support or connection from the children’s father or his family. As will be explored further in the next chapter, the history of male migration and consequent separation from home and family has narrowed the role of the father to that of financial provider, with the many other traditional roles such as role model and moral authority emptied out (Lesejane 2006). Hence, without a job, a father struggles to find a role, and many men are simply walking away from their children. Statistics South Africa reports that 4.3 million people were unemployed in the country for an overall unemployment rate of 25.2 per cent as of May 2010 (Statistics South Africa 2010). The country has seen steady increases in unemployment rates since 1995 (Statistics South Africa 2008b). Even more striking is that of those unemployed, according to these sources, the vast majority (about 3 million) are between the ages of fifteen and thirty-four years, and of these a large proportion (1.6 million) are “new entrants,” meaning they have never worked before. These high rates of youth unemployment are clearly linked to low marriage rates and high rates of fhhs; without a job, young men are not willing to commit to marriage and supporting a family, although they continue to have girlfriends and sire children. The figures also help ex-

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plain the appeal of a black masculinity that values crime, risky behaviours, and dominance over women, and the low take-up of other aspects of masculine roles and behaviours that rely on personal resources (e.g., looking after a family). So while it is not lack of male income per se that makes fhhs differentially poor (since there is no guarantee that men will share their income with family), unemployment does account for why many men opt out of familial roles even if they value them. Instead, many choose violent and sexist behaviours that give them status with other men, but cause much pain for others. Whether or not this constitutes a “crisis of masculinity” or a “social crisis” is explored in the next chapter. GE ND E R IN G C I TI Z E N S HI P :

“ R I G HTS ”

AND

“NEEDS”

Just as female headed households are not accurately defined as “missing a man,” so too is it inaccurate to describe state welfare machinery as a “replacement husband” for female heads. It is true that the realities of fhhs wherein women are raising children mostly on their own without help from children’s fathers or patrilineal families could suggest this “replacement husband” description, but only if a nuclear/male breadwinner model of family and household is assumed. As it turns out, this assumption does underpin the moral and cultural discourses prevailing among many social welfare bureaucrats, high-level government officials, and society at large (Goldblatt 2005). Goldblatt’s research on the implementation processes of the Child Support Grant (csg) uncovered many barriers placed before women seeking the grants, as well as demeaning and sexist treatment by welfare officials that were predicated on assumptions that a nuclear, male bread-winner family was “normal” and negative views towards single mothers in general. For example, in some areas women were forced to lodge claims for private maintenance support from fathers of their children before they could apply for the csg. In other cases women were required to get signed affidavits from their children’s father stating that he is unemployed and hence unable to support his children. Such requirements can place women in dangerous situations of having to approach sometimes violent and abusive men, and undergo expensive travel to acquire documents. Negative attitudes towards single mothers in society at large include claims that they deliberately become pregnant in order to receive the csgs, that they use the csg for themselves rather

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than their children, and that they are sexually corrupt and hence degrade the morality of society at large (Goldblatt 2005). These types of commonly held sentiments have been observed by other researchers, and some suggest that the csg and other provisions may unwittingly exacerbate tense gender relations wherein men see the state “fathering” children, further marginalizing men and highlighting their failures, and favouring women (Naidoo, P. 2011). Bank observes that some women in his East London study joked that they were “married” to the state through the welfare grants system on which they survived in the absence of any male support (Bank 2011). Swartz and Bhana report that the “teenage tatas” (teenage fathers) in their study reproduced common stereotypes about girls including that they should learn to say no to sex (implying their pregnancies were their own fault), should be tested for virginity (implying that their sexuality needs social control), and that the csgs should be stopped as they encourage girls to deliberately get pregnant (Swartz and Bhana, 2009). Mosoetsa claims in her study of two townships in KwaZulu-Natal, that it was common for unmarried daughters to collect csgs for their children, but then spend the money on themselves, for example on cell phones, leaving their mothers to feed and clothe their children through their pensions or other means (Mosoetsa, 2011). While it may be true that some young women deliberately become pregnant in part for the promise of the meagre csg, it is also clear that the motivations and conditions that contribute to high rates of teenaged and unmarried pregnancy are complex. These include the pro-child culture and the willingness of grandmothers to care for their daughters’ children, but also the desire of young men to father children as an aspect of masculinity and approval from peers as Swartz and Bhana found (2009). It is also true, however, that the high rate of unmarried childbirths garners widespread social disapproval, with the implication that being married to a bread-winning male is the desired norm. Most African families have never (or only briefly in some townships in the 1960s) reflected the nuclear, male breadwinner model, and are not transforming towards it. However, public welfare policy in its implementation, and society at large, use the assumption of this model as a means to denigrate female heads of households and single mothers. Female heads are treated as if they have “failed” at marriage and family. Hence when the minister of social development calls for “the preservation of the family,” it is hard to escape the conclusion that she is referring to a family defined as a

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married couple with a male breadwinner firmly in place. Nevertheless, the negative view of female heads and single mothers exists alongside a practical set of welfare practices, such as pensions and grants that targets these women for support in a way that acknowledges the reality that they are raising children and caring for others without the help of men and in a context of few employment options. What does this high dependence on state welfare, whether through social grants or housing subsidies mean for women’s citizenship? In the negotiations leading to the first democratic elections in South Africa in 1994, the African National Congress (anc) proposed a Bill of Rights which would include not only conventional civil and political rights (so-called “first generation” rights), such as the right to freedom from discrimination, the right to a fair trial, the right to vote, the right to freedom of assembly and expression, but also “social rights” (so-called “second generation” rights), such as rights to food, education, shelter, and health care (Robinson 1993). In language and spirit, these provisions closely mirror the United Nations 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights (Habitat International Coalition 1996). Internationally, the provision of shelter as a right has since been reinforced by numerous conferences and forums, such as Habitat 1 (1976, Istanbul) and Habitat II (1996, Vancouver). Proponents of entrenching these social rights in South Africa’s new constitution argued that it was a critical part of addressing the legacies of apartheid: The unique and pernicious nature of apartheid requires constitutional remedies to address its despicable legacy. Apartheid was more than social exclusion and the denial of civil rights and civil liberties; it was a legalized systemic and systematic program to dispossess the Black majority of economic power … Such a wholesale denial of economic and social rights compels their inclusion in the bill of rights that will govern a post-apartheid society. (Robinson 1993, 515) It was also argued that civil and political rights function interdependently with social rights (rather than separately from them). Both first and second generation rights are essential for “substantive democracy” wherein all citizens can exercise their full range of rights. For example, without adequate shelter it is almost impossible for people to exercise their civil and political rights (Zuern 2011, 183). In the de-

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velopment of South Africa’s Bill of Rights, it was further acknowledged that both types of rights were likely to be realizable only gradually under the new political dispensation. Securing political and civil rights would require massive institutional change, along with considerable human and economic resources. The same clearly applied to social rights; the honouring of a right to shelter, food, health care, etc. would not be immediately achievable in the new South Africa. It was nevertheless argued that embedding these rights in the Bill of Rights would signal that the constitution would be a tool for affirmative action to address historic inequalities and discrimination. This move would have effects on both citizens and the state; citizens would become empowered, while the state would gain obligations: “Rights talk” has a transformative effect that “needs talk” lacks. Rights imply empowerment and obligation, whereas needs imply dependency and sympathy … If a new government is sincere about achieving a just future, its institutions must be compelled to act affirmatively to redress the economic disparity caused by apartheid. Entrenching social rights in the South African bill of rights will institutionalize the obligation. (Robinson 1993, 517, 526) Robinson acknowledged that realizing the right to shelter in postapartheid South Africa would have to be incremental, given the massive problems of racialized land ownership patterns, the socio-spatial legacies of apartheid city planning, and the massive backlog of demand for housing among poorer blacks. Robinson also correctly anticipated that the first government would likely face criticism over the slow delivery of housing rights. However, Robinson still found the inclusion of housing and other social rights in the Bill of Rights to be an important signal of commitment to a radically different future for South Africa: “Social rights are progressively realizable and as such a new administration can credibly articulate them in a bill of rights and commit the government to their achievement. Moreover, to the extent that this progressive realization requires some immediate action, inclusion of these rights can quickly be meaningful in practical ways” (Robinson 1993, 531). The 1996 Constitution did indeed include a Bill of Rights that entrenched political, civil, and social rights, including the statement that: “Everyone has a right to have access to ad-

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equate housing” and that: “The state must take reasonable legislative and other measures, within its available resources, to achieve the progressive realisation of this right” (Section 28, 1.c). The right to housing is thus qualified, and the door opened to negotiations and challenges over the definition of “adequate,” “reasonable,” and “progressive realisation” (Section 26). South Africa also guarantees socioeconomic rights such as the right to food and water, and the right to basic education and health care. Social welfare provisions address the right to social security under section 27 of the Constitution (Constitution of the Republic of South Africa Act, No. 108 of 1996, 1255). The new state was lauded worldwide for this progressive Bill of Rights, and pointed to as “a successful model of ‘Third Wave’ democratization” (Madlingozi 2007, 78). However, not all analysts agree that rights under South Africa’s incomplete liberal democratic dispensation provide a vehicle for positive change for the poor. Critics on the left see South Africa’s transition as deeply compromised and ultimately incapable of delivering a “better life” for the poor. Aswin Desai warns, for example, that appeals to human rights and citizenship carry the danger of legitimizing the social order (Desai 2002, 146). Nigel Gibson also cautions that: “While the end of apartheid brought into being one of the most liberal constitutions in the world, both it and the process of ‘reconciliation’, as well as the promises of human rights for all, cannot address the structural economic inequalities embedded in post-apartheid South African capitalism” (Gibson 2006, 6). A good example of the contradictions between the realization of constitutionally protected rights and the logic of capitalism is the case of the right to water in South Africa. South Africa is rightly praised as the only country in the world to constitutionally guarantee the right to water, and for backing this up with a policy on Free Basic Water (which commits the state to provide 6,000 litres per month, per household for free). However, the government brought in cost recovery measures in the late 1990s that undermine this right. Driven by neoliberal reforms, these measures led to many poor people being cut off from piped water because of failure to pay user fees (Mehta 2006). As such, even where rights are constitutionally protected, they often have to be struggled for through protest and other means (Mehta et al. 2010). Robins contributes a somewhat different observation suggesting that while poor and working class South Africans are “highly literate

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in the language of rights, equality, citizenship and social justice” (Robins 2008, 16), the people are best described as both “citizens” and “subjects” in Mamdani’s sense (Mamdani 1996). That is, while people understand and claim the modern rights of citizenship under the liberal democratic Constitution and government, they also exercise their position as subjects seeking patronage under traditional communitarian values when this strategy makes sense for them. Citizenship and rights are not enough, from the vantage point of both urban and rural South Africans, and instead multiple strategies are often required to pursue individual and family interests. Ferguson makes a similar point in his essay on dependency and social identity (Ferguson 2013). He suggests that historically men in South Africa developed their social identities in relation to both wider society and the family through waged labour. This identity was the basis for their dependency, or social relations with others (employers, family members, etc), and defined how they belonged. In the last few decades and in the current context of high unemployment, this option for developing both identity and dependence is no longer available. Without a job, and left out of the welfare grant system, many men are without any means of dependence or social connection to others. Women, on the other hand, have not only their social roles as mothers, grandmothers, and caregivers but also roles as providers through their access to social grants. Women are part of new relations of patronage with the state that creates a kind of dependence and social identities of belonging, to which men have no access. Women are not only rights-bearing citizens but also clients participating in African communitarian values making claims of dependency on the state. One result of this dual discourse of both rights and culture is the challenge of negotiating the apparent contradiction between constitutionally protected gender equality rights, and “traditional” culture (often in a reinvented form) that insists on gendered hierarchy and the subservience of women: How does the liberal state reconcile gender equality provisions in the Constitution with patriarchal traditional leadership structures and everyday practices of violence against women? … [These] challenges cannot always be met using conventional state and ngo-driven programmes and pedagogies of citizenship. Instead, we need to begin to better understand the social, existential and religious

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experiences and meaning making process of citizens (Robins 2008, 171). Feminist scholars writing about conditions of violence for women in post-conflict societies such as South Africa make a related point; violence against women often increases after societies transition into periods of reconstruction despite new formal protections for women (Meintjes, Pillay, and Turshen 2002a). Indeed, countries like South Africa that transition into rights-based democracies, including those that provide new protection and rights around violence against women, can in fact distort or mask the continuation of patriarchal culture and power: “the rhetoric of equality and rights tends to mask the reconstruction of patriarchal power, despite recent emphasis on women’s human rights” (Meintjes, Pillay and Turshen 2002b, 4). Furthermore, rights-based approaches to violence against women do not address “the social conditions that give rise to rape and batter, namely sexual inequality and the oppression of women as a group” (Sideris 2002, 145). Activist groups like Abahlali bluntly point to the contradiction between rights on paper and experiences on the ground: Today’s is the International Women Rights day, dedicated to affirming and demanding rights for women around the world; we as the Abahlali Base Mjondolo Women’s League do the same. It is nice that we have these rights on paper but it remains a shame in our country that such important rights are not respected and are routinely violated. It is disappointment that we as women have such rights, but are still abused by the government are forced to live without basic services like water, electricity and access to housing. Moreover, women and children being sexually and physically abused everyday. (Abahlali 2013) The limits to rights-based strategies for gender justice have indeed received considerable attention from feminist scholars in South Africa, as well as elsewhere. Feminists appreciate the way that gender issues became highly visible during the transition period, with resultant creation of national machinery, the promotion of women in government and parliamentary posts, and the strong equality laws as protected by the Constitution. Legal changes have indeed affected women’s lives, it is argued, although mostly in the public sphere such as workplaces,

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while the private sphere of home and family remain primarily shaped by cultural notions and practices that expose women to high rates of domestic violence and other deprivations (Gouws 2005a). In addition, Amanda Gouws and others have argued that rights discourses can serve to “construct universal subjects that are devoid of difference” (Gouws 2005b, 79); that is, they render inequalities such as between men and women, black and white, rich and poor, invisible. A key example of this is the well-known Grootboom case (Republic of South Africa vs. Grootboom and Others, 1999), which is widely seen as a landmark case regarding the constitutional protection of socioeconomic rights, especially the right to housing, in South Africa (Chirwa and Khoza 2005; Huchzermeyer 2003; Tomlinson 2006). In this case a group of people who had been evicted from an informal settlement in the Western Cape, took the government to court, claiming it had failed to provide adequate housing, as the group had been evicted without replacement housing provided. While the Cape High Court found against the complainants, a later appeal at the Constitutional Court did find that the state had failed in its constitutional duty to provide adequate housing in a “reasonable” and “adequate” fashion, noting especially that the state’s housing program did not provide housing for those most desperately in need such as the evicted squatters in the suit. While this case was indeed a victory for the poor seeking state commitment to their housing rights, feminist scholars point out that the Court did not recognize the complainants as primarily “women,” only as a homogenized “vulnerable group.” As such, the Court remained gender neutral in its findings, missing an opportunity to recognize the differential poverty and vulnerability of women. This homogenization or universalizing tendency under rights-based laws, feminists argue, is one of the key limitations of such as system. Furthermore, feminist scholars claim, what is “different” amongst women in their various positionalities and identities (for example as caregivers, or as single mothers heading households) is often not recognized by state policies based on a gender blind, “neutral” rights based framework. Even more fundamentally, “reliance on rights can keep people passive and dependent upon the state because it is the state that grants them their rights” (Gouws 2005b, 80). This can have the effect of depoliticizing the struggle for gender equality. For rights to be meaningful for women, Gouws argues, there must be a moral and ethical context that supports women claiming their rights, i.e. a

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context of feminist struggle. In the end, Gouws questions the efficacy of a rights-based approach to address the context of high rates of gender based violence, hiv/aids, poverty, and the effects of globalization facing women. She asks, can “a liberal democratic rights-based democracy really deal with the complexities that these conditions create for women at the grassroots level?” (2005a, 2). For Lewis, who is also highly critical of a rights approach to justice for women, the answer to this question would be “no”: the emphasis in public discourse of gender transformation has therefore shifted dramatically from a bottom-up articulation of the interests of women’s organizations to the top-down codification of negotiated rights and entitlements that are believed to have national relevance … our current rights-based discourse assumes that melioristic and state-engineered transformation can grant rights and entitlements in terms of generalised notions of what ‘women’ of South Africa need and want (Lewis 2009, 209). From our examination of state efforts to address women’s housing and social security rights, we suggest here that the answer to Gouws is both “yes” and “no.” A key feminist critique of a liberal rights regime, as mentioned above, is that it “constructs universal subjects that are devoid of difference” (Gouws 2005b), which renders inequalities such as those related to gender or race, invisible. And yet, as we have seen in this and previous chapters, state programs have ended up differentially benefiting women in relation to housing (with more female heads of households receiving subsidized housing than other households) and welfare (with more women receiving both pensions and Child Support Grants), and so the application of shelter and social security rights cannot be said to be gender neutral. It is true that women’s right to housing is an effect of often caring for dependent children. Their right to social security through the csg is actually subsumed under their children’s social security rights. They do not qualify for the csg or the housing subsidy as women, but as mothers, or caregivers of children; these are mediated rights (Goldblatt 2005). Goldblatt definitely supports a rights framework, but she insists that it requires a feminist approach to truly be a tool for gender justice. For Gouws, a major element of this feminist approach to rights is to resist the observable shift in South Africa from “rights” to “needs.”

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While state recognition of women’s particular roles and responsibilities, such as childcare, can be positive, it can lead to a situation where women are reduced to these roles, and they become defined as a “vulnerable group” in need of state rescue or protection. What is required for a rights framework to be an effective tool for women’s struggle, rather, is a moral climate that supports women’s struggle to claim all of their rights. This context does not currently exist in South Africa, Gouws argues, and therefore women’s citizenship can be said to be compromised: “citizenship as a status (having rights) is highly contested in South Africa because the discourse that constructs women’s citizenship in the state limits women’s realization thereof” (2005b, 83). C ON C LU S I ON S

This discussion leads to a qualified acknowledgement of some positive outcomes for women and gender justice under a rights framework in South Africa, but also a recognition of the powerful social and cultural currents that hamper full achievement and recognition of women as equal rights bearing citizens. The effect of programs such as housing subsidies and social welfare, while addressing constitutional rights, also work to reduce women to their roles as mothers and care givers, compromising their position as full and equal persons. The state is also hampered by neoliberal pressures under globalization in its ability to deliver on its constitutional obligations. Rights are indeed an incomplete vehicle to address the “complexities that these conditions create for women” (Gouws 2005a, 2). While women are recognized, or “seen” by the state in some of their difference and their particular needs, the kind of citizenship produced through the major mechanisms of connection between women and the state (housing subsidy and welfare) move the discourse from “rights” to “needs.” This system produces women primarily as “the vulnerable” and the needy, not as rights bearing citizens actively engaging in their own transformation and empowerment. In Ferguson’s terms, women may be viewed more as clients of state dispensing patronage under African communitarian values than as rights-bearing citizens (Ferguson 2013). Despite these critiques, few scholars (or activists) are prepared to abandon rights as a strategy or as an aspect of citizenship. Wendy

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Brown, writing about feminist rights in the United States, emphasizes that rights claims are one of the most powerful discourses in the liberal democratic imagination. Rights claims are deeply problematic and contradictory, and “almost always serve as a mitigation -- but not a resolution -- of subordinating powers” and “vanquish neither the regime nor its mechanisms of reproduction” (Brown 2002, 422). Further, rights specified to women in North America have often fenced them in as defined by their subordinated status, and while offering some protection, usually do not “enable the escape of the subordinated from the site of that violation” (ibid.). Nevertheless, rights offer something irresistible. Borrowing from Gayatri Spivak, Brown indicates that even within the limits of equality rights, “we cannot not want” them (421). Rights constitute the language of liberal democracy, an imperfect and incomplete means through which injustice can be made visible: “Rights function to articulate a need, a condition of lack or injury, that cannot be fully redressed or transformed by rights, yet within existing political discourse can be signified in no other way” (431). Similarly, returning to the South African context, Desai acknowledges that “there would be little civic resistance at all today in South Africa if it was not for expectations of dignity, human rights and a dignified life” (2002, 146). As Ballard et al. point out, “acknowledging second-generation rights in the constitution allows for material gains to be constructed as rights” (2006a, 17). Zuern (2011) also points out that most community based protests in South Africa focus on material needs, or socioeconomic rights. Thus, while rights-based discourses are of limited transformative value, they are nevertheless a politicizing force in South Africa’s new social movements: “Institutional guarantees and rights can provide protection from state repression and sustain solidarity and a sense of morality in the absence of a discourse of seizing state power as the necessary condition of radical social transformation” (Barchiesi 2006, 237). The wider implications of this for transforming political subjectivities and public protest are discussed further in chapter six. For this chapter, we can suggest that the rights of women under the constitution to claim adequate shelter, social security, and gender equality can serve to produce particular kinds of opportunities for poor women to make claims on the state for housing and other services, and simultaneously to challenge forms of patriarchy and gender

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oppression. The fact is that state policies such as the housing program and welfare provisions are providing an opportunity for many poor women to live in cities as female heads, and raise their children there. As such, even if women are exercising these rights under continuing conditions of poverty, unemployment, and other aspects of cultural marginalization, they are still exercising their “right to the city.” The next chapter on love, intimacy, and gender relations illuminates even further the implications of women’s secure hold in cities for their negotiation of fraught gender relations.

