Shack Settlement Research Articles

“There is life in this place”: “DIY formalisation,” buoyant life and citizenship in Marikana informal settlement, Potchefstroom, South Africa

Their shack settlement labelled “too informal” to receive basic service provision, the residents of Marikana informal settlement, in Potchefstroom, North West province, South Africa, planned and executed what was locally referred to as “DIY formalisation” in order to politically appeal to the city council to provide them with services. During this formalisation, residents themselves laid out stands and streets and installed water infrastructure in an effort to claim their rights to access to the city and its infrastructures, and to assert their aspirations to a modern, urban life. Without formal municipal services, life in Marikana could be characterised as “raw life,” to use Fiona Ross’s term — an incomplete life in the midst of poverty and suffering. Drawing on Ross’s notion of “respectable life,” I argue that DIY formalisation in Marikana ensured what I call “buoyant life”: the DIY formalisation, and specifically the water infrastructure, enabled not only physical life but also political life (in the form of claims to citizenship and respectability) to be buoyed up against the curtailing tides of state abandonment.

William Kentridge: Process as Metaphor & Other Doubtful Enterprises

William Kentridge: Process as Metaphor & Other Doubtful Enterprises

Broadening conceptions of democracy and citizenship: the subaltern histories of rural resistance in Mpondoland and Marikana

ABSTRACTThe purpose of this article is to broaden perspectives on citizenship and democracy in post-apartheid South Africa. The article focuses on two spaces within South Africa, which have specific significance for both land and labour questions in South Africa and where we have focused our research: Mpondoland in the Eastern Cape and Nkaneng Shack Settlement in Marikana. The links that can be made between the recent Marikana/Lonmin Strikes and the earlier Mpondo Revolts reveal a subaltern sphere of politics informed by older modes of political organisation that challenge dominant institutions like civil society and traditional authorities. The article demonstrates that South Africa’s land and agrarian questions must, of necessity, be linked to broader struggles for justice, dignity and humanity that require structural socio-economic and political change, in line with how people practise politics.

Worker Struggles as Community Struggles: The Politics of Protest in Nkaneng, Marikana

This article deals with the changing spatial landscape of the mines in the post-apartheid era. It is here that the link between worker and community struggles becomes apparent, given the changing nature of space and community on the mines. It becomes more difficult to deny women’s roles and contributions to political life on the mines in South Africa when we are confronted with the Marikana massacre. For the first time, women on the mines made a public statement about living and working and being on the mines, a realm of experience previously ignored or silenced in most labour historiography. After the 1980s, mine compounds were ethnically desegregated and post-1994, mine companies began to offer a living out allowance (LOA) to mineworkers who preferred not to stay in the hostels. As a result, there was an immediate growth of shack settlements around the platinum belt. With the development of shack settlements has been the introduction of family life on the mines, which has brought with it a new form of community politics that have not been adequately addressed in the public sphere or in new labour literature. This shows how independently organised worker struggles are linked to, and reinforced by, the struggles of women and the community. More specifically the paper presents research undertaken in Marikana in November 2012 and it is an attempt to write a living history of people who currently occupy the shack settlement where most of the mineworkers involved in the 2012 strike live; it is called Nkaneng.

The Shack Settlement as a Site of Politics: Reflections from South Africa

In South Africa, the shack settlement has become a site of acute political intensity in recent years. However, political action organized from the shack settlement is frequently presented as being outside of the domain of the political—as a spasmodic response to deprivation, as criminal or consequent to external conspiracy. This paper argues that liberal, as well as some currents of Marxist and nationalist thought, have demonstrated an inability, or refusal, to recognize popular political agency in the shack settlement. It suggests that Partha Chatterjee’s work on the idea of political society, and Ananya Roy’s thinking about subaltern urbanism provide useful analytical tools to enable more effective recognition of political agency in the shack settlement. However, it notes that while it is necessary to think the shack settlement as a particular situation, it is also important to be attentive to insurgent modes of political agency that transcend that situation.

