Marriage at the Drop of a Hat: Housing and Partnership in South Africa's Urban African Townships, 1920s-1960s

Abstract

This paper holds a lens to the politics of marriage in South Africa's urban African townships, by way of a study of so-called 'house marriages': marriages transacted for the sake of a house. This was a mode of marriage that flouted all the established norms of Christian and customary marriage; yet it proliferated, and by the late 1960s, accounted for a significant proportion of partnerships in South Africa's cities and towns. The paper shows that this trend marked in the first instance the increasingly interventionist role played by the South African state in producing the sphere of African domesticity, along with the conditions of sexual and emotional intimacy. But the profusion of house marriages was also bound up with cultural shifts within urban African communities. While house marriages were persistently condemned as immoral and inauthentic by some, other township residents took a different view. Over time, the meaning of these partnerships was refashioned, so that house marriages were increasingly normalized as a legitimate, even respectable, mode of partnership.