Making Freedom by Anne-Maria Makhulu

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ANNE MARIA MAKHULU

Apartheid, Squatter Politics, and

the Struggle for Home

Making Freedom


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Making Freedom


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anne-maria makhulu

Making Freedom| | | | |

APAR T HE ID , SQUAT T E R POLI T ICS, A ND

T H E S T R U G G L E F O R H O M E

Duke University Press | Durham and London | 2015


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© 2015 Duke University Press

All rights reserved

Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper ∞

Typeset in Whitman by Westchester Publishing Services

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Makhulu, Anne-Maria, [date] author.

Making freedom : apartheid, squatter politics, and the struggle for

home / Anne-Maria Makhulu.

Pages cm

Includes bibliographical references and index.

isbn 978-0-8223-5947-0 (hardcover : alk. paper)

isbn 978-0-8223-5966-1 (pbk. : alk. paper)isbn 978-0-8223-7511-1 (e-book)

1. Squatter settlements—South Africa—Cape Town—History—20th

century. 2. Squatters—Political activity—South Africa—Cape

Town. 3. Apartheid—South Africa—Cape Town. I. Title.

hd7374.4.c34m35 2015

363.5'109687355—dc23

2015014082

Cover art: Untitled (Hope Chest series), by Zwelethu Mthethwa, 2012,

digital c-print, dimensions variable. © Zwelethu Mthethwa. Cour-

tesy of the artist and Jack Shainman Gallery, New York.


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Acknowledgments vii

Prologue xi

Introduction 1

Chapter 1

Migrations 27

Chapter 2

Counterinsurgency 63

Chapter 3

Transitions 95

Chapter 4

“Reckoning” 129

Conclusion

Making Freedom 153

notes 169 references 199 index 221

Contents


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I owe an incalculable debt of thanks to so many. Let me begin with my in-

terlocutors in the city of Cape Town, who made enormous contributions

to this book whether or not they came to appear in the text itself. Those

who did and who must remain anonymous and were thus renamed include

Edith, Evelyn and Evelyn (both), Ezekiel, Gugulethu, Kaizer, Lungile, Max,Naledi, Nelson, Noluthando, Nomalady, Nomasundu, Nombulelo, Ntom-

binkosi, Samuel, Solomon, Stembiso, Unathi, Winnifred, and Xoliswa. Why

they were so generous with their time and their stories is anyone’s guess.

Besides those living on the city’s perimeter there were municipal offi cials

who gave of their time and knowledge. My thanks to those who shared their

insights about spatial planning, development, and housing, as well as, on oc-

casion, their recollections of what it meant to work either for or against the

old apartheid regime. My debts to Madeleine Fullard are positively unrepay-able. Formerly at the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, Madeleine’s

continued work in the relentless pursuit of the truth on behalf of families

of the disappeared is extraordinary. Josette Cole’s longtime commitments

to the history of Crossroads have guided me through. I thank her for that.

Finally, to my South African family in Cape Town and Johannesburg—to

my cousins, aunts, uncles, nieces, and nephews— what great comfort you

afforded me; Antoinette, you, most of all.

As with all first books, monographs certainly, this one began as a doctoralproject longer ago than I care to admit. For that and its extended journey

Acknowledgments


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into book form I have my advisers, previously at the University of Chicago,

to thank. These include Andrew Apter and Jean and John Comaroff. The

Comaroffs issue, as I do, from South Africa, and their encouragement and

support to those of us who were part of a generation of PhD students able to

return, for the first time post-1994, to our homeland was and continues to

be immeasurable. To them I say “baruti ba me baba tlhaga.” Within Tswana

culture the stature of “teacher” is beyond compare. Additional thanks go

to Ralph Austen, Marshall Sahlins, David Scott, Raymond Smith, George

Stocking, and Terence Turner—each in his way, in the somber and stimulat-

ing context of the U of C, taught me more than I can ever repay. At Prince-

ton, first in the Society of Fellows in the Liberal Arts and then in the Shelby

Cullom Davis Center for Historical Studies, I was afforded the time and

resources to work on Making Freedom and a collection of essays, Hard Work,

Hard Times. Special thanks go to Leonard Barkan, Simon Gikandi, Carol

Greenhouse, Mary Harper, and Gyan Prakash, as well as to my “fellow fel-

lows,” as we liked to refer to ourselves.

At Duke University, my home of the last so many years, the support and

generosity of colleagues, both within the two departments I serve and be-

yond, have been tremendous. Duke is nothing if not a hothouse of ideas,

and I have benefited greatly from the rigorous and energetic exchanges

across departments, programs, and centers. In Cultural Anthropology, myprimary home, I have been permitted a space both inspiring and unstinting.

