Translocal Lives: Gender and Rural Mobilities in South Africa, 1970–2020

Abstract

ABSTRACT Rural spaces in South Africa remain crucially important to the material, emotional, and cultural wellbeing of many South Africans, and many ‘rural’ lives have long been highly mobile and dynamic. Women in rural areas, in particular, provide diverse maintenance work that sustains translocal households – entities that sprawl across rural, peri-urban, and urban space. This article situates South African mobilities, especially those of women, in the historical context of the past fifty years, exploring the changing nature of connections between rural and urban lives of Black South Africans through the lens of a village in a former ‘homeland’ in northeastern Limpopo Province. Whereas analyses tend to focus on migrants, often viewing rural people as immobile or out of step with modernity, the focus here is on those who remain principally rural yet maintain mobilities of diverse kinds. Rooted in the qualitative methods of oral history, social history, and gender history, the article provides a fine-grained analysis of rural households, the lives of those who remain in or return to rural areas, and rural contributions within translocal households and economies.