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5 “I don’t want any man in my life, I have no time for them”1: Love, Gender Relations, and the “Crisis of Masculinity”2

I N TROD U C TI ON

The absence of fathers and partners in the lives of female heads and their children, the high dependence of female headed households on state support, and other aspects differentially disadvantaging these households in relation to health and economic issues have already been explored. This chapter delves deeper into the everyday aspects of gender relations for female heads, especially their disappointments in “love” and men. While gender relations in this context could be read as a “crisis,” there are also deep experiences of positive emotional and psychological transformation at play that resonate with a feminist understanding of female challenges to patriarchal power, violence, and abuse. The chapter is grounded in our interviews with twenty-nine female heads understood in the overall context for women and gender relations in South Africa, and engages with the wider feminist and critical masculinity literature on contemporary gender relations, love, intimacy, and identity. THE C ON TE X T

The concern over male behaviours extends beyond their absence as contributors in the lives of female headed households to include very high rates of domestic and sexual violence. So pervasive is gender based violence, some argue, that it constitutes “an unacknowledged

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gender civil war” (Moffett 2009, 157). For youth, coercion and violence in sex is now expected and normalized (Leclerc-Madlala 2009). Dominance and conquest of women, displays of power, and at times unimaginable brutality have come to be pervasive and admired aspects of masculinity for marginalized township youth (Posel 2005a; Moolman 2009; Morrell et al. 2012). Scholars in South Africa began deploying Connell’s concept of hegemonic masculinity in the early 1990s (Connell 1987; 1995), and it has spread throughout the social sciences, health research, and gender activist fields (Morrell et al. 2012). The concept was tremendously helpful to allow the gendering of men as subjects of research, as well as to bring men into feminist activist politics. The concept has allowed scholars and activists to depathologize male behaviours, and instead understand them in relation to social, economic, cultural, and historical contexts, wherein power operates to profoundly marginalize certain groups of men, especially along race and class lines. As such, preferred behaviours that become associated with masculinity in particular racial and economic subgroups are always expressions of power between men and between men and women. In the case of black township masculinity, hegemonic masculinity has come to include not only violence against and control of women, but also risky behaviour (such as consumption of large quantities of alcohol or drugs), having multiple girlfriends, being involved in crime, roaming around in a group of other males (who sometimes engage in gang rapes to “discipline” girls) (Wood and Jewkes 2001), and opposition to femininity and assumed characteristics of homosexuality (Burnard 2008; Bushell 2008). This state of affairs is especially disastrous and tragic given the high rates of hiv and aids circulating in the townships and informal settlements of South Africa (Hunter 2010a; Motsemme 2007). For Morrell, one of the key researchers in this field, some of the early promise of the concept of hegemonic masculinity has been lost in the tendency to equate it with a rigid set of negative behaviours associated with marginalized township youth. For Morrell, the usefulness of the concept lies in understanding multiple and shifting types of dominant masculinity in different race and class groups, which can allow spaces for imagining new and positive masculinities and gender equality. Another unfortunate effect of the hardening of the meaning of hegemonic masculinity for Morrell is that a backlash against a perceived attack on black masculinity has ensued in popular culture. This has opened space for

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the emergence of self-identified “African” masculinities that are in part a rejection of gender equality and justice for women, as is seen with President Jacob Zuma and former anc Youth League President Julius Malema discussed further below (Morrell et al. 2012). This backlash may partially explain the distressingly slow progress on gender justice in public discourse and popular attitudes, despite the equality provisions in the Constitution, extensive state gender equality monitoring machinery such as the Commission for Gender Equality, and relatively large numbers of women in government (Meintjes 2009; Morrell et al., 2012). Meintjes suggests that contrarily, such formal advances and the emergence of some powerful women after 1994 have made women targets for male violence: “gender remains the defining difference in the life chances of women and men … A new kind of battleground opened up around gender power, gender roles and the status of women … the continued brutalization of women by men who are unable to deal with the idea of gender equality” (Meintjes 2007, 365–6). The state is unwilling to commit to the deep transformations required around gender relations, particularly to confront the power issues embedded in patriarchy, so gender transformation remains only partial. Government also resists labelling men as perpetrators of this violence and social malaise (Leclerc-Madlala 2009). Indeed, for Leclerc-Madlala (2009), ruling nationalist rhetoric places gender based violence as a “women’s issue” that is a “distraction” from the main tasks of overcoming apartheid legacies of racism; to insist on the national importance of the issue of violence against women is to be “unpatriotic” and if the speaker is white, it is “racist.” Public sexism performed by and around major political figures is also deeply disturbing. The highly publicized rape trial of Jacob Zuma in 2006 before he became President is a case in point. There were many women among the highly vocal supporters of Zuma during the televised trial, who expressed violent dismissal of the woman accusing Zuma of rape, and called her a “traitor” (Leclerc-Madlala 2009). The trial was also an opportunity for Zuma to strategically position himself as more “African” and pro-poor than the Thabo Mbeki camp, his challenger for the leadership of the anc at the time (Robins 2008). Tellingly, this performance of Zulu masculinity involved Zuma claiming that the sex with his accuser had been consensual, as Zulu culture frowns upon leaving an aroused woman unsatisfied. He would have

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paid cattle for her, Zuma stated, if she had wanted to be married (Robins 2008). This so-called “traditional” interpretation of an accusation of rape suggests to some feminists that the constitutional guarantee of bodily integrity is meaningless for women in South Africa, who instead contend with the real world where notions of masculinity and sexuality support and excuse male aggression and dominance (Moffett 2009). For Morrell and colleagues, Zuma created a new style of African masculinity that was “hetereosexist, patriarchal, implicitly violent and that glorified ideas of male sexual entitlement, notably polygamy, and conspicuous success with women” (Morrell et al. 2012, 17). This style of African masculinity is a stark departure from that performed by Nelson Mandela, who explicitly favoured “egalitarian masculinities” (ibid.) that “challenged much of the violent and authoritarian behaviors and attitudes associated with apartheid’s white male politicians, some elements within the liberation movement and the patriarchal, traditional African masculinities of Bantustan leaders” (ibid.). It is discouraging to say the least (from a feminist perspective) that the Zuma rape trial actually boosted public support for Zuma, who is now, after a highly successful 2014 election, in his second term as South Africa’s president. Zuma’s African masculinity is clearly an asset from the perspective of many African voters. This is well explained by Morrell and colleagues’ contention that ordinary Africans felt that black masculinity was under attack by feminists and (sometimes white) liberals, in the name of gender equality and rights. The trial’s effect on public discourse endured for some years, as is evident in the more recent example of public sexism performed by the highly influential former anc Youth Leader Julius Malema (deposed as youth league president, but reemerged as the leader of the new political party the Economic Freedom Fighters (eff)). Malema was convicted of hate speech by the Johannesburg Equality Court in March 2010, for having publicly stated that the complainant in the Zuma rape trial must have enjoyed herself since “when a woman didn't enjoy it, she leaves early in the morning. Those who had a nice time will wait until the sun comes out, request breakfast and ask for taxi money.” 3 It is important to emphasize, that it was not this conviction or his sexist views that brought down Malema in 2012. Rather, it was his multiple acts of defiance against the anc leadership, and ultimately his challenge to the Zuma faction in the anc leading up to the December 2012 leadership conference (which reelected Zuma as the anc

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President). 4 Indeed, the strength of the support for Malema’s new eff party in the recent 2014 national election testifies to the popularity of his personality (aggressive, anti-white, pro-African, and against rightsbased gender equality). In the 7 May 2014 election, the eff came third at 6.35 per cent of the popular vote, after the first placed anc at 62.15 per cent and second placed Democratic Alliance (da) at 22.23 per cent (Electoral Commission of South Africa 2014). Morrell and colleagues summarize: “Zuma and Malema have succeeded in presenting it [gender equity] as anti-African, implicitly equating it with modernity, (white) middle-class aspirations, and widespread lack of (male) economic advancement. Thus, they have collectively launched what amounts to backlash against gender equality” (Morrell et al. 2012, 18). Despite, or perhaps in the face of this backlash, feminist and critical masculinity scholars and activists continue to read the astronomical rates of violence against women, together with women’s differential poverty, poor education, unemployment, and high responsibilities for children and others, as well as the dismal state of dominant public discourses about this reality as a social crisis (Motsemme 2007). For some it is specifically a crisis of masculinity with severe impacts on the lives and well-being of women and children (Wilson 2006). Others, while sympathetic to the level of suffering and danger involved in contemporary gender relations, challenge the idea of a “crisis” (Hunter 2010a). How do we sort through these competing views? Is there a crisis, and if so, where is the subjectivity and self-definition of the women themselves amid this “crisis”? How do women make meaning in their situation, how do they interpret their lives? While women’s histories and contemporary conditions are littered with trauma and difficulties, they nonetheless endure, often with a surprisingly robust sense of themselves as accomplished women. Like Motsemme, who explored sexuality and identities for young women in a Durban township, I am interested to explore: “the ways cultural artifacts and other methods are used by … women in urban ghettos to fashion viable identities in the midst of social chaos. In other words, we begin to get a better sense of how meanings are generated in times of social and ethical breakdown” (Motsemme 2007, 369). In this chapter we explore themes emerging from our interviews with female heads in Msunduzi that speak to experiences and understandings of love, men, and gender relations for women now mostly past the youthful time of intimacy and sex. During the fieldwork I was sur-

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prised and moved by the intensity of the women’s statements about men and relationships. We assure the reader that the women’s words here are their own. D IS P L AC E M E N T , TR AU M A , A N D A B A N D ON M E N T

Question: Please tell us how you came to be a head of household. When the fathers of of ourour children the violence violence began, began,we weall allran ranaway, away,and andthe the fathers children got a chance to escape from us; they were never seen ever again. (Nthutukoville, #1)

We begin with the theme of displacement and associated trauma. Readers will recall from chapter one that the Pietermaritzburg area (now Msunduzi) was deeply affected by the war between Inkatha and the udf/anc supporters in the 1980s and early 1990s. Many of the women we interviewed told stories of fleeing the violence, either from rural areas or from other parts of the city, often losing husbands or partners, parents, and siblings along the way. Like the younger women in Motsemme’s study: “most of their recollections began with an episode of displacement. This foundational episode of uprootedness was often followed by repeated, sometimes forced, resettlements” (Motsemme 2007, 373). This uprootedness was often inextricably linked in the interviews with the loss of a husband or partner. This means that a marriage, or informal union with a man in the youthful times of love and intimacy, and usually resulting in children, is irreversibly connected to the trauma of displacement, and likely violence. This helps explain why some women speak so bitterly about the men who abandoned them at a terrible time of war and displacement: “If the violence had never happened, maybe I would be married to the father of my children, but he used that as an escape, so he left and then I was left to care for my own children on my own” (Nthutukoville, #2). Echoing Motsemme, I suggest that these stories linking war and displacement with the fracturing of gender relations helps explain some of the intensity and endurance of disordered love and intimacy in South Africa: “Probing the breakdown of the social fabric through experiences of displacement might also add to our knowledge regarding histories of violation that women continue to be embedded in” (Motsemme 2007, 373). As discussed in chapter one, Bonnin (2000) and

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Box 5.1. Household Profile and Field Notes: Ambleton #11 (11 March 2010): Mama T.

Figure 5.1 Mama T. with family and friends

The house is one room, divided by curtain; kept nicely if very crowded with appliances and beds, dining room table and chairs, etc. Mama T. is one of Reach Out’s families, so we brought food on the Tuesday, 9 March visit as Mama T. fosters some orphans. This is a rdp house; the water tank (which is supposed to be on the roof) is on the ground. Mama T. says when it is hot, it gets maggots in it. Some people use the bucket system for toilets, like here. Waste is dumped on land elsewhere (no collection). In the house there is a hot plate, TV, fridge, stereo, lounge suite, dining table, and bed. There is a beautiful view; we sat in the shade outside looking over the township. Mama T. was worried about our car, so we parked at her brother’s house nearby. There is a little baby here and toys were out to play. Nombuso sat next to Mama T. and this was a friendly stance as Mama could see the paper and what is being written; there are some shade trees in the area, and although

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houses are very close together, people have made their yards habitable (some, not all); Mama T. improved the small road that comes down to these houses herself which was just a dirt track, very rocky and rough. The head is the parent, and Zulu is the language that is usually spoken at home. There are eight people living in the home. The head of the household is thirty-eight years old, she only went to school up to grade eleven/standard nine, and is unemployed. The seven other people living in the house are: an eighteen year old female, who is the head’s niece, she is doing grade twelve now at school and was receiving a foster care grant but it has been stopped for now; a thirteen year old female who is also the head’s niece, she is currently doing grade eight and is receiving her foster care grant; a one year old who is the head’s grandchild, he is receiving his child support grant; an eighteen year old, who is the head’s daughter, she stopped schooling at grade eleven because she was pregnant, she is unemployed; a sixteen year old who is also the head’s daughter, she is currently doing grade ten; a fourteen year old who is the head’s son, he is doing grade eight; and lastly there is a five year old who is the head’s son, he is currently doing grade R, and he is not receiving the child support grant. The approximate household income is between R 1,500 and R 2,499, which comes mainly from the child grant and the two foster care grants. The household spends approximately R 700 on groceries, R 350 on transport, R 150 per annum on education, R150 on electricity, and R 130 on the burial society contributions per month.

Campbell (1992) explain the violence in youthful sexual relationships in the 1980s and 1990s in KwaZulu and Natal as part of this broader context of war, social breakdown, and gendered roles that associated masculinity with violence and femininity with sexual availability and acquiescence to male youths’ demands. This is the same time referred to by the middle-aged women in my interviews, who were in their twenties and thirties at that time, an age full of hope for love and intimacy.

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Box 5.2 Household Profile and Field Notes: Ambleton #13 (11 March 2010): Gogo L.

Figure 5.2 Gogo L.

Very friendly and beautiful older woman; house painted pink walls inside; older black lounge suite; room divided by curtain; one bed in kitchen/living room; linoleum floor in fairly good condition; lovely lace curtains – lots of effort to make this house nice. The house has a larger yard than others (corner lot) and is fenced; big enough for a garden but she says there are too many pests that destroy the plants. She wanted to know how to sue for divorce and if it would cost money (her husband left many years back with a younger woman but they were never divorced – now she wants to be sure he does not bother her). I called Amber at Women and Justice, and gave this woman the number she can call for information (praise cell phones!) The head is the parent in the household, Zulu is the main language that is spoken in the home and five people live in the household. The head is fifty-four years old, only went to school

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up to standard three, is unemployed and is diabetic. The other people living there are: a seventeen year old who is the head’s son, he only went to school up to grade eleven and he is unemployed; a fourteen year old who is the head’s son, he is doing grade seven; a ten year old who is the head’s son, he is doing grade six and is receiving the child support grant; lastly the seven year old male who is the head’s grandchild, he is doing grade three and is receiving the child support grant. The approximate household income is between R 0 and R 1,499, which comes from the child support grant and piece jobs that the head does (doing the laundry for people at R 20–50 per person). They spend approximately R 400 on groceries, R 200 on transport, and R100 on electricity per month.

For other women, abandonment came after a long period of marriage or cohabitation. Mama T. for example, one of the younger women in our research at thirty-eight years old in 2010 explains: “I had a husband, we weren’t really married, but we had been together for 13 years. He left me however, for another woman, so from there onwards, it was just me and my children” (France, #11). Mama T. lives in an rdp house with her own four children aged eighteen years and younger, two nieces, and one grandchild. Her experiences with her husband have left Mama T. bitter and disillusioned: “Men are untrustworthy, they use us, they can find you with a lot of things but leave you with nothing at the end of it all” (ibid.). Another woman in France, Gogo L. who was fifty-four years old in 2010, told a similar story, but with yet another layer of torment: “My husband of twenty-five years left me for another woman, but we never got divorced. I left him, and had to start a new life with my children … Yes, [it was difficult as a female household head to get access to this dwelling], we had a fight with my husband then he left so I had nobody to help me fight to get a house” (France, #13). Gogo L. further explained that her husband, now old and sick, wants to return to her to be cared for. She asked us about getting a divorce to protect herself from any claims from him.

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M E N A N D R E L ATI ON S HI P S

All the women interviewed, whether they had been abandoned or widowed, or otherwise disappointed by men, held extremely strong and negative views about men and relationships. For forty-nine year old Mama H. the main complaint is that they do not contribute anything to the relationship: “They are useless, have no profit, they help you with nothing, they just get women pregnant and leave” (Peace Valley 2, #25). Mama H., who has two adult children in their twenties living with her, and struggles to live on selling crafts and begging from neighbours, had never married, and she has no further interest in relationships with men: “I am too old, and I don’t want an old man to come die in my house.” For Gogo L. (see box 5.2), her experiences have struck very deep chords of distress: “I hate men, they are all the same, you can’t even trust them, they steal from you even if you are their partner … I would be fine even if the world only had women … I don’t want anything to do with men” (France, #13). Mama C. never got married, but had children while still living at home with her parents. Like all of the women interviewed, the father of her children “offers no support.” Aged thirty-six, Mama C. lives in her rdp house with her four children, ages two to fourteen years, her only income is from two child support grants. Still relatively young, she is nonetheless through with men: “You can never trust a man, in fact, women can actually live without men, because they always ruin your life … men are all the same, they leave you with a whole lot of diseases” (France, #16). We already know Gogo S. from chapter four (see box 4.1). Gogo S. took two years of struggling to get her rdp house on her own, spurred on by a disappointing marriage: “My husband was on and off … he was my husband whenever it suited him, so I decided to get a place of my own, to start a life of my own.” And now? “I don’t want any man in my life, I have no time for them … you can’t trust or rely on them, you can go hungry with a man in the house” (France, #15). While the civil war in KwaZulu and Natal in the 1980s and 1990s undoubtedly intensified the violence and instability in gender relations of love and family, we know from the historical account in chapter one that these tendencies have been a long time in the making. Reaching back to the nineteenth century, we can trace transforma-

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tions in gender relations as rural economies declined, patriarchal control of youth eroded, and men and women began migrating to urban areas in search of work and new experiences. Mark Hunter’s concept, “the political economy and geography of intimacy” (Hunter 2010a), helps us see these historical patterns of intimacy and gender relations. Many women accessed industrial jobs in the 1970s and 1980s that allowed them to migrate from rural areas, set up their own homes (usually in shack settlements), and become less economically dependent on men. In this context, gender relations started to focus more on love, intimacy, and sex than ideals of marriage and family, and become more unstable and short term. Instability and tension in gender relations, then, have deep historical and material origins. The material aspect is strongly evident in the words of our female heads as noted above: “They are useless, have no profit, they help you with nothing” (Mama H. Peace Valley 2, #25). Women’s poor opinion of men is also nothing new. Deborah Posel, writing about “town marriages” in the period between the 1920s and 60s, reports on her interviews with women remembering their marriages from the 1960s. These words could easily have come from my interviews in 2010: “suffering loomed large in the idea of marriage, because hopes and expectations of men ranged from sometimes optimistic, to mostly low, even abysmal: ‘men could do wonders for women’, said Mrs. L., but in the main, ‘men are like dogs, they mess up everywhere and that we accepted’” (Posel 2006, 72). Perhaps what has changed is women’s willingness to “accept” men who “mess up everything,” at least as they get older. The female heads interviewed for this book had an average age of over fifty-four years in 2010, with only three women under forty. As such, their views on love and men should be contrasted with those of the youth documented by Hunter and Motsemme. After 1994, Hunter argues, loss of jobs for black South Africans came alongside big expectations of a “better life for all.” The political economy of intimacy transformed as a result. Gender relations became increasingly hostile with multiple partnerships the norm for both men and women. Men gain status from their conquests of women, while for women, boyfriends provide economic as well as emotional support and pleasure. Tragically, these new gender relations of intimacy emerged just as hiv and aids entered the area in the 1980s, adding new dimensions to the fraught nature of love and intimacy. For Motsemme, in her study of young

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township women’s subjectivities in relation to hiv/aids and gender relations in Durban, the township is “the place which has no life,” where people are “left behind” in the new South Africa (Motsemme 2007, 372). Sex and love become one place meaning can be made. She asks: “What is it like to try to love in a time of hopelessness?” (ibid.). For her, “the search for pleasure” continues despite dangers, and “the biggest reason for unsafe sex is love” (Motsemme 2007, 372, 391). Finally, like Hunter, Motsemme also found that girls and young women have multiple boyfriends for both survival and to participate in consumer culture through receiving gifts and money from their lovers. This search for love, pleasure, and intimacy, and certainly the hope of gifts and money from boyfriends seem long past for the female heads we interviewed. They clearly are through with men: “I am too old for that” (France, #12) was a common comment as was: “I don’t want any man in my life” (France, #15). Besides their experience of men as being no material help, and as fathers who have abandoned their children and partners, the women fear sickness and the burdens of care that men would bring: “there are too many sicknesses these days” says Mama R., one of the youngest women in our group at thirty-four years: “besides, that man would probably want me to support him” (France, #17). As older women, most feel their chance at love is past, unlike the youth in Hunter’s and Motsemme’s narratives. The women we interviewed had no more chance for pleasure or love with men. As Gogo N. (see box 2.1) puts it: “They drink a lot and are very noisy. When the relationship is still fresh, they treat you well, then they change at some point; you can never trust a man” (Peace Valley 2, #21). It seems that once the romance and intimacy of youth are over, women are on their own emotionally as well as financially. In this sense, “love” does not include “care”; there seem slim prospects for growing old together with a long time partner (something acknowledged by Hunter). This is especially noticeable in the context of hiv/aids where so much care is needed, and women anxiously attempt to avoid being landed with an old sick man to care for after decades of holding their households together without help from men.