My thanks go to all my colleagues: Anne Allison, Lee Baker, Engseng Ho,

Ralph Litzinger, Randy Matory, Laurie McIntosh, Louise Meintjes, Diane

Nelson, Mack O’Barr, Charlie Piot, Irene Silverblatt, Harris Solomon,

Orin Starn, Rebecca Stein, and Charlie Thompson. In African and African

American Studies my colleagues have been equally supportive. I would like

to thank Michaeline Crichlow, Sandy Darity, Tommy DeFrantz, Thavolia

Glymph, Kerry Haynie, Karla Holloway, Bayo Holsey, Wahneema Lubiano,Mark Anthony Neal, Charmaine Royal, Karin Shapiro, Stephen Smith, and

Maurice Wallace for their encouragement. To my colleagues and friends

in the Concilium on Southern Africa, particularly Catherine Admay, our

programming and visiting scholars of and from South Africa have provided

such inspiration. Finally, I am forever indebted to graduate teaching assis-

tants Joella Bitter, Mackenzie Cramblit, and Samuel Shearer. Jacob John-

son, an mba candidate, also offered invaluable support in the figuring of

exchange rates, historic inflation, and the real value of wages.


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Let me say that editors have the patience of Job; at least mine has had to.

Ken Wissoker has been generous beyond compare. He and my anonymous

reviewers were meticulous in their reading and constructive comments on

the varying stages of the book project. Without them I would have been lost.

Portions of the manuscript were presented at a variety of conferences,

workshops, and lectures over the years. Sites of these have included the

University of California, Santa Cruz; the University of Cape Town; cuny

Graduate Center; Harvard University; Johns Hopkins University; New York

University; the University of North Carolina; the University of Pennsyl-

vania; Rutgers University; the University of Wisconsin, Madison; and the

University of the Witwatersrand, as well as the American Anthropological

Association, the Society for Cultural Anthropology, and, closer to home,

many conferences and workshops on the Duke University campus. I am

most grateful to the members of the departments that hosted me and to

fellow conferees and workshop participants who read my work closely and

charitably.

Research is always both time-consuming and costly, and without the

support of a variety of donor institutions, foundations, and my home uni-

versity, Making Freedom would never have come to print. At different stages

in my research I benefited from the financial support of the Princeton So-

ciety of Fellows in the Liberal Arts, the Princeton University Committeeon Research in the Humanities and Social Sciences Travel Grant, the Duke

University Arts and Sciences Committee on Faculty Research Travel Grant,

the Shelby Cullom Davis Center for Historical Studies Research Fellowship,

and the Duke University Center for International Studies Research Grant.

The Harry Frank Guggenheim Dissertation and Josephine de Ká rmá n

Fellowships supported the writing of the doctoral thesis.

In Cape Town I made many friends, and they opened their homes and

lives to me at a time when I most needed a quiet and safe space in the midstof often diffi cult fieldwork. Some cooked wonderful meals, others offered

wise counsel, and still others helped me make sense of the things I was see-

ing and hearing. For their care and friendship I must thank Birthe Bruun,

Kelly Gillespie, Patti Henderson, Steffen Jensen, Leigh- Ann Naidoo, and

Elaine Salo. Elaine’s husband, Collin Miller, raised the spirits with late

night Cape jazz jam sessions. My many interlocutors after the fieldwork was

completed made their own contributions to steering me through the thick-

ets. Patrick Bond, Beth Buggenhagen, Lisa Davis, Jack Halberstam, Neville


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Hoad, Stephen Jackson, Zolani Ngwane, and Hylton White certainly come

to mind.

Finally, my family: to my father, who has seen this project through from

start to finish, words cannot express my gratitude to you for your patience

and investments in this project. To Michael, my partner in all things, I

promise you this book in any case is done; others will surely follow, and I

know you will always be my greatest support. To Stya, you know who you

are; without you Making Freedom would have been impossible. You are my

brother, my comrade. This book is dedicated to you.


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I confess to feeling ambivalent about Cape Town. It is a breathtaking city,

framed by Table Mountain—the 1-kilometer-high peak with its signature

tabletop summit—and overlooking the Atlantic Ocean. Beginning in the

seventeenth century, the “Mother City” became a first port of call for Euro-

pean seafaring traders and in due course home to colonial settlers. I recalllooking out from the Rhodes Memorial, which offers panoramic views of

the metropolitan area. This was back in 1999, three years after the start of

the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (trc). I was with friends and fel-

low researchers as well as former members of Umkhonto we Sizwe (mk)—

the disbanded armed wing of the African National Congress ( anc). As we

looked out from the Table Mountain Nature Reserve in a spot just above

the University of Cape Town campus, I noted how the n2 motorway headed

southeast, toward the Cape Flats, while the m3 wended its way southwest- ward, toward the so-called leafy southern suburbs. This physical split in the

road said so much about the success of apartheid’s spatial planning strategy

to confine blacks and Indians and coloreds to the sandy, barren flatlands

leading to the ocean, while white Capetonians enjoyed the lush, green land-

scape of those suburbs close to the mountain toward Tokai,1 a particularly

beautiful suburb situated in the foothills of the Constantiaberg range,

surrounded by small wineries and pine plantations. It struck me how ex-

plicit the “mapping” of race and entitlement was, and I joked that uponlanding on the shores of the Cape those very first seafarers in 1652 must

Prologue


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have imagined they had come ashore on God’s land as they looked out on

the physical beauty of Table Mountain, Helderberg, the Hottentots-Holland

mountain range, the Atlantic and Indian Oceans’ convergence at Cape Point,

and the indigenous fynbos and other exotic vegetation. And yet, as I sug-

gested to our friends, those settlers in God’s land appeared to have commit-

ted the most ungodly of acts. At first, they stole land, conquered by power

of firearms, sold human beings into slavery, and then later, much later, they

perpetuated a deeply hierarchical system, in part by splitting and separating

space and inevitably forcing the n2 and m3 motorways to diverge.

