Black Township Research Articles

Uneven distribution of cultural facilities in the City of Tshwane, South Africa: a call for a cultural turn in spatial planning

This paper examines the distribution of cultural facilities in the City of Tshwane, post-1994 democratic dispensation. The spread of these amenities by the municipality throughout its jurisdiction since its inception has been uneven; tilting towards the urban formerly white towns and cities as opposed to black townships and rural areas as part of its mandate to reverse the legacy of colonial and apartheid spatial planning. Through qualitative research, the paper explains this unevenness and argues that the absence of cultural planning devices to inform and guide equitable as well as equal distribution of resources only serves to perpetuate the status quo. It thus proposes a cultural turn in spatial planning in South Africa in general and Tshwane in particular to offset obvious historic disproportionate geographical contours.

Social Preservation and Moral Capitalism in the Historic Black Township of Eatonville, Florida: A Case Study of "Reverse Gentrification"

Can twenty-first-century scholars of gentrification find historical precedents for "social preservationist" ideology in the gentry-assisted black town-building movement of the late- nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries? Might the strategies employed by African-American town-builders and their wealthy white patrons/allies hold relevant lessons for current-day struggles toward social justice through historic preservation? New research into the founding era of Eatonville, Florida—a black township made famous in the Harlem Renaissance–era writings of Zora Neale Hurston and marketed today as the "Oldest Incorporated African American Municipality in America" (est. 1887)—suggests the benefits of viewing social preservationist ideology as part of the African-American community's "long-memory" DNA. Far from exclusionary or isolationist in origin, Eatonville's founding resulted from a deliberate, collaborative effort by ex-slaves and wealthy white Northern "snowbirds" to mitigate/reverse the impact of rural and suburban gentrification and create a permanent social, political, and economic space for black citizens. Through their well-publicized, ideologically explicit acts of place-making, Eatonville's founders ensured that the benefits of neighborhood development would not be reserved for wealthy white investors alone, and that the black laboring classes—as property owners and voters—would play a critical role in regional politics and democratic self-governance.

Reflections on BDS

Reflections on BDS

Description of Subjugated Woman in ZoraNaele Hurston’s Their Eyes Were Watching God : A Feminist Analysis

This study aims to explore the subjugated woman in male dominant society in ZoraNaele Hurston’s novel “Their Eyes Were Watching God”. “Their Eyes Were Watching God” has become the most widely read and highly acclaimed novel in the canon of African-American Literature. One of the most important and enduring books of the twentieth century, “ Their Eyes Were Watching God” brings to life a Southern love story with the wit and pathos found only in the writing of ZoraNeale Hurston. The novel follows the fortunes of Janie Crawford, a woman living in the black town of Eaton, Florida. This study spotlights how women live under social restrained destiny; where they suffer letdown, thwarting, dismay and mocking. Subjugation against women which transcends all natural, ethnic and class boundaries. Women are mistreated by patriarchy financially, politically, socially and mentally. Where there is patriarchy, the woman is the other. She's objectified and marginalized, characterized just by her distinction from “ale standard”. All women’s activist movement specifically advances social change and women’ equality. A woman is not considered an equal, but rather the other, and thus inferior to a man. All these problems and incidents are dangerous for women’s identity. The research deals with major aspects of hegemonic masculinity, and violence against women. This research will study the threats to female identity in the light of Lois Tyson’s feministic views.