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H O ME A S S A N C T UA RY, C OM M U N I T Y A N D S E N S E OF S A F E T Y :

“ EV E RY THI N G

I S FAC I N G M E ” 5

Living in a home of their own, whether received free from government as an rdp house in France, or built themselves from wattle and daub or bricks and mortar, has produced a strong sense of belonging. All of the women interviewed agreed that they had “a strong sense of attachment to this place as my home and where I belong.” Readers will recall from chapter three that Ndinda found that women in Nthutukoville experienced their homes as sanctuary, a place to recover from the trauma of war and displacement (Ndinda 2003). For many of the women we interviewed their own home provided refuge from a bad relationship with a man; a place they could control; housing for themselves and their children, sisters, or other relatives; as well as an opportunity to set up permanent residence in the city. Home, in its ideal sense, is an intimate place of belonging, caring, and safety. However, women’s experiences of their homes must also be understood through the larger lens of the neighbourhood and community. Houses, especially in poorer communities, are not socially isolated, but are experienced through community relationships, and overall community safety and environmental conditions. In our interviews about half of the women said they felt safe all the time or most of the time in their community, while the other half said they sometimes felt safe and other times unsafe. All but one of the women said they knew their neighbours, and all but one reported that they shared food, money, or labour with neighbours or other community members. About a third of the women had extended family living in the community, and those that did shared food, money, or labour with them. Overall, this is a positive picture. People mostly feel safe, know their neighbours, and experience some social networks of mutual help in times of need. However, we must also take account the way gendered social norms surrounding their status as female heads of household can penetrate home and community to produce certain negative experiences in their treatment by others. A minority of the women say that the community respects them as women heading their households: “I feel welcome and people are always supportive of me, as they know I’m running a household on my own. I know I have rights in this new South Africa,” says Mama D. (Nthutukoville, #5). But Mama D. is not typical. One of the few women with a secondary school ed-

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ucation, a job in the formal economy, and a beautiful besg assisted home that has been extended, her story is one of multiple successes. A few other women said they were respected and well treated in their communities, either because their age garners respect, or “maybe it’s because I have a lot of sons” (Nthutukoville, #10). More typically, the women experience anything from low-grade harassment to real danger of theft or assault in their homes. Mama E. (see box 2.5) represents one end of this spectrum: “If you don’t have a husband, people try to steal from you, they look down on you” (Peace Valley 2, #29). A more specific case of harassment is expressed by another woman in France. At forty-nine years old, her rdp house also shelters her eight children and one grandchild: “It is hard because people don’t respect me, they walk all over my yard just because I don’t have a fence, and they try to steal in my house” (France, #19). Towards the other end of the spectrum is Mama T. (see box 5.1): “Men also sometimes knock on my door (randomly), in attempt to rape my children if they think there is no adult in the house” (France, #11). The most extreme case in our group was Gogo R. At age sixty-five years she houses seven others, her grandchildren, and great-grandchildren, ranging in age from five years to twenty-six: People look down on me just because I am a woman. This one man was busy raping one of the children; I am going to court cases for this matter. He did this because he was looking down on me, he knew there wasn’t much I could do about it; I’m a woman, and I am old. Another man wanted to kill my other grandchild because he said he was naughty. He chased him all the way into bushes; my child was afraid to come home for a while. That man actually came to me and told me that he was going to kill my child *sob*. People try to take advantage when there is no male figure in the family, they use every chance they get. (Nthutukoville, #3) These narratives indicate that while women may have escaped bad relationships, or even conditions of war, and found relative safety and sanctuary in their city homes, there can still be danger and harassment in the neighbourhood that can penetrate their yard or even their home. Their gendered status as female heads can have spatialized impacts on their safety and the quality of their homes as a sanctuary.

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In some of the extreme cases, such as those of Gogo R. we can ask: “what kind of subjectivities” are created when “sanctuary or safe space is experienced as a wound?” (Motsemme 2007, 374). This discussion also reveals the rigidities surrounding women’s social status. As Mosoetsa found in her study in two townships in KwaZulu-Natal, women’s extraordinary efforts to care for their families have not effected transformations in gender ideologies of power and status: “Their work is central to the survival of their households and their communities, a fact that has not yet effected a role reversal in the household, elevated the status of women or undermined the system of patriarchy to a meaningful extent. Even though gender relations are sometimes contested, patterns of male dominance are maintained” (Mosoetsa 2011, 44). S E N S E O F P R I D E A N D AC C OM P L I S HM E N T:

“I

T RUST M YS E L F, I A M V E RY C ON F I D E N T , I LOV E THE P E R S ON T H AT I A M , YOU C A N ’ T G I V E THAT TO A N YON E ” 6

Perhaps the most positive and moving finding to come out of our interviews with female heads was the near universal expression of how proud they were of their accomplishments as women. In the face of great hardship and adversity, with many experiencing and witnessing violence, they had secured a home, sent children to school, and gained their own self-respect. Some fiercely express this sentiment: “I am a tough woman, I fear nothing and nobody” (Mama H., Peace Valley 2, #25). Motsemme asks about the young women in her study: “In the midst of repeated fracture, what is it these young women hold onto? What do they let go of, in order to create viable identities to survive?” (2007, 374). For her young women, the answer was finding “ways of loving in a time when social meanings are collapsing and/or are in crisis” (2007, 388). For the older women in our interviews, love with men is not an option anymore. Indeed, some feel that their achievements have not only been gained despite the lack of help from men, but in fact because men have been absent: “I feel so much stronger now without my husband,” says Gogo L, “because when he was still around there were always problems. I am happier, I feel I have raised my children well. I even teach my sons to treat women well, and with respect” (Gogo L., France, #13; see box 5.2). For these women, their sense of self, their subjectivity, is imbued with self-confidence born of their

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achievements, but also in some part as a response to the perceived failure of men. This meaning making seems a key part of their resilience. As Scheper-Hughes suggests in her theory of human resilience, these women are not fragile victims of multiple shocks, but figures of strength and endurance that is achieved and performed, in part, but their own narratives of pride and success (Scheper-Hughes, 2008). It is in this light that we consider the women’s views of ideal masculinity, and the question of whether masculinity is “in crisis.” It has become a norm that African men do not support or live with their children, and most poor women are raising children on their own or in matrifocal or female linked households. It has also been established that these patterns are not new, with female headed households already evident in urban South Africa by at least the 1970s (Argyle and Preston-Whyte 1978; Burman and Preston-Whyte 1992; Lindsay and Miescher 2003; Posel and Devey 2006; Preston-Whyte 1978; Morrell and Richter 2006). However, the facts on the ground do not prevent the circulation of hegemonic ideals of masculinity and fatherhood, either in the past or today. These imagined ideals can provide a kind of sensemaking in the face of hardship and disappointment. Motsemme suggests, for example, that during the 1970s and 1980s youth uprisings, when female headed households, teenage pregnancies, and so on were already widespread, myths of the patriarch, the man as provider, as protector, and as leader, operated “to protect the family and community from ethical breakdown” (Motsemme 2007, 378). In other words, even if the reality was that the ideal patriarch rarely existed, the imagined ideal still functioned to help families through a time of terrible crisis, as an ideal that, perhaps, one day could return. Deborah James uncovers a similar seeming contradiction in her account of female Sotho migrants to the Reef and their songs (1999). She notes that while the women themselves were usually not married and led independent lives as mothers and contributors to their natal homes, many of their songs described traditional gender roles of rural domesticity for women in seemingly nostalgic and positive terms. For James, these songs provided an opportunity for the women to critique contemporary gender relations in which men fail so profoundly to play their role as provider, forcing women to also leave their traditional roles as rural wives. The women in our study easily conjured ideals of masculinity and fatherhood, which are commonly held by many women and men in

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South Africa. These ideals are explored in the critical masculinity literature. In response to the question “What is your view about what men’s role should be in a family?” all twenty-nine of our female heads said something like the following: “They should watch over the family, and the home, be a role model to the children, create a good name for himself and the family in the community, and provide for the family” (Nthutukoville, #3). Critical masculinity scholars suggest that many men hold similar views on the ideals of masculinity, but poverty and unemployment make these ideals unattainable (Wilson 2006). Some scholars trace how the history of male migration and consequent separation from home and family has narrowed the role of the father to that of financial provider, with the many other traditional roles such as role model and moral authority emptied out (Lesejane 2006). Hence, without a job, a father struggles to find a role: “[w]e need to ask what happens to men who are raised for a social role – waged employment – that no longer exists” (Desai and Pithouse 2004b, 307). Critical masculinity scholars have made huge contributions to the inclusion of men in the analysis of gender relations, historicizing masculinity, and linking it to dynamic political economy and culture rather than viewing masculinity as an unchanging product of static patriarchal oppression, “tradition,” and power (Morrell 2001; Reid and Walker 2005). Masculinity studies acknowledge and deplore male violence and neglect of family, but help explain how men are unable to achieve true manhood in the positive sense. In response, they pursue alternative masculinities that have negative effects for women and children, but which provide status and identity among peers, including young women (girlfriends) in the case of youth (Hunter 2010a). This analysis helps to avoid homogenizing and demonizing men, and at the same time mitigates against placing women in the category of victims, people without agency or choice, or as actors in isolation. For our interviewees, however, wounded by their disappointments in men and left to the real life struggle to raise children, build homes, find food, and face hegemonic sexism and often violence, explaining male behavior holds little value: “No, he left and never came back. I don’t even know where he is” (Gogo L. France, #13; see box 5.2).7 However, the ideals of masculinity and fatherhood play a role in how these women understand themselves and their achievements. The ease with which the women conjure up the ideal of the provider and pro-

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tector, husband and father, which is in such stark contrast with the realities of their own lives can be read as bolstering their own self-confidence and sense of achievement. In other words, the very fact that their lives so drastically depart from the idealized notion of the patriarchal family, and they still achieved so much adds to their sense of themselves as authors of their own lives: “I feel proud of myself; I have managed to raise my children even though I had nothing” (France, #14). Clearly, these women are not “victims,” but neither are they heroes emerging unscathed from the gender battles of contemporary South Africa. Are they, like Motsemme’s younger women, caught by the context of danger and hopelessness, only able to achieve a “flawed” agency (Motsemme 2007, 393)? And are we indeed facing a “social crisis” and a “crisis of masculinity”? C ON C LU S I ON S

Undoubtedly, the high rates of gender-based violence, high dependence of women on state welfare provisions, the extensive distrust that many women hold of men, and overall fraught gender relations does constitute a “social crisis.” The predatory and violent behaviour of many men, and the fact that they take little or no part in raising their children is clearly a large-scale social issue. Critical masculinity scholars are right to detach the widespread “disordered” masculinity from any notion of innate brutality or other biologically essentialist explanations. Instead they insist on how historical and economic conditions, especially the high rates of unemployment, make it nearly impossible for most African men to fulfill a positive masculine role as father, husband, and provider. It is also important to avoid imposing a nuclear family model as an implied “norm” from which the female headed households deviate, and overemphasize the failed conjugality of these households. In the social and cultural context of South Africa the link between spouses is much less important than it has become in western heterosexual marriages and families. African women’s role as mothers is typically much more important to them than their role as a wife or partner to a man. Nonetheless, it is apparent from our interviews that the disappointment and painfulness of their relationships with men figure strongly in these women’s experiences, and play an important role in how they interpret their own achievements and subjectivities. They also face terrains of sexism in their surrounding

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communities, and in the dominant discourses and actions of the most powerful men in the country. If we put ourselves in their shoes, it seems impossible to be satisfied with the status quo; there must be ways for healthier and happier gender relations, for love, care, and intimacy that is not so deeply accompanied by violence, illness, and ultimately alienation and sadness. In terms of whether this state of affairs is well described as a “crisis of masculinity,” again, care is needed. Hunter, for example, is keen to introduce much more subtlety and materiality into our understanding of gender relations, challenging the notion of a “crisis of masculinity” as too rigid to capture the dynamic and intimate dance of sex and love in post-apartheid South Africa (Hunter 2010a). Yet Hunter focuses mostly on youth in his analysis, and, as such, perhaps underplays the long term impacts of intimate violence, abandonment, and multiple forms of inequality that persist for women as they go through life. Women do understand themselves as gendered subjects in an oppositional relation to men; they see themselves as heads of their households, on their own with no help from others. They can also imagine how life would be better if men acted differently. Women’s voices, narratives, and “radical” stories suggest that masculinity, as it relates to women, is in “crisis.” However, this crisis should be understood not only through the lens of critical masculinity studies that explains the crisis as a product of history, economics, and politics. We must insist on a role for feminist analysis that reminds us that gender is also about terrains of power, injustice, and oppression, from the largest actions of the global economy, to the state and its actors, to the intimate lives of men and women. Women’s voices and lives tell us this, and as such, they must be given prominence in imagining ways forward to a better future for both men and women.

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6 Protest, Governance, and the Ballot Box: Gender, Generation, and Race1 There is no development in this community, people are hungry and we are living in terrible conditions. (France #15) They [local government officials] act like they are listening but nothing happens. (Peace Valley 2 #24)

I N TROD U C TI ON

We move now from the intimate sphere of love and home to the public world of protest and governance. How do African women engage with politics? For whom do they vote? Do they engage in public protest? South African society in the last ten or more years is experiencing very high rates of public protests and strikes. Between 2004 and 2008 there were over 34,000 public protests in South Africa, representing a large range of groups and issues (Alexander 2010). By the early 2000s, South Africa had the highest per capita protests in the world, at least for those countries that record such events (Bond 2012), capturing media and scholarly interest. Where are women in these activities? Are there important gender issues to be revealed? The protests are primarily about poverty and the condition of housing and services, which we have already seen to be profoundly gendered. In addition, most members of grassroots movements are female, although leadership of the movements is typically male. However, most analysis of the protests does not address gender issues. In addition, critical writing on the protests, social movements, and governmentality does not emphasize the effects of South Africa’s extensive social welfare sys-

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tem on the production of political subjectivities and citizenship. As we have seen in previous chapters, social welfare is of huge importance in the lives of poor women and their families, and has profound impacts on their relationship to the state and the nature of their citizenship and rights. Using the protests and strikes as a lens to explore citizenship, we find that generation, age, and race also emerge as important in people’s relationship to the state and political identities, including in voting politics. Do low-income African protestors still maintain their allegiance to the anc as expressed through their vote? Do race, class, gender, and generation interact in ways revealed by protest and voting politics? Protest is a major way that urban South Africans are attempting to participate in the governance of their local areas and their nation as a whole. As such, it forms an important aspect of their attempts to claim their right to the city and their right to citizenship more generally. This chapter does not attempt to evaluate the efficacy of the “service delivery protests” (Tapscott 2011), although some communities in fact have been successful in getting improvements after protests (Selmeczi 2012). The chapter also does not intend to contribute to social movement theory (Leysens 2006; Zuern 2011). Rather, the focus here is on what further can be learned about political subjectivities in relation to gendered and raced positionalities in post-apartheid South Africa through consideration of the protests. Are the protests an indication that massive black support for the anc is crumbling? Does gender or generation matter in how poor black South Africans think about their relationship to the anc controlled state? What are the implications for the right to the city for poor South Africans? The chapter draws on the extensive literature around the protests, a small fraction of which raises some questions about gender, generation, and race, as well as material from our interviews with female heads of households in Msunduzi, and other evidence from our case study city. We also consider the high profile shack dwellers’ movement, Abahlali baseMjondolo (AbM) as an illustration of the contemporary state of protest politics and subjectivities.

“ S E RVI CE

D EL I VE RY P ROTE STS ”: C OM P E TI N G A N A LYS E S

South Africa is arguably facing a broad social and economic crisis, even possibly a failure of the post-apartheid democratic transition.

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The wild cat miners’ strike at Marikana in August 2012, in which police shot and killed thirty-four miners, shocked the world.2 The massacre represents unprecedented police brutality post-1994, and the specter of possible state involvement indicates that South Africa’s hard fight for democracy and freedom from the brutal state violence of apartheid may be in question (Alexander et al. 2012; Frankel 2013). For Frankel, “Marikana has become a moral barometer against which further developments in mining and wider South Africa will be measured for many years to come” (Frankel 2013, 5). The world still waits for the outcome of the Farlam commission of inquiry into Marikana, and watches nervously as seemingly politically motivated murders of people close to the issue occur.3 The commission is again in session at the time of writing, but testimonies of officials are highly suspect (Falanga 2014) and the report has been delayed. Marikana is clearly a red flag indicating to the world and those at home in South Africa that the country may be in serious trouble. Less attention has been given internationally to the everyday strikes and protests that have come to define the way many South Africans are seeking to talk to their government.4 Most of these protests are peaceful, but some develop into violent events of tire burnings, road blockages, and property destruction. Among these is a surge of so-called “delivery protests” since 2009. These are uprisings of the poor and informal settlement (shack) dwellers, demanding that government fulfill its promises to provide houses and services to the poor. Some analysts refer to these activities as a “rebellion of the poor” (Alexander 2010), while others emphasize political alienation, and social and economic marginalization of the poor in post-apartheid times (Desai 2002; Desai and Pithouse 2004a; Gibson 2006). The “politics of necessity” is also suggested as the driving force, but also that it is an attempt of the poor and the marginalized to engage the government, claiming the right to be heard and to participate in democracy, as well as their right to fulfillment of basic needs (Zuern 2011). Others read the protests as a response to globalization and neoliberal macroeconomic policies in South Africa, that have squeezed the poor to an intolerable degree through government cutbacks, efforts to privatize basic services, and lack of employment creation (Bond 2010). Still others note government corruption and the self-enrichment of local elites, which disgusts and angers the poor. Protests often target local politicians specifically for these issues, plus failure to deliver on election and liberation strug-

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gle promises (Alexander 2010; Booysen 2007). Those in the movements themselves, such as S’bu Zikode, a leader of the shack dwellers’ movement Abahlali baseMjondolo(AbM), describe the profound marginalization of the poor in the new South Africa, and call for a new democracy and economy that includes them as equal citizens: Many things have been said. Many things have been seen. Many policies have been passed. Many people have voted. But what has been done has not been done for the poor. It has been done for the rich. The poor are outside. We have no country. This is not the democracy that the poor fought for. We must ask, are we citizens of this country? If we are not then who are we and where are we? ... We are on our own. We have no choice but to fight. (Zikode 2008, 113, 114) While South African news outlets report on the protests, many commentators and scholars feel that the meaning of the protests for South African society is downplayed or misread by media and the government: While the massacre in Marikana is certainly unprecedented in South Africa's recent history, the rebellion that drove the strike at the mine last year can be located within a greater culture of protest. “Service delivery protests” – demonstrations against local government for the failure of the delivery of services like housing, sanitation and electricity and water – have become a mainstay of South African life … These protests have come to be characterised as a madness confined to the backwaters of the country. The emerging narrative in the media centred on quelling an apparent insanity, but there is scant coverage of what it is actually driving these protests. Yet, studies have shown that these violent protests point to a growing disenchantment with the new South Africa … inherent in these protests is a sense of injustice, a sense of being hard done by, a sense of being cut off from the institutions that are meant to be securing the freedoms that were won through the struggle of those in Sharpeville in 1960 … despite the success of the anc government's service delivery to a record number of South Africans, many, many more continue to live without basic amenities. (Patel 2013)

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South Africa’s popular protests are most often explained in the press as resulting from people’s frustration at the slow delivery of housing, sanitation, and other basic services to poor communities living in shacks and informal townships. The term “service delivery protests” has become common in the press as a means of capturing this. Analysts critique this term however, suggesting that it functions to depoliticize the protests and reduce them to a technical issue of building more houses, roads, and sewerage systems, or connecting more people to water and electricity (Nleya 2011). The protests are often about much more than “delivery,” analysts argue. People are also protesting against local councillors whom they see as corrupt and incompetent: “Our councillor doesn’t want to talk to us. He drives a Hummer and has three houses,” says one protester quoted in the Mail and Guardian (Keepile 2010). Bank sees a reaction to the profound inequalities in the protests, underpinned by a spatialized identity of marginalization (Bank 2011). He writes that people are “entrapped in marginal places and develop place-based identities and notions of deprivation, which they draw on in protest action. The realization 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” (Bank 2011, 244). The state’s response has often been brutal, as in the case of evictions in Mandela Park in Cape Town in 1999 written about by Desai and Pithouse (Desai 2002; Desai and Pithouse 2004a). Another high profile example can be found in the September 2009 Kennedy Road attacks in Durban, where police beat and arrested leaders of AbM. Amnesty International released a report strongly condemning the attacks as human rights violations, and criticizing the South African government for failing to investigate the alleged violations perpetrated by the police (Amnesty International 2008). Robins suggests that the anc in power has turned against the mass mobilization of the poor – a key tactic it used itself in the liberation movement – which it now labels as “ultra left” activity. The party that once sought to make the townships “ungovernable” now seeks order, stability, and “governmentality” (Robins 2008, 171). In an interview with Zodwa Nsibande, Secretary of the AbM Youth League, I had the following exchange: goebel: Why do you think the government reaction to Abahlali baseMjondolo (AbM) is so harsh?