Many others have noted the deep social rifts and inequalities in South Afri-

can society generally and their acute expression in the context of Cape Town,

which is known to most outside South Africa as a playground for the affl uent

(McDonald 2008; McDonald and Smith 2004; Samara 2011; Seekings and

Nattrass 2005; Thorn and Oldfield 2011; Watson 2002; cf. Beall, Crankshaw,

and Parnell 2002). Tourists come to tee off on some of the best golf courses

the country has to offer, dine at some of its finest restaurants, rent or buy

luxurious holiday homes along the coastline, get cheap tummy tucks and

then recover in the Mount Nelson Hotel, and sunbathe for hours on some

of the world’s most glorious beaches. Many white Capetonians (not all of

course) enjoy the city’s natural beauty, too, and although beaches and other

public amenities are no longer legally segregated, they are de facto for themost part. To some extent this has to do with the city’s limited public trans-

port system, which makes getting to the coast or the mountains diffi cult for

those without cars. But the problem is not simply whether certain kinds

of people, specifically people from the townships and squatter areas, can

physically make the trip to Camps Bay or Clifton Beach no. 4, but whether

they see any purpose in it and whether they feel comfortable when they do.

One needs money in many of these places to feel accepted, and the subtle

and not so subtle policing of who is recognizably a consumer and who is notoften enough dictates who has access and who doesn’t. The Victoria and

Albert Waterfront is a good example. Though strictly speaking open to the

public, its combination of shops, galleries, restaurants, and condominium

complexes, which gleam with glass and steel in the South African sky, privi-

leges a purchasing power beyond the reach of the average black Capetonian.

And while waterfront supermarkets like Pick n Pay and Woolworths suggest

that just about anyone might come to do their food shopping, in reality the

combination of road access by car and the sprawling shopping complex’s se-curity staff makes this retail space more private than public.


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Chatting with friends in Lower Crossroads informal settlement—only a

few weeks after my trip to the Table Mountain Nature Reserve—about their

weekend plans and whether people would be “going to town,” I met with

a perplexed silence. On further prodding I was reminded that everything

took money: the long taxi ride into town from the Flats, the restaurants and

shops that most would not even dare to enter, never mind the museums and

galleries. What exactly was it that I thought people would “do” in town; what

purpose was to be served by going on a Saturday afternoon; whom would

one be visiting? “That’s for white people to go to town like that,” someone in

the group observed. This perhaps distinguishes Cape Town from other cities

and, in particular, Johannesburg, where a growing black middle-class works

and plays. But Johannesburg is also, cliché though it may be, genuinely an

“African” city in a way that Cape Town isn’t. Whatever people’s income brack-

ets and employment status, one rarely has the sense that black residents of

Johannesburg feel somehow unwelcome downtown or even in the swank

Nelson Mandela Square in Sandton City Shopping Center. Johannesburg is

abuzz with hip young black people of every class and income bracket. There’s

a vibe about “Jozi” that Cape Town lacks (Bremner 2004a; Nuttall 2004). As

Sarah Nuttall and others have noted, young African residents of Johannesburg

have taken up a loxion kulca (location or township culture) that enables an

imagining of possibilities, of cultural expression, of upward mobility.This isn’t to say that the same isn’t true of Cape Town’s townships—there

is a distinct location or township culture there, too—but Johannesburg

does offer the possibility for a kind of continuity between the culture of

the location and the culture of the city as a whole that seems continually

foreclosed in Cape Town, where the distinctions between black and white

modes of life remain stark. It surely helps that Johannesburg has a long and

gritty history of mining and migrant work, of polyglossia, and cosmopoli-

tanism. Further, as Lindsey Bremner has argued, “to be black and living onthe edge is not necessarily to be poor” (2004b, 42) in Johannesburg, because

the city’s edge can very often serve as the link between opportunities and

mobility. I’m not convinced the same can be said of Cape Town’s periphery.

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In 1979, my father moved our family to Botswana, where he served as bishop

for the Anglican diocese.2

Though a man of the cloth, my father was nostranger to the ins and outs of global refugee politics. Serving on the Africa


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Desk at the World Council of Churches in Geneva during the mid-1970s, he

worked closely with displaced persons from all across the continent but also

took an interest in the growing southern African refugee crisis, especially

those fleeing the system of apartheid. These were largely young men and

women who had never been afforded educational opportunities at home

under the oppressive system of Bantu education, which was designed to

“de-skill” black South Africans en masse.

