Home Spaces Street Styles: Contesting Power and Identity in A South African City

1
Towards an Anthropology of Urbanism
In broad terms, urban theory constitutes a series of ideas (sometimes presented as laws) about
what cities are, what they do and how they work. Commonly such ideas exist at a high level of
abstraction so that they do not pertain to individual towns or cities, but offer a more general
explanation of the role that cities play in shaping socio-spatial processes. Nonetheless, such
theories typically emerge from particular cities at particular times, to the extent that certain cities
become exemplary of particular types of urban theory …
(Phil Hubbard 2006: 6)
The city of East London, located on the eastern seaboard of South Africa,
represents one of those cities that became ‘exemplary of particular types
of urban theory’. In the same way that Los Angeles became emblematic
of ‘postmodern urbanism’, the small African city of East London came to
represent a challenge to the conventional wisdom about urbanism presented
by scholars like Simmel (1903), Park et al. (1925) and especially Wirth
(1996 [1938]). Wirth had defined urbanism as involving the ‘substitution
of secondary for primary contacts, the weakening of bonds of kinship, the
declining social significance of the family, the disappearance of neighbourhood
and the undermining of the traditional basis of social solidarity’ (1996 [1938]:
79). In the early 1960s, Philip and Iona Mayer captured the imagination of
a generation of urban scholars by convincingly demonstrating how migrants
in East London refused to relinquish their ‘primary contacts’ while in the
city, or to allow urbanisation to undermine their ‘traditional basis for social
solidarity’. Their rich ethnography (Mayer with Mayer 1971 [1961]) showed
how some migrants could live in the city for years, some for as long as 20
years, without accepting modernity and its commonly understood urban
cultural forms.
Mayer wrote at a time when a critique of the Wirthian perspective on
urbanism had been gaining momentum in sociology more globally. Peter
Wilmot and Michael Young had published their famous book on kinship and
family in the Bethnal Green borough of London’s East End in 1957. Bethnal
Green was being threatened with slum clearance programmes. Based on
interviews with over 1,000 families, their study revealed the dense associative
networks and rich family life of the old East End, and highlighted the role of
women in coping with poverty and holding extended family networks together.
They showed that the highest levels of social coherence and connectivity
were to be found in the most densely settled areas of Bethnal Green, whereas
the new housing estates being created for the working class tended to be
characterised by blasé attitudes and social withdrawal (see Parker 2004: 81).
Bank T01319 01 chaps 1 17/11/2010 08:13

2 home spac e s , s t re e t s t y l e s
Across the Atlantic, Herbert Gans (1962) published an important study of an

Italian-American community in the impoverished West End of Boston, which
was also faced with the threat of urban removal. Gans depicted Boston’s West
End as a working-class enclave in which people and institutions were created
to ‘serve and protect’ the family and the community. He stressed their unity
as a working-class community, dubbing the West-Enders as ‘urban villagers’
rather than as alienated urban individuals. The great irony of Wirth’s analysis
of the city was that he himself had described and uncovered such bonds in
his own 1935 ethnography of Chicago entitled The Ghetto, but that he had
chosen to suppress these insights when it came to developing a more universal
and theoretical definition of urbanism, which sought to sum up the collective
contribution of the Chicago School of the 1920s and 1930s to urban studies.
The problem with Wirth’s definition was that it set up the urban too starkly
in contrast to the rural and the traditional. By starting with what the urban
was not – a face-to-face, rural folk culture – it became very difficult for Wirth
to acknowledge the complex sociality of the city and its social networks (see
Parker 2004; Robinson 2006).
Within the field of social anthropology, which had but recently begun to
address the cultural adaptations of rural people to urban life, Oscar Lewis
led the way with his studies of family life and urban adaptation in Mexico
(1951, 1959, 1961). In a seminal article, based on fieldwork conducted in
Mexico City in 1950, Lewis argued that:
this study provides further evidence that urbanisation is not a simple,

unitary, universally similar process, but that it assumes different forms
and meanings, depending on the prevailing historic, economic and social
conditions … I find that peasants in Mexico adapt to urban life with far
greater ease than do American farm families. There is little evidence of
disorganisation and breakdown, of cultural conflict, or of irreconcilable
differences between generations … Family life remains strong in Mexico
City. (1951: 30)
Janet Abu-Lughod (1961) arrived at similar conclusions in her research among

rural migrants in Cairo of the late 1950s, while Bruner argued of North
Sumatra of the 1950s that:
contrary to the traditional theory, we find in many Asian cities that society
does not become secularised, the individual does not become isolated, kinship
organisation does not breakdown, nor do social relations in the urban
environment become impersonal, superficial and utilitarian. (1961: 508)
The Mayers’ book-length ethnography, Townsmen or Tribesmen (the second

volume of what became known as the Xhosa in Town trilogy) (Mayer with
Mayer 1971 [1961]) confirmed and crystallised this emerging critique of
established notions of urbanism. Their study also showed the great difficulties
associated with universal definitions of urbanism by highlighting the critical
Bank T01319 01 chaps 2 17/11/2010 08:13

towa rd s a n a n t hro p o lo g y o f u r b a n i sm 3
role of regional cultural dynamics in shaping processes of urban adaptation.

This point had been stressed by Lewis (1951), but was also consistently
emphasised in the work of another highly influential American urbanist, Lewis
Mumford. In his seminal book, The Culture of Cities (1958 [1938]) Mumford
had argued that, in all cities, elements of rural and regional cultures were
transformed and ‘etherealised’ into durable elements in a new and dynamic
process of cultural synthesis. For Mumford, new urbanisms emerged from
the ‘the diffused rays of many separate beams’, drawn from regional cultural,
social and historical materials. He expressed these ideas in theatrical idiom:
Every culture has its characteristic drama. It chooses from the sum total
of human potentialities certain acts and interests, certain processes and
values, and endows them with special significance … The stage on which
this drama is enacted, with the most skilled actors and a full supporting
company and specially designed scenery, is the city: it is here that it reaches
its highest pitch of intensity. (Mumford 1958 [1938]: 5)
Much of the power and fascination of Mayer’s work lay in his ability
to locate his anthropological analysis of urbanisation and urbanism within
a regional cultural drama. For Mayer, the character of urbanism in East
London’s African residential locations was shaped by a fundamental cultural
divide that had deep roots in the Eastern Cape countryside. Indeed, as part
of their preparation for their urban fieldwork in the mid 1950s, the Mayers
lived in a rural village outside of the city and travelled extensively around the
rural reserves of the Eastern Cape. It was here that they became convinced
of the centrality of what they came to characterise as the ‘Red/School’ divide
to an understanding of cultural process in East London. In the introduction
to Townsmen or Tribesmen, they wrote:
That two dramatically different sets of institutions exist within the Xhosa
countryside is not hard to see. One becomes aware of it before a word is
spoken, through the glaring contrasts in dress and personal appearance.
There are women – Red women – who go about like a commercial pho-
tographer’s dream of picturesque Africa, their arms and shoulders bare,
their brightly-coloured ochred skirts swinging, their beads, brass ornaments
and fanciful head-dresses adding still more colour. And there are others
– the School women – who go in cotton print dresses in sober colours,
with neat black head-dresses and heavy black shawls, looking as proper
as mid-Victorian or as sombre as Moslem wives. To see a dance for Red
youth and a ‘concert’ for School youth, a sacrifice in one homestead and a
prayer meeting in the next, or even a Red and a School family meal, is to
realise that these belong to two different worlds, in spite of the language and
the peasant background being one. (Mayer with Mayer 1971 [1961]: 20)
The Mayers went on to state that rural Xhosa (the dominant ethnic group in
the region) themselves ‘think of this division as bisecting the entire population’
Bank T01319 01 chaps 3 17/11/2010 08:13

4 home spac es , s t re e t s t y l e s
and view it ‘in terms of cultural differentia’: ‘Red people do things this way
while School people do them that way.’ They claimed that the division between
abantu ababomvu (Red people) and abantu basesikolweni (School people)
was marked not only by dress styles and social institutions, but was expressed
in deeper cultural values kept in place by ‘a kind of self-imposed aloofness’,
where each segment of the rural population firmly believed in the superiority
of their ‘own way of life’ (1971 [1961]: 21–41). The Reds saw it as their
‘common present duty’ to maintain a distinctive way of life which history and
the ancestors had sanctioned for them and for them alone (1971 [1961]: 40).
The roots of this cultural division can be traced back to the mid-nineteenth
century, during the colonisation of the Eastern Cape Province of South Africa,
when a large section of the Xhosa-speaking people were convinced by the
visions of the young prophetess, Nongqawuse, who declared that, if they
killed their cattle and scorched their fields, the ancestors would drive the
white settlers into the sea and restore peace and harmony to their lands.
Nongqawuse’s prophecy divided the Xhosa nation between ‘believers’ and
‘non-believers’, between communities and families that had come to accept
Westernisation and Christianity and those who rejected these forces, politically
and culturally. There is ongoing debate as to whether colonial officials and the
Governor of the Cape Colony, who had been struggling to defeat the Xhosa
on the Eastern Frontier, conspired to popularise the visions of the Xhosa
prophetess (Crais 2002; Peires 1989). The result, however, was undoubtedly
catastrophic for ‘the believers’, who implemented the vision of the prophetess
by decimating their herds and their livelihoods within a period of weeks and
months, thus opening up the Eastern Cape for final colonisation. By 1894,
the regional process of colonisation was concluded with the incorporation
of the Xhosa-speaking areas of Pondoland in the far Eastern Cape into the
Cape Colony. In 1910 the British colonies of the Cape and Natal amalgamated
with the Boer republics of the Transvaal and the Orange Free State to form
the Union of South Africa.
A century after the historic Xhosa cattle-killing, the Mayers argued, rural
communities in the Eastern Cape remained deeply divided between ‘believers’
and ‘non-believers’, between Red people and School people. This division
was seen to shape the way in which Xhosa people adapted to urban life in
East London. The most striking aspect of the Mayers’ ethnography was their
account of the urban lifestyles, cultural responses and orientations of the
conservative, anti-modern Red migrants. They showed that these migrants
remained doggedly traditionalist in outlook, rejecting Christianity in any form
and regarding entry into industrial wage labour as a ‘necessary evil’, which
they accepted only in order to earn enough money to support their rural
homesteads and resources. In the city, these men were seen to encapsulate
themselves in close-knit networks of home-mates, who socialised together,
resisted urban consumerism and morally enforced a commitment to building
rural homesteads. The lifestyles of these Red migrants were contrasted
with those of School migrants, who remained connected with their rural
homesteads but were much more open to Western cultural influences in
Bank T01319 01 chaps 4 17/11/2010 08:13