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nsibande: The government has taken them [AbM] as their opposition rather than attending to the issues. AbM doesn’t want to be part of the government or any political party. So government is afraid of them [because they don’t play the political game]. AbM wants justice and dignity and for the government to fulfill its promises and obligations. (Interview with Z. Nsibande, Durban, 8 April 2010) In a publication posted on the AbM website Nsibande and Zikode explain further: We have always said that in the eyes of the state and the ruling party our real crime was that we organised and mobilised the poor outside of their control. We have thought for ourselves, discussed all the important issues for ourselves and taken decisions for ourselves on all the important issues that affect us. We have demanded that the state includes us in society and gives us what we need to have for a dignified and safe life. We have also done what we can to make our communities better places for human beings. We have run crèches, organised clean up campaigns, connected people to water and to electricity, tried to make our communities safe and worked very hard to unite people across all divisions. We have faced many challenges but we have always worked to ensure that in all of this work we treat one another with respect and dignity. (Zikode and Nsibande 2010) For AbM, then, it is the fact that they reject the legitimacy of party politics, and remove themselves from party control that has turned them into targets of state violence. A recent case of violent and illegal eviction of squatters in the Cape Flats area of Cape Town, which is governed by the Democratic Alliance, suggests that this treatment of the poor is not limited to anc governments (Sacks 2013). Within the range of analysis, there is basic agreement, however, that the protests and movements do not constitute a cohesive, broad-based, antigovernment mobilization (Madlingozi 2007; Ballard et al. 2006a). Nevertheless, some scholars see an articulation of revolutionary and counter hegemonic politics in some of the movements. Scholars on the left have underlined the neoliberal pressures on the state that have hampered its ability to meet the needs of the poor and the marginal-

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ized such as job creation and the provision of modern services (Gibson 2006a; Desai 2002; Desai and Pithouse 2004a; Bond 2006; McDonald 2007; Narsiah 2010; Dawson and Sinwell 2012). A particular focus, especially in the early to mid-2000s, was on government efforts to deploy cost recovery practices in water and electricity delivery in poor neighbourhoods, utilizing technologies such as prepaid meters and partnerships with private corporations. Some households had their water and electricity cut off due to failure to pay outstanding bills. The high profile Anti-Privatization Forum based in Johannesburg and the Soweto Electricity Crisis Committee advocated self-provisioning tactics such as illegal reconnections performed by informal plumbers and electricians (Siwisa 2008; Egan and Wafer 2006; Buhlungu 2006). Scholars suggest that state actions such as cutting off the poor from water for non-payment turns rights-bearing citizens into consumers who either can or cannot pay for the right of citizenship (Narsiah 2010; Ruiters 2006; von Schnitzlier 2008; Wafer 2012). Some scholars invoke a Foucauldian approach to show how technologies such as prepaid meters are used to discipline and control citizens through infrastructure. These moves recall state actions in the 1980s to quell township boycotts against payment of rents and service bills as the apartheid government first brought in prepaid meters at this time (von Schnitzler 2008). Citizenship as consumption fits well with a neoliberal state that withdraws from welfare functions, making access to basic services the responsibility of individuals and households to purchase in the market. For some scholars, then, the protests are about challenging this new form of citizenship, a citizenship from which the poor are excluded through inability to pay. Other researchers challenge this characterization of the protests, suggesting participants themselves understand their actions differently. Pointer, for example, raises questions about Desai’s representation of the Mandela Park Anti-Eviction Campaign in 2002: While the struggle in Mandela Park has been described as a serious attack on the status quo – the anc’s neoliberal policies, privatization, and the imposition of consumerism on “the poor” – “insiders” have generally viewed the end point of struggle in terms of the anc’s election promises of free services (housing, electricity, water, etc.), while “outsiders” viewed and characterized Mandela Park as a platform for a wider, possibly

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even global, struggle, as part of the “new internationalism.” (Pointer 2004, 274) It is clear that neoliberal, macroeconomic policies, especially since 1996 with the replacement of the Reconstruction and Development Programme (rdp) with the Growth, Employment and Redistribution programme (gear), entailed rolling back state commitment to human development in favour of providing conditions conducive to business (Ballard et al. 2006a; Bond 2000; Hart 2002). Job losses have been massive since 1994, particularly in the relatively well paid industrial sector. However, neoliberal processes have been incomplete in their reach, a fact recognized but perhaps underemphasized by some of these same scholars (McDonald 2007, 68–70). The anc, after all, has long upheld its alliance with the Congress of South African Trade Unions (cosatu), 5 and, as we have seen in this book, has maintained and extended social welfare programs (Barchiesi 2006; Seekings 2002). As such, analyses that emphasize the rollback of the state as a result of commitment to neoliberal economic policies risk misreading the relationship of the poor with the anc and the state more broadly. The poor, and especially poor women, are not necessarily abandoned by the state as some analysis seems to imply; rather they are deeply linked to the state through pensions and grants, housing programs, and other basic service provisions. The experience of citizenship for poor South Africans needs further investigation beyond claims of exclusion. Analyses of the protests have in general begun to steer away from seeing them as clear indications of anti-neoliberal or anti-globalization articulations, and overall have become more reflective on the context of enduring loyalty of the poor to the anc despite extreme structural inequalities (Dawson and Sinwell 2012). There is some acknowledgement too, that there was significant influence by international anti-privatization and anti-globalization groups in the early 2000s on South African groups, particularly around the 2002 Johannesburg Summit on Sustainable Development. This influence has subsequently declined (Siwisa 2008). Bond, for example, one of the most prominent leftist theorists on the protests in South Africa, saw the Anti-Privatisation Forum in Johannesburg, when it was at its strongest in the early 2000s, as explicitly socialist and anti-globalization in focus, and potentially providing a viable opposition to the left

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of the anc in the future (Bond 2006). In later analysis, Bond acknowledges that the country is not yet at a place where coordinated class struggle against neoliberal globalization can occur, and most of the popular protests are not articulated in these terms. Rather, Bond considers most of the so-called “service delivery protests” as “popcorn protests” that flare up around urgent situations of poor living conditions. Once the immediate issues of housing, or other services are addressed, the protests dissipate without leaving lasting organizational strengths in the community, or enduring links or analysis that would build a broad based anti-capitalist social movement (Bond 2012). Other key scholars on the left remain cautious of elevating protests to an enduring movement with steady counter-hegemonic vision: “We are militantly against the dangerous tendency among elements of the post-apartheid left to reify certain personalities and struggles as permanently progressive and to continue to indulge in this fetish long after the struggles in question have been emptied of any progressive content” (Desai and Pithouse 2004b, 302). Despite the astronomical rate of protests which sometimes turn violent and destructive, and despite the highly troubling repressive state responses to them that at times occur, scholars tend to agree that a revolution is not yet in the making. Indeed, the support for the anc government by black South Africans, including the poor and the marginalized, continues to be very high. Scholarly interest has increased around this apparent contradiction between the high rate of public protests that critique government performance, and continued support for the national government and anc at the ballot box for the vast majority of black voters in South Africa (Piper and Africa 2012; Tapscott 2011; Beresford 2012; Naidoo, K. 2011; Bénit-Gbaffou and Oldfield 2011; Dawson and Sinwell 2012). Bénit-Gbaffou and Oldfield find, for example, that while the mass protests express high levels of disappointment with the government, both locally and nationally to deliver on its promises, they are not an expression of a rejection of the state (2011). Rather, the poor and others who protest see the state as hugely important to fulfilling their dreams for a better life and actualizing their citizenship. People seek to actively engage the state through protests, but also through many formal and informal means. Others emphasize that the ineffectiveness of local spaces for political participation, especially ward committees, and connecting with the ward councillor leads people to protest

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or seek other means such as media and social movements to make their views heard at the level of national government (Tapscott 2011). This is an indication of the failures and weaknesses of local governments, which have been noted for some time (Goebel 2007). The national government pursued a “radical restructuring” of local government, which involved a huge expansion in the mandates and responsibilities of municipalities (Devas 2004). At the same time, declining economic growth rates and few new revenue streams resulted in “unfunded mandates” (Beall et al 2002, 17). By the early 2000s, nonpayment for municipal services was leading to cities nearing bankruptcy (Huchzermeyer 2001). Municipalities have therefore struggled to deliver on housing and other services because of budgets, but also the severe lack of human capacity in the bureaucracies. Corruption and factional infighting are rife. Indeed our case study city of Msunduzi Municipality has been in a financial and management crisis since at least 2006, and faced a total meltdown in early 2010 when the financial mismanagement became clear and municipal workers went on strike. The province eventually stepped in and removed the Mayor and the executive committee in March 2010 (Mgaga 2010; Mgaga and Shamase 2010). Residents waited powerlessly for development. In 2010 there had been no new low-cost housing projects since 2006, and an upgrading project in Peace Valley 2 in Msunduzi, approved in 2002, was still stalled (Brisbane 2010). Meanwhile, institutional mechanisms to link government with residents remain poorly developed (Beall et al. 2005), and citizens feel neglected by their councillors and mayors. Most of our female head interview respondents said that their local officials neither listened to their concerns nor responded to problems in their communities. This has led to cynicism and lack of confidence in local governance: “They act like they are listening but nothing happens” (Peace Valley 2, #24). Elsewhere analysts have noted people’s deep disappointment with local government officials, especially councillors, which, while potentially leading to extensive local protests targeting these officials, such as with AbM in Kennedy Road, this does not necessarily signal an overall lack of support for the anc (Bryant 2008). Indeed the resounding electoral victory of the anc in the national elections of 2014 indicates that there is no significant wavering of popular support for the anc at the national level. Afrobarometer’s 2008 survey in South Africa reported more than 50 per cent of people disapproving or strongly disapproving of their local

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councillor’s performance, 42 per cent disapproving of the President’s performance in the twelve months preceding the survey, and nearly 60 per cent saying national government had done badly in improving the living standards of the poor. Nevertheless, nearly 80 per cent of people reported feeling close to the anc.6 From the perspective of the organized working class, the anc’s nationalist and symbolic appeal as the party of the anti-apartheid struggle endures despite formidable losses for unions and the industrial sector (Beresford 2012). We argue here that these apparently contradictory conditions in which black South Africans express both strong criticism and disappointment with their government, whilst still overwhelmingly supporting the anc at the ballot box can be partially illuminated by a discussion of gender, generation, and race as factors in political subjectivity. We also argue that cracks in the ongoing support for the anc may be emerging. G EN DE R A N D P OL I TI C A L S U B J E C TI V I T Y

We have discussed how poor women’s relationship to the state is often shaped by social welfare programs, whether they be in housing, pensions, or other social grants. In the context of very high rates of unemployment and poverty, many black South African women are keeping their families sheltered, fed, and sent to school in large part as a result of government assistance. We return to this point below. Women’s high dependence on the state for survival, however, does not mean that women are not politically active in social movements and protest. This section considers how gender analysis may enhance the examination of mass social movements and protest, before turning to discuss gender and generation as important in political subjectivities. “Women’s work” can play a key role in how protests emerge, despite its invisibility in public, male led meetings (van Heusden and Pointer 2006). When electricity or water is cut off, women will often protest, but then return to the less obviously political activities of caring for the people in their homes once immediate needs have been met. Many women’s political subjectivities are formed and expressed this way, a dynamic also noted in historical research (Bonner 1990; Bonner 2005; Bradford 1987). While women may become highly active in “public” spaces such as a protest march, this does not often gain them greater respect or recognition from male community members or

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lead to transformation in gender relations and ideologies. In the contemporary politics of protest, women are still often motivated by their caring roles in their families. While the women themselves may be motivated through their political activism to challenge prevailing gender ideologies and roles, those gendered roles can also be used by male leaders to deny women decision making and leadership roles in the movement, such as has been the case in the Anti-Eviction Campaign in Cape Town (Miraftab 2006). However, as we saw in the previous chapter, these experiences may lead to internal transformations in women, implanting in them a firm belief that they cannot rely on men as partners in their struggles against poverty and for a better life for their children, but they themselves can achieve a lot. AbM is one of the most watched social movements in South Africa, partly because of their well developed and highly intellectual philosophy expressed on their extensive website, in publications, films, and interviews. The group also has many connections with other social movement groups in South Africa and internationally (see abahlali .org). Does AbM have a gender analysis? The movement demands a fundamental transformation in politics from anc controlled clientism and exclusion of the poor, to a process that respects everyone equally as citizens: “Every person is a person and every person must count the same. This is obvious. But we do not count” (Ndabankulu 2009). This political philosophy is about a mutually respectful relationship between the state and its citizenry, and among members of the poor and their movements too. AbM’s internal processes include critical reflection on gender inequalities and patriarchal control of women and children. AbM promotes personal empowerment and transformation, as well as protest against government. In my conversation with Zodwa Nsibande, we discussed the challenges this poses within patriarchal Zulu culture: Zulu culture is often blamed (or used) to justify the silence of women, but it is not what I see and what I experience. We have to free ourselves and our minds; culture can be blamed or used to cover fear of doing things differently. Even in rural areas, there are women who are leaders [i.e., where patriarchal culture is thought to be very strong and keep women from those roles]. Believing in yourself is the important thing. The Women’s League [of AbM] emphasises being independent and

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empowered as women. Women have been raised to believe certain things are only for men. So we have to work to overcome these tendencies in ourselves. It is important to keep mutual respect between women and men, and with children too. (Interview with Zodwa Nsibande, 8 April 2010) AbM recognizes that most households in their informal communities are headed by women, and promote women as leaders in their movement: nsibande: Anyone is a leader, whether woman or man; most importantly AbM has opened up a Women’s League as a safe space for women to discuss their issues; in cases like hiv and aids, it is mostly women who need to look after sick people at home; also with evictions, since they usually happen during the day, it is mostly women who are at home so they suffer more; women suffer first on a whole range of issues. The Women’s League can encourage the women to become involved in the movement; the leadership has mostly been male up to now. goebel: Does DoesAbM AbMthink thinkabout aboutitsitswork workininrelation relationtoto women’s issues, that is, are its activities or practices affected by understanding women’s issues? nsibande: We organise workshops with progressive ngos to help people understand how to deal with the issues that face women; right now we have workshop plans. Women leaders have had to flee the area and go into hiding like male leaders, although no women leaders have been arrested in the current wave of arrests [following the events of 26 September 2009]. Four settlements are led by women as chairpersons. (Interview with Zodwa Nsibande, 8 April 2010) AbM, then, recognizes the gendered nature of its struggles, and women feature as leaders and members. As of yet, no gender analysis of AbM has been published, although this seems a curious gap in recent scholarship that explores the experiential philosophy of the group (Selmeczi 2012), a philosophy that seems deeply akin to feminist understandings of knowledge and power.

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In a study of women’s involvement in community organizations in Khayelitsha, researchers found that women’s definition of citizenship centred primarily on their sense of entitlement to government programs, subsidies, and grants. For these women, protest was a last resort, but could be used when other, institutional processes had failed. However, grievance and protest were not perceived as anti-government but as legitimate demands for improvements in socioeconomic conditions and services (Thompson and Conradie 2011). Others have noted, but not necessarily fully analyzed, gender and generation as important in protest and in definitions of citizenship. Researching the protests in Soweto, first around electricity cut offs in the early 2000s and then later around prepaid water meters, Wafer noted the “Soweto grannies” who owned the houses, and whose pensions supported many people. “To live depends on granny’s pension,” said one informant (Wafer 2012, 240). These grannies, residents of a formal township relatively well provisioned with “service delivery,” have deep memories and links to the anti-apartheid struggle. Their sense of citizenship is rooted in this history, which provides legitimation for their demands for decent services and a “better life.” The fact that they are the owners of the houses, and recipients of pensions also means that they are recognized by the state as legitimate in their citizenship. However, the informal settlements that have sprung up on the edges of older townships such as Soweto, are home to both different residents and different histories: “In many of these new communities, there is no history of state subsidised housing or services. Service delivery protests are common in the many of these communities, especially the informal settlements such as Thembelihle. But the profile of the constituency is very different. The Thembelihle Crisis Committee, for example, is constituted for the most part by several young unemployed men” (Wafer 2012, 241). Although Wafer does not say this explicitly, to me these observations are important in demonstrating how both gender and generation differentiate citizenship. Single young men have no access to state welfare programs, either housing subsidies, child grants, or pensions, while the “grannies” have all these things as well as the legitimating history of their involvement in the anti-apartheid struggle. Given these rather marked differences in relationship to the state, it could be expected that the two groups may also have different political subjectivities and levels of support for the anc government.

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Another study of the same protests and actors in Soweto focuses explicitly on women activists’ political subjectivities and especially how they manage the contradictions between their deep commitment to the anc and anti-apartheid struggle history, and their very high levels of disappointment and anger with the current situation under the anc (Matlala and Bénit-Gbaffou 2012). At times the women, many of whom were active in the anti-apartheid struggle, identify party functionaries or local councillors whom, they feel, are not the “real” anc, but opportunists. The anc itself plays the card of blaming local anc councillors for lack of delivery, while holding the national body apart from such local failures. The authors quote press reports of President Jacob Zuma such as the following in Business Day on 20 November 2009: “Councillors could find themselves out of work if they continue to ignore community issues.” Of course, as Matlala and Bénit-Gbaffou point out, this is deeply ironic and disingenuous given that the party appoints its local councillors. Nonetheless, separating local and national anc actors does allow women activists in Soweto to maintain their loyalty to the party while harbouring deep anger against government supported actions on the ground. This move also allows them to self-identify as part of the “real” anc, given their struggle history, which maintains the symbolic power of the anc while allowing that many of its contemporary members do not live up to the real mission of the party. The deep connection with history and the “real” struggle, also justifies their anger, use of violence, and illegal acts, just as they engaged in during apartheid to express the intolerable nature of their living conditions. To engage in contemporary protest and struggle in the face of electricity and water cut offs, and the imposition of very high bills for services, is in fact, to act like the “real” anc. This discussion suggests that middle-aged and older women have particular histories, as well as contemporary relationships to the state, that legitimate their sense of citizenship defined as entitlement to state services as well as political freedoms such as the right to vote. These observations are supported by our interviews with mostly middle-aged and older female heads of households in Msunduzi. All of the twenty-nine women had voted in the last election, and most said that women were active in community organizations, including as leaders, and participated in political meetings. Perhaps because of chaotic local government, no one in the study had been cut off from water or electricity, and no one paid for housing, water, or waste re-

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moval (electricity was used through prepaid cards). This is one small example of how “governmentality” in the form of turning citizens into consumers through prepaid water meters and other technologies relies heavily on functioning local government, and hence the effects can be incomplete in their reach and impacts. The women were split nearly in half in terms of whether they felt the new South Africa was meeting their expectations. The positive responses mention grants, while the negative responses emphasized their continued poverty and joblessness: “No, I have nothing, I live in a mud house, I have no job, things are just bad” (Peace Valley 2, #22). Despite this ambivalence about the current situation, however, most of the women felt hopeful that things were going to improve in the future, especially for their children and grandchildren. While they were strongly disapproving of their local councillors, many felt that the President, Jacob Zuma, had their interests at heart, and were hopeful that he could manage to bring changes for the poor. At the time of the interviews in 2010, many of the women believed Jacob Zuma’s promise to bring jobs for the youth, which was the hope for the future most mentioned by the women. To return to the study done with older women in Soweto, the researchers observe that the older generation of activists seems, for now, to be holding on to their anc loyalty as expressed with their vote, despite their local experiences. However, the authors wonder if the same will be true for the younger generation: “Is this changing with a new generation of local activists, borrowing from history (parents or grandparents’ history rather than their own), but possibly able to have more critical distance towards the anc? Do our conclusions on Phiri activists hold for a younger generation of protestors?” (Matlala and Bénit-Gbaffou 2012, 217). As the authors point out, the new, youth led groups such as AbM also make strong appeals to the spirit of struggle history, and associate themselves with this spirit and therefore not in opposition to the “real” anc. However, how long will the ability last to hold together this contradictory loyalty by continuing to vote anc? Indeed, the more radical movements such as AbM and the Landless People’s Movement have called for voter boycotts since 2006 under the slogan “No Land, No House, No Vote” (Abahlali 2006). Although this strategy has not yet been effective in changing the dominance of the anc in politics, according to the Mail and Guardian, nearly 75 per cent of South Africans aged twenty to twenty-nine did not vote in 2011

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elections for local posts, and the so-called “born frees,” those born after 1994 now eighteen or nineteen years of age, do not express strong party allegiances like their parents and will make up 30 per cent of the voting population by 2019 (Herskovitz 2013). Curiously, AbM came out with an endorsement for the Democratic Alliance (da) in KwaZulu-Natal just before the 2014 national elections as a vote against the corruption of the anc (Sapa 2014), a departure from their anti-political party stance that requires further study. While these observations are interesting, it remains unclear how the demographic youth bulge will affect South African politics. Strong concerns about the youth have emerged recently in national discourse: When cosatu general secretary Zwelinzima Vavi referred to the country’s current volatile mix of “unemployment, grinding poverty and deepening inequalities” as a ticking time bomb after acrimonious clashes between organised unionists and opposition political party members in May, this image quickly became emblematic of our youth – the unemployed and disenfranchised, provocateurs of violent service delivery protests, and guileless pawns in political plays between business, government, politicians and organised labour. Increasingly, young people are being portrayed as personifications of their circumstances rather than purveyors of dynamism and change. In a country split by deep economic inequality and extreme poverty, crippled by a faltering education system, and unable to create and sustain new jobs, the young – together with the social context they represent – have in the words of the National Planning Commission (NPC) become our “single greatest risk to social stability,” “likely to rebel if left with no alternative but unemployment and poverty”and a potential “hazard and a lost resource to society.”(Leftko-Everett 2012, 7) In a nationally representative survey in 2012 focused on youth perceptions, the Institute for Justice and Reconciliation (ijr) found some interesting differences in youth confidence in institutions compared to adults across race groups. For example, only 18 per cent of Asian or Indian youth expressed confidence in the presidency, while 54.6 per cent of adults in this group did. Indeed youth in all minority groups, including whites, coloureds, and Asian/Indians held less confidence

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than adults in their race group in the national government. Black youth, on the other hand, had nearly identical and very high levels of confidence in both the president and the national government (over 70 per cent in both cases). 7 Furthermore, while there is a trend for minority groups (both youth and adults) to have slightly more confidence in the local government compared to the national (although confidence levels are still well below 50 per cent), for black youth and adults, confidence plummets to around 20 per cent for the local government compared to the national (Leftko-Everett 2012, table 6, 22). The survey also found that nearly a quarter of people had participated in demonstrations or strikes at least some time in the past year, and nearly a fifth had participated in violent protest. Counter to popular perception, however, youth were less likely to participate than adults with the average age of protestors being in the mid-thirties (LeftkoEverett 2012, 25). Finally, the survey found that more than 40 per cent of black youth and a much higher proportions of minority youth (between about 68 per cent and 78 per cent) had low confidence in political parties, and more than half across all groups (except coloureds) would consider switching parties (Leftko-Everett 2012, 26). Overall, while public and official concern about “violent” and largely unemployed youth is high, it is, as of yet, unclear how this group will affect future South African politics and governance. While pro-poor grassroots movements such as AbM raise important questions about potential generational shifts in political perceptions and behaviours, such movements also offer profound critiques about South Africa’s current path of development. Very significant to me is the advanced critique that AbM has of social welfare as a replacement for real development, and a focus on human dignity as the key development goal. In a presentation in November 2009 in Cape Town entitled “We Want the Full Loaf (Not Just a Child Support Grant),” AbM member Mnikelo Ndabankulu reflected on “delivery,” human rights, and the conception of the struggle for AbM: [We] have to be out of the order that oppresses us. We have to rebel. Everyone must have the full loaf of bread that each person needs to live well. Service delivery is just trying to keep the people happy with one slice of bread when in fact a person needs the whole loaf. It is the same with human rights. Having the human right to a house is not the same as having a house.

