Home Spaces, Street Styles: Contesting Power and Identity in a South African City

Home Spaces, Street Styles

Anthropology, Culture and Society

Series Editors:

Professor Vered Amit, Concordia University

and

Dr Jon P. Mitchell, University of Sussex

Published titles include:

Home Spaces, Street Styles:

Contesting Power and Identity in

a South African City

LESLIE J. BANK

Culture and Well-Being:

Anthropological Approaches to

Freedom and Political Ethics

EDITED BY ALBERTO CORSÍN JIMÉNEZ

On the Game:

Women and Sex Work

SOPHIE DAY

Cultures of Fear:

A Critical Reader

EDITED BY ULI LINKE AND

DANIELLE TAANA SMITH

Slave of Allah:

Zacarias Moussaoui vs the USA

KATHERINE C. DONAHUE

Fair Trade and a Global Commodity:

Coffee in Costa Rica

PETER LUETCHFORD

A World of Insecurity:

Anthropological Perspectives on

Human Security

EDITED BY THOMAS ERIKSEN, ELLEN BAL AND

OSCAR SALEMINK

The Will of the Many:

How the Alterglobalisation Movement

is Changing the Face of Democracy

MARIANNE MAECKELBERGH

A History of Anthropology

THOMAS HYLLAND ERIKSEN AND

FINN SIVERT NIELSEN

The Aid Effect:

Giving and Governing in International

Development

EDITED BY DAVID MOSSE AND DAVID LEWIS

Ethnicity and Nationalism:

Anthropological Perspectives

Third Edition

THOMAS HYLLAND ERIKSEN

Cultivating Development:

An Ethnography of Aid Policy and Practice

DAVID MOSSE

Small Places, Large Issues:

An Introduction to Social and

Cultural Anthropology

Third Edition

THOMAS HYLLAND ERIKSEN

Anthropology, Art and Cultural Production

MARUŠKA SVAŠEK

Race and Ethnicity in Latin America

Second Edition

PETER WADE

What is Anthropology?

THOMAS HYLLAND ERIKSEN

Race and Sex in Latin America

PETER WADE

Anthropology, Development and the

Post-Modern Challenge

KATY GARDNER AND DAVID LEWIS

Anthropology at the Dawn of the Cold War:

The Influence of Foundations, McCarthyism

and the CIA

EDITED BY DUSTIN M. WAX

Corruption:

Anthropological Perspectives

EDITED BY DIETER HALLER AND CRIS SHORE

Anthropology’s World

Life in a Twenty-First Century Discipline

ULF HANNERZ

Learning Politics from Sivaram:

The Life and Death of a Revolutionary

Tamil Journalist in Sri Lanka

MARK P. WHITAKER

HOME SPACES, STREET STYLES

Contesting Power and Identity in a South African City

Leslie J. Bank

First published 2011 by Pluto Press

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Contents

Illustrations

Series Preface

Anthropology is a discipline based upon in-depth ethnographic works that deal with wider theoretical issues in the context of particular, local conditions – to paraphrase an important volume from the series: large issues explored in small places. This series has a particular mission: to publish work that moves away from an old-style descriptive ethnography that is strongly area-studies oriented, and offer genuine theoretical arguments that are of interest to a much wider readership, but which are nevertheless located and grounded in solid ethnographic research. If anthropology is to argue itself a place in the contemporary intellectual world, then it must surely be through such research.

We start from the question: ‘What can this ethnographic material tell us about the bigger theoretical issues that concern the social sciences?’ rather than ‘What can these theoretical ideas tell us about the ethnographic context?’ Put this way round, such work becomes about large issues, set in a (relatively) small place, rather than detailed description of a small place for its own sake. As Clifford Geertz once said, ‘Anthropologists don’t study villages; they study in villages.’

By place, we mean not only geographical locale, but also other types of ‘place’ – within political, economic, religious or other social systems. We therefore publish work based on ethnography within political and religious movements, occupational or class groups, among youth, development agencies, and nationalist movements; but also work that is more thematically based – on kinship, landscape, the state, violence, corruption, the self. The series publishes four kinds of volume: ethnographic monographs; comparative texts; edited collections; and shorter, polemical essays.

