Journal of Southern African Studies, Volume 29, Number 4, December 2003

Malevolent Traditions: Hostel Violence

and the Procreational Geography of
Apartheid*
GLEN S. ELDER
(University of Vermont)
The extant literature about migrant worker hostel violence in South Africa in the early
1990s is critiqued in this article from a gendered perspective. Based on that critique, a
feminist geographical framework is developed to examine hostel violence during South
Africas transition. By locating hostels and their residents within this geographical
framework, referred to as the procreational geography of apartheid, it is argued that hostel
violence evinces male hostel-dwellers resistance to a perceived erosion of heteropatriar-
chal family power structures inside hostels and in far-ung rural homes. From this
perspective, the post-1994-election hostels internal political geographies are shown to
reinscribe many of the heteropatriarchal claims to power negotiated under the conditions
of apartheid.
Introduction
Never in its history has South Africa been subjected to such high levels of political conict as
has been the case for the past twenty years. Despite the signicant socio-political changes that
have taken place in the last three years and the various efforts to reduce the conict, the levels
of conict and violence continue to be unacceptably high.
Much of the conict has been concentrated within black communities and an important
recurring feature has been the conict that has developed between hostel residents and members
of the surrounding communities. This has frequently resulted in some of the most violent
incidents South Africa has witnessed. As a result, many have come to view the hostels as a key
problem within the much larger context of protracted violence in South Africa.
1
In 1993, the Goldstone Commission of Inquiry regarding the Prevention of Public Violence
and Intimidation presented its ndings concerning hostel violence. The ndings, entitled
Communities in Isolation,
2
included quantitative and qualitative research that sought to
uncover the causes of violent antagonisms between people living inside migrant worker
hostels and people living in communities outside the hostel walls in the township at large.
The above quote opens the ndings of the collaborative research project; a grave tone
suggests hostel violence in South Africa has a long history and the causes lie in the broader
context of political violence in that country. Given this opening, the irony of the studys
title, Communities in Isolation, should not escape a curious reader: why are hostels and
those who live in them consistently viewed as hermetically sealed off from the real world
* An earlier version of this article appears in G. Elder, Hostels, Sexuality, and the Apartheid Legacy: Malevolent
Geographies (Athens, Ohio University Press, 2003). Printed with permission. Thanks to Rosemary Jolly, Jo Beall
and two anonymous reviewers for their constructive critiques of an earlier draft.
1 J. Olivier, Preface, in A. Minnaar (ed), Communities in Isolation: Perspectives on Hostels in South Africa
(Pretoria, Human Sciences Research Council, 1993), p. 1.
2 Minnaar (ed), Communities in Isolation.
ISSN 0305-7070 print; 1465-3893 online/03/040921-15 2003 Journal of Southern African Studies
DOI: 10.1080/0305707032000135897
922 Journal of Southern African Studies
when their condition is tied to the broader political and social context? What I hope to show
here is that this paradox, is born out of theorisations of apartheid policy that leave
unquestioned its heteropatriarchy. I plan to argue that a revisioning of hostels, hostel-
dwellers and hostel violence is possible when otherwise hidden and insidious heteropatriar-
chal relationships are located at the centre of an analysis.
The term heteropatriarchal is used throughout to capture the complicated gender/sex
system that operated with racist intent under apartheid and, arguably, continues into the
present. Heteropatriarchy more readily captures the gender/sex system than the term more
often used by feminist theorists in South Africa: patriarchy. Heteropatriarchy insists on the
ongoing and necessary interlinkages that exist between patriarchal social systems and the
politics of a compulsory heterosexuality.
3
Heteropatriarchy is the social power structure that
creates and maintains the heterosexist binary of masculinity and femininity and the
associated social expectations (gender performances) determined according to biological
sex. Heteropatriarchal constructions represent themselves as the original and correct
form of sexuality and erotic desire from which all other forms of sexuality have diverged.
Heteropatriarchal societies portray heterosexuality as the only approved form of sexual
expression. Here, heteropatriarchy is viewed as a constituent part of the racial system
known as apartheid.
By employing the concept of heteropatriarchy, we are able to question how, and explain
why, the ofcial state-sponsored hostel study, for example, presented the hostel com-
munity as a cohesive, homogeneous social unit. While the ofcial study admitted
differences between hostels, it did not examine differences within hostels. Disappointingly
but not surprisingly, missing from the account were the increasing numbers of women who
had moved into hostels throughout the region from 1985 onward. Because no mention was
made of the gendered nature of hostel transformation, I argue that the contested politics of
heteropatriarchy also escaped attention in the Minnaar report, an oversight that has then led
to partial understandings of hostel violence between 1990 and 1995.
While the actual numbers of women who moved into hostels throughout the region are
impossible to estimate, the excellent accounts of violence at the time by Lauren Segal,
4
Ari
Sitas
5
and Mahmood Mamdani,
6
mention the presence of women in hostels. The mere
mention of women, however, does not constitute a more thorough analysis of the sex/gender
dynamic within hostels at the time. More importantly, and as others like Enloe
7
have shown
in other times and spaces, the presence or absence of gures does not preclude us from
conducting an analysis that locates gender and sex at the centre of the debate about
violence, in this case in South Africas hostels between 1990 and 1995.
