Men with Cookers: Transformations in Migrant Culture, Domesticity and Identity in Duncan Village, East London

Abstract

This article is concerned with understanding current transformations in migrant culture and identity in South African urban areas. It approaches the topic by revisiting Philip and lana Mayer’s classic study of migrant culture and identity in the Duncan Village township of East London. The article uses the their work as the starting point from which to construct a detailed historical analysis of the tranformations in amaqaba migrant culture in the city from the 1950s to the mid-1990s. The first part of the paper attempts to show that the Mayers greatly underestimated the resilience of this cultural form in the face of far-reaching social and political change in East London. In documenting the survival of amaqaba culture well into the 1980s, it focuses not only on the external forces that shaped migrant responses to change, but also on the internal social dynamics and relations that facilitated cultural reproduction. The second part of the paper is devoted to an analysis of the decline of amaqaba culture as a rural resistance ideology in the city in the late 1980s and its reconstruction as an urban resistance ideology predicated on the defence of particular urban spaces, identities and power relations. The paper concludes by considering the significance of the analysis for the understanding of migrant identity politics in South Africa.