Home Spaces, Street Styles

Contesting Power and Identity in a South African City

Leslie J. Bank

• Publisher: Pluto Press
• Year: 2011
• Edition: 1
• eBook ISBN:
  9781783713783
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Anthropology
• Index: Social Sciences

This book revisits the classic anthropology study - the Xhosa in Town series - based on research in the South African city of East London conducted during the 1950s. The original studies revealed that there were two opposed responses to urbanisation in East London's African locations, one embracing Westernisation, European values and Christianity and another opposed to it. Leslie Bank returned to the areas of East London studied in the 1950s to assess how social and political changes have transformed these areas, in particular the apartheid reconstruction of the 1960s and 1970s and the struggle for liberation followed by the post-Apartheid period in the 1980s and 1990s. Bank has added important theoretical insights to this rich ethnography, and forged strong links with issues that transcend the particularities of his urban study.

1

Towards an Anthropology of Urbanism

In broad terms, urban theory constitutes a series of ideas (sometimes presented as laws) about what cities are, what they do and how they work. Commonly such ideas exist at a high level of abstraction so that they do not pertain to individual towns or cities, but offer a more general explanation of the role that cities play in shaping socio-spatial processes. Nonetheless, such theories typically emerge from particular cities at particular times, to the extent that certain cities become exemplary of particular types of urban theory …

(Phil Hubbard 2006: 6)

The city of East London, located on the eastern seaboard of South Africa, represents one of those cities that became ‘exemplary of particular types of urban theory’. In the same way that Los Angeles became emblematic of ‘postmodern urbanism’, the small African city of East London came to represent a challenge to the conventional wisdom about urbanism presented by scholars like Simmel (1903), Park et al. (1925) and especially Wirth (1996 [1938]). Wirth had defined urbanism as involving the ‘substitution of secondary for primary contacts, the weakening of bonds of kinship, the declining social significance of the family, the disappearance of neighbourhood and the undermining of the traditional basis of social solidarity’ (1996 [1938]: 79). In the early 1960s, Philip and Iona Mayer captured the imagination of a generation of urban scholars by convincingly demonstrating how migrants in East London refused to relinquish their ‘primary contacts’ while in the city, or to allow urbanisation to undermine their ‘traditional basis for social solidarity’. Their rich ethnography (Mayer with Mayer 1971 [1961]) showed how some migrants could live in the city for years, some for as long as 20 years, without accepting modernity and its commonly understood urban cultural forms.

Mayer wrote at a time when a critique of the Wirthian perspective on urbanism had been gaining momentum in sociology more globally. Peter Wilmot and Michael Young had published their famous book on kinship and family in the Bethnal Green borough of London’s East End in 1957. Bethnal Green was being threatened with slum clearance programmes. Based on interviews with over 1,000 families, their study revealed the dense associative networks and rich family life of the old East End, and highlighted the role of women in coping with poverty and holding extended family networks together. They showed that the highest levels of social coherence and connectivity were to be found in the most densely settled areas of Bethnal Green, whereas the new housing estates being created for the working class tended to be characterised by blasé attitudes and social withdrawal (see Parker 2004: 81). Across the Atlantic, Herbert Gans (1962) published an important study of an Italian-American community in the impoverished West End of Boston, which was also faced with the threat of urban removal. Gans depicted Boston’s West End as a working-class enclave in which people and institutions were created to ‘serve and protect’ the family and the community. He stressed their unity as a working-class community, dubbing the West-Enders as ‘urban villagers’ rather than as alienated urban individuals. The great irony of Wirth’s analysis of the city was that he himself had described and uncovered such bonds in his own 1935 ethnography of Chicago entitled The Ghetto, but that he had chosen to suppress these insights when it came to developing a more universal and theoretical definition of urbanism, which sought to sum up the collective contribution of the Chicago School of the 1920s and 1930s to urban studies. The problem with Wirth’s definition was that it set up the urban too starkly in contrast to the rural and the traditional. By starting with what the urban was not – a face-to-face, rural folk culture – it became very difficult for Wirth to acknowledge the complex sociality of the city and its social networks (see Parker 2004; Robinson 2006).