the city. The argument was thus not only ethnographically compelling, but
theoretically important in that: first, it confirmed the findings of other studies
that urbanisation did not necessarily lead to social breakdown; second, it
demonstrated there could be large rural lumps in the urban ‘melting pot’ that
did not dissolve with time; and, third, it illustrated that urbanism was always
shaped by its regional or local cultural contexts.
East London was already an established anthropological field-site by
the time the Mayers conducted their research there. As early as 1931, the
African urban locations of the city had been visited by Monica Hunter (later
Wilson) as part of the fieldwork she conducted for her classic South African
ethnography, Reaction to Conquest (1936). Her book included a large section
on social change that covered African life in towns, as well as on white-owned
farms, and this urban research was primarily focused on East London. When
the Mayers re-entered East London’s locations in the late 1950s, they did
not come alone. They were part of a team of researchers who collectively
produced what would come to be referred to as the Xhosa in Town trilogy.
The first book in the series, The Black Man’s Portion by sociologist Desmond
Reader had been published in 1960, presenting a sociological overview of
the history, residential life and employment patterns of the East London
locations. Reader’s description of the townships was based on a one-in-ten
household questionnaire conducted in 1955. He had supplemented this data
with in-depth life histories and household case studies, combining qualitative
and quantitative research techniques in a manner similar to the Bethnal Green
study of Wilmot and Young. Townsmen or Tribesmen (Mayer with Mayer
1971 [1961]) was the middle volume in the trilogy, which was soon followed
by anthropologist Berthold Pauw’s The Second Generation (1973 [1963]).
The Mayers commissioned Pauw to conduct an ethnographic investigation
of the families, lives, networks and adaptive strategies of urban-born families
to complement their study of the migrants. These other two volumes in the
Xhosa in Town trilogy did not, however, achieve the notoriety of Townsmen or
Tribesmen, which was updated and reprinted in 1971; The Second Generation
was updated and reprinted in 1973.
In this re-study, based on historical research and intensive fieldwork in East
London since the South African transition to democracy, I assess and update
all of the East London ethnographies, not just the work of Philip and Iona
Mayer. My own fieldwork in East London’s townships started 40 years after
that of the trilogy researchers, in 1995, and continued intermittently until
2005. In revisiting the townships of East London in the 1990s, I was both
preoccupied and guided by the work of the trilogy researchers. I imagined
their work as a sort of baseline from which I would proceed by following
up key themes and topics, while at the same time reporting on new areas of
cultural and social change through the apartheid and into the post-apartheid
period. Where my project differed from that of the trilogy (and Hunter’s earlier
work) was that I did not enter the city from the perspective of the countryside,
hoping to map out continuity and change across the urban–rural divide. My
Bank T01319 01 chaps 5 17/11/2010 08:13

East London and surrounding areas
Bank T01319 01 chaps 6 17/11/2010 08:13

interest was in the changing city itself and in townships as complex spaces
of creativity, social formation and struggle in their own right. I wanted to
contribute to a new anthropology of urbanism rather than simply add to
the old anthropology of urbanisation. I aspired to using the texts and notes
of Monica Hunter, Philip Mayer and the trilogy scholars as beacons to light
the road on a journey in new historical ethnography that would begin in the
1950s and navigate through the 1960s and 1970s and beyond, to end in the
mid 2000s. In all the chapters of this book, the earlier anthropological studies,
and especially the work of the trilogy researchers, provide critical points of
reference and are used as a baseline from which ideas about social change
are mapped out, discussed and contested.
The years between these two periods of intensive fieldwork were the
apartheid years in South Africa. They were years in which the old locations
of the East Bank and West Bank were flattened and destroyed by a racist
state determined to impose a new regime of urban management and control
on the city and its African population. Most of the East Bank location,
where the previous studies were focused, was pulled down during the 1960s,
and the people living in the wood-and-iron houses there were resettled
either to new township houses in the city or sent to the Ciskei or Transkei
homelands (see Map). The pace and intensity of these forced removals
created serious problems for people and the state, which was forced to
build transit housing in the city because the removals had left so many
homeless. New hostels were also built for migrants, who were shaken out
of the backrooms and yards of the old wood-and-iron houses and kept
separate from permanently urbanised working class families. This process of
restructuring fundamentally reconfigured social relations, power and identity
in the township. One of my primary aims in this book is to offer a new set of
understandings of what this restructuring process meant and how it might be
interpreted. Instead of simply focusing on the racial dimensions of apartheid
and documenting change from above, I explore the everyday encounters,
sensibilities and architecture of social and cultural change from below, from
various locations within the township itself, and reflect on the implications
of urban restructuring for different forms of place and home-making, as well
as for gender and generational relations and identities. This study also goes
beyond the apartheid period and seeks to provide insights into the nature
and form of post-apartheid urbanism.
In essence, this book provides a detailed, historical ethnography of social
and cultural change in a single township, variously known as the East Bank,
Duncan Village and Gompo Town, over a period of 50 years. Before I outline
my own interests in greater detail, I would like to reflect further on how
responses to the trilogy, and especially to Townsmen or Tribesmen, changed
in the 1970s and how, despite this fierce criticism, the Mayers’ discussion
of Red and School people, and their concern with the ‘rural in the urban’,
have remained important themes in anthropology and African studies since
the 1980s.
Bank T01319 01 chaps 7 17/11/2010 08:13

Red and School Revisited
During the 1970s, celebration of Townsmen or Tribesmen turned to damnation

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

versus permanently urbanized townsmen – were placed not only in
opposition but in succession. The two ideological stereotypes were the
different ends of a historical progression. (1999: 35)
Bank T01319 01 chaps 8 17/11/2010 08:13

This was not how the Mayers, and especially Philip Mayer, viewed the
situation. He did not see a shifting and shuffling of identities in East London
within a context of rapid and inevitable industrial modernisation. What
captured his imagination was the staunch resistance of certain groups of
migrant workers to the cultural influences of town life and their outright
rejection of the project of modernisation. For the Mayers, the Red-migrants
were heroic figures who still dreamt of an independent existence for themselves
and their families outside of the nexus of colonial capitalism, despite having
been drawn into the heart of the industrial wage labour system against their
will (see Mayer with Mayer 1971 [1961]).
While many came to the defence of Gluckman and his left-leaning
Manchester school, there were very few who were prepared to defend the
trilogy and its narrative of Red and School.1 The work of the Mayers was
seen to be particularly problematic because it seemed to suggest that many
migrants were essentially tribal in outlook and opposed to modernisation in
any form. Archie Mafeje, who had been born and brought up in the Eastern
Cape, argued that the Mayers ossified what was a dynamic and changing
cultural cleavage. He contested the idea that Red and School were starkly
opposed, as the Mayers suggested, indicating that ‘red boys’ in his home
village were often seen in church, while ‘school boys’ learnt stick-fighting
and underwent initiation. He also said that many of the families had relatives
that were both Red and School. The cultural divide was thus not nearly as
dramatic as that between Catholic and Protestants in Northern Ireland, as
the Mayers had suggested. The boundaries of the categories were porous and
fluid rather than culturally fundamental (Mafeje 1971: 5).
In his own urban study with Monica Wilson on the Langa township of
Cape Town, Mafeje argued that the process of urban adaptation was shaped
very specifically by who migrants knew in the cities rather than by some kind
of pre-existing cultural identity (Wilson and Mafeje 1963). Mafeje pointed to
the critical importance of ‘home-mate groups’ as units of social integration.
He suggested that a young migrant with a ‘school’ orientation who moved
in with an uncle with a ‘Red’ orientation would in all likelihood become
absorbed into his ‘home boy’ group and cultural milieu. With time, confidence
and perhaps a change of residence, the same young migrant might enter a
new social network and assume a different social identity. Mafeje tried, then,
to stress the fluidity of African urban identity formation, claiming that it was
irresponsible to speak of essential identities in the apartheid context.
Mafeje’s perspective has been theorised by Ferguson (1999), who
demonstrates that cultural knowledge and competence in Copperbelt towns
was always a prerequisite for the convincing performance of any cultural
style. Some migrants from rural areas simply did not have the cultural
resources to move between Red and School identities, or what Ferguson
terms localist and cosmopolitan styles. Thus, like Mafeje, Ferguson (1999)
argues that Africans on the Copperbelt could (and still can) choose between
identities and change their cultural styles as long as they have the competence
to perform them effectively (see Chapter 2 for further discussion). The point
Bank T01319 01 chaps 9 17/11/2010 08:13

that the Mayers would have wanted to make in this debate, I suspect, is
that the Red–School cultural division in rural Eastern Cape communities
was such that it was not easy for migrants to change identities (or perform
new styles) in the city (see McAllister 2006 for an account of the habitus of
Redness in the rural Transkei).2
It was the personal nature of the political critique which devastated the
Mayers. They were stung by claims that the aim of Townsmen or Tribesmen
was to celebrate African tribalism and endorse the policy of the apartheid
government. If read in a particular way, the work of the Mayers does seem to
support the idea that some African migrants did not want to live permanently in
the cities, which is precisely how the apartheid state proposed that migrants be
treated. The suggestion that their scholarship was complicit with the apartheid
project had a profound impact on the Mayers. Philip Mayer was a German
Jew, who had fled the Holocaust to live in Britain and had dealt with his
own personal experiences of racial discrimination in Europe (Beinart 1991b:
11–14). He admired the determination of rural labour migrants who refused
to be pushed into colonial modernity, Western beliefs and consumerism. He
found their denial of the city and modernisation uplifting. To try to clear his
name and redeem his project, Philip Mayer recast their analysis of Red and
School in more politically fashionable terms in a 1980 essay.
Drawing on the work of the French structuralist Marxist, Louis Althusser,
Philip Mayer argued that Red and School were both long-standing ‘rural
resistance ideologies’, which opposed colonialism in different ways and had
their roots in the history of African dispossession, missionary activity and
colonial exploitation in nineteenth-century Eastern Cape history. Significantly,
while Mayer added historical depth and context to his earlier work, he never
suggested that he had over-estimated, or misinterpreted, the social salience
or analytical significance of the Red–School divide in the townships of East
London. In the long essay, he also suggested that the material and social basis
of Redness was rooted in African access to land and agrarian resources in the
rural reserves, and that this was being progressively undermined by apartheid-
driven agrarian change in the homelands, first through the introduction of
betterment planning and then by fully fledged Bantustan development, which
increased closer settlement and landlessness in the 1960s and 1970s (see Mayer
1980; see also De Wet 1995).
In the face of constant criticism, the Mayers left South Africa and returned
to England. They eventually retired in Oxford and Philip Mayer died in 1994.
The impact of the sustained attack on their work is that it effectively expunged
any serious scholarly discussion of Red and School as social identities for 20
years. In fact, most scholars writing about the region during that period were
cautious about engaging directly with these cultural categories (cf. Bundy
and Beinart 1987; Mager 1999). It was only after 2000, when the South
African novelist Zakes Mda published his award-winning historical novel,
The Heart of Redness, that the debate re-ignited. Mda suggested that the
old divisions between ‘believers’ and ‘non-believers’ were still alive and well
in the Eastern Cape countryside, and remained influential in the politics of
Bank T01319 01 chaps 10 17/11/2010 08:13