The YCW moves into Soweto and other Black Townships: 1952 to 1965

The Young Christian Workers (YCW) movement in South Africa officially began in Johannesburg in 1949. Within a few years the movement expanded into Soweto and then other surrounding emerging black townships of Johannesburg. The YCW was a movement of the working class: by workers for workers. The young workers were the leaders of the movement. As a movement led by lay people in the church, the YCW is a movement of “Catholic Action” and this dimension will be clarified in the text. The specific focus of this article is an examination of the early history of the YCW in Soweto. This was initiated through the work of a young worker, Eric Tyacke, who was appointed to this mission by the local bishop in Johannesburg, William Patrick Whelan OMI. Missionary priests in the townships, especially those from Belgium and Ireland, facilitated the establishment and development of the movement in their role as chaplains. However, the main means of the primary activity of mission to workers, was carried out by the young worker leaders of the YCW themselves in their places of work and their communities. For this reason a major part of the data collection was through oral history, where possible from those former YCW members still alive, as well as other written sources. This missionary activity will be analysed in terms of a model of method in contextual missiology previously developed by the author. The social context of this period is also examined, as this was the time of establishing racially defined suburbs in Johannesburg as well as restrictions on trade unions, in a time when the apartheid policy of the new nationalist government began to grip.Â

Sof’town Sleuths: The Hard-Boiled Genre Goes to Jo’Burg

In an attempt to develop new constellations of world literature, this article places the writers of South Africa’sDrumgeneration within the orbit of the American hard-boiled genre. For a brief period in the 1950 s,Drumwas home to a team of gifted writers who cut their literary teeth in the fast-paced, hard-drinking, crime-riddled streets of Sophiatown, Johannesburg’s last remaining black township. Their unique style was a blend of quick-witted Hollywood dialogue, a private detective’s street sense, and the hard-boiled aesthetic of writers like Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler. Writing in English in the era of the Bantu Education Act (1953),Drumwriters challenged attempts to retribalize the African natives with the counter discourse of an educated, urbanized, modern African. This article (dis)orients conventional treatments of bothDrumwriters and the hard-boiled tradition by tracing alternative lines of flight between seemingly disparate fields of study.

‘No effort, no entry’: Fashioning Ubuntu and becoming queer in Cape Town

This article presents data from five years of research on fashion, gay identity, and post-apartheid democracy in Cape Town, South Africa. Through interviews, observations, and survey data on the experiences of young “black” and “coloured” gay men, it shows how admission standards at nightlife venues in the city’s “Gay Village,” De Waterkant, police patrons’ clothing and institutionalize essential models of raced and classed gay belonging that complicate the multicultural “Ubuntu” promised by the state. The article troubles the multiculturalism coincident with tourism media, which frames De Waterkant as “Africa’s Gay Capital,” and instead argues that participants’ understanding and use of clothing in city and black township nightlife present aesthetic anomalies through which the becoming of Ubuntu can be productively rethought. Contributing to geographies of sexuality work, the article shows how classed-race exclusions in De Waterkant help fashion Ubuntu at the junction of multiple scales of spatiality, and by applying Women of Color Feminism and Queer of Color Critique to African Studies, how everyday spaces, and the clothed bodies therein, can reveal the mutually constitutive becoming of Ubuntu and queerness.

Entrepreneurship in South African township tourism: the impact of interracial social capital

ABSTRACTEthnic entrepreneurship scholarship has demonstrated the importance of social capital for “minority” entrepreneurs, but these studies presume that social capital is co-ethnic. I complicate this assumption by investigating entrepreneurial black women and interracial social capital in South African township tourism, a niche market within the nation’s growing tourism industry. Drawing from ethnographic fieldwork conducted in two black townships in Cape Town, I spotlight black women who have established home-based bed and breakfasts and formed connections with white Europeans and South Africans during their entrepreneurial journeys. Employing Bourdieu’s theory of capital, I discuss how these entrepreneurs develop ties with whites to acquire social, economic, cultural, and symbolic forms of capital that have been systemically denied to them as black South African women. The interracial transference of these resources underscores the deep inequalities between blacks and whites, but also the agency of marginalized entrepreneurs to attain assets within constricting social structures.