Violence is always gendered, but the lacuna regarding women hostel-dwellers marked
accounts about hostel violence as non-gendered. Missing to date is an analysis that seeks
to examine the ways in which a masculinised violent form of heterosexual power was
challenged and reasserted between 1990 and 1995. Hints of this struggle are reected in the
newspaper accounts and rumours of female rape, female assault, domestic abuse of female
3 A. Rich, Compulsory Heterosexuality and Lesbian Existence, in H. Ablelove, M. Barale and D. Halperin (eds),
The Lesbian and Gay Studies Reader (New York, Routledge, 1993), pp. 227254.
4 L. Segal, The Human Face of Violence: Hostel Dwellers Speak, Journal of Southern African Studies, 18, 1
(March 1991), pp. 190231.
5 A. Sitas, The New Tribalism: Hostels and Violence, Journal of Southern African Studies, 22, 2 (June 1996),
pp. 235248.
6 M. Mamdani, Citizen and Subject: Contemporary Africa and the Legacy of Late Colonialism(Princeton, Princeton
University Press, 1996).
7 C. Enloe, Maneuvers: The International Politics of Militarizing Womens Lives (Berkeley, University of California
Press, 2000).
Malevolent Traditions 923
family members, and acts of violence undertaken in the interests of preserving structures
that reected visions of the heteropatriarchal family.
Research here shows that debates about the conversion of hostels into family housing
served to undermine further male hostel-dwellers claims to turf. I propose here that the
resulting violence was also a reaction against the changing of a particular (indeed,
apartheid-inspired) vision of heteropatriarchal kinship patterns.
Most studies suggest that ethnic nationalism and economic impoverishment colluded to
create an isolated and stereotyped community of male hostel-dwellers in the East Rand
townships of the early 1990s. These ndings emerge because the scale of the research
highlighted struggles between hostel-dwellers and the township community only. What
the ndings failed to show was how the hostel community itself was a deeply divided,
always gendered, shifting and transient, fractious group of people. Communities in Isolation
and other studies like it employ the intransigent apartheid architecture of hostel and
township as the epistemological model through which hostel violence is understood. The
arguments operate within an implicit spatial understanding of tensions between hostel
versus township and the belief that violence diffuses spatially from the hostel to the
township. I will show that for the hostel-dweller (by which I mean men and women), the
hostel is a non-static space and is understood in terms of interconnected geometries of
heteropatriarchal power negotiated through interpersonal relationships between far-ung
homes and the locales they inhabit called hostels. The term hostel community should
therefore be used advisedly and always with caution.
Because previous studies have employed a static notion of community, the accounts
of hostel violence were most noticeably non-gendered. Despite sensational newspaper
accounts about female rapes within hostels,
8
the heteropatriarchal face of hostel violence
has escaped attention. Instead, authors and researchers examined the hostel as a static ethnic
space, cut off from the world. Newspaper accounts of violence against women worked on
the assumption that women close to or living in the hostel deserved their fate; they were
in the wrong place at the wrong time. As research on the Kwa Thema hostel documented
here shows, hostels are neither disconnected nor non-gendered spaces. Hostels are also
deeply gendered and sexualised spaces. The hostel is also deeply implicated and felt in the
lives of family members who live hundreds of miles away. It is also felt by the many who
circulate between its walls and their rural homes, not least of all by the women who
undertake that journey.
Weaving through the ndings of the Goldstone Commission are hints that the violence
between hostel-dwellers and the citizens of their surrounding townships may be the result
of a fear of a diminishing patriarchal authority, not in the hostel, per se, but in nevertheless
connected rural patriarchal households. A survey of 750 male hostel-dwellers living in
fteen geographically dispersed hostels found that it was in fact plausible that the majority
of hostel-dwellers living in the most violence-prone hostels (53 per cent) favoured retaining
the single-sex hostel system.
9
Further, those in the most violence-prone hostels in the study
strongly objected to the presence of their wives and children, or any system that would
create such a set of circumstances. In fact, half of the entire sample (men living in both
more violence-prone and less violence-prone hostels) argued that the presence of families
in hostels would signal an end to their ties to rural homesteads, and by association the
power they wielded in those settings.
10
However, the implications of these ndings were not
8 City Press, 16 February 1992; Vrye Weekblad, 8 April 1992.
9 C. de Kock, C. Schutte, N. Rhoodie, D. Ehlers, A Quantitative Analysis of Some Possible Explanations for the
HostelTownship Violence, in Minnaar (ed), Communities in Isolation, p. 196.
10 Ibid., p. 197.
924 Journal of Southern African Studies
expanded upon. Instead, the male hostel-dweller was held up as the legitimate bed holder
and therefore the entitled hostel resident. Ironically, his legitimacy was dened by the then
crumbling, illegitimate and now debunked apartheid order.
Despite the astoundingly high proportion of male hostel-dwellers who clearly saw the
retention of hostel space as a means by which they could hold onto dwindling rural-based
heteropatriarchal power structures, the authors of most studies about hostel violence failed
to examine the question of masculinity, gender, or sexuality in any way whatsoever. Indeed
the study operated within the heterosexual matrix
11
that has dened much work on
migrancy in South Africa. Nowhere is the heteropatriarchal assumption more evident than
in the words of the authors describing their research methodology:
The eldwork was executed by young, but experienced and properly trained black female
workers Previous eldwork in hostels revealed that young ladies were best able to
establish rapport with hostel residents.