towa rd s a n a n t hro p o lo g y o f u r b a n i sm 1 1
post-apartheid development (see also Attwell 2005; McAllister 2006). The

novel explores the case of a community conflict over the prospect of a large,
foreign-funded tourism venture on the Transkei coast. Mda shows how the
local community is split down the middle by the prospect of outsiders holding
a large stake in the local economy. The modernisers, those descendants of
the ‘non-believers’, want to see jobs, ‘progress’ and investment in the area,
while the ‘red’ traditionalists, descended from the ‘believers’, want to see
their environment and heritage preserved for themselves and their children.
The hero of the story, an urbane Johannesburg teacher, returns to the Eastern
Cape to rediscover his roots and develops a growing appreciation of the
power of ‘redness’. This rediscovery of tradition is occurring on a wide front
in the Eastern Cape today, with a revival of local interest in chieftaincy, the
creation of heritage trails and community museums, constant and urgent
debates about the future and safety of traditional male initiation rites in an
age of HIV-Aids, and renewed emphasis on the importance of performing
traditional rituals in rural homesteads.
Identity, Tradition and the City
The bankrupt notion of the melting pot has been replaced by a model that is more germane to
our times, that of the menudo chowder. According to this model most of the ingredients do melt,
but some stubborn chunks are condemned merely to float.
(Vergigratia, quoted in Parker 2004: 147)
In the 1990s, 40 years after the publication of Townsmen or Tribesmen, a

new generation of anthropologists working on the postcolonial African city
continues to question the idea that urban modernity follows rural tradition
in some linear, unidirectional and inevitable way. The collapse of modernist
urban planning regimes in post-independence African cities has created new
spaces for the reconstruction of the ‘rural in the urban’ in a context de-
industrialisation and urban decay. In his work on Kinshasa, Devisch (1995,
1996) argues that the failure of modernisation to create the conditions for
stable urban existence has led residents to create new urban communities
modelled on ‘matricentral, rural village structures’ (1996: 584). He argues
that these communities actively oppose the ‘alienating project of whitening,
Christianising and unbridled commerce’ (1996: 584), and reconstruct the
migrant’s sense of belonging by reinforcing a sense of longing for solidarity,
support and genuine community identity in the city.
[V]illagisation in the city undermines and dismantles Western myths of

progress or technocratic modernisation. It questions the legitimacy of the
(post-)colonial hierarchy of opposing the urban citizen and the villager, the
political elite and the people, the educated evolué [elite] and the unschooled
peasant, the Christian and the pagan … [It] can be said to be a culturally
endogenous domestication of the modernity in which local and often
subordinate groups structure themselves along the lines of communes.
(1996: 584)
Bank T01319 01 chaps 11 17/11/2010 08:13

De Boeck and Plassart (2006) reinforce and extend these observations,

arguing that rural cultural images and metaphors, such as those linked to
hunting and gathering, are appropriated and applied as the ‘forest enters the
city’. These authors also show how notions of the rural and the urban become
inverted when diamond dollars are produced in the countryside and consumed
in the city. Van Binsbergen (1997) has written about the ‘virtualisation of
the village’ in cities in Zambia and Botswana. He is interested in how ideas
about village life and ideal social relations are invoked and inserted in town
to socialise the city in particular ways. These accounts of ‘encapsulated’ and
‘invented rurality’ in the urban, not only bring the Mayers (1971 [1961]) work
back into focus, but also remind us of the critical role that rural hinterlands
play in the shaping of the city.
The presence of the ‘rural in the urban’ is never simply a matter of the
transposition of rural cultural materials into the city, but involves reworking,
reconstituting and renegotiating ideas about the rural in the urban in what
might be defined as a ‘third space’ (see Bhabha 1994; Soja 1995). The
engagement of the rural in the urban is not a retreat into some pre-existing
form of identity, as implied by the Mayers, but always in some sense a hybrid
cultural form. As Papastergiadis explains in more theoretical terms:
Identity is neither in the interior space of the already known experience nor
doomed to the exteriority of an experiment with the unknown. Cultural
identity is thus never confined to a space on an exterior segment, nor is it
projected onto an open plane, but is formed through the practice of bridging
both differences and similitudes between the self and the other. Bridging
involves the performance of two tasks simultaneously: it requires memory
and experience. To know where the self has come from is to gain a sense
of belonging that enables one to risk the journey ahead. (2000: 98)
In his work on modernity and cultural hybridity in Latin America, Garcia

Canclini (1995 [1989]) stated that it is no longer possible for local people
to ‘enter and leave modernity’ at will, since they are all defined within
it. In other words, there is no escaping modernity, where ‘heterogeneous
temporalities’ intersect in a complex process of ‘intercultural hybridisation’
and ‘hybrid sociability’, and where identity struggles unfold in a common,
connected cultural space. For Canclini, Latin American countries are now
the ‘product of the sedimentation, juxtaposition and undercrossing of Indian
traditions, of colonial hispanism, and of modern political educational and
communicative practices’ (1995 [1989]: 71). He argues that this does not
occur through conventional processes of cultural syncretism, where different
cultural elements are separated out and then – and only then – mixed together,
but rather through a dynamic process of transcultural exchange. Canclini
describes this process as one of ‘truncated innovation’, which often leads to
the reinvention of older cultural forms, both urban and rural. He sees identity
formation as an ongoing process of negotiating difference, oscillating between
fixity and openness.
Bank T01319 01 chaps 12 17/11/2010 08:13

In a different context, Brenner (1998) shows how urban traditions can

also provide powerful narratives for identity in the city. In her work on the
Indonesian city of Solo, Brenner (1998) finds that the heyday of modernity, of
cultural innovation and economic prosperity, occurred in the early twentieth
century, when the local textile industry boomed and urban Javanese family
businesses prospered. By the late 1980s, de-industrialisation and urban
decay had set in, and the city had a distinctly unmodern look and feel. The
excitement of modernity, as something new and dynamic, was no longer
present there, despite constant attempts by the Indonesian state to reinvigorate
economic development and urban renewal. In this case study, Brenner finds
that Javanese families now live within a romanticised and idealised version of
its own urban past, nostalgically recalling social and cultural forms associated
with a golden age, traditions that they aspire to recreate in the present. In
this case, the urban community has seemingly transformed in the ‘wrong’
direction, ‘from a community that represented an emergent modernity in the
late-nineteenth and early-twentieth-century Java to what is often characterised
as an anachronistic bastion of “tradition” in the 1990s’ (1998: 13). The
‘tradition’ embraced by the Javanese merchants is not a rural tradition, but
a family-centred, cosmopolitan urban tradition of modernity from a bygone
era. Brenner’s study illustrates how the urban past can be as powerful as
the rural past in the remaking of urban culture and identity. This is a point
to note for the African literature, where tradition is usually thought of in a
distinctly rural way.
One social theorist fascinated by the idea of the city as a kind of ‘dynamic
ruin’ embodying many layers of historical rubble was Walter Benjamin.
Benjamin (1999) used the image of the flâneur, the voyeuristic walker and
observer of the city, as a way of thinking and writing about the changing
character of urbanism in Paris. In his well-known Arcades project, he explored
the ‘heterogeneous temporalities’ of the city by engaging nostalgically and
imaginatively with the run-down world of the ornate Arcades, the old centre
of urban consumerism in the late nineteenth-century Paris. Benjamin contrasts
the Arcades with the industrial city of twentieth-century Paris, moving back
and forth, imagining constellations of the present and the past, while exploring
possible urban futures that might take Paris beyond commodity fetishism
and urban capitalism. His work reveals the multiple pasts of a city, and how
these pasts can be invoked in the cultural imagination, and have an impact on
the nature and politics of identity in the city (cf. Merrifield 2002; Robinson
2006; Stevenson 2003).
Like Mumford, I see the city as a site of cultural drama, a space of contested
practices and identities. Parker (2004) argues that the main source of urban
dynamism and innovation is not the interaction between city and hinterland,
but that which occurs within and between urban spaces and identities inside
the city. He suggests that an understanding of urban place-making and identity
formation is critical for any grasp of the meaning of urbanism. In a similar
vein, Hansen and Verkaaik (2009: 5) suggest that cities and neighbourhoods
often develop a distinctive sense of charisma. ‘Urban spaces have spirits,
Bank T01319 01 chaps 13 17/11/2010 08:13