We publish work from all traditions of anthropology, and all parts of the world, which combines theoretical debate with empirical evidence to demonstrate anthropology’s unique position in contemporary scholarship and the contemporary world.

Professor Vered Amit

Dr Jon P. Mitchell

Preface and Acknowledgements

This book owes an intellectual debt to Jennifer Robinson and her book Ordinary Cities (2006) which came across my desk at a time when I had more or less given up on the idea of publishing this book. The book revisits and updates the classic urban anthropological work of Philip and Iona Mayer and their colleagues in the South African city of East London in the 1950s. The original Xhosa in Town project, as it was known, formed part of a generation of African urban anthropological studies that flourished in the post-war period when social anthropologists left their rural research sites to follow migrants into towns and cities in Africa, where they studied the social and cultural consequences of urbanisation. This collective body of work was heavily criticised and largely discarded from the late 1960s.

In her book, Robinson nostalgically recalls this golden era of urban anthropology and laments the passing of a tradition of urban scholarship which displayed a genuine interest in the comparative and cosmopolitan nature of urbanism. She argues that the dominance of political economy and development studies discourses, since the late 1960s, has shifted attention away from the sociality of cities and placed them in a neat developmental hierarchy with global cities at the top. In this scheme, Third World cities tended to be viewed only through the lens of their material conditions and infrastructural deficits, as cities with poverty, housing, sanitation and basic services problems, rather than places that display diverse forms of sociality and urban cultural life. Robinson exposed the Euro-centric underpinnings of global city discourses and demanded that more attention be given to ‘ordinary cities’ and to the project of ‘post-colonising the field of urban studies’ (see Robinson 2006). In particular, she calls for a return to older urban ethnographies and the use of anthropology to transform ‘urban studies’ back into a truly cosmopolitan field of enquiry, where we can appreciate and acknowledge the different ways in which the urban experience is constituted historically, socially and culturally in different cities. This book is a response to this challenge, it is a historical anthropology of urbanism in an ‘ordinary’ South African city.

In the field of African anthropology there has also been a renewed interest in updating and re-assessing older ethnographies. My work thus displays a close intellectual affinity with studies, such as those of Moore and Vaughan (1996), Ferguson (1999) and Hansen (2002) on Zambia, which revisit aspects of the colonial anthropology of Northern Rhodesia and the work of the Rhodes Livingstone Institute. I am especially indebted here to James Ferguson whose work on urbanisation and the Zambian Copperbelt guided me through the project. In conceptualising my work and my contribution to the field, I have also drawn inspiration from the rich and fascinating vein of historical anthropology now available on post-socialism, which explores continuities and change from pre- to post-socialist urban life. My own ethnography of a South African city explores continuities and change in social identities, power and everyday life before and after apartheid.

Most of the work done on the final preparation of this manuscript for publication occurred from March to December 2009, when I was on a Fulbright Scholarship to Emory University in the United States. The scholarship gave me the space to read, write and rewrite most of this book, which started as a PhD thesis awarded by the University of Cape Town in 2002. At Emory, I was hosted by Clifton Crais and Pamela Scully, who together with their students read and commented on many of my reworked and revised chapters. I was also supported by David Nugent and Peter Little in the Anthropology Department at Emory, who gave me opportunities to present my work, and Ben Carton from George Mason University in Washington. Setha Low at City University New York also made useful comments on my work. In addition to this opportunity, I spent time at Oxford and Cambridge Universities with the support of John Lonsdale and William Beinart in 2004. The Oppenheimer Trust and the Ford Foundation financed my time there. In the UK, Deborah Bryceson at the University of Glasgow has also been very supportive of my work, as has my long-term friend and colleague Sakkie Niehaus at Brunel University.