12
Although probably unnecessary, let me take a moment to show how this methodological
statement biased the research undertaken and how the results of this project could not
possibly have revealed anything but a re-inscription of the heteropatriarchal. As feminist
theorists have convincingly shown, the identity of the researcher does in fact shape the
results.
13
However, what makes this unabashedly sexist research methodology particularly
egregious is that presumably women interviewers were used as a lure in a highly contested
heteropatriarchal context. Although the ladies hopefully came to no harm while conduct-
ing the eldwork for this project, we can assume that their encounters with hostel-dwellers
were nonetheless tinged with hues of heterosexual tension, desire and possibly violence.
Unlike the work of Dunbar Moodie, for example (which has consistently employed the
ndings of Vivienne Ndatshe
14
in a self-conscious and purposeful way to uncover the
complexity of migrant masculinity in Pondoland), the work of this state-sponsored research
undertaking concluded unsurprisingly that proper control should be exercised over the
illegal residents inside hostels. Presumably, many of the illegal residents were women.
I open with a discussion of the Goldstone Commission because of its importance within
the debate about hostel violence in South Africa, but also because the report reveals the
perils of imagining the hostel community as a unit. The Goldstone Commission, and in
this it is not exceptional, also draws on apartheid-inspired and deeply gendered denitions
of legality and illegality, thereby legitimating the claims of a diminishing number of
formally employed and registered male hostel-dwellers. However, studies of hostels and
11 that grid of cultural intelligibility through which bodies, genders, and desires are naturalized a hegemonic
discursive/epistemic model of gender intelligibility that assumes that for bodies to cohere and make sense there
must be a stable sex expressed through a stable gender (masculine expresses male, feminine expresses female)
that is oppositionally and hierarchically dened through the compulsory practice of heterosexuality. See J. Butler,
Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (London, Routledge, 1990), p. 151.
12 De Kock, Schutte, Rhoodie, Ehlers, A Quantitative Analysis of Some Possible Explanations for the
Hostel-township Violence, p. 176.
13 J. Finch, Its Great to Have Someone to Talk to: The Ethics and Politics of Interviewing Women, in C. Bell
and H. Roberts (eds), Social Researching: Politics, Problems, Practice (London, Routledge and Kegan Paul,
1984), pp. 7087; P. Lather, Feminist Perspectives on Empowering Research Methodologies, Womens Studies
International Forum, 11 (1988), pp. 569581; P. Cotterill, Interviewing Women: Issues of Friendship,
Vulnerability, and Power, Womens Studies International Forum, 15 (1992), pp. 593606; R. Edwards,
Connecting Method and Epistemology: A White Woman Interviewing Black Women, Womens Studies
International Forum, 13, 5 (1990), pp. 477490; M. Miles and J. Crush, Personal Narratives as Interactive Texts:
Collecting and Interpreting Migrant Life-histories, Professional Geographer, 45, 1 (1993), pp. 8794.
14 For example, see T. D. Moodie (with V. Ndatshe), Going for Gold: Men, Mines and Migration (Berkeley, CA,
University of California Press, 1994); T. D. Moodie, Town Women and Country Wives: Migrant Labour, Family
Politics and Housing Preferences at Vaal Reefs, Labour: Capital and Society, 25, 1 (1992), pp. 116132; T. D.
Moodie, Migrancy and Male Sexuality on the South African Gold Mines, Journal of Southern African Studies,
14, 2 (1988), pp. 228256.
Malevolent Traditions 925
violence since the publication of this landmark study have deepened our understanding of
the hostel community. In fact, the work of Lauren Segal
15
predates the study, and works
by Ari Sitas
16
and Mahmood Mamdani
17
written in the mid-1990s stand out as exceptionally
nuanced examinations of alienation experienced by hostel-dwellers. Notwithstanding these
contributions, I would hasten to add that the non-gendered aspects of these studies might
have resulted in their drawing on apartheid-inspired notions of legitimacy when framing an
analysis of who is inside or outside of the community.
Hostels and Ethnicity
The reason the idea of the the hostel community is so pervasive and persuasive in
contemporary work on hostels is that, with a few exceptions,
18
life in hostels is viewed in
unproblematised heteronormative and patriarchal terms. Notwithstanding a feminist cri-
tique, some studies have nonetheless made a signicant, albeit partial, contribution to our
understandings of ethnic nationalism, economic restructuring and labour in South Africa
using what might be characterised as an ethnic lens.
19
Authors have shown how networks
of workers from rural South Africa fostered relationships in hostels that were often
explained by way of hierarchies, gerontocracies and associations at home.
From the middle of the 1980s however, work on the ethnic make up of migrant worker
hostels and compounds located on the Witwatersrand, or in the region known as Gauteng
today, tended to focus on the rise of ethnic nationalism. Specically, research has paid
attention to the rise of ethnic Zulu nationalism through the machinations of power that
emanated from the Inkatha Freedom Party (IFP). From the mid-1980s onwards, the IFP
ideologically negotiated the weighty legacy of a century of territorial and social partition-
ing that belied claims of a unied Zulu nation.