At the time, I was only vaguely aware of my father’s involvement in the

anti-apartheid struggle—specifically his involvement in a variety of initia-

tives to funnel assets into South Africa, predominantly from the Norwegian

government, and to assist in the escape of dissidents and their resettlement

in foreign countries, where many young exiles sought training in military

strategy or in higher education. Nor was I fully aware of the intricate details

of the refugee networks, their source of funding, or the practicalities of relo-

cating activists, never mind the efforts to support them. Still, I was, in some

limited sense, conscious of the enormity of the situation across the border in

South Africa and in the adjoining Frontline States. I read newspapers avidly

and precociously, including the now defunct Rand Daily Mail, listened to

South African radio in all its complicated and not so very complicated cen-

sorship and bias, sometimes ending an evening with Our Boys on the Border .

A program mostly directed toward whites, Our Boys on the Border coveredthe correspondence and news from young men in combat in Namibia (then

South West Africa), Angola, and Mozambique and was both a testament

to Cold War anti-Communist sentiments and a little old-fashioned. There

were late night visits from “friends” and “relatives” seeking refuge on the

Botswana side. Some came from Lusaka (headquarters to the African Na-

tional Congress in exile), and these were generally very serious encounters

that occasioned discussion in the garden, since my father was never sure if

the phone or the house was secure. All this sounds like cloak-and-daggersubterfuge, and in part it was. But really, the frequent reception of people

coming across at Tlokweng, just to the southwest of Gaborone, or organiz-

ing for someone to carry cash back into South Africa was mostly done in an

effort to attend to the most basic needs of those fighting the good fight on

the other side of the border (see, e.g., Schaap 2010).

My father always opined that revolutionaries had to be fed, clothed, and

sheltered and their children cared for; at times, they also needed their bills

paid. To the degree that formal organizations and collective action wereeffective, their success was rooted in the most fundamental requisites of


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the household. Rather than work against the grain of the funders and sup-

porters of “the struggle,” who mostly gave to formal bodies, my father tried

to get money to members of many different groups, as well as individual

families, churches, and social ser vices programs. With the aid of the Nor-

wegian Foreign Ministry, money went to various radical Left and African

nationalist organizations, among them the African National Congress, to

pay their phone and electricity bills; the Pan Africanist Congress in Dar

es Salaam; members of the Black Consciousness movement still operating

within South Africa’s borders; and families whose primary breadwinner was

in detention and no longer able to put food on the table. This ideological

agnosticism would ultimately earn my father the label of an anti- anc man,

but for what it was worth, he held to this position “religiously,” if I may say,

and in a sense it became an article of faith.

This is where I believe my own interest in the politics of the everyday,

both in apartheid and post-apartheid South Africa, probably finds its origi-

nal inspiration. I have often described my research on squatters and the

phenomenon of urban informal settlement as a kind of theology of the poor,

albeit a secular one, a theology in its turn inspired by the writings of that

great secular theologian Karl Marx—certainly the so-called early humanist

Marx— who aspired to make material a philosophy of pure contemplation

and yet at the same time remained a thinker of great philosophical and thuscontemplative depth. I have been equally inspired by other social theorists

who either followed or diverged from Marx’s dialectical materialism (as will

become apparent in the pages that follow) and who sought to understand

the causes of systemic and emergent inequality and were concerned with

the forms of consciousness that made the world appear either as it should

be or in great need of transformation. That being said, Marxian analysis

cannot, by any measure, account for the kinds of politics of life and forms of

life to which this book addresses itself. And as will become quite apparentin the course of Making Freedom, class analysis, specifically, cannot explain

most thoroughly or completely the politics of land grab, illegal settlement,

and everyday struggles to survive that together make up what I would like to

call a “politics of presence” on the margins of the city of Cape Town.

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Apartheid was a constitutionally ordained and legally enforced system ofracial discrimination, and those who fought against it became its heroes


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and martyrs, while the most defiant among them were spectacularly victim-

ized, as the proceedings of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission would

later reveal. Beginning in 1996 and concluding in 1999–2000, evidence of

the state’s hand in detentions, torture, disappearances, and murders built,

day after day, week after week. At the same time, apartheid generated con-

ditions in which blacks, coloreds, and Indians (so-called non- whites) suf-

fered materially the consequences of a system that functioned by a logic of

racial discrimination to create distinct classes of people.

Still, despite the many assertions I make about the politics of squatting

as having its basis in an urgent “materialism,” Making Freedom is not pri-

marily concerned with conditions of abjection. On the contrary, I argue

that notwithstanding the meagerness of life on the periphery of Cape Town

(both during apartheid and in the new democratic era), squatters mobilized

and continue to mobilize a whole array of everyday strategies in making lives

of tremendous meaning. Such practices, in the past at least, presumed the

future possibility of emancipation from the strictures of the system of influx

controls (those statutes that restricted individual movement). That the ho-

rizon along which such cultural practices have been engaged has changed

so dramatically since the end of the apartheid era is also the focus of much

of what follows. How is it, with democratization and the transition to a

constitutional system in which rights and entitlements in citizenship be-came so critical, that grinding poverty on Cape Town’s periphery not only

persisted but also deepened? In part, I propose that South Africa’s turn to

democracy in 1994 coincided with the adoption of free market reforms that

were anti-poor and that neoliberalization in the Mother City (to be distin-

guished from the neoliberal policies of other cities) followed a very particu-

lar course—a point cogently argued by David McDonald in World City Syn-

drome: Neoliberalism and Inequality in Cape Town (2008; also see Brenner

and Theodore 2002).Historically deemed a “liberal” city owing to the prominence of so-called