However, given that this project was imagined and executed in South Africa, my primary debts are local, to colleagues and friends in South Africa and East London, especially at Rhodes University and the University of Fort Hare. At the Fort Hare Institute of Social and Economic Research, Nkosazana Ngcongolo, Langa Makubalo, Landiswa Mqasho, Langa Makubalo, Ayanda Tyali, Clifford Mabhena, Octavia Sibanda, and Gary Minkley all contributed to my work in important ways. I also extend a special thanks to Mandisi Jekwa who initially assisted me during fieldwork in Duncan Village. Other academic colleagues who have supported me include Oliver Murphy, Andrew Ainslie, Gina Buijs, Chris De Wet, Janet Cherry, Robin Palmer, Roger Southall, Pat McAllister, Lungisile Ntsebeza, Setha Low and Luvuyo Wotshela. At the University of Cape Town, where my career as an anthropologist started, I would like to offer special thanks to Mugsy Spegiel who supervised my PhD thesis. At Pluto Press I thank Thomas Eriksen for promoting this manuscript, Jon Mitchell for his critical comments and role as series editor, and David Castle and Robert Webb for seeing the book through to production. Technical assistance on the manuscript was also provided by Dave Stanford, while Priscilla Hall and Mirie van Rooyen helped me with editing, proof-reading and the index.

Due to the length of time it has taken for this book to be published, some of the chapters of this book draw on previous published work. Chapter Two is an updated and reworked version of a paper first published in Kronos: Journal of Cape History, (2002) No 28; Chapter Five is a reworked version of ‘Cats, Comrades and Country Boys’, Anthropology Southern Africa, (2003) 1,1; Chapter Six is based on an article which first appeared as ‘Men with Cookers: Transformations in Migrant Culture, Domesticity and Identity in Duncan Village, East London’ published in the Journal of Southern African Studies, 25, 3 (1999), while parts of Chapter Eight recently appeared in ‘The Rhythms of the Yards: Urbanism, Backyards and Housing Policy in South Africa’, Journal of Contemporary African Studies, 10, 4, 2007. I thank these journals for allowing me to reproduce parts of these articles in this book.

My final and greatest debt goes to my family. Firstly, I thank Andrew, my brother who has read and commented on everything most studiously. I am also grateful for the support and encouragement of my parents, Louis and Margot, and to Stephen, my older brother, for his interest in my work. I thank my in-laws: Maryke Littlefield and Johan Lotter for their support.

However, most of my gratitude is extended to my fellow travellers, my immediate family, Mariette, my wife, and our three marvellous children, Dominic, Sarah and Rebecca, who I dragged halfway around the world in the process. I owe you all a great debt and it is for this reason that I dedicate this book to you.

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 aspired to mimic a white, Western-style modernity.

In his excellent review of the Copperbelt literature, Ferguson (1999) has insisted on the need to go beyond overly simplistic judgements of these researchers as either ‘radical’ pioneers or as ‘arrogant colonial racists’, by examining the deeper underlying assumptions that informed their liberal modernist approach. Ferguson argues that after the Second World War, Gluckman and his colleagues anticipated that the Zambian Copperbelt would become the ‘Birmingham of Africa’, and began to imagine and map a historical progression from ‘tribesmen to townsmen’. These scholars strongly opposed the colonial idea that Africans did not belong in town and exposed the settler argument that Africans were ‘target workers’ as an ideological justification for low wages. In this debate, Gluckman famously argued that Africans shifted identities as they moved between the spaces of town and country. His perspective collided with the government and mining company policy of ‘stabilisation without urbanisation’ and made these urban anthropologists increasingly unpopular with the colonial authorities. Ferguson summarises the view of the Copperbelt scholars on the question of townsmen or tribesmen as follows:

The two competing images of the African – migrant labouring tribesmen versus permanently urbanized townsmen – were placed not only in opposition but in succession. The two ideological stereotypes were the different ends of a historical progression. (1999: 35)

This was not how the Mayers, and especially Philip Mayer, viewed the situation. He did not see a shifting and shuffling of identities in East London within a context of rapid and inevitable industrial modernisation. What captured his imagination was the staunch resistance of certain groups of migrant workers to the cultural influences of town life and their outright rejection of the project of modernisation. For the Mayers, the Red-migrants were heroic figures who still dreamt of an independent existence for themselves and their families outside of the nexus of colonial capitalism, despite having been drawn into the heart of the industrial wage labour system against their will (see Mayer with Mayer 1971 [1961]).