20
For over a decade now, commentators
have argued and shown how a cauldron of Zulu nationalism was tended closely by former
homeland leader and present-day Cabinet Minster Buthelezi. Notwithstanding the charis-
matic, and some might argue egomaniacal, vision set forth by Buthelezi, the African
National Congress did outmanoeuvre the IFP in the 1980s. While the stranglehold of
apartheid lost its grip in the 1980s, the ANC made signicant inroads into the urban black
proletariat support base. At the same time, the economic restructuring of capital meant that
hostels were being depopulated by traditional forms of labour
21
and into these vacant spaces
moved a rural migrant. On the Witwatersrand, these migrants were most often from the area
15 See Segal, The Human Face.
16 See Sitas, The New Tribalism.
17 See Mamdani, Citizen and Subject.
18 See footnote 11 as well as M. Ramphele, A Bed Called Home: Life in the Migrant Labor Hostels of Cape Town
(Athens, Ohio University Press, 1993); M. Ramphele, The Dynamics of Gender Politics in the Hostels of Cape
Town: Another Legacy of the South African Migrant Labour System, Journal of Southern African Studies, 15
(1989), pp. 393414; M. Ramphele, The Male and Female Dynamics amongst Migrant Workers in the Western
Cape, Social Dynamics, 12, 1 (1986), pp. 1525; S. Jones, Assaulting Childhood: Childrens Experiences of
Migrancy and Hostel Life in South Africa (Johannesburg, Witwatersrand University Press, 1993).
19 For example, see K. Breckenridge, Migrancy, Crime and Faction Fighting: The Role of Isitshozi in the
Development of Ethnic Organisations in Compounds, Journal of Southern African Studies, 16, 1 (1990),
pp. 5578.
20 See T. Waetjen, The Home in Homeland: Gender, National Space, and Inkathas Politics of Ethnicity, Ethnic
and Racial Studies, 22, 4 (1999), p. 661; but see also S. Hassim and L. Stiebel, The Semiotics of Struggle: Gender
Representations in the Natal Violence (PRIF Reports, No. 30) (Frankfurt, Peace Research Institute Frankfurt,
1993); H. Adam and K. Moodley, Political Violence, Tribalism, and Inkatha, The Journal of Modern African
Studies, 30 (1992), pp. 485510; C. Campbell, C. G. Mare and C. Walker, Evidence for an Ethnic Identity in
the Life Histories of Zulu-speaking Durban Township Residents, Journal of Southern African Studies, 21, 2
(1995), pp. 287301.
21 J. Crush and W. James, Depopulating the Compounds: Migrant Labour and Mine Housing in South Africa, World
Development, 19 (1991), pp. 301316.
926 Journal of Southern African Studies
known today as KwaZulu-Natal. Sitas
22
and Mamdani
23
provide a detailed mapping of this
process within the hostel system.
In an article aptly titled The New Tribalism: Hostels and Violence, Sitas argues that
violence in hostels on the East Rand must be understood within a broader context within
which hostel-dwellers (migrants) are battling a process of marginalisation. He traces, by
way of a case study during the late 1980s, how the men living in the Vosloorus hostel were
alienated from organised labour and evolving grassroots political movements in townships.
However, while the trenchant analysis by Sitas does document the development of Zulu
nationalism in the hostel system, the study operates within a heteropatriarchal epistemolog-
ical framework. In other words, Sitas assumes that male hostel-dwellers and their associa-
tive rural power structures (founded on normatised heterosexuality, I would remind the
reader) are at the centre of the debate about hostels and their future. Missing from his
analysis is the insidious web of heteropatriarchal power and relationships that locates male
hostel-dwellers at the centre of this debate and women at its margins.
Indeed, Sitas argues that ethnic violence inside hostels is the result of alienation,
disvaluation, disoralia and degendering (emphasis mine), but I would argue that his
gendered analysis does not go far enough to uncover some of the other root causes of
violence within the hostels. In his view, the process of alienation, disvaluation, disoralia,
and degendering amount to an assault on the male hostel-dwellers sense of self. Part of that
assault on the self has resulted in an aggressive regendering of male roles and patriarchal
pride . It is precisely crises within these cultural formations that create a climate of
turbulence that, in turn, animates the rise of social movements.
24
Sitas argues, then, that
degendering amounts to the pressure on gender roles as men and women are thrown into
the mill and ground.
25
Fair enough. However, from the perspective that apartheid operated
within a clearly understood and dened set of gender roles, for women in particular,
degendering even by Sitass denition may not necessarily translate into a necessarily
oppressive process; as alienation, for example, would. Degendering is oppressive only for
those who valorise heteropatriarchal gender relations. For women and men, presumably,
this degendering process is gendered. In other words, the effects of degendering are
different for men and women. By failing to examine the gendered and sexed nature of this
process, I would suggest that this article operates in a maze of heteropatriarchy. Nowhere
is the peril of this viewpoint more telling than in Sitass description of the process whereby
hostels became repopulated by non-traditional residents:
As individuals and families moved to the urban areas and specically to the hostels, the vacant
beds were taken up by a new kind of migrating population inside the hostels: newcomers who
moved from bed to bed and from dormitory to dormitory. People who had been pushed off the
land, despairing of waiting at the labour bureaux for jobs, without any permit to be in the
areas, occupied the unoccupied spaces . This group of dispossessed people did not necess-
arily sponge off others, however, but survived on temporary work provided by the industry
in the area, or relief work provided by hostel inmates.
26
The sleight of hand in the statement occurs when Sitas moves from a discussion of male
hostel-dwellers to this paragraph, wherein he admits to the presence of families in hostels.
As the analysis continues, new hostel-dwellers become non-gendered subjects. Because no
explicit mention is made of the changing gendered dynamics of hostels during this time, the
male migrant hostel-dweller is held up as the standard by which legitimacy is measured.