English-speaking South Africans in economic and political life, white Cape-

tonians were nevertheless guilty of the worst forms of racial paternalism

(Bickford-Smith 1995). As Making Freedom tries to show, it was in the Cape

that influx controls were most stringently enforced, in part owing to a se-

ries of preexisting circumstances: long distances between the Cape and the

Transkei and Ciskei homelands, which facilitated the exclusion of Africans,

as well as job reservation policies that favored colored labor. It surely didn’t


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hurt the city’s reputation that it was distant from the seat of administrative

power, Pretoria; nestled between mountain and ocean, Cape Town was a

place of great natural beauty and somehow remote enough to give it the

appearance of operating above the fray. But Cape Town was no less an apart-

heid city, whatever its liberal claims.

The racial politics of Cape Town don’t begin and end with black- white

relations, of course. What makes the Cape unique, at least one of the things

that makes it unique, is the presence of a large colored population. So what-

ever the parochialisms of the English-speaking community, Cape Town is

actually incredibly diverse. Coloreds have lived almost everywhere in the

city and just beyond its limits: in the now rather diminished Bo-Kaap (for-

merly the exclusive home of Cape Muslims) bordering the central business

district—much of it sold off to wealthy whites and re-delimited as the Cape

Quarter—on the Flats, long home to colored farmers and, beginning in

the mid-1960s, communities displaced from the City Bowl, and finally, be-

yond the city proper, out in the Winelands toward Stellenbosch. From Cape

Malay cuisine to the muezzins’ call to prayer, reaching from the Flats to the

center of town, to the old colored fishing families based in Simon’s Town to

the very particular timbre of Cape Afrikaans, Cape Town’s colored popula-

tion in a sense defines the city. Demographically, coloreds are in a majority

given former job reservation (the Coloured Labour Preference Policy), seg-regation (Group Areas), and pass laws (Natives Urban Areas Act). Language

most tellingly indicates something of the force of colored influence: of the

province’s population of approximately 4.5 million, 49.7 percent speak Afri-

kaans,3 20.2 percent speak English, and 24.7 percent speak isiXhosa.4

Quite apart from their cultural impact, coloreds have often perversely

influenced the outcome at the ballot box. Since 1994, the province has

been led first by the New National Party and, since 2009, the Democratic

Alliance against a general tide of anc support across the other provinces.Historically, coloreds were molded as a constituency, a community, and a

type of citizen through a set of welfare interventions in housing, educa-

tion, and institutions addressing social “deviance.” In his book about the

colored Cape Flats, Steffen Jensen argues that coloreds, beginning in the

1930s, were the focus of a series of commissions of inquiry, consistent with

a broadly biopolitical project in which coloreds were “managed” at the level

of population. Jensen goes on to propose that such efforts produced a “col-

ored citizen” well integrated into the institutions of welfare, punishment,


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and labor and that this “management” was quite distinct from the forms of

extreme violence and coercion meted out to Africans (Jensen 2008, 21–22,

39; also see Ashforth 1990).

Without a doubt black, colored, and white Capetonians experience the

city very differently in view of their uneven access to public amenities, insti-

tutions, and jobs. In the townships, the commute between home and work

is both long and costly. Most making the daily trip to jobs in the suburbs

and central business district use the system of kombi taxis, which are ex-

pensive and not always roadworthy. The train and bus, while less expensive,

are also unsafe, either because they have not been ser viced or because of

limited security; many commuters try to avoid the state-owned train com-

pany (formerly Spoornet and now Transnet Freight Rail), particularly after

dark, for fear of being mugged or worse.

A great deal has been written about the politics of ser vice delivery and

denial (Bond and McInnes 2007; Desai and Pithouse 2004; Gibson 2012;

Pithouse 2008), specifically the frequent suspension of electricity and water

by local authorities in the face of nonpayment by ratepayers on the Flats.

The resort by ser vice providers to prepaid meters has inevitably shut off

vital ser vices to those who cannot afford them. And while nationwide pro-

tests against the corporatization of local state functions stem from condi-

tions of poverty that make it virtually impossible for the poor to pay forser vices, the general view in offi cial circles is not that market-orientated

reforms may be unsuited to the complex post-apartheid economic climate

but rather that the failure to pay rates is consistent with a “culture of non-

payment,” dating back to the rent and consumer boycotts of the 1980s. This

is an astonishing position in the face of the country’s unemployment rate of

about 25.6 percent,5 Cape Town’s 30 percent poverty rate, the highest rate

of any city in the country, and a poverty rate of 77 percent in the Eastern

Cape, the predominant geographic origin of in-migration to Cape Town andthe second poorest province in the country (Bä hre 2011, 373).