Within the field of social anthropology, which had but recently begun to address the cultural adaptations of rural people to urban life, Oscar Lewis led the way with his studies of family life and urban adaptation in Mexico (1951, 1959, 1961). In a seminal article, based on fieldwork conducted in Mexico City in 1950, Lewis argued that:

this study provides further evidence that urbanisation is not a simple, unitary, universally similar process, but that it assumes different forms and meanings, depending on the prevailing historic, economic and social conditions … I find that peasants in Mexico adapt to urban life with far greater ease than do American farm families. There is little evidence of disorganisation and breakdown, of cultural conflict, or of irreconcilable differences between generations … Family life remains strong in Mexico City. (1951: 30)

Janet Abu-Lughod (1961) arrived at similar conclusions in her research among rural migrants in Cairo of the late 1950s, while Bruner argued of North Sumatra of the 1950s that:

contrary to the traditional theory, we find in many Asian cities that society does not become secularised, the individual does not become isolated, kinship organisation does not breakdown, nor do social relations in the urban environment become impersonal, superficial and utilitarian. (1961: 508)

The Mayers’ book-length ethnography, Townsmen or Tribesmen (the second volume of what became known as the Xhosa in Town trilogy) (Mayer with Mayer 1971 [1961]) confirmed and crystallised this emerging critique of established notions of urbanism. Their study also showed the great difficulties associated with universal definitions of urbanism by highlighting the critical role of regional cultural dynamics in shaping processes of urban adaptation. This point had been stressed by Lewis (1951), but was also consistently emphasised in the work of another highly influential American urbanist, Lewis Mumford. In his seminal book, The Culture of Cities (1958 [1938]) Mumford had argued that, in all cities, elements of rural and regional cultures were transformed and ‘etherealised’ into durable elements in a new and dynamic process of cultural synthesis. For Mumford, new urbanisms emerged from the ‘the diffused rays of many separate beams’, drawn from regional cultural, social and historical materials. He expressed these ideas in theatrical idiom:

Every culture has its characteristic drama. It chooses from the sum total of human potentialities certain acts and interests, certain processes and values, and endows them with special significance … The stage on which this drama is enacted, with the most skilled actors and a full supporting company and specially designed scenery, is the city: it is here that it reaches its highest pitch of intensity. (Mumford 1958 [1938]: 5)

Much of the power and fascination of Mayer’s work lay in his ability to locate his anthropological analysis of urbanisation and urbanism within a regional cultural drama. For Mayer, the character of urbanism in East London’s African residential locations was shaped by a fundamental cultural divide that had deep roots in the Eastern Cape countryside. Indeed, as part of their preparation for their urban fieldwork in the mid 1950s, the Mayers lived in a rural village outside of the city and travelled extensively around the rural reserves of the Eastern Cape. It was here that they became convinced of the centrality of what they came to characterise as the ‘Red/School’ divide to an understanding of cultural process in East London. In the introduction to Townsmen or Tribesmen, they wrote:

That two dramatically different sets of institutions exist within the Xhosa countryside is not hard to see. One becomes aware of it before a word is spoken, through the glaring contrasts in dress and personal appearance. There are women – Red women – who go about like a commercial photographer’s dream of picturesque Africa, their arms and shoulders bare, their brightly-coloured ochred skirts swinging, their beads, brass ornaments and fanciful head-dresses adding still more colour. And there are others – the School women – who go in cotton print dresses in sober colours, with neat black head-dresses and heavy black shawls, looking as proper as mid-Victorian or as sombre as Moslem wives. To see a dance for Red youth and a ‘concert’ for School youth, a sacrifice in one homestead and a prayer meeting in the next, or even a Red and a School family meal, is to realise that these belong to two different worlds, in spite of the language and the peasant background being one. (Mayer with Mayer 1971 [1961]: 20)

The Mayers went on to state that rural Xhosa (the dominant ethnic group in the region) themselves ‘think of this division as bisecting the entire population’ and view it ‘in terms of cultural differentia’: ‘Red people do things this way while School people do them that way.’ They claimed that the division between abantu ababomvu (Red people) and abantu basesikolweni (School people) was marked not only by dress styles and social institutions, but was expressed in deeper cultural values kept in place by ‘a kind of self-imposed aloofness’, where each segment of the rural population firmly believed in the superiority of their ‘own way of life’ (1971 [1961]: 21–41). The Reds saw it as their ‘common present duty’ to maintain a distinctive way of life which history and the ancestors had sanctioned for them and for them alone (1971 [1961]: 40).