While many came to the defence of Gluckman and his left-leaning Manchester school, there were very few who were prepared to defend the trilogy and its narrative of Red and School.¹ The work of the Mayers was seen to be particularly problematic because it seemed to suggest that many migrants were essentially tribal in outlook and opposed to modernisation in any form. Archie Mafeje, who had been born and brought up in the Eastern Cape, argued that the Mayers ossified what was a dynamic and changing cultural cleavage. He contested the idea that Red and School were starkly opposed, as the Mayers suggested, indicating that ‘red boys’ in his home village were often seen in church, while ‘school boys’ learnt stick-fighting and underwent initiation. He also said that many of the families had relatives that were both Red and School. The cultural divide was thus not nearly as dramatic as that between Catholic and Protestants in Northern Ireland, as the Mayers had suggested. The boundaries of the categories were porous and fluid rather than culturally fundamental (Mafeje 1971: 5).

In his own urban study with Monica Wilson on the Langa township of Cape Town, Mafeje argued that the process of urban adaptation was shaped very specifically by who migrants knew in the cities rather than by some kind of pre-existing cultural identity (Wilson and Mafeje 1963). Mafeje pointed to the critical importance of ‘home-mate groups’ as units of social integration. He suggested that a young migrant with a ‘school’ orientation who moved in with an uncle with a ‘Red’ orientation would in all likelihood become absorbed into his ‘home boy’ group and cultural milieu. With time, confidence and perhaps a change of residence, the same young migrant might enter a new social network and assume a different social identity. Mafeje tried, then, to stress the fluidity of African urban identity formation, claiming that it was irresponsible to speak of essential identities in the apartheid context.

Mafeje’s perspective has been theorised by Ferguson (1999), who demonstrates that cultural knowledge and competence in Copperbelt towns was always a prerequisite for the convincing performance of any cultural style. Some migrants from rural areas simply did not have the cultural resources to move between Red and School identities, or what Ferguson terms localist and cosmopolitan styles. Thus, like Mafeje, Ferguson (1999) argues that Africans on the Copperbelt could (and still can) choose between identities and change their cultural styles as long as they have the competence to perform them effectively (see Chapter 2 for further discussion). The point that the Mayers would have wanted to make in this debate, I suspect, is that the Red–School cultural division in rural Eastern Cape communities was such that it was not easy for migrants to change identities (or perform new styles) in the city (see McAllister 2006 for an account of the habitus of Redness in the rural Transkei).²

It was the personal nature of the political critique which devastated the Mayers. They were stung by claims that the aim of Townsmen or Tribesmen was to celebrate African tribalism and endorse the policy of the apartheid government. If read in a particular way, the work of the Mayers does seem to support the idea that some African migrants did not want to live permanently in the cities, which is precisely how the apartheid state proposed that migrants be treated. The suggestion that their scholarship was complicit with the apartheid project had a profound impact on the Mayers. Philip Mayer was a German Jew, who had fled the Holocaust to live in Britain and had dealt with his own personal experiences of racial discrimination in Europe (Beinart 1991b: 11–14). He admired the determination of rural labour migrants who refused to be pushed into colonial modernity, Western beliefs and consumerism. He found their denial of the city and modernisation uplifting. To try to clear his name and redeem his project, Philip Mayer recast their analysis of Red and School in more politically fashionable terms in a 1980 essay.

Drawing on the work of the French structuralist Marxist, Louis Althusser, Philip Mayer argued that Red and School were both long-standing ‘rural resistance ideologies’, which opposed colonialism in different ways and had their roots in the history of African dispossession, missionary activity and colonial exploitation in nineteenth-century Eastern Cape history. Significantly, while Mayer added historical depth and context to his earlier work, he never suggested that he had over-estimated, or misinterpreted, the social salience or analytical significance of the Red–School divide in the townships of East London. In the long essay, he also suggested that the material and social basis of Redness was rooted in African access to land and agrarian resources in the rural reserves, and that this was being progressively undermined by apartheiddriven agrarian change in the homelands, first through the introduction of betterment planning and then by fully fledged Bantustan development, which increased closer settlement and landlessness in the 1960s and