Decency and exclusion: a symbolic interpretation of post-displacement discriminatory discourse in De Doorns, South Africa

From 14–17 November 2009 an estimated 3000 Zimbabweans were violently and forcefully displaced from their dwellings in a rural farming area, De Doorns, in the Western Cape, South Africa. This study looks into a discourse of decency to contribute, through symbolic interpretation, to an understanding of discriminatory motives behind the aggressive expulsion of Zimbabweans from Stofland, a shack settlement in De Doorns. An analysis of one of the prominent discourses used by residents after displacement reveals the logic behind discrimination and also illustrates the ways in which discrimination manifests and is perpetuated through language and action. This discourse of decency is also discussed in relation to findings that suggest that, far from being the result of a common identity, displacement motives are based on perceived difference and constructed entitlement identities. Constructed entitlement identities need to be understood in relation to desires for material emancipation in Post-Apartheid South Africa.

Slums of Hope: Land Tenure Reforms, Local Economic Development and Environmental Improvement in a Kenyan Shanty Town

Kambi Moto is a village shack settlement in Nairobi's vast eastern peripheral slums. Kambi Moto differs from the slum around it, however, as it is in the middle of a community-led slum upgrading programme. This programme has instituted land tenure reform, house building, environmental improvements and has forced the local community to seek economic development. The environmental improvements include permanent, formal houses with electric, water and sanitation infrastructure provision. Roads were also built allowing better access to the community. Experts state that secure tenure leads to economic, health, education and other benefits (Durand-Lasserve & Selod, 2007). This ‘In Perspective’ case study will investigate the Kambi Moto experience to see if this holds true in practice.

“For us women, working is an unfulfilled dream”: Womens' wage work and food security

abstract This article reviews the findings from two small community studies in South Africa on the experience of poor households in respect of the economic downturn, employment, and food security, with special emphasis on gender dynamics. This study was implemented by the Human Sciences Research Council and funded by Oxfam International, and sought to explore the human, social and personal experiences of the economic downturn. The study interviewed 29 households in Swedenville, a recently formed shack settlement outside of the Pretoria/Johannesburg city region that mainly comprises rural in-migrants, and in Bergpoort, a rural sending community in Mpumalanga. Most of the shack households and many of the rural households reported not being able to afford preferred foods or to eat three meals a day. The female-headed households without male partners were unable to send workers to the labour market and survived on social grants alone; they clustered at the bottom of both communities' income distributions and suffered the greatest food insecurity. High levels of migration left migrant households isolated and vulnerable, dependent on their own resources, with few reliable contacts in communities made up of strangers. Shack households especially reported surviving on part-time or insecure employment of the male partner only, while the women remained out of the labour force; women's wage employment was low in the rural community as well. Interviews with the women point to a concealed gender struggle over women's access to wage work. To protect the male lead role in domestic relations, younger rural-born men in particular may discourage their previously employed wives or partners from remaining in the labour market. Although women's wage contribution could make these impoverished households viable and food secure, isolated and vulnerable women may acquiesce in order to avoid the greater food security risk of becoming female household heads.

Understanding and managing sanitary risks due to rodent zoonoses in an African city: beyond the Boston Model

The Boston Model describes a successful rodent management plan that succeeded in a first-world city in the USA. In third-world cities, which often contain informal shack settlements, it is debatable whether the Boston Model would apply. In Durban, a major harbor city of three million people on the east coast of South Africa, we investigated the sanitary risks due to rodents in both formal (residential and commercial) and informal (shacks) sectors, and we evaluated the relative merits of different management interventions suggested by the Boston Model. Blood and tissue samples of six species (Rattus norvegicus, R. tanezumi, R. rattus, Mus musculus, Mastomys natalensis, Tatera brantsi) from 262 live-trapped rodents from 54 localities were tested for antibodies or DNA for plague (n= 193: antibody test), leptospirosis (n= 221 for antibody test; n= 69 for polymerase chain reaction test for DNA) and toxoplasmosis (n= 217: antibody test). We conducted a socioeconomic survey of 90 household to determine environmental and socioeconomic disease risk factors in the shack settlement of Cato Crest. No rodents were seropositive for plague, but nine Norway rats, R. norvegicus (4.1% of the sample tested) were seropositive for toxoplasmosis, and 22 R. norvegicus (10.0% of sample tested) were seropositive for leptospirosis. Disease endemic areas were concentrated in Cato Crest and the commercial district of Durban. Serology tests of humans living in Cato Crest (n= 219) showed 0% exposure to plague, 23% to leptospirosis and 35% to toxoplasmosis. Compared with shack-dwellers, the residents of brick houses had slightly lower levels of exposure to leptospirosis and toxoplasmosis. Based on our results, environmental hygiene and rodent-trapping campaigns were launched in Cato Crest. The initiative owes much of its current success to implementation of the principles inherent in the Boston Model, even though certain elements were lacking.