The roots of this cultural division can be traced back to the mid-nineteenth century, during the colonisation of the Eastern Cape Province of South Africa, when a large section of the Xhosa-speaking people were convinced by the visions of the young prophetess, Nongqawuse, who declared that, if they killed their cattle and scorched their fields, the ancestors would drive the white settlers into the sea and restore peace and harmony to their lands. Nongqawuse’s prophecy divided the Xhosa nation between ‘believers’ and ‘non-believers’, between communities and families that had come to accept Westernisation and Christianity and those who rejected these forces, politically and culturally. There is ongoing debate as to whether colonial officials and the Governor of the Cape Colony, who had been struggling to defeat the Xhosa on the Eastern Frontier, conspired to popularise the visions of the Xhosa prophetess (Crais 2002; Peires 1989). The result, however, was undoubtedly catastrophic for ‘the believers’, who implemented the vision of the prophetess by decimating their herds and their livelihoods within a period of weeks and months, thus opening up the Eastern Cape for final colonisation. By 1894, the regional process of colonisation was concluded with the incorporation of the Xhosa-speaking areas of Pondoland in the far Eastern Cape into the Cape Colony. In 1910 the British colonies of the Cape and Natal amalgamated with the Boer republics of the Transvaal and the Orange Free State to form the Union of South Africa.

A century after the historic Xhosa cattle-killing, the Mayers argued, rural communities in the Eastern Cape remained deeply divided between ‘believers’ and ‘non-believers’, between Red people and School people. This division was seen to shape the way in which Xhosa people adapted to urban life in East London. The most striking aspect of the Mayers’ ethnography was their account of the urban lifestyles, cultural responses and orientations of the conservative, anti-modern Red migrants. They showed that these migrants remained doggedly traditionalist in outlook, rejecting Christianity in any form and regarding entry into industrial wage labour as a ‘necessary evil’, which they accepted only in order to earn enough money to support their rural homesteads and resources. In the city, these men were seen to encapsulate themselves in close-knit networks of home-mates, who socialised together, resisted urban consumerism and morally enforced a commitment to building rural homesteads. The lifestyles of these Red migrants were contrasted with those of School migrants, who remained connected with their rural homesteads but were much more open to Western cultural influences in the city. The argument was thus not only ethnographically compelling, but theoretically important in that: first, it confirmed the findings of other studies that urbanisation did not necessarily lead to social breakdown; second, it demonstrated there could be large rural lumps in the urban ‘melting pot’ that did not dissolve with time; and, third, it illustrated that urbanism was always shaped by its regional or local cultural contexts.

East London was already an established anthropological field-site by the time the Mayers conducted their research there. As early as 1931, the African urban locations of the city had been visited by Monica Hunter (later Wilson) as part of the fieldwork she conducted for her classic South African ethnography, Reaction to Conquest (1936). Her book included a large section on social change that covered African life in towns, as well as on white-owned farms, and this urban research was primarily focused on East London. When the Mayers re-entered East London’s locations in the late 1950s, they did not come alone. They were part of a team of researchers who collectively produced what would come to be referred to as the Xhosa in Town trilogy. The first book in the series, The Black Man’s Portion by sociologist Desmond Reader had been published in 1960, presenting a sociological overview of the history, residential life and employment patterns of the East London locations. Reader’s description of the townships was based on a one-in-ten household questionnaire conducted in 1955. He had supplemented this data with in-depth life histories and household case studies, combining qualitative and quantitative research techniques in a manner similar to the Bethnal Green study of Wilmot and Young. Townsmen or Tribesmen (Mayer with Mayer 1971 [1961]) was the middle volume in the trilogy, which was soon followed by anthropologist Berthold Pauw’s The Second Generation (1973 [1963]). The Mayers commissioned Pauw to conduct an ethnographic investigation of the families, lives, networks and adaptive strategies of urban-born families to complement their study of the migrants. These other two volumes in the Xhosa in Town trilogy did not, however, achieve the notoriety of Townsmen or Tribesmen, which was updated and reprinted in 1971; The Second Generation was updated and reprinted in 1973.