The broader picture is equally uneven. At the national level there re-

mains much evidence of the post-apartheid state’s efforts to redistribute

wealth, if not in the form of actual reparations, certainly through the de-

velopment of infrastructure. The state has delivered housing, social grants,

and welfare to its citizens, yet at the same time the adoption of market

reforms has had, as McDonald and Smith have proposed, “far-reaching im-

plications for South African cities” (2004, 1461)—and rarely positive ones


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at that (cf. Ferguson 2007). Housing, for instance, has often been slow on

delivery and almost always poor in quality, even though a robust housing

policy, a cornerstone of the post-1994 government’s efforts to make restitu-

tion for the past, is something on which the anc has long campaigned. This

is due partly to the decrease in capital transfers from national to local states

and partly to the outsourcing of construction to private companies, whose

primary concern is not equity but the bottom line.

Cape Town’s winters are cold and damp, and the flood-prone Flats only

add to the constellation of public health challenges, including chest infec-

tions, which are widespread and in the most serious cases tubercular, both

as a consequence of poor baseline health and the prevalence of hiv / aids

(see, e.g., Nattrass 2004; also see Fassin 2007).6 Access to decent schools

and hospitals remains uneven across the city, and in the townships these

tend to be overcrowded and poorly equipped, with teachers and nurses

being inadequately trained. During my first stint in the field, 1998–99, and

then again in the early 2000s, I was frequently told that to be hospitalized

was a death sentence. The logic was faulty, of course, but in practice to

seek medical care was to submit to long waits in casualty, to the possibility

of having to sleep out in the corridors, and finally to be sent home with

little more than a Panado (acetaminophen). Only the very sick ventured

to hospital—so, yes, in a sense, to go was to never return home.Early attempts to redistribute assets and reprioritize budgets, a “peace

dividend” of sorts, never really came to pass, and the Cape metropolitan

area remains “remarkably skewed along race and class lines” (McDonald

and Smith 2004, 1477). Relatedly, the city has remained a deeply violent

place. The Western Cape’s murder rate, for example, was 48.3 per 100,000

for 2013–14 (the last year for which statistics are available), far outpacing

Gauteng Province at 26.2 per 100,000, which is perceived, at least, as more

dangerous. It also far exceeds the national average of 32.2 murders per100,000 for the same period.7 South Africa has enjoyed a long and varied re-

lationship with violence, though its codes and meanings have changed over

time and as the country transitioned from a colonial to a postcolonial order.

If political violence was most common during the 1980s, intermittent taxi

wars, gang violence, and more intimate aggressions like domestic violence,

murder, and rape have come more recently to characterize the South Afri-

can scene (Steinberg 2000; cf. Comaroff and Comaroff 2006).8 The debate

over whether there has been an escalation in violent crime since the end of


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the old order has never really been resolved. Some note that South African

society has always been shot through with cruelty and aggression—on the

shop floor, at the missionary school, prison, mental hospital, and home,

in the confrontations between a gun- wielding state and its stone-throwing

insurgents. The role of municipal breweries in raising revenue in the town-

ships, the use of alcohol in the mines to dull fear and encourage labor com-

pliance (see Van Onselen 2001), and the shebeen (tavern) brawls that seem

to be such a part of daily life in the townships suggest a historically specific

relationship between violence and high levels of alcohol consumption. But

it is the intimacy of so-called contact crimes that makes one wonder about

the relationship of violence, racism, and poverty.

Leslie Bank has cogently argued that family relationships were system-

atically reordered in the 1980s with the rise of the culture of the comrades,

or amaqabane. While the migrant labor system, single-sex hostels, and the

feminization of poverty in the reserves all played their part, it was the in-

tensity of protest politics and how they were taken up by young people (es-

pecially men) that informed the changing role of parents and children in

relation to one another. Leslie Bank notes that so-called traditional forms

of marriage were steadily eclipsed by live-in arrangements (ukuhlalisana),

which had a direct bearing not only on the spatial arrangement of domestic

space—the expansion of shack settlements and backyard tenancies where young people sought to live independently—but on the relationships be-

tween parents and their teen and young adult children (2011, 130–31).

Further, the mobilization of communities via block committees and other

civic organs often created continuity between the comrades, the domestic

sphere, and township central committees. To the degree that such youth

politics were ascendant, the role of the comrades in consumer and rent

boycotts had a direct impact on matters of home and young male authority.

“At each level, disciplinary structures were set in place, which dealt withcases ranging from political dissent to domestic disputes as these spheres

interpenetrated each other” (93).

Bank also proposes that young men were dictating not only to parents

what they could or could not do but also to wives and partners. They were

likely to stipulate where relatives and spouses could shop in the context of

the consumer boycotts, for example. For some of my interlocutors these

questions resonated, and in one instance, a former comrade admitted that

he had once forced a woman who defied the boycott to ingest the contents


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of her shopping bag while he watched, including a bottle of cooking oil!

Those forms of masculinity that emerged in struggle, what Clive Glaser has

identified as “struggle masculinity” (2000), were at times threatening and

could lead to physical violence, while such excesses of highly sexualized

conduct became critical to the very essence of protest politics.