What’s in a name and why it matters: A historical analysis of the relationship between state authority, vigilantism and penal power in South Africa

This article aims to clarify the relationship between state authority, vigilantism and penal power. I ask how shifting political contexts shape the construction of the ‘vigilante’ and the legitimation (or not) of vigilante violence. Based on a historical analysis of how the terms ‘vigilante’, ‘vigilantism’ and ‘mob justice’ are used in mainstream discourse in South Africa the article tracks the political transformations that took place in the South African state in the late 1970s, the mid-1980s and post-1994. I use the term ‘precarious penality’ to describe penality on the periphery—both geographically, in marginalized poor black townships—and symbolically, to denote spaces where the boundaries between what is ‘state’ and what is not are blurred. Spaces of ‘precarious penality’ pose specific problems for the liberal principles of due process and human rights that are enshrined in the South African Constitution but often distorted in practice.

Writing the Woman’s Voice: On the Verandah with Jean “Binta” Breeze

Writing the Woman’s Voice: On the Verandah with Jean “Binta” Breeze

‘The Tortoise under the couch’: an African woman’s reflections on negotiating insider- outsider positionalities and issues of serendipity on conducting a qualitative research project in Cape Town, South Africa

Issues of positionality of Black African researchers researching African issues is seldom discussed in methodological literature. In this article, I reflect from an African perspective on issues of insider/outsider positionalities and of serendipity and unexpectedness during my fieldwork which are areas often dominated by writing from the global north and by writers and researchers who do not identify as African people of color and hope that my article will contribute to fill this gap. I share my background, identity, gender and age, and how these might have influenced my approach and interpretation during the process. My qualitative study explored perspectives and subjective experiences of Xhosa speaking adults with epilepsy and their carers in an urban Black township in Cape Town, South Africa. I conclude with the tortoise metaphor to show the cultural relevance thereof, the importance of curiosity and of embracing events of unexpectedness in fieldwork.

Indicators of post-productivism in South Africa’s “platteland”: A second home case study of Rosendal, Eastern Free State

AbstractThe idea of post-productivism has been found to apply extensively in developed countries, but has been studied less in developing countries. A recent study in South Africa on second homes demonstrated that some rural spaces are slowly evolving into post-productivist countrysides, especially during weekends, month-ends and peak holiday periods. Wilson and Rigg’s six indicators were utilised to assess the rural town of Rosendal in the Eastern Free State of South Africa, the adjacent black township of Mautse and the surrounding farming area, to determine whether the notion of post-productivism can be exported from the developed North to a developing world context. Some of the indicators have been found to be highly relevant in this case study, but others have been found to be nearly irrelevant. Also important to note is that the meaning of these indicators may be different when applied to the developing South.

Translanguaging and English-African language mother tongues as linguistic dispensation in teaching and learning in a black township school in Cape Town

ABSTRACTDrawing on the notion of translanguaging, I show how learners in a Black township secondary school in Cape Town use their multilingual repertoire to achieve power, agency and voice. I use the conceptualisation of the prototypical pedagogical macrogenre from systemic functional linguistics to show how translanguaging can be used strategically to actualise regulative and instructional registers to engender teaching and learning in multilingual contexts, and to illustrate that the often-assumed “chaos” in translanguaged discourse can be harnessed to engender pedagogic discourse. I demonstrate that by using the extended linguistic repertoire, learners do not need to be competent in monoglot English to be involved in classroom interactions and learning, as the Xhosa-English translanguaged discourses provide the co(n)texts on which the “standard” English texts are consumed and produced. The article concludes with a thesis for language education policy that puts translanguaging at the centre of classroom practice in multilingual South Africa: it provides a new avenue for postcolonial learning/teaching, as it frames the learners’ cognition of content and ability to construct meaningful texts in familiar cultural and sociolinguistic contexts.