In this re-study, based on historical research and intensive fieldwork in East London since the South African transition to democracy, I assess and update all of the East London ethnographies, not just the work of Philip and Iona Mayer. My own fieldwork in East London’s townships started 40 years after that of the trilogy researchers, in 1995, and continued intermittently until 2005. In revisiting the townships of East London in the 1990s, I was both preoccupied and guided by the work of the trilogy researchers. I imagined their work as a sort of baseline from which I would proceed by following up key themes and topics, while at the same time reporting on new areas of cultural and social change through the apartheid and into the post-apartheid period. Where my project differed from that of the trilogy (and Hunter’s earlier work) was that I did not enter the city from the perspective of the countryside, hoping to map out continuity and change across the urban–rural divide. My interest was in the changing city itself and in townships as complex spaces of creativity, social formation and struggle in their own right. I wanted to contribute to a new anthropology of urbanism rather than simply add to the old anthropology of urbanisation. I aspired to using the texts and notes of Monica Hunter, Philip Mayer and the trilogy scholars as beacons to light the road on a journey in new historical ethnography that would begin in the 1950s and navigate through the 1960s and 1970s and beyond, to end in the mid 2000s. In all the chapters of this book, the earlier anthropological studies, and especially the work of the trilogy researchers, provide critical points of reference and are used as a baseline from which ideas about social change are mapped out, discussed and contested.

East London and surrounding areas

The years between these two periods of intensive fieldwork were the apartheid years in South Africa. They were years in which the old locations of the East Bank and West Bank were flattened and destroyed by a racist state determined to impose a new regime of urban management and control on the city and its African population. Most of the East Bank location, where the previous studies were focused, was pulled down during the 1960s, and the people living in the wood-and-iron houses there were resettled either to new township houses in the city or sent to the Ciskei or Transkei homelands (see Map). The pace and intensity of these forced removals created serious problems for people and the state, which was forced to build transit housing in the city because the removals had left so many homeless. New hostels were also built for migrants, who were shaken out of the backrooms and yards of the old wood-and-iron houses and kept separate from permanently urbanised working class families. This process of restructuring fundamentally reconfigured social relations, power and identity in the township. One of my primary aims in this book is to offer a new set of understandings of what this restructuring process meant and how it might be interpreted. Instead of simply focusing on the racial dimensions of apartheid and documenting change from above, I explore the everyday encounters, sensibilities and architecture of social and cultural change from below, from various locations within the township itself, and reflect on the implications of urban restructuring for different forms of place and home-making, as well as for gender and generational relations and identities. This study also goes beyond the apartheid period and seeks to provide insights into the nature and form of post-apartheid urbanism.

In essence, this book provides a detailed, historical ethnography of social and cultural change in a single township, variously known as the East Bank, Duncan Village and Gompo Town, over a period of 50 years. Before I outline my own interests in greater detail, I would like to reflect further on how responses to the trilogy, and especially to Townsmen or Tribesmen, changed in the 1970s and how, despite this fierce criticism, the Mayers’ discussion of Red and School people, and their concern with the ‘rural in the urban’, have remained important themes in anthropology and African studies since the 1980s.

RED AND SCHOOL REVISITED

During the 1970s, celebration of Townsmen or Tribesmen turned to damnation as increasing numbers of scholar – liberals and Marxists alike – attacked the Mayers from different angles. The criticism was intense and formed part of a broad, critical reassessment of the political role of anthropology during the colonial era (Asad 1973; Eriksen and Nielsen 2001; Kuper 1987). In the changed political climate of decolonisation, urban anthropologists were denounced for failing to locate their analyses of urban adaptation and migrant identity within an understanding of the political economy of racial capitalism and colonialism. African anthropologists, like Magubane (1973) and Mafeje (1971), strongly objected to what they saw as an assertion that modernising Africans in towns were just mimicking and imitating the culture of their oppressors rather than creating something uniquely African, their own version of modernity that inspired their struggles for independence and freedom. Reviewers of the 1970s tended to view the urban Copperbelt studies by the Rhodes-Livingstone Institute anthropologists like Gluckman, Mitchell, Epstein and Powdermaker as ‘more progressive’ than the ‘reactionary’ trilogy, which was condemned for arguing that African identities were fixed and static in a context of rapid change. Even the Copperbelt studies, with their emphasis on the malleability and situational nature of identity formation, did not escape severe criticism for their alleged failure to analyse racial and class exploitation, and for simplistically imagining that Africans asp...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Illustrations
• Series Preface
• Preface and Acknowledgements
• 1. Towards an Anthropology of Urbanism
• 2. The Xhosa in Town Revisited
• 3. Modernism, Space and Identity
• 4. Rebellion, Fractured Urbanism and the Fear of Fire
• 5. The Style of the Comrades
• 6. Changing Migrant Cultures
• 7. Re-modelling the House
• 8. The Rhythms of the Yards
• 9. Post-Apartheid Suburb or Hyper-Ghetto
• Conclusion
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index