22 A. Sitas, The New Tribalism.
23 See Mamdani, Citizen and Subject.
24 See Sitas, The New Tribalism, p. 238.
25 Ibid.
26 Emphasis added, Ibid., p. 239.
Malevolent Traditions 927
This male-centred analysis draws on the heteropatriarchal framings of the apartheid state.
The effect is to mask the complicated gendering of hostel space that occurred at this time.
In other words, when families replace male hostel-dwellers and in particular when women
replace men, the sexed and gendered geography of apartheid is challenged, and so too is
the heteropatriarchal division of space and labour. Sitas ignores the procreational economic
geography of apartheid: the many practical and symbolic ways in which South African men
and women were expected to mother and father and to unquestioningly assume the power
relations that trickled out of that expectation, and how those ways were regulated and
contested in spatial terms. Men are always viewed as legitimate heads of households
entitled to urban shelter. By contrast, women in hostels are viewed as transient, visiting,
or, worse still, looking for it. It is surprising that most studies fail to examine the change
in the social make up of the hostel population from a sex/gender perspective. Sitas points
out that these new residents sometimes moved from bed to bed. While this is true, the
consequences for women moving from bed to bed are quite different from those for men.
Further and correctly, he also posits that this group of dispossessed people did not
necessarily sponge off others. I would argue that more than supporting themselves, this
group of new residents and especially the women in that cohort actually supported the lives
of male hostel-dwellers who were eking out existences in the formal, albeit shrinking, work
sector outside the hostel.
In a similarly timed work, Mamdani argues that a long historical view of the process
reveals that the hostel-dwellers at the centre of this struggle were marked differently at
different points in time. Highlighting the two decades that opened with the Durban strikes
of 19721973 and closed with the hostel-centred violence of the early 1990s on the Reef,
he argues that a metonymic shift occurred regarding hostel-dwellers. Whereas in the early
1990s hostel-dwellers came to represent rurality in the urban, in the 1950s for example,
they were recognised as the cutting edge of antichief struggles in the countryside.
Notwithstanding his nuanced tracing of how this came to be, like Sitas, his analysis operates
within an understanding that sees these shifts in non-gendered ways. A brief quote taken
from his methodological eld notes underscores this point:
In the rst half of 1993, I interviewed many of these, initially as part of a Durban-based
COSATU research team charged with understanding the needs of hostel-dwellers. That effort
bore little fruit . With the assistance of a union organizer, I persisted for the next month, but
little happened. I was able to meet with one male resident of Dalton Hostel and ten women
living in Thokoza [Womens] hostel . I met the ten Thokoza women workers for several
evenings of long conversations, as did one organizer assigned to me. Eventually I realised the
reason behind my difculties . A little discouraged, I moved to Johannesburg.
27
Even after being indulged by ten women hostel-dwellers, Mamdani fails in his analysis to
note the signicant ways in which these womens presence or insight might be important
to his ndings. Even his discussion of family housing, later on, does not acknowledge that
women migrants themselves might be considered legitimate consumers of upgraded or
converted housing. In fact, when women or families feature in the argument, they do so in
vexing ways:
The problem was that the situation changed radically once inux control was abolished in 1986.
The shanty population grew dramatically. The more those hostel residents who wanted to live
with their families moved into shanties, the greater was the likelihood that many of those
remaining behind would also be exercising an optionfor not living with families.
28
Troubling is the erasure of women as hostel-dwellers altogether. The argument that women
27 M. Mamdani, Citizen and Subject, pp. 255256.
28 Ibid., p. 272.
928 Journal of Southern African Studies
were surgically removed by family men into the shanty settlements fails to acknowledge
that women continued to live out lives in hostels after 1986. Like Sitas, Mamdani views
women migrants and hostel-dwellers in ways that conne them to roles dened and dictated
by the crumbling apartheid order of that time.
The earlier and equally insightful work by Segal
29
documents what she describes as
The Human Face of Violence. By interviewing men living in Thokoza and Katlehong, she
captures the process whereby people living in hostels perceived that they were under siege.
She argues:
By the late 1980s, the injection of factory oor cultural formations into hostel life no longer
appeared to be occurring. Moreover, ethnicity was able to raise itself as a powerful force
obscuring the commonality of working class interests. The interviews suggest that gerontocratic
rule persisted, home-based allegiances remained intact, and union based associations were
restricted to the factory oor.
30
It is into this vacuum that the IFP sought to mobilise an alienated cohort of mostly
Zulu-identied migrants. However, even in Segals work there is the suggestion that this
change was accompanied by a shift in the gendered make-up of hostel life. One hostel-
dweller tells her for example, more women started popping in. They would come and get
water . I didnt like it at all because a lot of women would stay and there would be a
lot of corruption.
31
In the light of these comments, she argues that while women appeared
to be moving into hostels, male residents were reluctant to speak about this issue. It is
therefore perplexing that Segal did not seek out women hostel-dwellers herself. Towards the
end of her study, she mentions a struggle about women in the Thokoza hostel. However,
the gendered aspects of hostel life remain unexplored by this otherwise excellent examin-
ation of the society of people living inside hostels.