Bank and I carried out research in different parts of South Africa—he

worked in Duncan Village, just outside East London in the Eastern Cape,

while I worked on the periphery of Cape Town—and to the degree that these

were shaped by distinct local histories, the dynamics of the domestic sphere

were also rather distinct. Bank reasons that the growth of shack areas might

be connected quite practicably to ukuhlalisana arrangements in which

women, in a sense, risked “shacking up” with male partners—this without

guarantees of social respectability afforded by marriage. Beginning in the

mid-1970s and early 1980s such arrangements were also predominant in

Crossroads and Brown’s Farm and other shack areas in Cape Town, but

given the stringencies of the system of influx controls in the Western Cape,

shack areas became a space of emancipation and possibility for a slightly

older generation of migrant workers and hostel dwellers, too many of

whom desperately hoped to reconstitute preexisting family arrangements

with wives and children.

I mention such transformations in domestic arrangements because Ithink these are critical to any understanding of the ways in which violence

comes to be expressed in contemporary South Africa. That so much crimi-

nal violence is personal, intimate, and physical surely bears some continuity

with shifting relations of domesticity and sexuality dating back to at least

the 1980s, if not significantly earlier. Whether such shifting relations of in-

timacy can account for the prevalence of violence in the home in South

Africa is unclear, though I would venture to say there is surely a connection

between the two. Apartheid was terrifyingly destructive at the level of theeveryday; it permeated the social and the intimate. Tellingly, rates of sexual

offense, specifically, are extremely high in South Africa. At the same time,

qualification is called for: one, the fact that sexual offenses are reported

and recorded already speaks volumes of the state of policing and criminal

statistics gathering in contrast to other countries, certainly across the con-

tinent; two, the expansion of the definition of “sexual offense” in the Sexual

Offenses Act of 2003 and 2007 has opened up the possibility for recognizing

“that men, women, and children are potential victims” (Salo 2010, 36; also


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xxii |

see Salo 2007).9 Still, the question of how to reckon with the fact that rates

of sexual violence in the Western Cape, for example, have reached as high

as 229.9 per 100,000 (the highest rate across the provinces in 2004–5)

remains, whatever the gender of the victims involved.10

Such considerations had significant bearing on my research—the places I

was able to go (accompanied or alone), how I got to those places (mostly with

private transport), and the fact of deeply fractured social relations, such that

where I lived and where I worked might as well have been separate worlds.

Despite my best efforts to convince friends on the Flats that I should live with

them, specifically in Philippi East, and despite offers of rent that most desper-

ately needed to supplement very small or absent household incomes, no one

seemed to want the additional responsibility—that and the fact that space

was certainly at a premium because of the average size of rdp core homes.

I would eventually move to Observatory, a formerly white working-

class suburb, close to the city center. From my host, Patti, someone who

cares very deeply about South Africa, I learned invaluable lessons about

both white and black. Her experience during the anti-apartheid struggle,

mostly within the student movement in the 1970s and then in radical the-

ater, taught me other kinds of things about opposition politics, as distinct

from the radical street protests of the townships.

In any case, whatever the degrees of separation between South Africans ofdifferent complexions, I gleaned from living on Arnold Street many things

about “white lefties,” about the challenges of living in post-apartheid South

Africa where, in fact, it was becoming harder and harder to reach across the

divide separating black, white, colored, and Indian. If in the past “politics”

was a reason for gathering, organizing, and conjoining lives across the racial

divide, the urgency that had attended such activities had dissipated, and

in Cape Town post-1994 there was a palpable sense of a reimposed separa-

tion as people retreated into mostly private spaces (Morphet 1995). This was a subject of many late-night dinner conversations at home and with

other researchers and colleagues, including my very good friends Steffen

and Birthe; Elaine and her husband, Colin; Madeleine, through whom I

gained entrée to the Truth Commission; and many others besides. Truth-

fully, at the end of long days in the field in Brown’s Farm, Philippi East,

and Crossroads, as well as some of the older nearby townships, including

Nyanga and Gugulethu, it was a relief to clamber into my little car and head

home along the n2 motorway. At the same time, every single night I felt a


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pang of conscience for leaving and for what felt, at least at the time, to be

the utter impossibility of bringing together the two worlds—of research and

postresearch friendship and hospitality.

That, of course, changed over time as I met and made fast and furious

friendships, shared stories and research findings, and grew to love this mag-

nificent city despite all its injustice and fragmentation. My fieldwork neces-

sarily jumped from site to site and institution to institution, again reflecting

how disconnected the city really is: from the planning department of the

City of Cape Town to the offi ces of Ikapa to the Truth and Reconciliation

Commission and, most critically, to those settlements bordering the south-

ern side of Lansdowne Road between Duinefontein Road and the r 300.

Whether such a “method” constitutes a method as such is unclear. What I

very quickly intuited, however, was that there had to be a way of drawing

lines of connection between other wise starkly separate spheres of urban

life: between the kinds of rhetorical and ideological work of planning and

policy; between claims to a participatory process in urban transformation

even as plans continued to be mostly imposed from above; between a past

that was defined, in part, by efforts to control populations through removal

and displacement and a present in which the terms of human settlement

were being radically renegotiated. If that meant chatting with civil engi-

neers, councillors, local residents, and self-appointed “community” represen-tatives, then so be it. If it meant delving into the murky past of insurgency

and counterinsurgency efforts on the Flats and I had to hightail it to the

archives and finagle my way into the trc, then so be it, too.