and cities have souls’, they argue, and ‘these are contagious qualities that
are said to seep into the character of the people living in such cities’. In my
historical anthropology of the urbanism in East London, I am consequently
intensely interested in the continuities and discontinuities in place-making
and identity formation in the townships. Kolb (2008: 72) makes a distinction
between dense and diluted spaces, where dense spaces have multiple layers
of memory, routine and shared experience, while diluted spaces tend to be
defined by single-stranded relations and a certain shallowness of experience.
Kolb (2008: 73) suggests that a place is ‘historically dense insofar as its social
norms involve reference to a history that has been sedimented’. But density
is not just a matter of age, it depends on ‘how the marks of sediment and
age are taken up into the contemporary texture of action in place’ (2008:
73). In addition to density, which refers to the multi-layers of the urban
landscape, Kolb also speaks of the complexity of urban places, by which he
means the level to which they are connected to places and processes beyond
the space itself.
The East London township of Duncan Village is both a dense and complex
urban place, with a long and contested history as well as a strong set of local
and trans-local associations and connections. ‘A dense and complex place’,
Kolb (2008: 74) explains, ‘is not all present at once’, ‘it does not come at
you from one angle’. This sense of density and complexity was immediately
impressed on me on my very first visit to Duncan Village in 1995. As I
walked up Florence Street through the historical centre of the old location-
cum-township, I inhaled the sour smell of mqomboti home-brewed beer,
which drifted into the street from the yards of old one-roomed houses where
migrants gathered. As I turned the corner, up the hill I passed an old granite
plaque to the South African Governor General Sir Patrick Duncan, who
donated the land for a new location in the 1930s, as well as the houses built
for returning servicemen in the late 1940s. Many of them had been repainted
in bright colours and their front doors literally opened onto the street. It was
mid afternoon and the street was bustling with people and activity. I imagined
that the neighbourhood would have felt much the same in the 1950s. Further
up the road, the street widened and there were newer apartheid-style houses,
the 51/9 units, built during the township reconstruction period of the 1960s,
while on other side of the road, shacks cascaded down the slope and were
packed no more than a metre apart.
To the west, across the Douglas Smith main road, I could see the single-sex
migrants’ hostels, with their dirty blue exterior walls and smoke billowing
out of the chimneys. Beyond the hostels lay Duncan Village Extension or
Ziphunzana, which had more a suburban look with mainly free-standing
houses on pavilion-style plots covering the rolling hills to the south. There
were fewer variations in housing type and fewer shacks too. Across the road,
I could also see the old transit area of C-section, which had a completely
different look and feel to it too. There were no yards or divisions between
structures here, just a dense honeycomb of one-roomed brick structures with
shacks squeezed in between. On that afternoon, I had a profound sense of
Bank T01319 01 chaps 14 17/11/2010 08:13

having entered a different world, a complex mosaic of different precincts and

places in a township that had its own distinctive history and social character.
The influx of tens of thousands of individuals and families into the space of
the old apartheid township since the 1980s had created an involuted and
overcrowded urban space with different residential and social niches, which
had their own social character and identities. Over the next ten years, I would
walk up Florence Street many times, doing a variety of primary and applied
research assignments in the area. In this time I came to realise that Duncan
Village was a single township that embodied many different places, where:
Physically, a place is a space which is invested in understanding of

behavioural appropriateness, cultural expectation, and so forth. We are
located in ‘space’, but we act in ‘place’… It is a sense of place not space
that makes it appropriate to dance at a Grateful Dead concert, but not at
the Cambridge high table; to be naked in the bedroom but not in the street;
and to sit at our windows peering out rather than at other people’s windows
peering in. Place not space frames appropriate behaviour. (Harrison and
Dourish 1996: 69)
Rather than encountering a two-dimensional and socially thin space, as a

sort of theme park of poverty, oppression and disadvantage, as the townships
are often portrayed, I encountered complex, diverse and socially dense place,
which was fragmented into different smaller residential niches, but nevertheless
remained inextricably linked both to the surrounding hinterland, as well as
its own sense of history, as a place with a particular identity. It was the latter,
that sense of place, that I felt had been ignored in the earlier anthropology of
the city, where localism was understood to mean a longing for the rural areas.
Mobility, Localism and Power
In this book, I am interested in processes of urban place-making or what

might more simply be called settlement. To understand African cities better,
I believe that we need to pay much more attention to the creation, character
and the charisma or spirit of urban settlements, rather than simply focus on
mobility, networks and social connectivity. People do not simply pass through
space, they develop memories, meanings and attachments to particular places,
where they establish social relations, engage in struggles over resources and
construct narratives that valorise those places, as they enter the cultural
repertoire of the city (cf. Borer 2006). The conversion of spaces into places is
a complex material, cultural and sociological process which needs to be better
understood. In African cities, the obsession with migrants and mobility has
diverted our attention away from place-making. Many authors define African
urban spaces in terms of hyper-fluidity, mobility and informality, arguing that
Africans are generally averse to urban permanence and settlement, seeking
instead to engage multiple points of belonging and complex migrant identities.
Simone and Gotz (2003: 125), for example, claim that ‘African identities
Bank T01319 01 chaps 15 17/11/2010 08:13

display a remarkable capacity not to need fixed places’ and that Africans
‘have the capacity to configure highly mobile social formations that focus on
elaborating multiple identities’. Nuttall and Mbembe (2008) have also recently
affirmed this perspective by arguing that the migrant is the iconic cultural
figure in the African city, the local equivalent of what the flâneur was to the
European city in the early twentieth century.
But we should also be careful not to over-emphasise mobility and movement
and the inability of urban Africans to become grounded in the cities and neigh-
bourhoods within which they live. There is a common perception that, because
many African urban residents live in shacks, they must necessarily only be
temporary sojourners in the city. This is untrue. A great deal of research shows
that shack life is far from temporary for those who live in these areas, and
that it is common for squatters to live in the same areas or settlements for
most of their adult lives. The same problem of perception was noted by Janice
Perlman in her book The Myth of Marginality (1976) on Brazilian favelas in
the 1970s, where she challenged the myth that favela dwellers were economic,
social and cultural outsiders in the city. She demonstrated that they had often
lived in the city much longer than had been thought, and were well-integrated
socially and economically. The same myth was debunked in South Africa in
the 1990s when a new generation of research into life in informal settlements
revealed that, contrary to the apartheid ideology, many shack-dwellers were
committed to urban permanence. It was this realisation that inspired the
African National Congress (ANC) to make low-cost housing delivery in urban
areas one of its most important objectives in the post-apartheid period. My
own research in Duncan Village showed that, by the late 1990s, the average
shack-dweller had been living in the township for longer than ten years. It
is interesting that in the United States where, according to Kolb (2008: 32),
suburban residents move once every five years, no one seems to think that
urban Americans have become ‘hyper-mobile’ and have lost their desire to
settle in fixed places.
In the anthropology of urbanism that I seek to develop here, I am as
interested in urban localists and township flâneurs who wander the city
as I am in migrants and restless cosmopolitans. Our obsession with the
migrant, especially the male migrant, has led us to think of localism mainly
in terms of a longing for a rural home, while imagining cosmopolitanism as
a state of homelessness, as the aspiration to belong to something beyond the
local, something global (cf. Englund 2004; Ferguson 1999). Appiah (2006)
questions whether African urban identity politics is always constructed
around an opposition between localism and cosmopolitanism in this sense.
He challenges the idea that cosmopolitanism must necessarily involve a
‘sense of homelessness’ and suggests that the notion of ‘rooted cosmopoli-
tanism’ might be more accurate in many cases. But, despite his objections
to earlier formulation, the rooted in Appiah’s formulation remains a kind
of romantic notion of rural tradition. What we hear so much less about in
Africa, however, is that life in the city generates all sorts of localism which
need not necessarily have any sense of connection to rural areas or traditions,
Bank T01319 01 chaps 16 17/11/2010 08:13

nor any aspiration towards cosmopolitanism. It is entirely possible for urban

localists not to hanker after village life and also to remain quite disconnected
from transnational social and cultural flows. One of the reasons we continue
to miss these aspects of African urban life is that we seem more interested
nowadays in social networkers, deal-makers and mobile connectors, than in
people who stay in one place, or feel at home in the city.
In order to understand the meaning of urban localism and the process of
place-making in African cities we need to address what Ortner (2006) calls
the ‘refusal of gender and generational analysis’ in many anthropological
studies. In the 1930s, when Hunter (1936) and Hellman (1948) pioneered
urban anthropology in southern Africa, they placed women at the centre
of their analysis and developed compelling ethnographies of the nature of
urban localism and the struggle for survival in the city. Hellman’s urban
yard came alive as a marginal place in the city through her discussion of
how this space was domesticated by poor, but energetic single women with
a passion to support their families. In the post-war period, as the emphasis
shifted from urban women to male migrants, questions of urban localism
were replaced by other concerns, such as whether African male migrants were
really tribesmen, townsmen or workers. Rebecca Lee’s (2009) recent work
on migration and settlement in Cape Town recovers some of the spirit of
these early ethnographies by putting urban women back at the centre of the
equation. In Cape Town’s townships, she notes that masculine identities are
generally more closely associated with mobility than feminine ones, and that
men needed to embrace mobility in order to express successful masculinity
in a way that women do not.
In this book, I suggest that an understanding of urban localism must start
with a reconsideration of the roles, aspirations and experiences of urban
women and come to grips with the changing dynamics of gender relationships
in everyday urban life. One of the most insightful and brilliant accounts of
neighbourhood life and place-making is still provided in Jane Jacobs’ classic,
The Death and Times of Great American Cities (1961), published in the same
year as Townsmen or Tribesmen. Jacobs celebrates the tolerant, civilised and
constrained urban order of the West side village in Manhattan of the late
1950s, which she contrasts to the lifeless mid-town neighbourhoods and the
sprawling, low-density suburbs of the post-war American city. She argues that
order and civility in this precinct was created and maintained, not by police
surveillance or urban renewal schemes, but by the density of social networks,
interactions and relationships on the street, and by the commitment of local
people to maintain respect and order in their neighbourhoods. The power of
Jacobs’ analysis lies in her ability to combine detailed observation and finely
textured ethnography of everyday life in her locality, and she conveys a sense
of the ‘ballet of the sidewalk’ (Jacobs 1961; see also Flint 2009). Marshall
Berman (1988), a great admirer of Jane Jacobs and fellow campaigners against
the destruction of old neighbourhoods in Manhattan, attributes her powerful
understanding of place to her gender, as West side village mother by day and
intellectual by night. He states that:
Bank T01319 01 chaps 17 17/11/2010 08:13