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Of course if you don’t have any bread then you must struggle for that one slice. But our struggle does not stop there. After you have won one slice you struggle for the next slice up until you have the whole loaf. Only then can you relax. Our struggle is not only for service delivery or human rights. Our struggle is for the full loaf. It is important that this is clear to everybody. (Ndabankulu 2009) This passage indicates that social welfare provisions, the “slice of bread,” whether they are housing programs or child support grants, are inadequate responses to the needs of the poor. AbM demands democratic inclusion and full citizenship in South Africa, “the whole loaf.” Nsibande holds a similar view, identifying “human development” as the goal rather than more government hand-outs: People should be involved in building their own houses, and be a part of planning, building and benefiting from that development. In rdps [houses built by contractors for poor people] people are passive receivers. This is not what AbM is fighting for. We are fighting for human development (freeing the mind, access to information, as well as decent housing and services). (Interview with Zodwa Nsibande, 8 April 2010) AbM is currently not active in our case study city of Msunduzi, however there are some groups that express a similar focus on human dignity, although they do not currently espouse the sort of delinking from politics advocated by AbM. Rather, they attempt to alert the local government to their needs. According to Mervyn Abrahams, Director of Pietermaritzburg Agency for Community Social Action (pacsa), there are numerous women led groups forming around issues of services and poverty, with the Electricity Action Group (eag) being the largest. eag is struggling for affordable electricity. They see this as their role as mothers in families, which is powerfully political. eag emphasizes that human dignity and care for each other underpins and is the root of affordable access to services (Abrahams 2014). pacsa reported on eag activities and reproduced their statement in its April 2014 Newsletter: “On Sunday 27th April, Freedom Day, the Electricity Action Group launched its campaign around the idea that the access to services by all is intrinsic to dignity, humanity, justice and

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freedom. The eag believes that nobody should be denied access because they are unable to pay for services.” The launch was held at the Edendale Lay Centre and included more than 300 people from across the city. The campaign is based on 6 pillars: 1 We must all have access to services because services are intrinsic to dignity. 2 Nobody must be denied access to services because they cannot afford to pay. 3 Our dignity is more important than paying for services. We refuse to put money before people. 4 Everyone must have services. 5 Leaders must be controlled by us and responsible to us – the people. 6 We will unite and fight for dignity, humanity and justice. This campaign is about dignity, about love, humanity and justice. It is about everyone having services (electricity, water, decent toilets, frequent refuse removal, street lights that work, decent schools for our children, enough and nutritious food, good quality health care and safe and reliable transport) so that all people can live in dignity. (pacsa 2014) These calls to “live in dignity” from groups such as eag and AbM, and AbM’s explicit critique of state welfare, illuminate the profound inadequacy of the state’s main response to gross inequality and poverty through its welfare programs. However, as we saw in the previous two chapters, the gendered realities of residents of poor townships and informal settlements in South Africa have made social welfare a critical aspect of women’s connection to the state and their conception of their citizenship and entitlements. Women typically see the state as having a central role and a great deal of power to make their situation better, especially the national government, as the deliverer of citizenship and development. Older women also have historical memory of the struggle that adds symbolic power to the anc, despite its current failings. It may be that alternatives to this conception of citizenship and the ability to retain loyalty to the anc are emerging in youth driven social movements such as AbM, and even perhaps among women

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fighting for the survival of their families, such as articulated by eag in Msunduzi. For now, however, South Africans, including a large majority of the poor, continue to support the anc. For Msunduzi, the 2014 national election revealed even higher support for the anc than the national and provincial average. There, 72.06 per cent of the votes were cast for the anc compared to 62.15 per cent nationally, and 65.31 per cent for KwaZulu-Natal (Electoral Commission of South Africa 2014). We turn now to the question of race, where some parallel observations can be made. R AC E A N D P OL I TI C A L S U B J E C TI V I T Y

The question of the role of race in voting behaviour is difficult to unravel. While many observers expected the widespread protests by black South Africans to have some effect on the outcome of the 2011 elections, very little impact was seen, leading some to feel that elections are nothing more than a “census,” as the population seems to vote according to their racial group (Piper and Africa 2012). A survey of residents of Msunduzi in 2008 complicates this straightforward association of race with party, as well as supposed links between poverty, marginalization, and protest (Piper and Africa 2012). The survey found that politics is indeed racialized in the sense that black voters mostly vote for the anc and express a much higher level of trust in anc government officials and the president, while whites and Indians overwhelmingly vote for opposition parties, in this case the Democratic Alliance (da) and overwhelmingly express mistrust of the anc at both local and national levels. However, there is little race-based differences in other aspects of political perception, for example, similarly high levels of dissatisfaction with the performance of the government at both local and national level were found across the race groups. In addition, the researchers found similar patterns across race groups along other aspects of citizenship such as percentages of people who vote, belong to faith based organizations, attend community meetings, feel close to political parties, engage in bribery, belong to community organizations, attend the “invited spaces” of political participation such as ward committee meetings, and engage in protest. The researchers also found that people across the race groups overwhelmingly endorse political and democratic rights, although they also share a sense that they have little agency to effect change

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themselves. The researchers conclude that: “Conceding that race matters to voting is not the same as saying that the fundamental patterns of citizenship are primarily racialised … the above results confirm the limits of formal institutions of local governance and party membership for most citizens, suggesting instead reflecting on other informal ways in which they seek to secure their rights” (Piper and Africa 2012, 227). Another study in four racially defined poorer areas (black, Indian, coloured, and white) around Pretoria makes different observations about race and citizenship (Naidoo, K. 2011). Focusing on only poor neighbourhoods brings to light both similarities and differences across race groups. Firstly, all groups have seen an increase in the gap between the rich and the poor in their group, with the gap the largest in the black population. This gap, in addition to actual levels of poverty such as experiences of food insecurity and joblessness, exacerbates people’s sense of hopelessness and cynicism about the future, which is strongly felt across all the race groups. However, unlike the Piper and Africa study, K. Naidoo found that there was a racialized difference regarding political engagement, with blacks more politically engaged, and other groups withdrawing as they felt they had no access to the state. In fact, they felt they were actively discriminated against because of affirmative action policies that favoured blacks. However, despite this higher political engagement of blacks, and the fact that the anc was voted back in the black area in the study (Soshanguve) as well as in the Indian area (Laudium) in the 2011 municipal elections, the research found declining support for the anc across all race groups and communities studied. A split in opinion regarding why the anc was not delivering the promised “better life for all” was also observed in the black community, with some maintaining that the government lacked resources to implement its desired improvements, while others said the government did not care about the poor. These very different findings across racial groups resonate with those from the ijr survey reported on above. The cracks that seem to be appearing in black support for the anc and the changing relationship between race and citizenship are well illustrated by the words and actions of some pro-poor groups such as AbM. As we have seen, AbM has called openly for boycotting voting, going beyond switching support from the anc to other parties, to a rejection of the current political and economic system. For the AbM

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leadership, political subjectivity, and citizenship is based on their belief in their inherent humanity as equal citizens, despite their experience of intense marginalization and criminalization (Selmeczi 2012). Interestingly, for AbM, continued racism also shapes their experiences and critiques. Race continues to matter in South Africa, despite the formal overturning of racist apartheid laws, and a Constitution that guarantees equality rights across race, gender, religion, and sexual orientation. Race and racism remain powerful discourses of privilege and oppression in South Africa.8 While blatant racism and discrimination in the workplace and elsewhere have declined, racial relations remain entrenched in hostility and separateness (Seekings 2008). Seekings points out that while the state holds an official commitment to “non-racialism,” bureaucratic practices still require citizens to identify their race group on many forms and applications for government services, in effect continually reproducing racial identities and separation. More blatantly, legislation supporting affirmative action in hiring non-whites, and black economic empowerment legislation which requires business owners to hire black partners, among other mechanism to support the emergence of a black business elite, works to entrench racialized identities and categories, even while attempting to redress the historical legacies of discrimination that made membership in the “black” category, a severe disadvantage. Even more powerful for Seekings than these state supported practices of racialization, is the continued “race-thinking” of most South Africans, who still hold a deep consciousness of race: “It is hard to imagine that South Africans’ acute consciousness of race would vanish if the state was to abandon such administrative categorisation. South Africans’ racialised identities and perceptions of others have strong roots in civil society. ‘Race-thinking’ persists uneasily alongside a strong commitment to transcending the racial divisions of apartheid” (Seekings 2008, 8). This “race-thinking” is reflected in popular discourses surrounding the many thousands of murders of white farmers (Vena 2010), and strong anti-white rants from official sources, such as the former African National Congress Youth Leader Julius Malema, whom we met in the previous chapter. He has been and still is a hugely popular figure among black African youth, and, after being ejected from the anc, now leads a new political party the Economic Freedom Fighters (eff). Malema was charged with hate speech for publicly singing a song from the days of the anti-apartheid struggle that includes the words

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“shoot the boer” (shoot the white, Afrikaner farmer) (Parker 2011). There are also horrendous stories of blatant racism of white people against blacks, such as a series of events at Free State University (Evans 2010). More mundanely, there is very little cross race social contact, despite increasingly multiracial workplaces, and youth perform racialized identities through profoundly marked differences in clothing, music, clubs, and friendships (Seekings 2008). Other recent research supports this view. While there is much more public interaction among race groups, such as at sports stadiums, bars, and universities, when it comes to private spaces and personal identities: “race remains the most powerful force shaping our experiences, opportunities and interactions in this country” (Lefko-Everett 2012, 14). Race-based identities and experiences continue to be supported by urban geography. As we have seen, there have been only very small changes to racialized residential space in urban areas with some mixing of blacks and whites in former elite white suburbs as the black middle class and elites move in. The new low-cost housing program has built new townships for poor blacks predominantly on urban peripheries, extending rather than challenging apartheid patterns, and exacerbating historical dynamics of social, economic, and geographical marginalization of poor urban blacks. For all these reasons, race requires attention in analyzing any social issue in South Africa, let alone one such as the uprising of the urban poor, who are predominantly black. But how can we understand how race is operating in contemporary South Africa, as formal racism has ended? Certainly the enduring racialized residential patterns of South Africa’s cities are important in prolonging legacies of racialized marginalization. However, the poor and the black are the majority in South Africa, but also the majority in government and even many rich and powerful business people are blacks. Pro-poor groups rising up are not challenging racist, white authority, but calling on “their” (black) government, and “their” liberation party to fulfill the promises made to them; they all fought the liberation war for South Africa together (Alexander 2010; Booysen 2007). Key analysts insist that differential environmental and other injustices for poor black South Africans are no longer primarily a product of racism, but are better explained by capitalist relations of class and the outcomes of the growth paradigm of development (Cock 2010; Ruiters 2002). While this argument has merit, I argue it would be a

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mistake to completely loosen the association of injustices with racism. Instead, I suggest that problematizing, rather than taking for granted the ways that race and racism are implicated in injustices, will lead to insights regarding the current urban protests. What is clear in the South African case is that liberation from apartheid in 1994 has transformed but not erased racialized privilege for whites, and as of yet failed to pull the majority of black South Africans out of poverty. But given the transformation of the political elite from white to black, the erasure of racist policies and laws, and the implementation of problack policies in employment and programs such as public housing, the role of race and racism in this failure is not transparent. As one scholar suggests: “Citizens are free of race formally and ideally, not actually and practically” (MacDonald 2006, 178). In this context, we suggest that rather than discarding the concept of racism, it is more fruitful to consider how the poor are “racialized” through new forms of exclusion in the post-apartheid city. One example is security and policing regimes that keep poor blacks out of upmarket city centers such as in Cape Town (Samara 2010), or away from the gated communities that protect elites (both white and non-white) from personal and property crime (Lemanski 2004). In these regimes to be poor and black is to be vulnerable to brutal, often illegal, police actions, such as police attacks on peaceful protests, home invasions, arrests, and illegal evictions. AbM in Durban has accused police of racism, in part because Glen Nayager, the former superintendent of Sydenham ward, where AbM’s Kennedy Road settlement lies, exercised extreme police brutality against the community. Nayager is of Indian decent, which adds to the accusations of racism, but the issue is broader, including the targeting of blacks and apartheid like treatment by his unit as a whole. This excerpt from a memorandum delivered to the police in 2007 makes these points: Glen Nayager you have vandalized our humanity … since we united as Abahlali base Mjondolo you have constantly harassed and attacked our movement … racism: You, and many of your officers, are guilty of extreme, systematic and casual racism towards African people. You insult us in the most ugly language, language which is supposed to be part of the past … When your officers do this ‘stop and search’ it is only Africans who are stopped and searched. If there is a line of young men waiting for

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the taxi your officers leave the coloured men and the Indian men and search only the Africans … criminalisation of the poor: You, and many of your officers, speak and act as though all poor people and especially shack dwellers, are criminals … You and your officers come to us as though we are all criminals and not as though we are citizens deserving protection. (Abahlali 2007)9 To return to the event of the Marikana massacre, AbM responded with a painful analysis of the “Black Boers,” that is, the black elites running the country as if they were the Afrikaners of apartheid’s bitter past: South Africa has the most beautiful Constitution amongst all countries. Its beauty is well documented and respected. But we are living in a Democratic Prison … The struggles of the past defeated the White Boers and brought us democracy with all these beautiful rights on paper. We have so many documented rights, like the right to housing and to protest. But every day our rights are violated by the Black Boers. They vowed to protect our rights but the vow was a fake vow … they are sending out their securities and police to evict the poor, to lock us out of the cities and to smash our struggles. Instead of working with the people to transform the society they are repressing the people to protect the unequal society that they took charge of 1994 … for the poor, employed or unemployed, things have got worse and they continue to get worse. The arrests, beatings, torture, destruction of people's homes and killing has continued after apartheid. Now the massacre is here too. Every year the Black Boers tell us to remember 1976 but they say nothing about the repression of our struggles after apartheid. (Abahlali 2012) Even laws that are formally “colour blind” can contribute to racialized governance if the people they target are predominantly black. This is the case with bylaws in Cape Town against “nuisances” such as begging and sleeping in public (Samora 2010). 10 It is true as well of the (proven unconstitutional) eviction law attempted in KwaZulu-Natal, the so-called “Slums Act” (Elimination and Prevention of Re-Emergence of Slums Act) brought in by the provincial government in 2007. The act brought provisions to clear “slums” through forced evic-

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tions. The Slums Act would in effect only target poor blacks. Indeed, pro-poor advocates such as AbM (see previous quote) suggest that poverty has been criminalized, and to be poor is to be denied full citizenship. It could also be said that to be poor is to be subjected to processes of racialization that are both spatially and institutionally experienced. Less obviously, the poor are racialized even through housing programs and policies that attempt to help them, but fail to challenge spatial legacies of racism and segregation. As we have seen, despite strong state interest in challenging racialized settlement patterns through its pro-poor public housing program, little progress has been made, demonstrating that racialized space can endure under democracy, as can racialized citizenship (Samara 2010). Race continues to “matter” in South Africa (MacDonald 2006), and while some argue that class has become more important in explaining inequality and exclusion (Seekings 2008), others insist that processes of racialization persist despite political and legal changes that have reduced (but certainly not, as already noted, eliminated) blatant acts of racism. “Racialization” can occur even when elites and rulers, like the majority, are black. Racialization needs to be understood as a process of marginalization, not a case of membership in a given biological category upon which institutional processes act in undifferentiated fashion. As such, explanations are needed for the continued production of regimes of racialized inequality and exclusion. For Murray, while the new democratic dispensation and the 1996 Constitution formally awards citizens’ rights, the fact that in practice many of the poor, who are also black, are criminalized and denied their rights calls into question and contradicts the postapartheid promise of inclusion of all people as citizens regardless of race (Murray 2008, 26). When pro-poor groups, such as AbM, articulate their marginalization in part in terms of racism, we can see another crack in the previously tight association between racial group and support for the anc. The “real” anc fought racism and stood for full citizenship for black South Africans, albeit in a “rainbow nation” of non-racialism. If poor blacks begin to feel that the anc perpetuates rather than fights the continued racism and racialization they face, willingness to vote against the anc may increase.

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C ON C LU S I ON S

The high rates of public protest in South Africa point to the country’s unique history and the painful contradictions and disappointments of contemporary political culture and economic conditions. Gender, generation, race, and class emerge as important in understanding the complex social world of political subjectivities expressed in protests and voting patterns. Middle-aged and older black women have both struggle memories and contemporary rewards from the state’s social welfare programs that underpin enduring affiliation with the anc government. Afrobarometer Surveys show a decrease in the proportion of people who have engaged in protest since 2000 up to 2011, and an increase in those who say they would “never” protest. Black South Africans, are however, far more likely to have engaged in a protest and less likely to say they would “never” protest than other groups. Poor people are also more likely to protest than others. People who protest are also more likely to try to contact their member of parliament or councillor, refuse to pay for services, or pursue other means of making their voices heard (Lavery 2012). In addition, in some quarters youth are seriously questioning the anc, expressing deep alienation and marginalization, a denial of citizenship: “We have no country,” writes AbM’s Zikode, already quoted in the introduction to this chapter. “This is not the democracy that the poor fought for. We must ask, are we citizens of this country? If we are not then who are we and where are we? ... We are on our own. We have no choice but to fight” (Zikode 2008, 113, 114). In terms of political subjectivity, then, race, gender, generation, and class interact in complex ways. While older black women seem to be currently holding their contradictory alliance to the anc together, it is a strain, and cynicism, especially about local government officials is high. There seems to be more tension and less political loyalty among youth, especially as expressed by pro-poor groups like AbM, although overall, black youth still appear to have high levels of confidence in both the president and the national government, unlike minority youth. Given the extremely high rates of youth unemployment, and the consequently high rate of dependence on the social welfare system by the poor, there could be serious implications for political subjectivities and protest when the current generation of grannies with their pensions passes away. While mothers will still be left with the

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child support grant, many, including young men, will be left without access to many (legal) means of livelihood support. Besides the protests, another indication that political change may be on the horizon in South Africa is the emergence of new political parties with potential to attract black voters. The Congress of the People (cope) was formed in 2008 by former anc members, and contested elections in 2009. After that election they held thirty out of the 400 seats in the National Assembly, the third largest number of seats after the anc (264 seats) and the da (67 seats) (Parliament of the Republic of South Africa n.d.). However, cope was virtually wiped out in the 2014 elections. More recently, Mamphela Ramphele, one of the original founders with Steve Biko of the Black Consciouness movement of the 1970s, and since community doctor, successful businesswoman, a managing director at the World Bank, and former vice chancellor of the University of Cape Town, has launched a political party called Agang.11 Agang slams the anc for corruption and mismanagement, and for failing to fulfill the dreams of the new South Africa. However, the embarrassing shambles of the da’s attempt to make Ramphele their presidential candidate scuppered any chance of Agang making waves in the 2014 election (Pillay 2014). The new party Economic Freedom Fighters led by Julius Malema garnered a surprising 6.35 per cent of the overall popular vote in the 2014 contest (Electoral Commission of South Africa 2014). Enthusiasm for the eff was unevenly distributed, however, with the highest levels of support showing in North-West Province (12.53 per cent), Gauteng (10.26 per cent), and Limpopo (10.22 per cent). The eff did much less well in KwaZulu-Natal and Msunduzi, where they polled only 1.97 per cent of the popular vote, the second lowest score in any province (Electoral Commission of South Africa 2014). With a strongly nationalist and populist message, Malema clearly strikes a chord with many of the people left behind in the new South Africa. Scholars are highly critical of the genuineness of the pro-poor message of the eff, suggesting it is “a populism of bluster and bling, an opportunistic demand for new ways of making resources accessible to upwardly mobile but politically out-of-favour youth” (Bundy 2014, 154). While it is too early to tell if these challenges to the anc from within the ranks of the black elite will have significant effects in the long term, the challenges do indicate cracks in unwavering support for the anc among black South Africans.

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South Africa may indeed be on the brink of a social and economic crisis. However, while discontent is on the rise, especially about the enduring poverty and marginalization of poor blacks, the 2014 election suggests it is unlikely that political upheaval is imminent. While political options may multiply and challenge the dominance of the anc, it will likely take many years for such challenges to seriously undermine the control of the anc and hence the social, economic, and political order that continues to replicate the inequalities of the past. Unfortunately, this likely means more painful struggles for day to day survival for the poor, especially poor blacks, with the right to the city curtailed or truncated on material, political, and symbolic terms. We also make a larger theoretical point. In part, the protests point to both the limitations and possibilities of a rights-based liberal democracy in addressing the inequalities of gender, race, and class, particularly in the current context of neoliberalism and globalization that so profoundly curtails this agenda, not only in South Africa, but worldwide. In the next chapter, we carry this further with discussion of rights based approaches to protest and social transformation, with a detailed focus on the concept of the right to the city.