Hostels and the Procreational Economic Geography of Apartheid
Apartheid was premised upon the spatial fracturing of the black family unit, but not its
destruction. Designers of apartheid policy realised that by stringing black heteropatriarchal
bonds of desire and responsibility across space and time, white wealth and black labours
impoverished reproduction was secure. The intention was to restructure existing social
relations and reconstruct a particular kind of familial racialised heterosexuality extended
across space and time. Built into this spatially recongured heterosexuality was the belief
that racialised heterosexual desire (between men and women), or heteropatriarchal bonds of
affection (between mothers and sons, fathers and daughters, etc) would guarantee the
reproduction of the racialised system. This spatial reconstruction of heterosexual relations
took place by shaping individual family members identities in apartheid places like the
township, the homeland or the migrant worker hostel. Inux-control laws siphoned
husbands, brothers, sons, uncles and fathers off into the urban industrial centres and
relegated mothers, sisters, daughters and aunts to the peripheral rural areas of South Africa.
By fracturing families but not completely destroying them, the apartheid state reconstructed
black families identities into functional heteropatriarchal identities and thereby functional
worker identitiesmale wage workers and female unpaid labourers. Individuals who resisted
or trespassed this neat heterosexualised geography, arguably, resisted apartheid. Men who
stayed on in rural areas and women who decided to move to urban areas without
29 Segal, The Human Face of Violence.
30 Ibid., p. 206.
31 Ibid., p. 211.
Malevolent Traditions 929
masculine permission challenged the sexual assumptions of apartheid and its procreational
economy.
The changing character of hostels provides a spatial context for examining how the
procreational economic geography of apartheid operated and continues to operate. The
argument, however, should not be viewed in structuralist terms alone. Hostels were, and
continue to be, sites of resistance to the effects of apartheids procreational economic
geography. As an important aspect of apartheids spatialised racial technology, hostels were
also ofcially designated as heteromasculine spaces, i.e. spaces where heterosexually coded
male bodies resided. While hostels were one site where apartheid identities were forged,
hostels were also sites where family members (including women and children) resisted and
co-opted the imposition of new identities that would have otherwise destroyed their
household and family structures. In this light, the geography of apartheid might well be
referred to as a heterospatiality.
The hostel family household then is a process that extends well beyond the barbed-
wire fence of the hostel. For all contemporary hostel-dwellers (men and women), these
meanings emerge as resultant vectors in a geometry of survival and resistance strategies,
apartheid and familial heteropatriarchal domination. In what follows here, I hope to show
that the ofcial intent of hostels as an arsenal of disposable wage labour created by way
of a familial re-articulation across space was never passively accepted or successful in its
mission. Instead, I aim to show that the municipal hostel as an apartheid-state-engineered
ideal was never realised because it was resisted, invisibly co-opted, and incorporated into
an extended household structure by hostel-dwellers. I am not suggesting that the hostel did
not cut deeply into the South African psyche, changing black family life as it was known.
Indeed, contemporary life-threatening struggles around escalating rates of domestic violence
and HIV/AIDS infection in former and present day migrant families suggest that the
struggle for family survival continues in the contemporary era. What I plan to argue here,
however, is that the black family extended spatially and that the static break-up of the
household presented in much of the literature on hostels did not take place. The terms of
that struggle took place around the meaning of heterosexual familial relations in space; at
times these heteropatriarchal assumptions were in line with those of the state, at other times
women in particular resisted their imposition. This study highlights the resistant strategies
of hostel-dwellers, and women especially, that can only be understood once we accept that
their response took shape around the struggle over sexed gender identity and survival at the
household level. Although the contest for meaning and identity between hostel-dwellers and
the state took place throughout the apartheid years, it was only in the mid-to-late 1980s that
the sexed and gendered nature of that struggle emerged visibly in newspaper accounts and
in the form of women literally occupying hostels.
Between 1985 and 1995, former municipal migrant-worker hostels in present-day
Gauteng were sites of struggle on several fronts. For example, beginning in the late 1980s
as part of the effort to massage the apartheid landscape into something else, hostel
conversion schemes have sparked an architectural controversy about the shape of future
family housing in South Africa. However, in all of these discussions, the heterosexual
matrix that defaults all discussions of family as heterosexual families has shaped the
debate. At very best, the resulting plans, such as permitting women to stay overnight in
hostels, reveal an effort to release some of the heterosexual tensions of desire across space
and time. However, plans that recognise female-headed hostel family households, hostel
family households led by older men who are not husbands, or any household that does not
present a procreational unit have been ignored by planners and policy makers. It would not
be overstating the case to argue that the current debate around hostel conversions into
family housing has in fact reinforced the procreational geography of apartheid. Only
930 Journal of Southern African Studies
families who measure up to some apartheid-inspired notion of procreational worth are
allowed access to housing today in old hostel spaces; widows who head families,
grandfathers who adopt AIDS orphans, and young unmarried parents of both sexes will not
nd adequate and affordable housing in contemporary South Africa.
The linkages between areas of origin and the hostel are also at the core of the struggle
for identity that hostel-dwellers have experienced during and after the collapse of apartheid.
The physical incarceration of hostel-dwellers behind razor-fences and their symbolic
imprisonment secured by a discourse that labels their living space as Fortresses of Fear,
32
slaughter houses,
33
and primordial palaces of darkness
34
has isolated their urban
experience. In the 1980s and early 1990s, the struggles over the meaning of hostels
marginalised hostel-dwellers (women and children as well as men) in such a way that the
path was left open to a South African variation on post-colonial exploitation. Tragically,
desperate living conditions, unsurpassed poverty even in South African terms, and thou-
sands of violent and politically motivated deaths in hostel-related violence since the
mid-1980s support this claim (for accounts of this period see Reed
35
and Marinovich and
Silva).