She writes out of an intensely lived domesticity… She knows her

neighbourhood in such precise twenty-four hour detail because she has
been around it all day, in the ways that most women are normally around
all day, especially when they become mothers, but hardly any men ever
are … She knows all the shopkeepers, the vast informal social networks
they maintain because it is her responsibility to take care of the household
affairs. She portrays the ecology and phenomenology of the sidewalk with
uncanny fidelity and sensitivity, because she has spent years piloting children
… through these troubled waters, while balancing heavy shopping bags,
talking to neighbours and trying to keep hold of her life. (1988: 322)
Judy Giles (2004) argues that while the masculine view of the city has
emphasised mobility, adventure and newness, the feminine view has been
more sensitive to continuity and routine, and to the meanings of fixed places.
My feeling is that our view of the African city remains a very masculine
one, influenced by decades of obsessive interest in men, migrants and
masculinity, and it is for this reason that scholars fail to understand processes
of place-making in these cities. For men and women, memory, routine and
shared experience in a specific place creates local knowledge and binds people
together in a common urban culture. The history of place and social practice
in place defines local notions of identity and belonging. But while I make
this claim for us to better understanding of locality and localism in urban
African studies, I am also mindful of Massey’s (1995) seminal contribution,
that localities are defined as much by the networks that flow through them
as by the activities that occur within them (cf. Parker 2004; Stevenson 2003).
The power of masculine versions of modernity and the city as public,
mobile, connected, self-realising and constantly changing has also played a
critical role in creating a dichotomy between the city and the suburb, which is
usually portrayed as feminine, repetitive, sterile and repressed. Many feminist
scholars, such as Giles (2004), have commented on the limitations of this
opposition, suggesting that it not only denies women access to modernity but
also misreads the suburb and the home. In this book I resist the tendency,
which I believe is still very much alive in African studies, to see the streets and
public squares as sites of the making of modernity, and the homes as spaces
where traditional roles are entrenched and re-enacted without innovation and
change. To the contrary, I suggest that home spaces have undergone processes
of fundamental transformation over time in the townships of East London,
and that the roles of men and women in the home have constantly shifted.
Indeed, I argue that the home and the house in the old location proved to be
a critical launching pad for the strategies of urban mothers and matriarchs to
assert their social and economic independence. The confidence of these women
also spilled over into the streets in the unruly 1950s as they fearlessly took
on the apartheid state, which set out to clip their wings and to domesticate
and subordinate their daughters in the townships of the 1960s and 1970s
(cf. Walker 1995; Wells 1993). But even without their independent mothers
in the city and constrained by new forms of patriarchy, I suggest that young
Bank T01319 01 chaps 18 17/11/2010 08:13

township mothers and homemakers continued to pursue their own projects

and objectives as modern women in their township homes.
Urban anthropologists have spent more time in the urban house and the
suburb, collecting household details, kinship diagrams and migration histories,
than on the streets of the city or simply staring out of the window, like Jacobs,
onto the street outside the home. Conversely, Amin and Thrift (2002) suggest
that cultural geographers are only just arriving at the doorstep of the house
and beginning to encounter the home as a dynamic part of the city. They
note that:
Strangely the everyday rhythms of domestic life have rarely counted as part
of the ‘urban’, as though the city stopped at the doorstep of the home. But
domestic life is now woven routinely into the urban public realm … The
rhythms of the home are as much part of city life as, say, the movements of
traffic, office life, or interaction in the open spaces of the city. Its rhythms,
too, need incorporating into the everyday sociology of the city. (Amin and
Thrift 2002: 18)
In this book, I lament the extent to which anthropologists have been

pegged back in the spaces of the home and inclined to produce ‘home-made’
ethnography which often defines the home as a space of the enduring and
repetitive structures of everyday life rather than as a site of and catalyst for
change. Change in the city and the township, I will argue, has as much to
do with change in the home as with change on the streets. Indeed, I find
it difficult to account for one without the other. To understand what the
‘comrades’ achieved in the townships of South Africa in the 1980s it is
necessary, for example, to know what they were doing in their homes and
shacks, how they related to their parents in those spaces and what they wanted
to achieve personally in their lives. The anthropology of urbanism that I seek
to develop here encourages a more multi-site ethnographical approach, one
which supplements the conventional anthropological focus on home life and
the formation of urban social groups, on the rhythms of the city as Lefebvre
(1991) calls it, with a greater sense of engagement with the way power and
identity are contested on streets and in public spaces. The social circuitry that
connects spaces such as homes and streets, or verandahs and dance halls, is
also critical to understand. It is an approach that deals simultaneously with
home spaces and street styles, with the everyday rhythms and routines of
urban life at home and on the street, as well as explosive upheavals in the
cultural and political life across the space of the city.
This highlights another weakness of conventional urban anthropological
approaches to the city, which is their general lack of interest in relations of
the power and inequality in the city. Appadurai (1996) noted some time
ago that we must acknowledge that: ‘neighbourhoods and localities never
simply exist, but are always socially produced and consequently have to be
constantly defended from competing claims and demands’. In his analysis,
‘locality production’ always involves ‘a moment of colonialization, a moment
Bank T01319 01 chaps 19 17/11/2010 08:13

both historical and chronotypic, where there is a formal recognition that the
production of neighbourhood requires deliberate, risky, even violent action’.
In this process, there is ‘the assertion of socially (often ritually) organized
power over places and settings that are viewed as potentially chaotic and
rebellious’ (1996: 183–84). In re-thinking space in relation to power, Lefebvre
(1991) wrote in the 1970s about spatial relations and the dialogue between
‘representations of space’ (constellations of power, knowledge and spatiality),
people’s own ‘spaces of representation’ (counter-spaces of spatial meanings
and understandings that emerge from located social life), and the emergent
‘spatial practices’ (time-space routines and the spatial structures through
which social life is produced and reproduced). Within this framework, he
imagined that spatial relations were infused with unequal power relations and
emerged from the struggle between those who are able to define and control
space, such as landlords, capitalists or the state, and those who use that space
on a daily basis, ordinary people. Both scholars stressed, as I would want to
here, that locality is always the product of contested place-making rather than
some pre-existing container of ‘local culture’, a site of uncontaminated ‘local
knowledge’, or a fixed site of community power (see also Smith 2001, 2005).
With these conceptual and theoretical considerations in mind, I would like
to turn more specifically now to the field site of my research in East London,
Duncan Village, and make some preliminary comments on the politics of
place-making and identity formation in this anthropologically renowned space
in the period after the Mayers left, namely the apartheid and post-apartheid
period. I begin with a very brief history of the city and the townships.
East London after the Trilogy
The city of East London is located on the eastern seaboard of South Africa. It
was established in the mid nineteenth century as a military garrison town on
the eastern frontier of the Cape colony and soon evolved into a trading centre
as the colony expanded eastwards. With expanded trading, the urban economy
grew through the export of agricultural goods, such as wool and hides, and
the importation of basic consumer goods and agricultural equipment for
white settler farmers in the immediate hinterland and African peasants to
the east. East London boomed in the 1870s and 1880s on the back of rising
wool prices. In the latter half of the nineteenth century, missions, soldiers
and German settlers also came in through the port city as part of efforts by
the British to expand the frontiers of the Cape colony. By the 1880s, most
of the Xhosa heartland of the Eastern Cape had been annexed by Britain
and the structures of colonial administration were in place all along the
eastern seaboard from East London. A system of indirect rule, where native
commissioners and magistrates ruled over large districts with the assistance
of co-opted headmen and chiefs provided the modus operandi of the new
administration (Crais 2002; Hammond-Tooke 1975). Missionaries and traders
followed in the wake of the colonial administrators and soon established
a powerful presence in the colonial interior, first in the western part of the
Bank T01319 01 chaps 20 17/11/2010 08:13

eastern frontier; later they moved eastwards, extending mission outposts and
trading stations beyond the Mthatha river. The final act of colonial annexation
occurred in 1894, after stubborn resistance from Mpondo people collapsed,
and with it the independent African chieftaincies that separated the Cape
colony from Natal (Beinart 1982).
In the early decades of the twentieth century East London rose to prominence
as a trading centre, where economic activity centred on the harbour, railway,
merchant houses, processing works and craft shops. The town was a centre
of African trade, and was also a major port for the export of wool produced
in the Eastern Cape, to Britain and elsewhere. By the 1920s, however, the
wool-exporting role of the city was under challenge and the city was beginning
to experience the effects of economic decline and depression (Bundy and
Beinart 1987: 273). Population growth in the urban locations that had been
established for Africans at the turn of the century increased steadily during the
first two decades of the century, but exploded in the 1920s as rural poverty in
the surrounding African reserves of the Ciskei and Transkei intensified in the
middle years of that decade. It is reported that, between 1919 and 1928, the
African population of East London increased by 41.7 per cent, and between
1925 and 1930 it grew by nearly 8,500 people, an increase of over 50 per cent
in five years. In 1929 alone, it was reported that 1,100 immigrants arrived
in the city from rural areas, pushing the African population of the city over
25,000. The late 1920s was also a period of growing labour unrest in the city
following the consolidation of the Independent Industrial and Commercial
Workers Union in East London. It was a time of rapid change in the city, as
new African independent churches grew in popularity, and political agitation
and anti-white political sentiment were strong in the locations.
In the period between the early 1930s and the mid 1950s, when a new group
of anthropologists arrived in East London locations under the leadership of
Philip Mayer, there was rapid change in the economy of the city. This period of
secondary industrialisation started shortly before the outbreak of the Second
World War and continued through into the 1960s and beyond. In the 1930s,
new industrial parks were established around the harbour and the city was
marketed as a growing industrial hub. By the end of the war, there were
already over 100 manufacturing plants in East London, and these increased
from 135 in 1946 to 323 in 1958. The number of jobs for African workers
in the industrial sector also quadrupled within a decade from 3,800 in the
mid 1940s to over 13,000 in the mid 1950s. By 1954, it was reported that
there were approximately 800 industrial establishments in the ‘eastern half
of the Eastern Cape’. The greatest concentration of industries in this region
was found in the magisterial district of East London. The total industrial
work force in the region was recorded at 17,500 employees, of whom 85 per
cent were male and more than 75 per cent lived in the East London and King
William’s Town areas. The industrial base of the city was structured around
the food, textile, motor vehicle, furniture and chemical producers. In 1953–54,
there were 28 food-processing concerns, 11 textile and footwear firms, 11
chemical industries, 48 transport businesses (including those involved in motor
Bank T01319 01 chaps 21 17/11/2010 08:13

vehicles and their parts), and 59 construction concerns. In terms of total

employment, the industrial sector of the city alone had as many employees
as the wholesale, retail and service sectors combined. Industry was thus the
mainstay of the East London economy (Black and Davies 1986: 10–15).
Photo 1.1 A view of the East Bank location in the 1950s