In the end, this patchwork of “sites,” negotiated by moving up and down the

n2 (for that matter the m3 as well), made for the richest of ethnographic ex-

periences, if on occasion a jolting sense of the disjuncture in perceptions held

by such different kinds of people. Ultimately, however, it was the significance

of those stories of a long and enduring struggle to a “right to the city” (seeHarvey 2008; Lefebvre 1968) and through this a right to family that seemed

most compelling. Over the course of time I spent longer and longer days on

the Flats than more or less anywhere else. And as I did, the significance of the

politics of life and the forms of life that define everyday experience in Cape

Town’s informal settlements became the centerpiece of my research efforts.

It is equally the central ambition of Making Freedom to understand their po-

litical significance in apartheid and post-apartheid South Africa.


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Introduction

Making Freedom is an ethnographic study of domestic worlds in Cape Town,

beginning in the 1970s through the lead-up to the end of the liberation strug-

gle and the start of the transition after 1994. By “domestic,” I mean to imply

very little about the internal composition of households— whether extendedor nuclear, patriarchal, or single sex, as in the case of the mining compounds

and company hostels (Donham 2011). Rather, my concern rests with the very

many necessary risks and labors in constituting a domestic scene of whatever

sort during apartheid in what was then called “metropolitan” South Africa.

To that end, I examine the efforts of squatters to anticipate and then live the

terms of democracy and how living democracy shaped the emergence of a

politics of home, or ikhaya, as both an affective and material reality.

The creation of homes as spaces both implicated in and autonomous ofthe conditions of apartheid—as a system that most fundamentally manipu-

lated black family relations—provides a window onto a politics of opposi-

tion beyond that of the liberation organizations. Homes would become a

terrain of struggle. And as was evident during fieldwork in Lower Cross-

roads (located in the Eastern Node) (see map i.1), people afforded a tre-

mendous amount of effort in the building and maintaining of both shacks

and backyard “bungalows” as an expression of genuine care and value for

their homes, or emakhaya (the plural form of ikhaya). Notably, emakhaya


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is both the plural and locative form of home and suggests not simply many

homes or the place where homes are located (i.e., the townships or loca-

tion) but homes in the countryside. In other words, the locative form sig-

nals the fact of homes here and there, in the city and in the country, and

in so doing indexes a much longer history of migration and displacement.1

Relatedly, informal settlements without ser vices, so-called greenfields,continue to be understood as sites for those more or less cast out of soci-

ety. Greenfields go by the name ezimbhacwani, which refers to the place

for those without claims to home or citizenship; that is, displaced persons

(refugees), or imbhacu. This realization of the intimate connection of home,

politics, and belonging organizes Making Freedom.

In the spirit of home as a place in the city that yet signifies a whole his-

tory of movement between town and country, I open this chapter with a

chance meeting, on a return trip to Cape Town in August 2004, with former

MAP I.1 Wetton-Lansdowne-Philippi Corridor. Courtesy of Mapping Specialists Ltd.

H i g h lan d s

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WESTERN

NODE

CENTRAL NODEEASTERN

NODE

C APE TOW NC APE TOW N

LansdowneCrossroads

New Crossroads

NyangaGugulethuManenberg

Wetton

HanoverPark

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Brown’sFarmWynberg

WeltevredenValley North

LansdowneCrossroads

New Crossroads

NyangaGugulethuManenberg

Wetton

HanoverPark

Kenilworth

Brown’sFarmWynberg

WeltevredenValley North

Cape TownInternationalAirport

2 Kilometers0

0 2 Miles


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| 3

Crossroads headman Sam Ndima. Ndima had long maintained a home in

the shantytown on the city outskirts, yet before he settled in Crossroads in

the mid-1970s he, like many others, traveled back and forth between Cape

Town and the Eastern Cape.

On the morning of our first meeting, Ndima sits in his backyard, qui-

etly holding court, while several womenfolk prepare food and wash clothes.

They keep the open fire well stoked, attend to several potjies (three-legged

cast-iron pots) filled with mielie pap (ground maize) and samp (succotash),

and hang mounds of laboriously hand- washed laundry. Wooden benches

line the wattle fence, and the men, mostly senior Crossroads men, wait pa-

tiently to speak directly with Ndima, who remains closest to the fire. It is

late winter, and though the Cape sun warms by midday, the damp that con-

tinues to rise from the sandy, waterlogged earth keeps everyone in woollies

or overcoats; one or two are wrapped in blankets.2

Ndima had organized a gathering of male elders to discuss housing sub-

sidies and site allocations in the township. Twenty years earlier, as a local

headman in Crossroads squatter area,3 he had put the same leadership skills

to use brokering stays of evic

Making Freedom by Anne-Maria Makhulu

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Transcript of Making Freedom by Anne-Maria Makhulu