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7 Conclusions: Women and the Right to the City I am proud of myself. I have managed to raise children on my own, and they are doing well at school, regardless of the living conditions at home. I also see myself as a strong woman. (Nthutukoville, #3)

I N TROD U C TI ON

This book has traversed a wide terrain of aspects of gender and urbanization, including histories of migration; contemporary experiences of health, housing, poverty, and livelihoods; household formations and intimate gender relations; impacts of government policies and the regime of constitutional rights; and dynamics of protest, political subjectivities, and citizenship. This final chapter draws these strands together to reach some overall conclusions by considering the concept of the “right to the city” in relation to the material presented. The first part of the chapter details the right to the city as a comprehensive, qualitative concept that encompasses a set of rights within it. This discussion includes how South Africa’s Constitution and emerging jurisprudence supports aspects of this set of rights. We also look at conditions overall for the urban poor in South Africa and whether or not their “right to the city” is being honoured. The sheer number of protests discussed in the last chapter is one indication that many remain excluded from the set of conditions that comprise the right to the city. For many poor South Africans, constitutionally protected rights to shelter, water, and work, among other rights, are violated on a daily basis. In this chapter, we return to the debates around “rights” and citizenship visited in earlier chapters but

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extend that discussion to embrace the broader issues of urbanization and justice for the poor in the context of neoliberalism and globalization. The second part of the chapter deals specifically with the implications for women, gender, and urbanization. This book as a whole has highlighted how women in the city face particularly gendered types of exclusion and denial of their right to the city, as well as some ambiguous privileges as women are targeted by the state as particularly “vulnerable.” What are the implications of the right to the city for women, and how can gender analysis contribute to the concept of the right to the city? The chapter concludes with a brief discussion of the implications of the South African case for thinking about the urbanizing global south in general, and the concept of the right to the city. T HE R I G HT TO THE C I T Y

The central question for advocates of the right to the city is about citizenship. Who has legitimate access as belonging to the city (Lefebvre 1996; Murray 2008, 26–7)? In South Africa, many of the urban poor are not seen as “legitimate” in this way. Illegally squatting on private land or in buildings, crowded into backyard shacks under often insecure tenure arrangements, or simply bedding down under a bridge, many of the urban poor do not “belong”: The ever-shifting interplay between material locations and legal signifiers renders ostensibly equal city dwellers legible as either legitimate city users (citizens, property owners, consumers, tenants and guests) or illegitimate occupiers of urban space (undocumented immigrants, trespassers, squatters or itinerant traders). Those who do not belong or are out of place are subject to removal and expulsion, exclusion and banishment. (Murray 2008, 18) Beyond this basic question of belonging and legitimacy as city residents, exercising the right to the city is also about “absorption into the mainstream of urban life” (Murray 2008, 18). The French philosopher and sociologist, Henri Lefebvre, who coined the concept of the right to the city in the 1970s, called this to “inhabit” the city (Lefebvre 1996, 109). As summarized and interpreted by Coggin and Pieterse, the right to the city is about:

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sharing in the fullness of urban life. The right to the city therefore requires meaningful access to the city and that which it offers. It consists of claims of habitation (to inhabit the city, to use its spaces and share in its spoils), appropriation (to be present in, to experience and make use of the fullness of the city) and participation (to imagine the city and to constitute its form, meaning and operation, through the practices of daily life). (Coggin and Pieterse 2012, 259) Many poor urban South Africans clearly do not share “in the fullness of urban life.” Besides having claims to “habitation” rejected through evictions, slum clearances, or arrests, they are also often barred from certain areas of the city, such as upscale malls, posh city squares, and gated suburbs, and hence cannot be said to enjoy “appropriation.” “Participation” is also often denied them, certainly left out of city planning exercises, but also denied meaningful participation in formal “invited spaces” such as town halls and ward level meetings, despite the strong emphasis on public participation in the Integrated Development Plans of cities. Indeed, as we saw in the last chapter, disillusionment with local government and a profound sense of not being heard by councillors and others meant to represent them is a main strand in the disaffection of the poor as expressed through protest. There is also a strong material basis to “inhabiting,” which involves access to work that provides a viable livelihood, adequate housing, and access to the basic services of clean water, energy, and sanitation: “In combination, they [work, housing and services] anchor urban residents into a relatively stable place in the sociocultural fabric of the city. The rootedness in place – linked as it is to the materiality of locality and a sense of belonging – enables urban residents to mobilize and tap into the kinds of social networks necessary for their material survival” (Murray 2008, 18). For many of the urban poor, vulnerability to eviction as “squatters” or tenants renders their “belonging” precarious, while access to work, housing, and services can also be disrupted through, for example, job losses or inability to pay water or electricity bills. High rates of unemployment and inadequate opportunities in the informal sector also mean that the majority of the urban poor have little or no hope for establishing a robust material base for urban habitation. For Murray, these conditions mean the urban poor are constantly struggling to be “less excluded” (Murray

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2008, 20), often participating as individuals or as part of a group in acts of protest that can be read as a demand for the right to city: occupying vacant buildings, squatting on land and building informal houses, illegally connecting to water pipes or electricity grids, or other forms of self-provisioning. Resisting “exclusion” is a strong theme running through how Abahlali baseMjondolo (AbM), the shack dwellers movement highlighted in the preceding chapter, articulates its struggles. AbM speaks of exclusion in physical terms, in terms of access to schools, decent living conditions and services, and in terms of political participation: Everybody knows that we are the people who do not count in this society. But the truth that must be faced up to is that we have been sentenced to permanent exclusion from this society. Over the years it has been made clear that the cities are not for us, that the good schools are not for us and that even the most basic human needs like toilets, electricity, safety from fire and safety from crime are not to be met for us. When we ask for these things we are presented as being unreasonable, too demanding and even as a threat to society. If we were considered as people that did count, as an equal part of society, then it would be obvious that the real threat to our society is that we have to live in mud and fire without toilets, without electricity, without enough taps and without dignity. Waiting for “delivery” will not liberate us from our life sentence. Sometimes “'delivery” does not come. When “delivery” does come it often makes things worse by forcing us into government shacks that are worse than the shacks that we have built ourselves and which are in human dumping grounds far outside of the cities. “Delivery” can be a way of formalising our exclusion from society. But we have not only been sentenced to permanent physical exclusion from society and its cities, schools, electricity, refuse removal and sewerage systems. Our life sentence has also removed us from the discussions that take place in society. Everyone knows about the repression that we have faced from the state and now, also, from the ruling party. Everyone knows about the years of arrests and beatings that we suffered at the hands of the police and then the attack on our movement in the Kennedy Road settlement. (Zikode and Nsibande 2010)

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While the poor struggle for “inclusion” in the city, for AbM, there is also articulation of their struggle as a radical call for fundamental economic and political transformation. This stance aligns well with understanding the right to the city as a challenge to unjust political and economic relations of power as articulated by Marcuse et al. (2009), and Harvey and Potter (2009). For Harvey and Potter, the real struggle in the right to the city is not only about access to what is there, but to the right to create the city we want and desire through collective action and social movements. The right to the city must be demanded and seized, claims Harvey, as it will not be given as a gift from the powerful to the marginalized (Harvey and Potter 2009, 44–9). These sentiments can be recognized in AbM’s calls for revolutionary change: It is warned that this is not about making small changes to policies. This is a class struggle. This is a struggle between the Haves and Don’t Haves. Our society can only be saved if the Don’t Haves win this struggle. If we lose this struggle everyone will have to live afraid forever. Everything will be broken everywhere … Our movement seeks to bring the government to the ground, to bring the institutions of government and the private sector to the ground. (Zikode 2008, 114, 115) Other scholars emphasize the right to inhabit the city as a challenge to spatial and economic patterns and structures of injustice. That is, the right to the city is about the right of all to inhabit urban space in a way that does not reproduce power relations of injustice, such as poverty, racism, or exposure to environmental hazards (Connolly and Steil 2009). This resonates with an environmental justice perspective, which helps us to understand the extreme marginalization of the poor in urban areas as a “crisis of justice” (Cock 2010, 43). This results from South Africa’s commitment to neoliberal economic growth within a globalizing context. This has led to dramatic shedding of better paying industrial jobs, structural unemployment for masses of the poor, vast wealth for the few, and environmentally destructive growth that produces toxic and dangerous environments where the poor must often reside. As we have seen in earlier chapters, patterns of urbanization in post-1994 South Africa continued the spatial legacy of apartheid through relegating the poor and the black to peripheral new townships, which are often poorly built and inadequately

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serviced, creating new “ghettos” of poverty and exclusion, or to illegal shanty towns and backyard shacks where they face daily environmental risks and hazards, as well as violence, crime, and poverty. The legacies of urban environmental racism linger in these geographies of cities, and as discussed in the previous chapter, new forms of racialization and criminalization continue to mark and marginalize the poor. The pattern for the rich and the middle class has been a trend towards gated communities, protected by private security firms, and serviced by upscale shopping centres. These are patterns seen elsewhere in urbanizing Africa (Murray and Myers 2006; Hansen and Vaa 2004). Despite these overall discouraging patterns and failures to promote the right to the city for the urban poor, South Africa does have some advantages compared to other African countries on these issues. A relatively strong economy and state institutions provide many aspects of formality including planning regimes, housing policy, rule of law, and infrastructure development that are not available in other African countries. It is this context in South Africa, especially the Constitution based on a Bill of Rights and a still relatively independent judicial system, which animates debates about rights-based claims for the poor and marginalized. In the next section, we explore how the discourse of the right to the city both resonates with and challenges the struggle of the poor and the marginalized to claim these “rights.”

“ RI GH T S ”

A N D THE R I G HT TO THE C I T Y

Scholars write both for and against rights-based approaches to social transformation and protest, as we have seen in chapter four, which focused particularly on gender justice. In a fascinating article from a primarily legal perspective, Coggin and Pieterse (2012) explore the relationship between South Africa’s constitutionally protected socioeconomic rights, and the city, where they argue citizens have the best chance of fulfilling those rights. By examining the Constitution and “rights-based litigation and judgements” (Coggin and Pieterse 2012, 257) they conclude that South Africa’s Constitution provides a strong basis to protect people’s right to the city: “It would therefore seem that the South African Constitution recognises and protects many of the constituent elements of the right to the city and that it is therefore possible to found the right within a purposive and holistic

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reading of the Constitution” (Coggin and Pieterse 2012, 264). Both the Constitution and the concept of the right to the city share the goal of social transformation, for example. The authors refer to the Constitution’s preamble and founding values proclaiming a vision of South Africa which “belongs to all who live in it, united in our diversity,” which strives “to improve the quality of life of all citizens and free the potential of each person” and which is founded on values of “human dignity, the achievement of equality and the advancement of human rights and freedoms,” “non-racialism and non-sexism” and “accountability, responsiveness and openness.” (Constitution of the Republic of South Africa 1996 (s1); Coggin and Pieterse 2012, 261) Coggin and Pieterse further identify a long list of rights protected in the Constitution that make up important aspects of the right to the city, such as (among others) equality rights, the rights to life and dignity, the right to security of person, the right to freedom movement, to trade and occupation, the right to adequate housing, the right to due legal process before eviction or demolishing of a home, and the “guarantee of ‘an environment that is not harmful to health and wellbeing’ … Together, these rights provide a powerful legal basis for claims of habitation … as well as a powerful contra weight to the hegemony of private property rights that underlies much of capitalist urban development discourse” (Coggin and Pieterse 2012, 263). Not only does the Constitution provide a strong legal basis for the right to the city, the authors go on to demonstrate that jurisprudence is also emerging to demonstrate that the urban poor can succeed in using rights-based claims, despite the highly contradictory context of protection for private property rights. For example, two high profile cases of eviction from central Johannesburg towers (City of Johannesburg v. Rand Properties, 2007; Occupiers of 51 Olivia Road and Berea Township v. City of Johannesburg, 2008) show that the poor can successfully claim the right not to be evicted without due notice, and also that their right to meaningful consultation before eviction can be upheld by the courts. These points are supported by Wilson, also from a legal perspective: “Simply put, the law has developed to the point where an eviction will not normally be authorized if it would result in homelessness. The state, at all levels, is required to develop policy

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and practice which caters for the need to provide shelter to people who are under threat of eviction, or which can prevent evictions altogether through the implementation of informal settlement upgrading” (Wilson 2011, 266). The state, including municipal government, is also required to have meaningful engagement with citizens and to treat people with dignity, for example in cases where eviction or relocation of people is unavoidable. As Wilson clarifies, evictions and relocations can still legally happen, but only through processes that protect the rights to dignity and shelter of inhabitants: Nothing in the law prohibits the state from implementing planning schemes of from vindicating immovable property. However, the means adopted in doing so are limited in the interests of poor people with no secure access to land. The law requires the state to implement planning legislation in a manner that is sensitive to the widespread poverty, inequality and vulnerability bequeathed by apartheid. Post-apartheid urban development must remedy the worst features of apartheid planning, not perpetuate them in the name of unrestrained capital accumulation. (Wilson 2011, 280) Parnell and Pieterse (2010), coming from the perspective of urban planning, are also supporters of using claims to rights as part of challenging the increasing poverty and marginalization of the urban poor within the context of neoliberal globalization: “a universal rights agenda can and should be fulfilled as much at the city-region scale as it is at the national scale” (Parnell and Pieterse 2010, 146). They go on to argue that strong state institutions are a necessity in order to uphold the critical rights-based agenda, and therefore the focus in South Africa should be on institutional reform, and addressing key blockages such as land availability for low income housing, and lack of institutional capacity to actually roll out constitutionally protected rights to the poor, such as free basic services. In this time of burgeoning social movements and protests, many groups and movements have utilized rights-based claims (Ballard et al. 2006b). As discussed in chapter four, not all scholars, however, support this strategy, whether we are talking about justice for the poor or for women. Desai warns, for example, that appeals to human rights and citizenship carry the danger of legitimizing the social order (Desai 2002). Gibson also cautions that appeals to the Constitution

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and human rights “cannot address the structural economic inequalities embedded in post-apartheid South African capitalism” (Gibson 2006, 6). Evidence of emergent jurisprudence noted above, however, seems to contradict this statement, with legal scholars arguing that the outcomes of court cases, particularly around eviction, show that the Constitution forces balancing the protection of private property rights with the rights of the poor and the commitment to transformation from the apartheid past. However, it can certainly be strongly argued that seeking this kind of balance will be an uphill, and likely only partially successful battle. Harvey also cautions against putting much trust in the promise of universal human rights, as a state can choose to recognize these or not depending on its interests. In the globalizing, neoliberal world, Harvey claims, the hegemonic conception of rights is fundamentally about the protection of private property, which in turn is the basis of capitalism. In this regime, Harvey argues, people the world over are struggling against globalization and the type of “rights” this allows them, which are always set against the bedrock of private property rights. The struggle for the right to the city must include a redefinition of rights (Harvey and Potter 2009, 44–9). Nonetheless, scholars and activists in South Africa still find efficacy in pursuing rights-based claims as a protest strategy and a key focus of citizenship, and rights claims by protest movements, including numerous court cases, are seen as a qualified success (Chirwa and Khoza 2005; Charlton and Kihato 2006). In chapter four, for example, the benchmark Grootboom case was discussed, wherein state responsibility to address the shelter rights of the very poor was established. AbM has also successfully utilized constitutional rights claims to housing and services, most notably winning a case in the Constitutional Court challenging the so-called “Slums Act” (Elimination and Prevention of Re-Emergence of Slums Act) brought in by the government of KwaZulu-Natal in 2007, which was found to be unconstitutional in its provisions to clear “slums” through forced evictions. Legal provisions and occasional victories for the poor in court provide a discourse of entitlement and moral rectitude, which combined with the narratives of the liberation struggle that promised a “better life for all,” creates powerful rallying cries for those left out of the “new South Africa” (Ballard et al. 2006b; Barchiesi 2006). Legal provisions and functioning state institutions are not something to be casually dis-

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carded, as they provide protection of the poor: “Institutional guarantees and rights can provide protection from state repression and sustain solidarity and a sense of morality in the absence of a discourse of seizing state power as the necessary condition of radical social transformation” (Barchiesi 2006, 237). We turn now to specific discussion of gender and women’s “right to the city” before making some general conclusions. G EN DE R A N D THE R I G HT TO THE C I T Y

The research presented in this book demonstrates that many aspects of the conditions necessary for the fulfillment of the right to the city are gendered. Beginning from historical patterns of migration to urban areas, we find that in South Africa while women have long left rural homes for better lives in urban areas, they have always done so under different conditions from men. These include different kinds of pressures from natal homes and prevailing cultural norms, and government policies and laws that often restricted women’s mobility and their access to income generation, jobs, and houses. In the 1980s these patterns shifted with the lifting of apartheid era restrictions on migration meaning more people, including women, began to fill new informal settlements and backyard shacks in and around urban areas. Often, and especially in our case study area of Msunduzi and more widely in KwaZulu-Natal, women fled violence in rural areas, ending up in urban areas in the early 1990s. The effects of this violence are strongly gendered as women were often abandoned by husbands, left with children to care for on their own, or suffered violence, rape, and other trauma that left lasting psychological wounds. Thus, the most basic element of the right to the city, the right to occupy a place there, is laden with a history of struggle and often trauma for poor South African women, just to arrive. Post-1994, we see these patterns changing. Rather than being explicitly denied access to urban housing as unmarried women, the new subsidized housing policy actually targets poor single women with dependents as beneficiaries, and the majority of recipients of the new township houses under the rdp are women. As we have seen, however, this positive move has come with contradictory outcomes. While women’s access to housing, and hence right to reside in the city have been enhanced, the new townships are mostly built on urban periph-

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eries far from income earning opportunities, and with often poor access to other urban amenities such as clinics, schools, shops, and financial services. In addition, while access to basic urban services such as water, sanitation, and electricity has been improved for many South Africans, these services have often been poorly constructed in the new rdp townships, and in many cases, new fee rates for the usage of services like water and electricity have curtailed, limited, or even eliminated people’s access. While many women feel a deep sense of pride and belonging through home ownership and the secure place in the city, they are also often caught in a cycle of poverty, and the new townships may be describe as feminized urban ghettos. Therefore, in the new rdp townships while part of women’s right to the city has been addressed in terms of access to housing – in Murray’s (2008) terms, they have become “legible” as legitimate city dwellers through their home ownership – other elements are missing including right to work and right to adequate services. Many other women reside in more precarious conditions in informal settlements. While these kinds of homes have historically figured importantly for women coming to cities where formal housing was not available to them, they were, and remain, dangerous and risky environments, where fires, poor sanitation, high levels of violence, and vulnerability to eviction contradict most elements of the right to the city. While government policy has shifted to formally commit to slum upgrading rather than clearances, in practice, shack dwellers, many of them women, remain vulnerable to eviction and the demolition of their homes and property by state authorities. Regardless of their vulnerability and poor living conditions, women in informal housing, such as those in Peace Valley 2 in our study, still express a strong sense of belonging in the city and the view that urban life is still better than what they left behind in rural areas. They imagine themselves as urban women, and hence are participating in modern life, full of pride in what they have accomplished, and committed to their lives in town, where they find all services (no matter how poor) to be better than what is available in rural areas. The most positive set of conditions prevail for women in upgraded houses in central locations, such as those in the ngo assisted self-help houses in Nthutukoville in our study. Well situated to rent out rooms and backyard shacks, with access to water borne sanitation, electricity, running water, and beautifully built homes, these women have the best chance to make a good life in the city for themselves and their children.

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All told, women across the different settlements we studied are enjoying access to some aspects of urban life. However, most poor women cannot be said to enjoy the full meaning of “habitation”: “to inhabit the city, to use its spaces and share in its spoils” (Coggin and Pieterse 2012, 259). While housing access and conditions vary across urban settlements, the urban poor in general, and women differentially, face very poor opportunities for work and informal livelihoods. This makes survival in the city precarious, and means that most poor households headed by women are surviving on government grants such as pensions, child support grants, and disability payments. While these welfare provisions do provide the means through which women and their families can stay in the city, and are progressive in acknowledging women’s caring roles, they do not provide the means for families to thrive and climb out of poverty. Welfare programs do not address the structural conditions that reproduce inequalities along race, gender, and class lines, and as such, are little more than stopgap measures in the face of a crisis of structural unemployment. This high dependence on welfare also has implications for women’s citizenship. Tied to the state for their survival in ways that most men are not means that while they are prepared to protest, most poor women remain committed to the anc government, despite what is widely seen as its failure to deliver on their promises for “a better life,” the poor performance of councillors and other local government actors, and widespread corruption and nepotism. While women exercise their citizenship through their right to vote, their qualification for state welfare support, their access to housing and other services, they do not enjoy their right to full participation in shaping their lives and the governance of the city. This is truncated by government failures to manage the economy to produce work, widespread mismanagement, and lack of genuine mechanisms for public participation in governance. In terms of the right to the city, most poor women cannot be said to have the right to “participation (to imagine the city and to constitute its form, meaning and operation, through the practices of daily life)” (Coggin and Pieterse 2012, 259). The final main finding in this book relates to the quality and implications of fraught gender relations in both public and private spaces. While female headed households have long been an important household form in urban South Africa, the phenomenon seems to be

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intensifying, and has become the main household type for poor, urban South Africa. Women are increasingly “on their own” in this way, that is, without male conjugal partners, although they may share homes and social network support with mothers, sisters, grown sons, and other natal family members. However, they think of themselves as doing things “for themselves,” and with this comes tremendous pride in their accomplishments as well as often intense bitterness and suffering caused from difficult past experiences with men they have loved. High rates of gender-based violence prevail, as does the exploitation by men of women (such as robbing them of pension or child support money, food, and household goods), abandonment by men of their children, and toxic levels of disillusionment, alienation, and despair for poor men. While female heads cherish their homes as safe havens, they remain vulnerable to violence and a hostile sociocultural regime in their homes and neighbourhoods that compromises their right to belong in the city as equal citizens who can enjoy “appropriation (to be present in, to experience and make use of the fullness of the city)” (Coggin and Pieterse 2012, 259). In the introduction to this book I asked: Does urban life offer new opportunities for personal development, gender equality, and freedom for low income women in the new South Africa? Are there new forms of gendered marginalization and danger shaping their lives? I think the answer to both of these questions is a qualified “yes.” Women are experiencing personal development and more gender equality in their access to housing and services compared to apartheid times. They value and exercise their right to vote, although they are strongly disillusioned and disappointed by local government actors and the overall state of the economy. They are also better supported by state welfare programs than before, allowing them to survive in urban areas despite lack of economic opportunities. These provisions help them live without male partners, in a context wherein living with a man has become fraught with danger, impoverishment, and disappointment. However, these positive trends for women are compromised by their continued poverty and marginalization, differential unemployment, poor education, ill health, and care burdens. So while new opportunities for women are found in urban areas, there are also new forms of gendered marginalization and danger shaping their lives. In the stories of poor urban women we see the positive impacts of some well-informed policies and laws, as well as the tenacity, bold-

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ness, and commitment of the women themselves to live successfully in cities and raise their families well. But we see also the incomplete reach and success of state policies to promote gender justice in the face of prevailing cultural norms and practices, dysfunctional and disordered gender relations, and the structural conditions of high unemployment, enduring poverty, and stark levels of inequality along gender, race, and class lines. C ON C LU S I ON S

The urbanizing global south is raising widespread concern in international organizations such as the un, human rights groups, and environmental groups. Rapid urbanization is resulting in dangerous and unhealthy conditions in which the vast majority of the new urban dwellers live. Human rights to dignity, food, water, and adequate shelter are violated on a daily basis in most of the urban slums of the global south. Concern is also high regarding the ability of cities and national governments to cope with huge demands on infrastructure, energy supplies, and land that is brought by this “last migration” (Saunders 2010). The concept of the right to city allows us to consider this urbanization as both a local and a global issue, a process that has both national and global causes and dynamics. The concept points to the overarching processes of globalization and the spread of neoliberalism that is linked to the intensification of the exploitation of resources in the global south by multinational interests, and constraints on states to promote policies that protect the poor and enhance social development locally (Harvey and Potter 2009). The right to the city idea captures both the inevitability of this last wave of migration, but also the desire to imagine urban life for the poor as just, safe, healthy, and politically empowered. All over the global south, rural economies are collapsing for the poor, as former subsistence and peasant agricultural land comes under commercial agriculture or is appropriated and poisoned by large-scale mining activities. A process already well advanced in Central and South America, now India, and increasingly countries in Africa, face these same pressures that push the rural poor to migrate to cities. Rural dwellers themselves, especially young people, also desire the modern life available in urban areas, and are attracted by the promise of jobs, cultural production, and greater personal freedoms. In many, if not most cases, urban gov-

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ernments are profoundly unprepared both physically and institutionally for this influx, and are unable to prevent the emergence of massive slum settlements, and informal processes of self-provisioning in services such as water delivery, sanitation, and security, that are generally sorely inadequate, often dangerous, and environmentally destructive. India, for example, faces huge institutional obstacles to dealing effectively with its massive slums (Roy 2009), while Nigeria has little hope of addressing the chaos of Lagos, given extremely weak governance structures, a desperate lack of human capital, and entrenched informality and criminality in everything from water provision to transportation (Gandy 2006). However, although these processes at the very general level can be said to be common across the world, the South Africa story presents some particularities that offer rays of hope for a different kind of urban future. South Africa is subject to the pressures of globalization and neoliberalism as elsewhere. It also faces extreme environmental challenges, including being a water scarce country and having a high reliance on polluting and otherwise environmentally destructive industries such as mining and coal power electricity generation. However, it also enjoys a legacy of strong government institutions, and relatively rich human resources in the fields of planning, environmental management, policy expertise, and the human sciences. South Africa often has excellent government policies, including in terms of gender issues, and its Constitution is widely recognized as among the most enlightened in the world. The country also has a strong civil society, ngo sector, and an active citizenry, loudly agitating for the right to a better life. These qualities have allowed important advances for the urban poor, providing a basis of legitimacy and a language of entitlement and justice that is not always simply squashed through government brutality, or trumped by the interests of private capital and the protection of private property. As we have seen, important battles for the poor have been won in South Africa’s courts, supporting their right to the city, as well as broader socioeconomic rights. While current political conditions of breathtaking corruption and mismanagement and incidents of state brutality such as at Marikana mine in 2012 are profoundly discouraging, we should not lose sight of the positive qualities in South Africa that can serve to promote the struggle for the right to the city for the poor, including women.