Resistance, Critical Agency and Initiatives of Black Post-School Youth, Facilitators and Organisers in a Black Township in South Africa

The Post-school Education and Training (PSET) policy seeks to address the education and training needs ofpost-school youth not in education, employment nor training (NEET). The problem of youth NEET has beenresearched from many perspectives. However, there is a dearth of knowledge about the responses, views and actions ofpost-school youth NEET living in this precarious situation. This paper analyses the resistance, critical agency andinitiatives of youth; organisers; and facilitators at a youth development and organisation centre in a township inGauteng. The study is framed by the notion of ‘critical’ agency (Gramsci: 1971) and Bourdieu’s concept of 'strategies'that mediate structure and agency. These concepts enable a focus on critical agency that emerge withinseverely constraining social conditions. Data were collected through the following sources and methods: from a'youth dialogue' amongst engaged youth; ethnographic interviews with post-school youth themselves; interviews withkey individuals such as organisers, leaders and facilitators of programmes; and observations of literacy classes offeredat the centre. Data analysis revealed resistant counter discourses amongst the youth to school and current PSET;acceptance of education for employment; desire for higher quality education; and clear ideas of alternativepedagogies. In addition to these counter discourses the paper highlights the critical agency of key individuals in theface of debilitating structural constraints. Implications for the post school education and training system are raisedand some recommendations are made.

Black Towns and the Civil War: Touring Battles of Race, Nation, and Place

This article focuses on the inclusion of a Civil War battle site, Honey Springs, in two bus tours of Oklahoma’s historic Black towns. I explore why tours devoted to Black communities visit the site of a historic military event, and how each tour does so differently. Looking at a conventional state-sponsored tour narrative of the battle site and an alternative tour narrative, I argue that the two are distinct in how they position the relationship of blackness to America. The conventional narrative focuses on the details of the battle, placing Black participation and relevance to the war story on the sidelines. Ultimately, I argue that the two tours demonstrate public struggles over the place of blackness in the nation’s history.

Kwazakhele after twenty years of democracy: the contradictory development of political pluralism and political alienation

The article explores political participation and democratic consolidation in South Africa 20 years after the end of apartheid. It does so through the lens of the residents of Kwazakhele, a black township in Nelson Mandela Bay in the Eastern Cape province of South Africa. Two surveys conducted in the month following the May 2014 elections provide the basis for analysing the political attitudes and expectations of older residents and comparing them with those of younger residents of the 'born free' generation. The findings are that while there is a high level of participation by older residents, there is a significant alienation of youth. At the same time, the consolidation of democracy is evidenced by the growth of political tolerance and political pluralism, shown by the presence and (limited) support for opposition parties. The findings include analysis of how the voting patterns in Kwazakhele contributed to the defeat of the ANC in the 2016 local elections in the Nelson Mandela Bay Municipality.

The YCW moves into Soweto and other Black Townships: 1952 to 1965

The Young Christian Workers (YCW) movement in South Africa officially began in Johannesburg in 1949. Within a few years the movement expanded into Soweto and then other surrounding emerging black townships of Johannesburg. The YCW was a movement of the working class: by workers for workers. The young workers were the leaders of the movement. As a movement led by lay people in the church, the YCW is a movement of “Catholic Action” and this dimension will be clarified in the text. The specific focus of this article is an examination of the early history of the YCW in Soweto. This was initiated through the work of a young worker, Eric Tyacke, who was appointed to this mission by the local bishop in Johannesburg, William Patrick Whelan OMI. Missionary priests in the townships, especially those from Belgium and Ireland, facilitated the establishment and development of the movement in their role as chaplains. However, the main means of the primary activity of mission to workers, was carried out by the young worker leaders of the YCW themselves in their places of work and their communities. For this reason a major part of the data collection was through oral history, where possible from those former YCW members still alive, as well as other written sources. This missionary activity will be analysed in terms of a model of method in contextual missiology previously developed by the author. The social context of this period is also examined, as this was the time of establishing racially defined suburbs in Johannesburg as well as restrictions on trade unions, in a time when the apartheid policy of the new nationalist government began to grip.

