Gangs: Spatialities and Socialities in South Africa

The “making” of gang relationships has remained at the periphery of research, yet it is critical in understanding the continuity and sustainability of gangsterism in different contexts. This paper examines the ways in which young men involved in gang violence forge and sustain their relationships in the streets of a black township in South Africa. I argue that the “making” of gang relationships is never easy; rather, it is characterised by violence within and outside gang membership. The article asserts that, within gangs, violence is a technique which sustains their relationships, as it acts as a source of social and emotional support—especially in a context characterised by fractured families as well as social and economic marginalisation. The paper draws from an ethnography of walking the township streets, being in gang streets, talking to gang members, engaging with and observing young men involved in gang violence.

Guns and Gang Spaces in South Africa

The gun is not just an object and or a weapon; it has particular, deep relations with those who carry and possess it. The gun is embedded in the mentality of the man who uses it. Once gun life is inculcated in the mind, it is difficult to leave it behind. In post-apartheid South Africa, gangs and the use of guns have continued unabated. Despite this continued relationship between gangs and guns, studies have skirted around the ways in which guns are experienced and embodied in a context which is imbued with violence. Guns define the gang members who carry them in their everyday lives, as well as the spaces in which gangs operate. Importantly, understanding the spaces of gangs, such as the streets, is critical to understanding the ways in which they help gangs to forge a particular relationship with guns. This article is based on an ethnography of the black township Gugulethu in Cape Town, South Africa.

The Public Accounts of a ‘Private’ Act: Domestic Violence in the Eyes of Mamelodi, a South African Township

Domestic violence against women is a serious social and public health problem facing women in South Africa and other countries. This social malaise in South Africa is often seen as “private” – committed within the home space, or “imperceptible” to the public. In other words, domestic violence is framed as a phenomenon that takes place exclusively behind the closed doors of the home. This study contends with this notion of “imperceptibility” in the domestic violence discourse. Using qualitative data from Mamelodi, a black township in Pretoria, South Africa, this paper argues that the notion of imperceptibility is reductionist and helps to perpetuate the act. The commission of domestic violence does not only take place in the privacy of the home; it is also committed in public, and it is visible to the community where it takes place.

South Africa as postcolonial heterotopia: The racialized experience of place and space

This essay claims that heterotopia is characteristic of post-Apartheid South Africa, i.e. where heterotopia is usually the exception in society, it is the norm in South Africa. This claim reinterprets and expands Foucault’s concept: heterotopia here refers to the racialization of place and space, and hence to otherness and difference as primary. The ubiquity of heterotopia post-Apartheid is evident in the life-worlds of white suburbia and the black township. A case study is undertaken of white suburbia through a series of phenomenological descriptions of contemporary South Africa using heterotopia as a heuristic tool. This study demonstrates how Foucault’s notion of heterotopia is relevant but also too narrow when related to the postcolonial context. An expanded notion of the term as denoting a racialized experience of space and place is necessary for the purposes of coming to terms with the strangeness of post-Apartheid South Africa, where contradiction and otherness are the norm rather than the exception.

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.

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

The 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.