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7 Notes

I NT ROD U C T I ON

1 The late apartheid racial designations are still in widespread use both colloquially and officially by Statistics South Africa. I use these categories without in any way accepting any essential meaning to the terms. I use the lower case (e.g., black, white, coloured) except when the reference is to a geographical origin (e.g., European, Indian). African is usually taken to be synonymous with black, although for political reasons, non-whites of all origin sometimes identify that way. 2 See un-Habitat, “Our Mission,” un-Habitat: For a Better Urban Future. Accessed 7 September 2013. http://www.unhabitat.org/categories.asp?catid=10. 3 South African figures show a slight decline in the overall percentage of people living in informal settlements, from 16.2 per cent in 1996 to 13.6 per cent in 2011 (Statistics South Africa 2012a, fig. 3.46, 57). 4 “Housing,” South African Government Information. Accessed 6 March 2013. http://www.info.gov.za/aboutsa/housing.htm. 5 There have been some projects related to improving building materials, energy and water conservation, and waste management and recycling in the new townships, but these have not always lasted or worked well (Irurah and Boshoff 2003). See also Pieterse 2010a for accounts of sustainable urban developments in the Cape Town area. 6 The 2011 Census reports the 2011 municipal population at 618,536 up from 552,837 in 2001 (Statistics South Africa 2012c, 6). 7 The per capital income in 2010 for Msunduzi was R 15,634, R 22,593 for metro areas, and R 15,136 for South Africa as a whole (John 2012, 15). 8 This project was funded by the International Development Research Centre (idrc) of Canada (2004–07).

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Notes to pages 15–23

9 For Survey 1, we also sampled in Ward 10 in Acacia Park, a lower middle class subsidized rental complex, for comparison across class. Data from that neighbourhood are included only in figure 2.2 in chapter two. 10 Sample areas were selected in wards in which we were able to obtain approval for entry from the Ward Councillor, and in areas known not to be overly dangerous to ensure the safe access of the research team. Once the areas had been selected, aerial photography was used to randomly select particular households to survey. Hence, while the sampling of neighbourhoods may not be random, we remain confident that they are representative of the major types of living environments available to the poor in Msunduzi. 11 This phase of the research was done in collaboration with the Built Environment Support Group (besg), who provided the major research assistant, Nombuso Masinga. Ms. Masinga conducted the interviews in isiZulu, and translated and transcribed the interviews. besg also provided contacts to gain entry into Nthutukoville and Peace Valley 2, while Melanie Duplessis of the ngo Reach Out assisted with contacts in Ambleton / France to identify interview participants. 12 This phase of the research was (and is) supported by Queen’s University through the Gender and Housing in South Africa project (2007-2010), and by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council (Canada) through The Right to the City in South Africa: Female-Headed Households, Housing and Protest project (2011–2016). 13 All interview participants identified as amaZulu with isiZulu as their home language. Census 2011 data for Msunduzi reports the following home language groups: 71 per cent isiZulu; 18.7 per cent English; 1.9 per cent Afrikaans; 1.8 per cent isiXhosa; 1.5 per cent Sesotho; and 1 per cent Ndebele (Statistics South Africa n.d. Statistics by Place, Msunduzi). So while there is some diversity in the black African population, it identifies overwhelmingly as amaZulu. 14 In this I am grateful to Nombuso Masinga who assisted me in the field, conducting the interviews with the twenty-nine female heads of households in isiZulu, translating and preparing transcripts of the interview data, and assisting me in interpreting the women’s words. 15 Queer contributions to gender theory are placed to one side in the writing of this book. African feminists have questioned the relevance of western feminism’s focus on sexuality (Arnfred and Ampofo 2009; McFadden 1996; Zinanga 1996) for African women. Understandably nervous about the legacies of the hypersexualization of African women in the colonial gaze, as well as a sense that sexuality studies are decadent in contexts where extensive

Notes to pages 24–53

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poverty and exploitation remain unsolved, sexuality studies have nevertheless become a serious part of African feminism (see for example, two special issues of Feminist Africa in 2005 and 2012). Queer perspectives critique the way society and culture insist on a sex/gender binary, which assumes biology (sex) as obvious, pre-social and fixed, and tends to restrict biological and social categories to two sets (male (man-masculine) and female (woman-feminine)). Also assumed is a norm of heterosexuality. Feminists claimed these social conceptions ignored or rendered deviant other bodies and gendered identities such as transgendered, transsexual, queer, lesbian, gay, bisexual, and hermaphrodite (Butler 1990). These debates are hardly solved, and research that focuses on bodies and “non-normative” sexualities, including in the Southern African region, continue to produce important insights not only about sexed and gendered minorities, but also into the hegemonic operation of the dominant sex/gender system including compulsory hetereosexuality, as part of broader patriarchal and capitalist systems (Epprecht 2004). 16 The 2011 Census found that 43.8 per cent of Black African households were headed by women (Statistics South Africa 2012a). The South African Institute for Race Relations found that as of 2010, 41.9 per cent of Black African children were living with their mother only, and only 28 per cent lived with both mother and father (South African Institute for Race Relations 2012, 77). 17 See Arnfred 2011, Gasa 2007 and multiple volumes of Agenda, Feminist Africa, and the Southern African Feminist Review. C H A PT E R ONE

1 Mpumulanga, established in 1968, was to be a “model” African township within the Bantustan system, serving the labour needs of the industrial area Hammarsdale (between Pietermaritzburg and Durban) and administered by the Department of Bantu Administration (Bonnin 2000, 304–305). 2 This material on Nthutukoville relies on Ndinda 2003, discussions with Cameron Brisbane, the Executive Director of besg, and our own interviews with ten women residents in February and March 2010. 3 Apparently many of the new rdp townships in South Africa are located on land that had originally been acquired for township development under apartheid (Pithouse 2009, 7).

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Notes to pages 57–70 C H A PT E R T WO

1 This chapter, while extensively updated and revised, relies heavily on Goebel, Dodson, and Hill 2010. 2 At the provincial level, a number of provinces, including KwaZulu-Natal are showing net losses of population due to out-migration. The Western Cape and Gauteng Province are experiencing the highest numbers of in-migration and hence population growth (Statistics South Africa 2012a, 27). 3 “Housing,” South African Government Information. Accessed 6 March 2013. http://www.info.gov.za/aboutsa/housing.htm. 4 Ibid. 5 All names of interview participants are pseudonyms. Participants have given permission to have their photographs reproduced. 6 Note for table 2.1. An earlier version of this table, without Census 2011 data, appears in Goebel, Dodson, and Hill 2010 and Goebel and Dodson 2011. See also note 8. 7 KwaZulu-Natal has the highest overall hiv prevalence rates in South Africa, with 2008 figures estimating 15.8 per cent for the province, and a rate of 39.5 per cent of antenatal clinic attendees for 2010 (“South Africa hiv and aids Statistics.” Accessed 18 March 2013. http://www.avert.org/south-africahiv-aids-statistics.htm.). 8 The Community Survey, unlike the Census 2001, does not count traditional and other housing, and hence the figures for formal and informal housing do not add up to 100. An earlier version of this table, without Census 2011 data, appeared in Goebel, Dodson, and Hill 2010. 9 For simplicity’s sake all types of flush toilets (sewer, septic, and onsite drainage) are combined, and vented and unvented pit latrines are combined in the table. These data were reported in Goebel, Dodson, and Hill 2010. 10 Those interested in more detailed health findings are encouraged to consult Goebel, Dodson, and Hill 2010. 11 Other headed households include male headed and jointly headed households. Of all households in Survey 1, 88.4 per cent were headed by a parent or parents, 6.9 per cent by a grandparent, and 4.7 per cent headed by a child. 12 Respondents were asked if household members were experiencing any of the following incidences of illness and disease at the time of the survey: bloody diarrhoea (>3 loose stools a day), watery diarrhoea (>3 loose stools a day), asthma (diagnosed by health professional), TB (diagnosed by health professional), scabies (diagnosed by health professional), cough with spu-

Notes to pages 73–86

13

14 15

16

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tum for more than three weeks (observed by household head), and sores on legs. The most commonly recorded incidences were watery diarrhoea and asthma. In ohhs the “head” was counted the oldest resident male. These data have been previously published in Goebel, Dodson, and Hill 2010 and Goebel and Dodson 2011. These data have been previously published in Goebel, Dodson, and Hill 2010. Prishani Naidoo (2011) queries the use of the phrase “feminization of poverty,” as it seems to imply that poverty has become more feminine, as if somehow it was more gender neutral in the past. She also cautions against thinking of the rise in numbers of female headed households as only a negative sign of the female nature of poverty; rather it can indicate a set of positive choices made by women seeking to deal as best as they can with troubling situations of poverty and gender relations. This point is supported by material presented in chapter five. For Msunduzi as a whole, it is estimated that in 2001 44.5 per cent of all households were female headed and in 2011 this rose to 45.2 per cent (Statistics South Africa 2012a: 30). C H A PT E R T H RE E

1 This chapter, while extensively updated and revised, relies heavily on Goebel and Dodson 2011. Belinda Dodson has kindly given her permission to use our article for this chapter. 2 See Goebel 2007 for a fuller discussion of urban conditions and housing policy. 3 Recall the historical narration of chapter one. 4 Section 21 companies are not-for-profit associations under Section 21 of the Companies Act (Act 61 of 1973, as amended). 5 For another local example of evictions, see “Municipality Fails to Find Accommodation for 300 Evicted Tenants,” The Witness (Pietermaritzburg, SA), 2 August 2007. 6 The term “first economy” is used in South Africa to refer to the formal economy of registered commerce, while the “second economy” refers to the informal economy where unregistered buying and selling of homes, goods, and services occurs. 7 Detailed analysis of economic policy is beyond the scope of this chapter. Briefly, in 1996 the government brought in the Growth, Employment and

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Redistribution program (gear), widely criticized as promoting neoliberal, macroeconomic policies that hurt the poor through increased unemployment and limiting welfare functions of the state (Bond 2000; Hart 2002; Marais 2001; Municipal Services Project (msp); McDonald 2007). gear was replaced in 2006 by the Accelerated and Shared Growth Initiative for South Africa (asgisa), which broadly maintains the same neoliberal, market based macroeconomic strategy for national development, while acknowledging the need to address socioeconomic inequality by bringing the poor into the mainstream economy. asgisa identifies housing as one of the key areas for government expenditure. 8 Lemanksi (2011) notes, too, that in rare cases where rdp housing has been built in better locations, the houses have developed value on the housing market, and are sometimes purchased by non-resident landlords who turn them into rental properties. However, even these better located rdp houses do not sell for enough money for the sellers to “move-up” on the housing ladder. A more stable option is that such better located rdp neighbourhoods provide opportunities to resident owners to rent out rooms or backyard shacks and hence enhance (to a small extent) meagre incomes (see also Lemanski 2009). 9 See also doh 2000 and doh 2005. 10 The South African Homeless People’s Federation (sahpf), is a grassroots organization with over 85 per cent female membership, and mostly female leadership. Its flagship project, Victoria Mxenge, in which a local group of women succeeded in building their own homes as well as a strong local community in the Cape Town area, is often cited as a big success for selfhelp housing (Baumann et al. 2004; Newton 2012). The sahpf transformed into the Federation of the Urban and Rural Poor (fedup) in 2005. Information on this organization is available at http://www.courc.co.za/fedup.html and http://sasdialliance.org.za/about/fedup/ (accessed 10 July 2013). C H A PT E R FOU R

1 This chapter draws on sections of Goebel 2011. 2 Women have long been involved in illegal occupations such as beer brewing and different forms of transactional sex (Bonner 1990; Bradford 1987; Dunkle et al. 2004). These are tried and true ways of accessing male wages, but carry many costs – social disapproval, police crackdowns, disrupted family life, stds, etc. Mark Hunter (2010a) also documents the importance of ‘gifts’ from multiple boyfriends, especially for younger women. We did not

Notes to pages 108–31

3 4

5

6

7

8

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explore these activities in our research but acknowledge their importance to female livelihoods. Some of these data have been previously published in Goebel and Dodson (2011) and Goebel, Dodson, and Hill (2010). Committee of Inquiry into a Comprehensive System of Social Security in South Africa. 2002. Transforming the Present-Protecting the Future. South African Regional Poverty Network. http://www.sarpn.org/CountryPoverty Papers/SouthAfrica/march2002/report/Transforming_the_Present.pdf. The 2009 monthly rates for social grants were: old age pension R 1,010 (usd 136); disability grant, R 1,010; war veterans grant, R 1,010; child support grant, R 240 (usd 32.30) per child; foster care grant, R 680 (usd 91.55); and care-dependency grant, R 1,010. All exchange rates calculated on 23 July 2010. For comparison, the government set minimum monthly wage for full-time domestic workers in 2009 was R 1,340.95 (usd 180.36). For monthly social grant rates, see Tolsi 2010. “Pensioners Get R70 More, Children Only R10, But Grant Extended up to Child’s 18th Birthday,” The Witness, 18 February 2010. http://www.witness.co.za/index.php?showcontent&global[_id]=36020. See also Tolsi 2010. Patterns in western societies are changing rapidly with decreased rates of marriage and increasing rates of divorce. In the United Kingdom, for example, numbers of first marriages halved between 1970 and 2000, while divorces have increased by nearly 150 per cent (Benson 2010). Using statistics from 2006, the United Nations Development Program (undp) quotes estimated annual female earned income at usd 5,647; for males it is usd 12,637. (Human Development Indices, 39). http://hdr.undp .org/en/media/hdi_2008_EN_Tables.pdf. Accessed on 23 February 2011). Indeed, in some fhhs, wages earned by sons can figure importantly in household well-being. C H A PT E R F I VE

1 Gogo S. France, #15. Response to the question: “If you do not have a relationship with the father(s) of your children, do you hope to meet someone new? If so, what kind of a relationship would you want (casual, formal [i.e. get married])? See box 5.1 for profile. 2 A few sections in this chapter draw on Goebel 2011. 3 “Malema to Appeal Hate-Speech Ruling,” Mail and Guardian, 15 March 2010. http://www.mg.co.za/article/2010-03-15-malema-to-appeal-hatespeech-ruling.

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Notes to pages 132–165

4 Charles Molole, Matuma Letsoalo, and Mmanaledi Mataboge, “anc Youth League agrees to dump Malema,” Mail and Guardian, 4 January 2013. http://mg.co.za/article/2013-01-04-00-youth-league-agrees-to-dump-malema. 5 France, #17. Response to the question: “Does being a female household head affect your status in the community at all? Please explain.” 6 Peace Valley 2, #29. Response to the question: “Does being a female household head affect your feelings about yourself as a woman and as a person in your family and community? Please explain.” 7 Response to the question: “Does the father(s) of the child(ren) living here have any contact or provide any support for the children or you and your family (e.g. financial, gifts, emotional connection, etc.)? If so, please explain.” C H A PT E R SI X

1 Parts of this chapter draw on Goebel 2011, including the interview material with Zodwa Nsibande which was published in that article. 2 See for example Polgreen 2012. 3 For one example, Mawethu Steven, a leader of the Association of Mineworkers and Construction Union, was shot dead on 11 May 2013. He was scheduled to give evidence at the Farlam commission of inquiry into the Marikana killings. See Evans 2013. 4 See for example, Keepile 2010. The Centre for Civil Society at the University of KwaZulu-Natal in Durban keeps a South African Protest Observatory in which all protests of any type that are reported in news services are compiled. See Centre for Civil Society. n.d. “Analysis.” http://ccs.ukzn.ac.za /default.asp?2,40. Public protests over service delivery continue amid many other types of protests. 5 cosatu leaders, however, have particularly criticized neoliberal policies that they blame for the massive job losses since 1994, and consistently identified as socialist. cosatu’s own longitudinal research with its worker members also shows declining support for the idea that workers’ interests are best served through the alliance with the anc, and about one fifth of members think cosatu should not be aligned with any political party (Buhlungu and Tschoaedi 2012). 6 Afrobarometer. 2013a. “Afrobarometer Online Data Analysis: Round 5 (2010–12),” Afrobarometer. http://www.jdsurvey.net/afro/AnalizeIndex.jsp. 7 Afrobarometer 2011 (Round 5) survey results for South Africa seem to slightly contradict this finding. Their results show about 64 per cent of South Africans approved of the President, with the age group of eighteen to

Notes to pages 170–6

8

9 10 11

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twenty-five year olds having the highest approval of the President at 70 per cent, with only 56 per cent of over fifty year olds claiming such approval (Graham and Alpin 2012; Afrobarometer 2013). For one stark example of continued racial privilege for whites, the most recent labour statistics released by Statistics South Africa for the second quartile of 2011 indicate the unemployment rate for the racial groups as follows: Black/African: 30 per cent; Coloureds: 23.1 per cent; Indian/Asians: 10.8 per cent; and Whites: 5 per cent. (Statistics South Africa 2011). See Abahlali’s website for details of clashes with the police (http://abahlali .org). It must be noted that white and “coloured” street people are to be found on the urban streets of South Africa, but are a tiny minority. Staff Reporter. “Ramphele Announces New Political Platform, Agang,” Mail and Guardian, 18 February 2013. http://mg.co.za/article/2013-02-18-ramphele-announces-new-political-platform-agang.