36
Sex, Gender and Hostel Violence: the Case of Kwa Thema.
With this critique in mind, I would like to examine the vortex of violence that shaped the
lives of those who lived inside the hostel that formed the basis of the research for this study.
Admittedly, what follows here is a case study of one particular hostel during one protracted
period of intense violence and bloodshed. This study focuses on violence in Kwa Thema
between 1990 and 1995.
During that time, the Kwa Thema hostel came under the national spotlight. More than
anywhere else, events inside the Kwa Thema hostel were used to exemplify a regional
trend. The increasing numbers of Zulu hostel-dwellers from KwaZulu who had moved into
the PWV hostels
37
were viewed as a marginal but politically volatile group. Hostel and
township dwellers were shown to have widely differing experiences that precipitated out
into political afliations. (See Table 1)
As argued above, a considerable amount of material at the time and since has posited
Table 1. Political afliation of legal (male) hostel-dwellers
and the surrounding township population, c. 1991
38
Support for Hostels, % Township, %
(n101) (n 330)
Inkatha Freedom Party 71 10
African National Congress 12 43
National Party 7 17
32 City Press, 30 June1991.
33 City Press, 21 June 1992.
34 The Citizen, 30 April 1992.
35 D. Reed, Beloved Country: South Africas Silent Wars (Johannesburg: Jonathan Ball Publishers, 1994).
36 G. Marinovich, J. Silva, The Bang Bang Club: Snapshots from a Hidden War (London, Basic Books, 2000). This
graphic account by the Pulitzer prize-winning photojournalist of the East Rand hostel war is also told from a
troubling heteromasculinist perspective. Violence, as well as black and white masculinity in crisis, are at the core
of this retelling of the last days of apartheid.
37 Ibid.
38 Industrial Monitor, ANC/IFP Support in Reef Townships and Hostels, Indicator SA, 10, 2 (1993), p. 21.
Malevolent Traditions 931
ethno-political cleavages as the cause of hostel violence. These ethnically focused analyses
failed to recognise that, along with an increasingly Zulu ethnic order inside hostels, the
sexual make-up of the hostel population was also changing to include more visible
women. Of course, we should recall that in hostels where women were not residents, a
heteropatriarchal vision held sway and shaped the lives of those who lived in the hostel or
were connected to it. Furthermore, hostel-dwellers and hostels in general came to represent
the apartheid state for most of those who lived in the township. Arguments in favour of
retaining the hostel system and hostel-dwellers were inevitably interpreted by the surround-
ing township community as arguments in favour of the retention of apartheid a
consequence of the history underlying the creation of hostels.
It is important to note that, throughout the PWV region discussion about the hostel
conversions galvanised male hostel residents political support for the Inkatha Freedom
Party. While Sitass work, discussed above, posits economic reasons for the alienation
experienced by male hostel-dwellers, I am suggesting that a debate about the future of
hostels has in fact circulated in hostels and townships since the mid-1980s. I posit that this
discussion was instrumental in unsettling hostel-dwellers because the mere suggestion of
hostel conversions upset the heteropatriarchal word view and the procreational geography
of apartheid: men temporarily in cities and women tied to rural homes.
Since late 1989, the IFP (Inkatha Freedom Party), using KwaZulu as a regional base,
had set about rallying political support throughout the country. In particular, they targeted
an older, Zulu-speaking and impoverished proletariat who had migrated from KwaZulu to
places like Kwa Thema in search of work. With patriarchal imagery, such as warring Zulu
impis and Shakas military might the IFP presented an adumbrative version of Zulu history
that provided a safe option for older and fearful black male workers. For the growing
number of Zulus who lived inside the deteriorating hostels in the PWV, the sense of
alienation was heightened as anti-apartheid township politics raged and in some instances
focused on the hostel as a symbol of apartheid. As a minority party in most East Rand
townships, the IFP came to articulate an increasingly appealing position for hostel-dwellers
who saw the hostel as home. The IFPs sense of history was one that inculcated an idyllic
rural past with a hierarchical cultural order where old age was respected and a traditional
sexual division of responsibility prevailed. The IFP leader Buthlezi, addressing a rally of
women in Msinga, argued:
You are the custodians of this heritage and that is why our languages are called Mothers
tongues. It is your duty . Who will bring forth the next generation of warriors? Who will
bathe the wounded? We men need you so we can be strong.
39
The violence that followed in Kwa Thema and throughout the region has little to do with
tradition. Rather, it was a direct result of the IFPs culturally encoded struggle to assert
a patriarchal order in the face of mounting political support for the ANC. The ANC
articulated a position that sought to guarantee an end to the traditional oppression of
women. Public attacks on entrenched institutions such as polygamy, female circumcision
and bride wealth began to receive attention.
40
However, the balancing of these issues
alongside the constitutionally guaranteed rights of traditional leaders has, in reality, forced
a compromise around both sets of seemingly incompatible guarantees. The patriarchal
imperative surfaced with particular effect inside the hostel. A Kwa Thema hostel-dweller
was reported as saying:
39 Quoted from S. Hassim, Family, Motherhood and Zulu Nationalism: The Place of the Politics of the Inkatha
Womens Brigade, Feminist Review, 43 (1993), p. 45.