“Class D coloureds”: The establishment of Noordgesig, 1939-1948

Noordgesig Township is situated on the edge of Soweto, bordering the better known Orlando Township. This article pieces together the history of the township and its residents from the late 1930s to the beginning of the apartheid government in 1948. This is the first academic study of Noordgesig, and the first to include the township in the historical analysis of Soweto. The article is a contribution to the under-researched history of coloured townships in the Johannesburg area. It explores the heterogeneous categories of class and race that influenced government policies and propelled some urban township dwellers into a vaguely defined group termed “Class D coloureds”: those classified as “near native”, “families of mixed race as cannot be classified as either coloured or native” or “racially mixed coloureds” were considered for housing in Noordgesig and regarded as “Class D coloureds”. Furthermore, the article highlights the various class, race and skin colour distinctions used at the time the township was established to decide who could reside there. This complex politics of identification was further complicated by the then current idea that coloureds should not live close to blacks. This notion of racial proximity as a factor governing the relationship between the coloured inhabitants of Noordgesig and the black township residents of Orlando was put to the test with the construction of the township. In the article it is argued that these spurious distinctions based on class, race and skin colour were used to justify the placement of Noordgesig next to Orlando, which had lasting implications for both the state and residents. It is further contended that the perceived differences between the types of coloured people housed in Noordgesig influenced the creation of a unique identity experience among so-called “Class D coloureds” which problematises the grand narrative of coloured identity based largely on experiences from the Cape region.

The evaluation of the heritage of the 1956 South African water policy

Purpose: Water management issues in poor communities in South Africa were never addressed directly by apartheid policies. The 1956 water policy was found not to be holistic in the management of the resource within the country. The growing economy of South Africa resulted in explosive urbanization, which gave rise to an increasing number of townships. The purpose of the paper is, therefore, threefold, namely: it outlines the water management challenges resulting from the 1956 water policy, it outlines the progression of implementing the apartheid ideologies in water management and, lastly, it relates the old policy of water management to today’s environment. The 1956 water policy had a colonial perspective, thus, this has created an observable challenge in the current endeavors of the water management regime. These challenges are presented in the paper in an effort to illustrate that the failures of today’s policies are largely historically embedded. Design/methodology/approach: A comprehensive framework of the evolution of the water management regime from the DWA’s library was used. Databases that contained historical policies of South Africa were also used to do a rigorous literature review. Because of the nature of the research, the study, therefore, uses both qualitative and quantitative methods of investigation. Findings: The old apartheid policies created a challenging ideological environment in the townships. This has resulted in the difficulty of implementing the current water policy in water management. The unintended consequences are difficult to factor into the current policies. Over time, communities collaborated and became defiant. The defiance of the water policy by the communities resulted in non-payment for the use of the resource. Implications: The challenges surfacing in the paper seem to imply that the current policy implementation in water management has an observable challenge that has a potential of hindering policy discourse in water management. Originality/value: New democracies have a tendency of being overly ambitious about the inclusive nature of the policy discourse. Ideologically, this means that implementation of the new policies cannot be done without challenges. This paper attempts to highlight that the 1956 water policy systematically created certain social norms and ideologies that have the potential to hinder new policy ideals in the townships. Keywords: water policy, black townships, apartheid ideologies, social dilemmas and water management practices. JEL Classification: Q25, J71

Introduction: the problem of nostalgia

We distrust nostalgia not only because we are wary of the seduction of sentiment, but also, and perhaps more especially, because we are suspicious of a sentimental feeling centred on home, childhood, family, the past, the community. On the one hand, we have been taught that such attachments may serve a politics of exclusion and oppression; on the other hand, we have learned that such attachments may be precluded under conditions of political oppression. Yet nostalgia persists, and what renders it interesting is precisely that it is a problem, particularly in South Africa, in the immediate post-apartheid context, where the home to which the feeling refers may be located in an impoverished black township or in an affluent white suburb, on a plot of land in a Bantustan or on a family farm in the Karoo. Within the current generation of those whose individual memory reaches back into the apartheid era, some are seen not to be entitled to nostalgia because they benefited from the politics of the past, and some are said to have little to be nostalgic about because they were exploited by these politics.