Source: East London Municipal Collections, East London Public Library.
The urban locations of East London became a magnet for new immigration
from the rural areas, especially after the war. Between 1930 and 1950, the
population of the locations had swelled from around 30,000 people to over
50,000. The provision of local services did not keep pace with the growth in
population, and by the 1950s, the East Bank, East London’s largest location
had been declared one of the most overcrowded in the union, a festering,
uncontrolled slum with open sewers. It was politically volatile and had a
well-established and sizeable educated local elite of African teachers, nurses
and clerical workers, as well as a growing male working class, most of whom
were migrants living in backrooms in the yards of formal houses. It was
into this context that Philip Mayer led his team of anthropologists in 1954.
Their engagement with the East Bank location and East London lasted for
most of the 1950s and, as I have explained, resulted in the production of
three books, known collectively as the Xhosa in Town trilogy, published by
Oxford University Press in South Africa between 1960 and 1963. One of the
reasons why Mayer and his team placed migrants and migrant culture at the
centre of the enquiry was because the city was awash with urbanising, rural
migrants in the 1950s. They came to East London from the struggling and
drought-stricken rural reserves, the Ciskei and Transkei areas, surrounding the
city in search of industrial jobs and were found by Mayer and his colleagues
huddled together in the backyards and shack areas, struggling to survive
Bank T01319 01 chaps 22 17/11/2010 08:13

with their amakhaya (home mates). In this context, it is not surprising that
Mayer afforded rural migrants in the city – or what Roberts (in Ward 2004:
183) called ‘urban peasants’ in the late 1960s in his work on slums in Latin
America – such a central place in his analysis of the locations.
Photo 1.2 The destruction of the Meine family house on Fredrick Street, Tsolo, East Bank, 1967
Source: FHISER Hidden Histories Collection, Fort Hare.
Racial Modernism, Socialism and the House
In the period after the Mayers and their colleagues left East London, the
city underwent a dramatic transition with the announcement that the
wood-and-iron sections of the East Bank location would be demolished and
the old location would be reconfigured as a much smaller urban township,
called Duncan Village, housing a combination of permanently urbanised
African workers and male migrants, confined to tightly controlled municipal
single-sex hostels. Belinda Bozzoli (2004) has recently tried to define this
transition from the location to the township strategy as a move from ‘welfare
paternalism’ to ‘racial modernism’. Following Rabinow (1989, 1995), I define
the township model as a form of middling modernism, a version of modernist
planning focused principally on reconfiguring the home and domestic life,
as opposed to other versions of modernism which concentrated more on
public spaces and the integrity of the city centre. Like many cities in South
Africa, East London underwent a facelift in the post-war period that saw
the city centre restructured with new multi-storey modern office blocks and
shops on wider roads. In the areas outside the city centre and the burgeoning
white suburbs, I argue that a fundamental aim of this racial modernism
Bank T01319 01 chaps 23 17/11/2010 08:13

in the townships was the desire to re-engineer urban social relations and
subjectivities at the local level. It offered permanently urbanised Africans a
vision of black suburbia by offering them more solid houses to live in, but
denied them the right to own these properties or to express their individuality
in their new neighbourhoods. The township affirmed neither individuality
nor private property, but actively advocated the universal adoption of the
male-centred, nuclear family form for urban Africans. In recognition of these
limitations, Freund (2007) has recently equated township formation with a
process of ‘sub-suburbanisation’.
The restructured African urban space of the township was undoubtedly
based on suburban ideas, but the model also drew on the authoritarian
tradition of socialist urbanism, which set out to enforce obedience, compliance
and feelings of ‘sameness’ among members of the new socialist working class.
Under apartheid, private site or home-ownership was abolished for Africans
in the city. The township home was conceived as part of the public sphere
and, as such, was open to any intrusion by the state. The idea was that
everyone classified in a certain way would get exactly the same housing unit
and yard. There was no scope for variation according to private or individual
difference. Moreover, as Crowley and Reid note in relation to socialist Eastern
Europe: ‘new ways of organising the home, the workplace and the street would
create [it was believed] … new kinds of persons or moral subjects’ (2002:
15). In a similar vein, Stephen Lovell (2003: 105) writes that, in Russia, the
‘post-revolutionary order was designed to create a new man by remaking
his environment in the broadest sense: not only by eliminating political and
social opposition … but also by ripping apart the fabric of everyday life and
weaving it anew’ (emphasis added).
Verdery (1996) argues that socialist states legitimated themselves and
their interventions by claiming that they redistributed the social product in
the interest of the general welfare. On this basis, Verdery argues, socialist
paternalism constructed its nation on an implicit view of society as a family,
headed by a wise Party, a kind of male father figure. Verdery (1996) called it
the zadruga state, meaning the extended family, patriarchal state. This type of
state tried to reconfigure male and female roles. ‘One might say that it broke
open the nuclear family, socialised significant elements of reproduction’, she
argues, ‘while leaving women responsible for the rest’ (1996: 65). The state
clearly usurped certain patriarchal functions and responsibilities, thereby
altering the relationship between gendered ‘domestic’ and ‘public spheres’
familiar from nineteenth-century capitalism (1996: 65).
Like Verdery’s socialist state in Romania, the apartheid state was also a
patriarchal state. Afrikaner nationalism was configured around male heroes
who built and defended the nation, while women – volksmoeders (folk
mothers) – protected the home and looked after the children (cf. Coombs
2003; McClintock 1995). Afrikaners and the ‘white nation’ generally did
not want their women to be drawn into the industrial labour market in the
way that socialism opened up that possibility in the nationalisms of socialist
Eastern Europe. There was also no need for such a move under the apartheid
Bank T01319 01 chaps 24 17/11/2010 08:13

system, because it was designed to release black men to meet the increasing
demands for industrial labour in the modernising economy. Some of these
black men would have to prove themselves to be civilised labour, capable
of living and reproducing themselves in the city. For this to transpire, it was
necessary for the state to deal with the dilemma of the urban location, which
presented itself in the 1950s as an essentially feminised space, dominated by
unmanageable youth and unruly, independent women.
A fundamental component of racial modernism, I will argue, was the
desire to re-assert male power and authority over the ‘native spaces’ in South
African cities. To restore control and discipline, the apartheid state wanted
to shut down all spaces where women in the city could act independently of
male authority. The aim of racial modernism, I suggest, was therefore not
only to disconnect white and African society and deepen the divisions in
the colonial dual city, as Bozzoli (2004) points out, but also to restructure
power and authority within urban African society itself. In order to do this,
apartheid needed to institute a system of patriarchal proprietorship in the
township, which transferred the authority for the management of women
in the city from the state onto the black male headed nuclear family. Urban
women who were not already under patriarchal authority needed to be placed
under such authority, or systematically removed from the city. It was also
declared in the new township regulations that all forms of petty commerce
and income-earning by women would be banned. The limited number of
new township formal businesses that were permitted after the 1960s were
invariably given to men, and this is precisely what happened in the new
Duncan Village as well.
The argument I advance here consequently differs significantly from that
of scholars like Mamdani (1996), who asserts that it was race that excluded
Africans from equal rights and civil liberties in colonial towns and cities,
and patriarchal proprietorship that kept African women disempowered and
bonded in the countryside. I want to suggest that this distinction is misleading
because it not only ignores that extent to which, as Hooper (1995) explains,
all forms of modernist planning, including colonial and postcolonial ones,
are fantasies of male control – what she calls ‘poems of male desire’ – but
also the particular nature of patriarchal entitlement in the apartheid city. In
the apartheid city male authority did not rest on any appeal to the legitimacy
of customary power, it was simply bestowed on township patriarchs by the
white state, which placed the full weight of its repressive power behind the
defence of patriarchy. Women who would not submit to male authority in the
city simply had no place there. Even widows were driven out to prevent the
kind of gender contamination that had characterised the location.
The conjoining of white male power at the centre with black male power
on the periphery created what I call an invisible staircase within the structure
of racial modernism and domination that had crucial implications for the
ways in which some men rose up against others within the township during
the 1980s and, even more importantly, for the way in which township men
have behaved and responded to the collapse of apartheid and the building
Bank T01319 01 chaps 25 17/11/2010 08:13

of a new post-apartheid society. Elder (2003: 5) has been one of the few
scholars who has clearly recognised these links. He argues that there has been
inadequate understanding of how ‘the geography of apartheid’ intersected
with ‘heterosexist oppression’, allowing new forms of ‘sexual oppression’
into the ‘nooks and crannies of the apartheid landscape’. He calls for a more
detailed analysis of apartheid as a ‘hetero-patriarchal system’ that cut across
the urban–rural divide. The historical ethnography presented in this book
seeks to respond to this call and places gender relations and gender identities
at the centre of the analysis. Indeed, in exploring women’s responses to new
forms of male domination and control, I have found that De Certeau’s (1984)
distinction between tactics and strategies as forms of resistance to domination
a useful heuristic device for the analysis (cf. Chapters 7 and 8).
By the 1980s the apartheid model had begun to unravel in East London. The
post-war industrial boom in the city petered out in the late 1960s and by the
1970s the manufacturing sector slowed down. To revive industrial interest in
peripheral areas, the apartheid state offered firms incentives to relocate to the
newly ethnic homelands, which included the Ciskei and Transkei outside East
London. The thinking behind the scheme was that it was better to encourage
job creation in rural areas than have unemployed Africans streaming into
the cities in the 1970s. This process saw some factories shutting down in
East London and reopening in nearby homeland towns, where industrialists
received state subsidies and labour unions were banned.
By the 1980s, labour and political activism, and generalised worker dis-
satisfaction with low wages in East London, created a crisis, leading to
major strikes that threatened to close production plants in the city. At this
time local residents also evicted the apartheid government appointed officials
from the township and instituted a system of democratic street, branch
and area committees as the legitimate authorities in the township. In other
words, the residents of township had declared their ‘right to the city’ in the
Lefebvrian (1974) sense (cf. Fawas 2009). Part of this assertion of power
involved the township civic organisations declaring the right to control influx
and settlement in the township. This opened Duncan Village up to new
settlement, not only from families who had been removed from the area, but
also to new immigrants moving into the city from rural areas. The result was
a quadrupling of the township population, which overloaded the existing
urban infrastructure and encouraged population densification in Duncan
Village that rated among the highest in South Africa. By 1990, backyard
and free-standing shacks outnumbered formal structures by a ratio of about
three to one. The newspapers and the politicians lamented the reversion of
Duncan Village to an overcrowded and under-serviced urban slum of well
over 70,000 people.
When I entered the field for the first time in 1995, I encountered a community
in transition. A large section of the traditional working class had been moved
out of the township by large employers and resettled in new company housing
estates. This pushed unemployment levels in the area beyond 40 per cent of the
adult population. Moreover, the political unity and high levels of community
Bank T01319 01 chaps 26 17/11/2010 08:13

organisation that had characterised the township community during the

struggle years of the 1980s had begun to dissipate with the collapse of civic
structures and the rise of crime and violence, which entrenched the idea that
Duncan Village had reverted to being an ‘irredeemable slum’.
Photo 1.3 Duncan Village Proper, 2004