Transit Spaces: Thinking Urban Change in South Africa

ABSTRACTThis work looks at aspects of urban development in post-apartheid South Africa. It concerns the tension between the symbolic town, represented by the “Rainbow Nation,” and the practical town: a topography conceived as a plan of action. Located in Khayelitsha township at Cape Town's metropolitan periphery, Victoria Mxenge's shack settlement provides an informal silhouette against which the journey from apartheid to the “Rainbow Nation” is staged. Understanding change on this scale and of this nature entails deciphering the city's transformational urban order. This task demands that we situate individual endeavors within a common world. As a reciprocity anchored to place, such a dialogue is most explicitly played out between the home and the town, between self and city. Domestic visual culture often appears to be at odds with official policies and professional practices that administer urban transformation. This research draws on field studies that have tracked changes to the environment at the scale of a neighborhood block, and in particular the concern for public space at the recently completed Bangiso Tandazo Link project. Conceived as a sign of change and a vehicle for its delivery, this “transit space” frames the larger question of the urban future: the prospect of a topography connecting township to town.

Reframing Township Space: The Kliptown Project

n 1955, the African National Congress (ANC) held its historic Congress of the People to ratify its liberation manifesto, the Freedom Charter. This event took place in Kliptown, on the outskirts of Soweto (fig. 1, above), at a site that came to be called Freedom Square in honor of the occasion. Today Freedom Square is an open, windswept tract of land, lying between a shack settlement, a railway line, and a taxi rank and bounded by the back facades of warehouses and wholesale stores. The trees that once lined its edges, providing shade for local traders and commuters, have mostly died, and the farm that once cultivated the land around it has long been abandoned. Remarkable today only for the tapestry of footpaths marking its surface, tracing the movement of people who traverse it in the course of their daily lives, Freedom Square has an auspicious history. This site in Kliptown was chosen for a meeting of what became known as the

Planning ‘Suburban Bliss’ in Joe Slovo Park, Cape Town

AbstractJoe Slovo Park, a housing development in a white middle-class suburb of Cape Town, was designed to replace the shack settlement of Marconi Beam with an orderly working-class suburb. This article focuses on the vicissitudes of post-apartheid housing development schemes, and raises troubling questions about the failure of planners, policy makers and developers to take into account the complexities of the everyday lives they sought to transform. Had they done so they might have anticipated the ‘re-informalisation’ of the newly formalised suburb. The article explores the disjunctures between the planners' model of ‘suburban bliss’ and the reality. The messy, improvised character of low-income housing development in South Africa is contrasted with their Utopian and technocratic vision. This is not to deny that dreams embodied in blueprints may often be shared by the intended ‘beneficiaries’, only that for a variety of social, economic and cultural reasons poor communities are generally unable to realise such ideal visions of modern urban living.

Stories of life in Impolweni

PRIYA NARISMULU speaks to neighbours in a shack settlement about their lives and aspirations to a decent life with sanitation, water and secure tenure. Their dreams for improvement are backed by the Constitution. But how far will this take them?

Stories of Life in Impolweni

PRIYA NARISMULU speaks to neighbours in a shack settlement about their lives and aspirations to a decent life with sanitation, water and secure tenure. Their dreams for improvement are backed by the Constitution. But how far will this take them?