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7 References

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Introduction 233

7 Index

AIDS. See HIV/AIDS

Abahlali baseMjondolo (AbM): Anti-Eviction Campaign, 91, 154–5, 159; on citizenship, 151, 181–2; and gender, 122, 159–60; Kennedy Road, 152–3, 157, 172, 181; on racism, 170, 172–4; rights-based claim, 186; and voting, 163–4, 169–70; on welfare, 165–6, 181. See also protest Accelerated and Shared Growth Initiative for South Africa (ASGISA), 86, 197–8n7 affirmative action. See race African Food Security Urban Network (AFSUN), 14. See also food African National Congress (ANC): and the anti-apartheid struggle, 39, 158; competing ideologies within, 82, 86, 109, 111; declining popularity, 151, 163–5, 169, 174–7; factionalism, 131–2; failure of, 7, 11, 86, 173, 189; loyalty to, 49, 155–8, 161–3, 167–8, 175, 189; role in the Natal War, 43, 44–5, 47–9, 53; socialism, 11,

152–3, 200n5; welfare based approaches by, 91, 109–11, 155; well-being under, 5, 6–13, 111–12 African National Congress Women’s League, 38 Agang, 176 age. See generational difference agriculture. See food Ambleton/“France,” 16–7, 53, 95; conditions, 55, 67, 75–8, 100–1 Amnesty International, 152 Anti-Privatization Forum, 154 apartheid: addressing the legacies of, 8, 11, 87–8, 92, 118–20, 185–6; housing policy, 14, 34–8, 40, 42–3, 85, 195n1; spatial legacies, 5–7, 12–3, 53, 85–6, 95, 102, 182–3, 195n3; and racial discourse, 170, 193n1 Ash Road, 67, 73 Ashdown, 42–3 “buffer zones,” 8, 12 Basic Income Grant (BIG), 108 belonging: and adequate housing, 87, 92, 101–2; contradictory sense

234

of, 188, 190; in the city, 26–7, 99–100, 141, 179–80; for men vs. women, 121, 161. See also right to the city Black Consciousness Movement, 176 Black Economic Empowerment (BEE), 84, 170 Bill of Rights. See Constitution Biko, Steve, 176 born frees, 164 boycotts, 37, 44, 154, 163, 169 Breaking New Ground (BNG), 11, 81, 85–8; criticism of, 91–3 Built Environment Support Group (BESG), 52–4, 89–92, 98–9 Buthelezi, Chief, 33, 44–5, 47, 48 Cape Town, 9–10, 36–7, 198n10; evictions, 152–3; racialization of the poor, 172–3 capitalism. See neoliberalism children: care of, 34, 37–8, 113–15, 144, 195n16; as caregivers, 71, 98; rape of, 55, 142. See also motherhood Child Support Grant (CSG), 105, 109, 111, 135, 137; criticism of, 165–6; gender and, 108, 116–17, 124 Cinderella Park, 67, 73 citizenship: as consumption, 154–5, 161–3; “deep citizenship,” 86; gendering, 28, 118, 120–2, 125, 161, 189; generational differences regarding, 161–3, 167, 175; and the poor, 151, 172–4, 179–81; protests for full, 143, 156, 166; and race, 168–70, 174; and the

Index

right to the city, 103, 179; welfare and, 111, 167 civil war. See Natal War class. See poverty class struggle. See protest colonial era, 12, 30–3; ethnic consciousness, 47; in Msunduzi, 41–3 commuting. See Urban Peripheries Congress of the People (COPE), 176 Constitution, The: contradictions in, 82, 120–3, 130–1, 186; gender provisions in, 23, 27–8, 121, 192; housing provision, 7, 23, 28, 59, 92, 118–20; intersection of gender and housing in, 103; and the right to the city, 183–6; socioeconomic rights/second generation rights in, 118–20, 123, 126, 184. See also rights discourse; citizenship construction. See People’s Housing Process Congress of South African Trade Unions (COSATU), 43, 155, 164, 200n5 crime, 4, 7, 55, 59, 190; policy on, 85–6. See also masculinity corruption, 5, 88–9, 91–2, 157; protests vs., 148, 150–2 culture: consumer, 140; hegemonic, 16, 19, 24; popular, 129–30; of protest, 151, 175. See also tradition democracy: limits of rights-based, 86, 124, 126, 177; substantive, 118. See also New South Africa Democratic Alliance (DA), 132, 164, 168, 176

Index

Department of Housing (DOH), 81–6 dignity: calls to live in, 153, 165–7, 181; as a right, 126, 184–5, 191 disability grant, 108, 109–10, 199n5 divorce, 93, 136–7, 199n7 Dlamini, Bathabile O., 110, 112 domestic wage labour, 31, 33, 37–8, 41–2, 199n5 East London, 35–6, 39–40, 87, 117 Economic Freedom Fighters (EFF), 131–2, 170, 176 economy, 9–10, 13–4, 86–7, 183, 189–90, 197n6; political, 22, 25, 111, 145; rural, 30–2, 56. See also informal economies Edendale, 41–3, 48 education, 4, 56; and employment, 90, 164; right to, 118, 120; women’s level of, 6, 64, 73, 132 Elandskop, 73 election (2014), 131–2, 157, 164, 168, 176–7 electricity, 63–6; and health, 68; cutoffs, 154, 158, 161–3 Electricity Action Group (EAG), 166–7 employment, 33, 105; opportunity, 4, 90; policy, 86, 150, 155, 172, 197n7; proximity to, 13, 43, 76–7, 85; women, 35, 73, 95, 104, 105, 112, 118. See also unemployment environment: damage to, 5–9, 67, 192–2; health risks, 42, 55, 63–4, 183; justice perspectives, 4–5, 11, 26–7, 182, 184; and racism, 7, 43, 79, 182–3 ethics, 20

235

evictions, 92, 152–3, 180, 197n5; policy on, 88, 173, 184–6; and women, 36, 160 family: “nuclear,” 33–5, 146; state conceptions of, 110, 112, 116–18; support, 99–100, 141; urban African, 34, 37–8, 45, 105, 113–14, 96–7 fatherhood. See masculinity Federation of South African Women, 38 Federation of the Urban and Rural Poor (FEDUP), 5, 88–9, 198n10 female headed households (FHH), 16, 24–5, 56, 77, 96, 113, 188–90, 195n16, 197n16; burden of care, 71, 73, 95, 140; empowerment/pride, 19, 90–1, 141, 143–4; history, 34–8, 40, 42; missing man view of, 24, 114, 146; negative views of, 111, 142; and poverty, 15, 73–5, 94, 96; as property owners, 97, 99, 100; relationship to the state, 105, 111, 117–18, 121, 158; right to the city, 79, 127, 187–90. See also housing policy feminism, 22–5, 38–9; backlash against, 129–31, 132; depoliticization of, 23, 25, 123 feminist analysis, 19–20, 22–5, 122–6, 159–61, 194n15; on the “crisis” of gender relations, 28, 130–1, 147. See also masculinity food: preparation, 65; security, 13, 55–6, 100, 110–11, 114 foster care grant, 135, 199n5 “France.” See Ambleton/“France” freehold tenure. See home ownership

236

gender discrimination, 75, 90, 102, 114, 122, 129–32, 190; during apartheid, 34–6, 38, 40; during colonial era, 31–4; in housing policy, 24, 82–3, 88–9, 92–3, 121, 123; and labour, 30–1, 33, 90, 95, 111, 158–9. See also masculinity; sexism gender relations: feminist theory, 20–4; fractured, 114–15, 128, 133, 135, 137–40, 144–6, 189–90; patterns of male dominance in, 30–3, 128–32, 143, 146–7, 158–9; policy and, 90, 92–3, 117; transformations, 30–4, 38, 49–51, 56, 113 gender justice, 130–2, 190–1; and the right to the city, 27, 94, 121–5 generational difference: hierarchies, 25, 30–1, 47; view of the ANC, 161–5, 167–8, 175; view of love, 135, 137–40, 143, 145–7. See also grandmothers ghettos, 9, 182–3; feminized urban, 132, 188 globalization, 5, 10–1, 110, 125, 177, 191–2; movements against, 150, 155–6, 185–6 government. See African National Congress grandmothers, 105, 108, 114, 161, 196n11; reliance on, 117, 175. See also generational difference; pensions grants. See welfare Grootboom case, 123, 186 Group Areas Act, 12, 43 Growth, Employment and Redistribution (GEAR), 86, 155, 197–8n7

Index HIV/AIDS, 65, 68–9, 108, 112, 114,

129, 196n7; burden of care, 6, 71–2, 140, 160; and intimacy, 139–40; stigma, 98–9 heath risks, 42, 55, 74, 196n12; environmental, 63, 65, 100–1, 182–3, 188; social determinants of, 64, 69–71, 75–7. See also HIV/AIDS; health care health care, 55, 57, 65, 70–1, 74; right to, 120, 167, 184 home ownership: and citizenship, 87, 161, 186, 188; economic value, 86–7, 98–9, 198n8; and gender, 40, 70, 97; social and symbolic value, 89–90, 99–100, 141–2. See also housing policy household: composition, 58, 77, 96–7, 105; vs. family, 113–14. See also female headed household; other headed household housing: backlogs, 59, 94–5, 157; design, 93, 95, 102; RDP, 55, 67–8, 81, 83–7, 99, 198n8; right to “adequate,” 7, 95, 118–20, 180, 184–85; upgrades, 53, 67, 188. See also housing policy; informal settlements housing policy, 7–11, 58–9, 81, 91, 171, 192, 197n7; apartheid era, 14, 34–8, 42–3, 85, 195n1; and the environment, 9; and gender, 21–3, 28, 56, 80–6, 92–7, 102, 123–4, 126–7, 161, 187; inheritance, 98–9; and poverty, 10–1, 94, 174, 182–3, 188; problems, 11, 12–13, 123, 166; progressive elements, 126–7, 183–5, 190–1; selfhelp approaches in, 40, 82, 88,

Index

89–91; suggestions for improving, 100, 102. See also housing; informal settlements identity documents, 108–9 ilobolo. See marriage Imbali, 36, 43 Indians: employment, 201n8; and residential patterns, 8, 42; and voting, 164, 168–9 inheritance, 93, 98–100, 102, 113 Inkatha Freedom Party, 32–3, 44–5, 47–9, 50. See also Natal War informal economies, 10, 104–5, 197n6; beer brewing, 33, 35, 198n3; transactional sex, 34, 198n3; renting, 37, 39–40, 91, 101–2 informal settlements, 3–4, 7–9, 12–13, 16, 52–3, 59, 64, 94–5, 193n3; and citizenship, 27, 179–80; conditions, 40, 42–3, 56, 59, 66–7, 99–101, 129, 188–9; evictions from, 53, 89, 123, 153, 173–4, 184–5; government approach to, 7, 59, 61, 63, 88, 91, 191–2; history of, 32–5, 38, 53–4, 187; movement from RDP houses to, 85, 87. See also housing policy infrastructure, 8–9, 14, 40, 59, 84–5; and citizenship, 154; delays in improving, 68, 79, 89; improvement, 55, 183. See also housing; service delivery Integrated Development Plan (IDP), 94–5, 180 intersectionality, 22–3, 28, 175 intimacy, 31–2, 147; disruptions, 55, 134, 135; geography of 139–40. See also love; sex

237

Johannesburg, 8–9, 33–4, 58, 184 justice: environmental, 4–5, 9, 11, 26–7, 182, 184; gender, 23, 27, 28, 103, 122–5, 129–30, 190–1; for the poor, 151, 153, 166–7, 171–2, 192. See also right to the city Kennedy Road. See Abahlali baseMjondolo Landless People’s Movement, 91, 163 Lefebvre, Henri. See right to the city Local Health Commission, 42–3 love, 128, 133, 135, 138–40, 143, 190. See also intimacy; marriage; sex Mainstreaming Gender in the Housing and Human Settlement Sector (MGHHSS), 81, 92–4, 102 male headed households. See other headed households Malema, Julius, 130, 131–2, 170–1, 176 Mandela, Nelson, 7, 48, 131 Mandela Park Anti-Eviction Campaign, 154–5 Maphumulo, Chief, 52 Marikana Massacre, 150–1, 173, 192 marriage: erosion of traditional, 31–4, 115–16; house, 36–7; low rates, 6, 56, 113, 199n7; policy, 31, 34–5, 93, 95, 112, 116–17; women’s view of, 133, 137–9, 146. See also divorce; unmarried women masculinity: crisis of, 49–50, 115–16, 121, 132, 143–7; and family, 114, 117, 133, 137; hegemonic, 128–31, 135, 144; provider

238

Index

love, 31; studies 22, 145–6. See also gender relations “matchboxes,” 85 mental health, 45, 73 migration, 13, 30–3, 187; and gender relations, 31–2, 38, 58, 113, 133, 138–9, 144–5; the “last,” 3, 191–2; from violence, 43–4, 49, 52, 89 Millennium Development Goals, 61 minority groups, 164–5, 175 mothers: in African feminism, 23–4, 146; grants for, 104, 108, 118, 121, 124–5; politicization of, 39, 49–50, 166; single, 52, 89, 111, 113–14, 116, 144; teenage, 117; traditional role of, 47–8. See also gender relations Mpumalanga, 45, 49–50 Msunduzi. See Pietermaritzburg municipal governments: corruption, 150, 189; disappointment with, 148, 151–2, 156–8, 165, 175, 180, 190. See also African National Congress; protest Natal War, 43–9, 51–3, 56, 133, 135 National Gender Policy Framework, 92 National Home Builders Registration Council (NHBRC), 84 National Urban Reconstruction and Housing Agency (NURCHA), 84 nationalism: and the poor, 176; and women, 38–9, 130; Zulu, 44–5, 47. See also African National Congress Nayager, Glen, 172–3

neoliberalism: intensification of, 125, 177, 182, 185–6, 191–2; and policy, 87–8, 108–10, 120, 153–5; and protest, 150, 153, 155–6. See also globalization New South Africa: disenchantment with, 151, 176, 181, 186; “governmentality,” 152, 162–3; possibilities for change in, 177, 192; transition to, 119, 139–40, 149–50; urban women in, 141, 163, 190. See also Constitution; neoliberalism Ndabankulu, Mnikelo, 165–6 Non-Governmental Organizations (NGOs): assisted housing, 52–3, 98–100, 188; support of protest movements, 160, 192 non-racialism, 170, 174, 184 Nsibande, Zodwa, 152–3, 159–60, 166 Nthutukoville, 16, 18, 52–3, 89–91, 101–2, 188 nyatisi, 34. See also sex other headed households (OHH), 15, 70–1, 73, 105, 196n11, 197n14 Oxfam Canada, 53 participatory housing. See people’s housing process patriarchy, 130, 143; challenging, 19. See also tradition; gender discrimination patrilineal lineage, 34, 104, 113, 115 Peace Valley 2, 16, 52–3, 73, 157 pensions, 103–7, 109–11, 117–18, 199n5; family reliance on, 108, 161, 175–6

Index

people’s housing process (PHP), 40, 88–92, 102, 166, 188, 198n10 Pietermaritzburg/Msunduzi, 12–15, 41–3; election, 168, 176; income, 104–5, 193n7; language, 194n13; Municipal government, 81, 157; urban development, 58, 79, 94–5; services, 63–7. See also Natal War Pietermaritzburg Agency for Community Social Action (PACSA), 166–7 police, 150, 152, 172–3, 181; role in the Civil War, 44 poor: loyalty to the ANC, 155–6, 168–9, 175, 177; marginalization of, 13–4, 87–8, 154, 171, 178, 180–1; mobilization of, 150–3, 156, 166–7, 175, 182; vulnerability of, 10, 59, 76–7, 105, 107, 180, 188. See also poverty; right to the city poverty, 10, 111–12, 172; citizenship, 26–7, 154, 179–80; criminalization of, 91, 172–4; feminization of, 73–5, 197n15; and gender, 24–5, 94, 96, 100, 114, 123, 145, 158; and health, 64, 69, 75–6; persistent, 68, 79, 104–5, 163, 188–9; racialization of, 172–4, 180, 182–3; and residential patterns, 8–9, 14, 76–7, 84–5, 183; state response to, 10–11, 59, 82, 86–7, 109–10, 164, 185–7 pregnancy, 34, 117. See also mothers protest, 7, 11, 28, 52, 59; and citizenship, 149–50, 152, 156, 162, 175, 177, 180–1; and generation, 161–3; rates, 148, 164–5; and

239

rights-based discourse, 120, 126, 185–6; self-provisioning as, 154, 181; state and media response to, 151–4, 164; women in, 38–40, 49, 89–90, 148–9, 158–61, 189. See also Abahlali baseMjondolo race: affirmative action, 119, 169–70, discourse, 130, 170, 172–4; political engagement, 168–9, 175; and racism, 43, 111–12, 170–2, 182–3; and residential patterns, 7–8, 12–14, 42, 79 Ramphele, Mamphela, 176 rape, 50, 55, 57, 142; justifications for, 21, 129; Zuma trial, 130–1 Reconstruction and Development Program (RDP), 58–9, 82–4, 109; criticism of, 11, 55, 67, 79, 84–9, 166, 187–8; success of, 98–100, 141, 187 refugees, 45, 53 renting: landlords, 37, 39–40, 85, 91, 101–2; policy, 35, 84–5; tenants, 35–6, 54 rights-based claims, 183–6. See also Grootboom case rights discourse: limits of, 23, 118–19, 125, 165–6, 174, 185–6; and protests, 168–9, 177; value of, 125–7, 183–7 right to the city, 4–5, 95, 102, 191–2; and citizenship, 103, 149, 178–9; and the Constitution, 183–6; as interpretive frame, 26–7; material aspects, 58, 79; and the poor, 177, 179–83; right to arrive, 29, 187; women’s, 79, 127, 187–90 Rooiyard study, 33–4

240

Index

rural: economy, 30–2, 41, 191; life compared to urban, 55–6, 188; links with urban areas, 13, 34, 37–8, 100; to urban migration, 3–4, 14, 33, 54, 58, 113, 138–39, 191–2 sanitation, 59, 61, 63, 94, 193n5; and health, 4, 7, 68, 100–1; problems, 53, 55, 95, 100, 188; toilets, 43, 64–7; waste removal, 65–6, 100–1, 134. See also service delivery protests security: firms, 172, 183; food, 13, 55–6, 100, 110–11, 114 ; and home ownership, 37, 87, 92, 98–100, 102; as a right, 120, 124, 184 service delivery, 10–11, 188; costrecovery measures, 120, 153–4, 161–3; limits of, 79, 151, 165–6, 188; in Msunduzi, 13, 14, 63–6, 68, 94–5, 100–11. See also service delivery protests service delivery protests, 149–52, 156, 161–2, 164. See also Abahlali baseMjondolo sex: challenging/gender binaries, 22–3, 38, 194n15; exploitation, 40, 50; shifting practices and attitudes, 31–2, 34, 117, 129, 130–1; transactional, 34, 198n3. See also gender relations; intimacy; love sexism, 130–2, 145–7, 184. See also gender discrimination; masculinity sexuality, 22–3, 194n15; expressions of, 31, 34, 56, 132–3, 139–40, 143; negative attitudes toward female, 117. See also masculinity; sex

sexually transmitted disease. See hiv/aids shack dwellers movement. See Abahlali baseMjondolo; protest slums. See informal settlement Slums Act, 173–4, 186 Sobantu, 43 South African Homeless People’s Federation (SAHPF), 5, 88, 198n10 South African Social Security Agency (SASSA), 110, 112 Soweto: Electricity Crisis Committee, 154; protests, 40, 161–2, 163; uprising, 44 squatter settlements. See informal settlement state: apartheid, 44; contradictions of the modern liberal, 82, 88, 108, 125, 154–5, 186, 191–2; failure of the post-apartheid, 111–12, 121–2, 130; and motherhood, 37–8; obligations, 7, 119–20, 123, 184–5; and the poor, 85, 111–12, 152–3, 156, 186–7; progressive aspects, 59, 120, 183; violence, 150, 153, 173, 192; women as subjects of the, 103–5, 116–18, 121–5, 127, 158, 167, 179, 189. See also welfare; African National Congress subjectivity, 16, 175; formation, 19–20, 90–1, 128, 141, 143–4; feminist analysis and, 20–1; in the context of a social crisis, 132, 143–4; political, 149, 158, 162; race-based, 47, 169–71; urban, 26, 33–4, 55–6, 139–40, 188, 190–1 sustainable development, 4–5, 9, 26, 65, 155, 166 Sustainable Habitat Agenda, 4, 9

Index

Thembelihle Crisis Committee, 161 tradition, 3, 30–2, 34, 139; gender equality rights vs. preserving, 121–2, 125, 130–1, 159; healers, 70, 74; nostalgia for, 131–2, 144–5. See also gender relations; patriarchy trauma, 45, 51, 56, 133, 141 187; human resilience as a response to, 49, 90, 132 Truth and Reconciliation, 49 unemployment, 11, 14, 59, 67, 104, 115, 155, 175; and masculinity, 108, 115–16, 121, 145, 146, 190; and violence, 50; and women, 6, 73, 104. See employment; informal economies United Democratic Front (UDF), 14. See also Natal War United Nations, 4; Human Development Index (HDI), 111–12 Universal Declaration of Human Rights, 118 unmarried women, 38, 55; with children, 42, 89, 113, 116; negative views about, 111, 116–17, 141–2 Urban Areas Act, 32, 42, 43 urban peripheries: commuting costs, 9, 42, 76–7, 85, 87; development of, 8, 9, 12–13, 94–5; marginalization of the poor, 79, 84, 87, 100–2, 171, 182–3, 187–8 urbanization: challenges of rapid, 4–7, 26, 58; feminist analysis of, 16, 19, 26–7; gender and, 30–4, 37–8, 40–1, 56; the spatial legacies of apartheid, 12–13, 53, 85–6,

241

95, 102, 182–3, 195n3; studies, 3–4, 7–8, 10-2; and the right to the city, 179. See also housing policy uTshani Fund, 88 violence, 7, 40, 48–9; gender-based, 6, 25, 94, 95, 121–2, 187; legacies of, 51, 56; and masculinity, 50, 116, 128–30; township, 14, 40, 45, 59. See also Natal War; migration Vulindlela, 48, 92, 94–5 war veteran grant, 110, 199n5 water, 79, 81; access to clean, 10, 63, 65–6, 134; prepaid metres, 120, 153–4, 161–3; self-provisioning, 181, 192; right to, 120. See also sanitation welfare, 82, 108, 109–11, 135, 137, 199n5; and children, 98; citizenship, 103, 111, 120–1, 148–9; criticism of, 104–5, 106–7, 111, 165–6, 181; failure of, 11, 111–12, 87–8, 167, 189; gendered policy, 21, 23, 28, 103, 108, 112, 116–18, 124–5, 161; policy recommendation, 71, 73; reliance on, 5–6, 59, 75, 104–5, 114, 127, 175; shifting approaches to, 86, 91, 108, 154–5, 197n7. See also housing policy; state Western concepts, 23–4, 113–14, 194n15; impact on policy, 34–5 whites, citizenship, 169; family, 113; privilege post-apartheid, 8, 111–12, 172, 201n8; race thinking, 170–1; voting, 164–5, 168

242

World Urban Forum, 4 youth: activism, 39–40, 163–4; conflict with elders, 30–1, 49, 138–9; culture, 56, 171; gender relations, 31–2, 34, 50–1, 128–9, 133, 135, 139–40; political views, 164–5, 167–8, 170, 175; in political discourse, 163–5, 176; unemployment, 115, 175. See also

Index

generation difference; Abahlali baseMjondolo Zikode, S’bu, 151, 153, 175, 182. See also Abahlali baseMjondolo Zulu, 41, 194n13; and gender, 30–2, 47, 159–60; masculinity, 130–1; nationalism, 44, 46–8, 50–1 Zuma, Jacob, 130–2, 162–3