Source: Leslie Bank.
Fractured Urbanism and the Post-apartheid City
Colonial cities are classically dual cities, and South African cities, as we have
seen, are not exceptions. These days the notion of the ‘dual city’ is most often
invoked in relation to post-industrial cities, where the gap between the rich
and poor is growing and the traditional middle and working class has been
eroded by structural and economic change. Globalisation has increased the
ability of the upper classes to realise larger profits while at the same time
displacing jobs that were once secure for the traditional middle and working
class. In countries like South Africa, where cities were already racially divided,
the impact of globalisation and neoliberal economic restructuring has widened
divisions between rich and poor, between township and suburb. The rhetoric
of urban renewal in post-apartheid development demands that the townships
become suburbs. In terms of official policy, all informal settlements are also to
be converted into new low-cost housing estates by 2014 and townships are to
be converted into vibrant, economically integrated and connected suburban
Bank T01319 01 chaps 27 17/11/2010 08:13

settlements. However, everywhere one looks the problem of urban poverty

seems to be growing. Thus, despite promises of a ‘better life for all’ in cities
where all citizens have access to basic urban services and social welfare, the
neoliberal economic policies of the ANC have helped to ensure that economic
inequalities have grown since apartheid. The main problem for the traditional
African working class in the townships is that steady economic growth since
the 1990s has been accompanied by de-industrialisation and downsizing in
manufacturing and mining (cf. Barchiesi 2008). This has undermined the
traditional African urban working class, which is being replaced by what
Waquant (2006) calls a precariat, an amalgamation of people who lack social
organisation and access to secure wage labour employment. They now mostly
live by their wits, depending on part-time casual employment, welfare grants
and hustling in the informal economy (see Chapter 9).
In 2000, Graham and Marvin developed the term ‘splintering urbanism’ to
describe the ‘uneven overlay and retrofitting of new high performance urban
infrastructures onto the apparently immanent, universal and (usually) public
monopoly networks’ set up between the 1930s and the 1960s. They argue
that the market liberalisation of the 1980s and 1990s ensured that high-end
services and infrastructure could be delivered to geographically dispersed
enclaves of wealthy consumers, thus creating the spatial effect of splintering
access and connectivity to infrastructure. In theory, the old comprehensive
modernist plans were ditched in favour of a model which allowed private
sector agents to partner with the neoliberal state to rapidly improve services in
selected, high-value areas, while ignoring investment in others. Other authors
have noted how new forms of inequality and spatial segregation, associated
with gated communities and fortressed neighbourhoods, have helped to
ring-fence the rich and keep out the poor (Caldeira 2000). In Johannesburg,
Martin Murray (2009: 10) recently notes that:
if the steady accretion of luxury entertainment sites, enclosed shopping malls

and gated residential communities in the northern suburbs [of the city] has
come to symbolize the entry of the middle class urbanites into the culture of
aspirant ‘world class’ cities, then the proliferation of overcrowded, resource
starved informal settlements on the peri-urban fringe represents the dystopia
of distressed urbanism.
This uneasy coexistence of what some call ‘distressed urbanism’ (Murray

2009), others ‘amorphous urbanism’ (Gandy 2005), and yet others ‘ruined
urbanisation’ (Simone 2004), – which they all associate with the social
and economic dystopia of overcrowded, crime-ridden and poorly serviced
townships, slums or ghettos – with areas of privilege, wealth, cosmopolitanism
and global connectivity, lies at the heart of current debates about the African
city. Some authors are choosing to ignore the distressed areas in their desire to
push a version of the African city as dynamic, innovative and global. Nuttall
and Mbembe (2005, 2008), for example, declare that to continue to define
Johannesburg as a segregated, colonial or an apartheid city diverts attention
Bank T01319 01 chaps 28 17/11/2010 08:13

away from its pedigree as an important global metropolis. They claim that
Johannesburg is an ‘illusive metropolis’ and that many aspects of the city’s
history, cultural and economic life position it within the global cities club.
Watts (2005) objects, arguing that such a perspective ignores deeply rooted
poverty and slum formation in the city, which is as much part of its ‘city-ness’
as its affluence and postmodern inclinations.
Similar arguments have erupted around Dakar, a city that is a centre of
cosmopolitan, global modernity, despite the fact that it runs on a fragile infra-
structure that denies the vast majority of the population access to basic urban
services, such as clean water and electricity (see Scheld 2007). In Lagos, Rem
Koolhaus (2002) has famously turned the old dualism on its head by asserting
that this seemingly chaotic and unplanned city represents the ‘perfect storm’
of neoliberalism, urbanism and globalisation, the ultimate market-driven
global city of the future where the state has little or no influence on the shape
and form urbanism takes. Koolhaus sees aspects of the future of Chicago and
New York in Lagos now. Gandy (2005) strongly disagrees. He states that
the unplanned ‘amorphous urbanism’ of Lagos is a complete disaster for the
people of the city and is nothing short of catastrophic for the future, hardly
something to be celebrated. Living in such squalor and poverty, he postulates,
it is little wonder that so many Nigerians have turned either to evangelical
Christianity or fundamentalist Islam for hope, succour and solace (Gandy
2005: 45; see also Davis 2006).
One of the challenges we face in trying to move the debate beyond these
stylised oppositions of the urban, global postmodern and the slum is to better
grasp some of the similarities and differences between cities of the south.
Robinson (2006) suggests that one way to achieve this is to dispense with the
global cities model and adopt a non-hierarchical approach to understanding
‘ordinary cities’, one that reveals the complex sociality of the city and the
cosmopolitan forms of urbanism that exist in the postcolonial world. One
problem I have with the dual city model is that it reproduces ideas that locate
modernity, change and innovation in that part of the city that is well-resourced
and privileged, while it ignores the complexity of urbanism in poor areas of
the city. It is bit like the old debate between the city and suburb, invoked
by Berman (1988), Sennett (1977) and Jacobs (1961), where the dense and
diverse city centre is seen as innovative, edgy, progressive and dynamic, always
changing, while the socially thin suburb is presented as boring, repetitive
and staid. In the dual city debate, the slums seem to have taken on some of
the attributes of the dystopic suburb, which is often feminised as a space of
routine, repetition and reproduction, where nothing much changes. The slum
is also commonly presented as socially thin and fragile, as a place which lacks
social density and durability.
Just as everyday life in the suburb and its dynamic contribution to the city
has remained sociologically hidden, so too, I would argue, has the sociality
of the slum (or the township) remained a mystery, which is often theorised
but improperly understood. Watts (2005) claims that if we are to better
understand African and postcolonial cities, we need to focus much more on
Bank T01319 01 chaps 29 17/11/2010 08:13

3 0 home spac e s , s t re e t s t y l e s
those parts of the African city that are less easily legible, recognisable and
immediately visible. ‘What one needs to understand’, he urges, ‘is the politics
of the governed in these vast spaces of exclusion and invisibility’ (2005: 190).
And this is precisely what I set out to achieve in this book, which presents a
detailed historical ethnography of social, economic and cultural change on
the margins of the South African city.
In undertaking this project, we would also do well to recognise that, as
Graham (2000) himself points out: ‘binary oppositions are prone to exaggerate
differences, confound description and prescription, and set up overburdened
dualisms that miss continuities, underplay contingency and overstate the
internal coherence of social forms’ (2000: 186). In the case of the South
African city, it is clear that the slums or the economically marginal areas,
which include the former township, are not actually located completely off
the city’s infrastructural grids. In addition, there has been no sudden and
absolute move away from urban modernist planning traditions to something
openly neoliberal, postmodern and purely market-driven. What exists is a
hybrid set of plans and practices that blend older ideas of the state as ‘master
builder’ with a drive towards a more market-driven, splintering urbanism. It
is also incorrect to assume that apartheid racial modernism, which precedes
the current moment, was always successful in creating entirely new urban
communities. People resisted forced relocation, state funds ran low at critical
points, and the focus of urban planning sometimes shifted to other projects.
This is precisely what occurred in Duncan Village in East London, where racial
modernism was introduced in the 1960s and 1970s but never taken to its
logical conclusion before it imploded, thus fragmenting the urban landscape
of disadvantage further. The place is not and never was homogeneously
‘distressed’, nor is it a socially and economically ‘amorphous’ slum.
In conceptual terms, I would like to suggest that the term fractured urbanism
might usefully describe what is happening in many old townships and
settlements like Duncan Village in South Africa, where the apartheid urban
infrastructure still operates and is periodically extended and upgraded through
new state investment, but nevertheless remains hopelessly over-extended in
places where social life and economic need exceed both the capacity and the
physical reach of existing grids. Under such conditions, distress translates
into fracture, which breaks and segments the urban locale into different
zones, niches, territories and settlements that are created, not by the force
of real estate capitalism (Harvey 1989; Zukin 2000), nor by the imperatives
of market-driven infrastructure and service provision for the rich, but by
the failure of comprehensive urban planning systems and state structures
to effectively manage counter-insurgent urbanisation and settlement, which
continually overruns the plan. The process of fractured urbanism I describe
in Duncan Village started in the 1960s, when the apartheid state failed to
forcibly remove all targeted residents of the old East Bank location, leaving
many to linger in transit camps and residential niches that were never removed
or destroyed, and that gradually developed their own social character or
charisma. In the post-1980s period, further fracturing has occurred as older
Bank T01319 01 chaps 30 17/11/2010 08:13

grids and templates in the township plan cracked, broke and segmented
under the weight of demographic stress, insurgent urbanisation and low
levels of public investment and maintenance. This transformed the place
into ‘complex and dense’ settlement of a variety of socio-spatial communities,
with different settlement histories, dynamics and trajectories, all displaying
a slightly different level of access to urban infrastructure, social services and
livelihood opportunities.
In this book I focus on different parts or zones of the new post-apartheid
urban ecology and give the different socio-spatial segments – backyard shacks,
hostels, free-standing shack areas, old formal rental enclaves, new Recon-
struction and Development Programme (RDP) housing enclaves – careful
attention in their own right, looking at their social composition, gender
dynamics, identity politics and place-making tendencies. I argue that while
the boundaries of these new socio-spatial communities are often very fluid,
connections exist within and between them which contribute to the feel and
identity of different niches and social enclaves. I also acknowledge varied
and diverse forms of temporality in different localities, which gives each one
its own unique character and identity within a broader sense of belonging to
the marginal space, which has its own challenges and issues of identity and
definition. These I address at the end of the book in a detailed discussion of
marginality and the dissolution of place.
The Organisation of the Book
The chapter outline is broadly in keeping with the conceptual and historical
analysis outlined above. In Chapter 2, as noted above, I revisit the East Bank
location of the 1950s and attempt to re-evaluate some of the criticisms levelled
against the trilogy volumes. Based on the restitution research I conducted
between 1999 and 2001, I reconstruct a somewhat different account of the
social and cultural history of that period and the nature of urbanism in the
East Bank to that presented in the trilogy. In particular, I address significant
silences in relation to urban cultural formation, which I attribute more to
limitations of method than to a deficit of theory. The chapter does not discount
the trilogy as an impressive ethnographic baseline from which to work, but
highlights analytical gaps in these earlier analyses.
The third chapter of the book turns readers’ attention to the unfolding of
racial modernism in East London and its impact on the residents of the old
locations. I argue that urban restructuring gained momentum after the urban
riots in the East Bank in 1952, which had a profound impact on race relations
in the city. The political mood in the city literally changed overnight as the old
paternalism of the ‘city fathers’ was replaced by repression and authoritarian-
ism. I then examine how the old East Bank location was destroyed and how
Duncan Village township was erected in its place. I argue that the township
model was much more than a means of controlling Africans and containing
political unrest. It developed as a socio-spatial model, which drew inspiration
from the American city and socialist urbanism, to design new urban African
Bank T01319 01 chaps 31 17/11/2010 08:13

communities and subjectivities. The main focus is on the way this new regime
of power and control was implemented and how local residents responded to
it. Here we see how the new Duncan Village ended up being a social mixture
of old and new, with important implications for the cultural politics of the
new township.
Chapter 4 picks up the story of Duncan Village in the 1980s, after the forced
removals and restructuring of the previous two decades. The new township
population stabilised at around 15,000, as opposed to the 50,000 people that
had once lived in the East Bank. The residents of Duncan Village kicked out
the apartheid-appointed black town councillors in 1982, ushering in ‘the era
of the comrades’. The township was declared ungovernable and was now
effectively ruled by young men deeply hostile to the white racist state. These
youths deliberately reversed the rules of township governance and opened
Duncan Village up as a ‘space of liberation’, as a new people’s democracy,
a space of socialism where all who wished to live there would be permitted
to do so. Within just a few years, apartheid modernism had imploded and
the neatly planned neighbourhoods were again overrun with wood-and-iron
shacks, transforming the township back into an overcrowded urban slum.
This chapter pays particular attention to the emergence of the sprawling new
shack areas which encircled the township, and analyses the changing social
and cultural dynamics of the township as a whole, telling a story of multiple
transitions in politics and identity as Duncan Village was remade.
The above discussion lays the foundation for a series of more specific inves-
tigations of social identity, cultural style, and the politics of space and place.
In Chapter 5 I look at the phenomenon of ‘the comrades’, not as a political
movement, which is how they are usually described, but as a cultural style.
I argue that ‘the comrades’ dismantled the central divide between urban and
rural youth that had dominated township politics over the preceding decades.
By dismantling the age-old division between ‘borners’ and ‘bumpkins’, they
strengthened their capacity for resistance and encouraged the formation of
more hybrid identities and values, ones that could absorb aspects of rural
youth socialisation while still embracing urban values and forms of struggle.
Rural tropes of power and identity informed the creation of ‘people’s courts’
in this period, while country values associated with fighting and bravery were
valorised. The chapter also explores how the style of the comrades came to
be expressed in the domestic sphere through the creation of new kinds of
youth households, where young people lived together without getting married.
From the free-standing shacks and the township streets, my attention shifts
to single-sex hostels. The research for this chapter is based on extensive
fieldwork in B-hostel complex in Duncan Village, which had been built in
1959 and was transformed into a family housing unit in 2000. My research
was conducted just before this transformation occurred, at a time when
women were not welcome in a hostel complex, which remained a residual
focus of an older male migrant identity. The central theme of the chapter is a
concern with the reconstruction of migrant cultures and consciousness in the
Bank T01319 01 chaps 32 17/11/2010 08:13

hostel after the 1960s. I argue that, far from falling away with relocation, Red
migrant culture was powerfully reconstructed in the hostels by conservative
migrants from the former Transkei area. The chapter tracks the reconstruc-
tion of these pockets of Red subcultural life and explores its longevity in
the township.
Chapter 7 moves from the hostels to the homes of the formal township
residents who were expecting Duncan Village to evolve into a stable and
prosperous suburban-style residential area. Here I explore cultural models
of the house and of home-making, and show how these have changed over
time. I begin by documenting the destruction of the female-centred, matrifocal
household model and its replacement with the hetero-patriarchal model
of the township house, which casts men as breadwinners and women as
homemakers. I argue that individualising the home inside was a way in
which women could assert their individuality and resist the uniformity of the
authoritarian township model. I then proceed to explore how house-making
has changed since the 1980s with the collapse of full male employment
and the growth of new opportunities for women in the informal economy.
I argue that, while many women would like to recreate older models of a
female-centred entrepreneurial household, these are increasingly difficult
to realise in the context of domestic fragmentation and intergenerational
conflict. I also show how many of these households have become ‘married
to the state’, in the sense that their members are critically dependent on state
grants for survival.
From those in the formal homes we move to the backyards and, more
specifically, to the social spaces of shack communities that have arisen in
yards behind formal houses. Here I track the changing history and social
composition of the backyard residents. When the Mayers worked in the
location, the yards were filled with migrants. By the 1990s, however, these
spaces were predominantly inhabited by single women with children. The
feminisation of the yards thus forms the central focus of this chapter, as well
as the changing relationships between landlords and tenants. I argue here that
backyards emerged as critical spaces for the survival of women in the city.
Through an analysis of the rhythms of the yards, I demonstrate how networks
are constructed and spaces used in women’s struggles against marginalisation,
interpersonal violence and exclusion.
The concluding chapter of the book shifts the discussion from the
anthropology of urbanism to the comparative sociology of exclusion
and marginality. Here I apply Wacquant’s (2006) model for the analysis
of advanced urban marginality and assess the extent to which it fits the
Duncan Village case material. I am particularly interested here in the issue of
‘spatial stigma’ or the disillusion of place. I try to show how Duncan Village,
despite its very distinguished history of urban achievement and struggle,
has now become a place of shame, a dishonoured urban locality, which few
believe has a viable future. In making this argument, I suggest that it is the
increasingly fractured nature of the township urban experience, the deep
Bank T01319 01 chaps 33 17/11/2010 08:13

3 4 home spac e s , s t re e t s t y l e s
social and gender cleavages that exist in the township, and the failure of new
place-making strategies to capture the imagination of township residents that
have ensured the increasing marginality of Duncan Village as a place and
generated increasingly bleak imaginations of the urban among its residents,
many of whom are convinced that yet another spatial removal represents their
best chance of urban survival. I conclude by suggesting that, as yet another
set of redevelopment plans are implemented, the very future of this historic
township hangs in the balance.
Bank T01319 01 chaps 34 17/11/2010 08:13

Home Spaces Street Styles: Contesting Power and Identity in A South African City

Uploaded by

Copyright:

Available Formats

Home Spaces Street Styles: Contesting Power and Identity in A South African City

Uploaded by

Document Information

Original Title

Copyright

Available Formats

Share this document

Share or Embed Document

Sharing Options

Did you find this document useful?

Is this content inappropriate?

Copyright:

Available Formats

Home Spaces Street Styles: Contesting Power and Identity in A South African City

Uploaded by

Copyright:

Available Formats

1

Towards an Anthropology of Urbanism

Bank T01319 01 chaps 1 17/11/2010 08:13

Across the Atlantic, Herbert Gans (1962) published an important study of an

this study provides further evidence that urbanisation is not a simple,

Janet Abu-Lughod (1961) arrived at similar conclusions in her research among

The Mayers’ book-length ethnography, Townsmen or Tribesmen (the second

Bank T01319 01 chaps 2 17/11/2010 08:13

role of regional cultural dynamics in shaping processes of urban adaptation.

Bank T01319 01 chaps 3 17/11/2010 08:13

Bank T01319 01 chaps 4 17/11/2010 08:13

Bank T01319 01 chaps 5 17/11/2010 08:13

Bank T01319 01 chaps 6 17/11/2010 08:13

Bank T01319 01 chaps 7 17/11/2010 08:13

Red and School Revisited

During the 1970s, celebration of Townsmen or Tribesmen turned to damnation

The two competing images of the African – migrant labouring tribesmen

Bank T01319 01 chaps 8 17/11/2010 08:13

Bank T01319 01 chaps 9 17/11/2010 08:13

Bank T01319 01 chaps 10 17/11/2010 08:13

post-apartheid development (see also Attwell 2005; McAllister 2006). The

Identity, Tradition and the City

In the 1990s, 40 years after the publication of Townsmen or Tribesmen, a

[V]illagisation in the city undermines and dismantles Western myths of

Bank T01319 01 chaps 11 17/11/2010 08:13

De Boeck and Plassart (2006) reinforce and extend these observations,

In his work on modernity and cultural hybridity in Latin America, Garcia

Bank T01319 01 chaps 12 17/11/2010 08:13

In a different context, Brenner (1998) shows how urban traditions can

Bank T01319 01 chaps 13 17/11/2010 08:13

Bank T01319 01 chaps 14 17/11/2010 08:13

having entered a different world, a complex mosaic of different precincts and

Physically, a place is a space which is invested in understanding of

Rather than encountering a two-dimensional and socially thin space, as a

Mobility, Localism and Power

In this book, I am interested in processes of urban place-making or what

Bank T01319 01 chaps 15 17/11/2010 08:13

Bank T01319 01 chaps 16 17/11/2010 08:13

nor any aspiration towards cosmopolitanism. It is entirely possible for urban

Bank T01319 01 chaps 17 17/11/2010 08:13

She writes out of an intensely lived domesticity… She knows her

Bank T01319 01 chaps 18 17/11/2010 08:13

township mothers and homemakers continued to pursue their own projects

In this book, I lament the extent to which anthropologists have been

Bank T01319 01 chaps 19 17/11/2010 08:13

East London after the Trilogy

Bank T01319 01 chaps 20 17/11/2010 08:13

Bank T01319 01 chaps 21 17/11/2010 08:13

vehicles and their parts), and 59 construction concerns. In terms of total

Photo 1.1 A view of the East Bank location in the 1950s

Bank T01319 01 chaps 22 17/11/2010 08:13

Racial Modernism, Socialism and the House

Bank T01319 01 chaps 23 17/11/2010 08:13

Bank T01319 01 chaps 24 17/11/2010 08:13

Bank T01319 01 chaps 25 17/11/2010 08:13

Bank T01319 01 chaps 26 17/11/2010 08:13

organisation that had characterised the township community during the

Photo 1.3 Duncan Village Proper, 2004

Fractured Urbanism and the Post-apartheid City