40 For a summary of the varying pro-ANC positions and debates see S. Bazilli, Putting Women on the Agenda
(Johannesburg, Ravan, 1991).
932 Journal of Southern African Studies
Six years ago it seemed the government had decided to phase out the single-sex hostel for some
700 000 migrant workers . Although we were living as married bachelors, we made the
best of the worst. We never expected anybody could inuence us against one another in the
hostel in this way.
41
The quote reveals how the hostel conversions threatened a particular masculine identity: the
married bachelor. The conversion debate was dened in such a way that the inclusion of
women in upgrading schemes became the reason for much of the violence that followed as
male hostel-dwellers fought for their status as married bachelors. As married men living
in the hostels throughout the PWV, these older Zulu migrant men could maintain a
semblance of patriarchal power because the rural power base and access to land would
remain intact. Once female relatives moved to the urban areas, however, control over the
declining rural base and the accordant patriarchal social relations were threatened.
42
It was
not surprising, some time later, when it was reported that:
Several thousand Natal Zulu hostel dwellers at a rally yesterday expressed their opposition to
ending the single-sex hostel system in South Africa, saying they had not been consulted on the
issue . According to the speakers, it would be impossible to transform single-sex hostels into
family units and accommodate all the present hostel dwellers and their families.
43
The English-speaking press continued to present the Kwa Thema hostel as a cauldron of
seething ethnic rivalry. By using essentialist notions of Zulu identity, reports ignored the
complexity of hostel-related social processes. Hostel violence was actually a highly
gendered and local contestation for power linked to the IFPs national political movement.
Male hostel residents who had established a family network that extended across the
country were represented as fearful of their future displacement, especially if the hostel was
to be converted into family dwelling units.
44
As mentioned above, it is in this vortex of
change that the IFP began its mobilising efforts. As Segal showed, many hostel-dwellers
were in fact ignorant of the actual policies of the IFP. Indeed, most male hostel-dwellers
understood the IFP to be little more than a rallying cry for some kind of unity around a
series of issues. Despite the oftentimes-confused political implications of IFP policy, most
IFP supporters seemed united in their desire to protect a vision of heteropatriarchal family
life that had taken root during apartheid. Missing from these genderless debates were the
accounts of women whose lives were connected to the hostel, as well as input from women
who had already moved into the hostels.
I am suggesting that because policy makers and politicians ignored the gendered
dimension of hostel-related violence and the gendered nature of hostel life, redressing the
apartheid past was almost impossible. In fact, during South Africas transition, as alienated
male spaces, hostels were prime sites for the IFPs sexist mobilisation efforts that argued
that hostels must remain as single-male, temporary accommodation. The sexist gaze of
apartheid was not limited to the IFP when it came to reconceptualising urban space.
In late 1990, the then President de Klerk, having released the jailed African National
Congress leader Nelson Mandela earlier that same year and eager to demonstrate a break
with apartheid, spoke out against the single-sex hostel system. The migrant-worker
municipal hostels became the focus of a highly publicised media campaign during which
de Klerk called for an end to single-sex hostels.
45
Protracted national debate in the media
injected new vigour into the hostel question. Violence in and around hostels continued to
41 City Press, 26 August 1990.
42 For detailed documentation of changing patriarchal relations and access to land among Mpondo male migrants,
see Moodie, Going for Gold.
43 The Citizen, 29 May 1991.
44 G. Schreiner, Transforming Hostels, Indicator SA, 8, 3 (1991), pp. 8788.
45 Beeld, 30 August 1990; Natal Witness, 29 August 1990.
Malevolent Traditions 933
soar as male residents interpreted de Klerks call as evidence of their future displacement
by families.
National Politics and the Design of Family Housing
By refocusing its efforts on hostel upgrading, the government had hoped to appease the
material demands of hostel-dwellers and thereby quell hostel-related township violence.
Results from a state-funded research project
46
suggested that the government would be well
advised to retain aspects of the single-sex hostel system. The proposal advocated a
transitional model of hostel planning. It was recommended that the single-sex hostel should
be supercially upgraded without any structural changes and that the same buildings would
be transformed into family housing some time in the future.
47
Echoing the earlier liberal
critique of hostels, new proposals argued that by addressing the material needs of
hostel-dwellers and ultimately bringing families into the hostels, violence would cease,
old-style apartheid would be scrapped, and family life would be restored.
The proposal did not acknowledge that families had always been part of the hostel and
some female-headed families had already moved into the hostels pre-empting the ofcial
call. Consequently, post-apartheid planning looked remarkably similar to apartheid planning
for women living inside hostels. Their informal work lives that balanced income and
household responsibility were still devalued, and their links to hostels, regardless of how
they were upgraded, were still dependent on male relatives. Although the nuclear family as
a socio-economic unit has seldom characterised the rural black family,
48
suddenly it was
argued that Happiness is a home with his family.
49
It is worth noting that at this time hostels were also undergoing a radical transformation
in other parts of the country. Indeed, Cape Towns hostels, too, were being slowly
transformed into spaces that housed families.
50
Hostel transformation in the black townships
of Cape Town, however, must be understood within the broader geography of apartheid and
the highly differentiated way in which that policy was implemented between 1948 and
1994.
51
An extreme housing shortage in Cape Town, tied to the racist employment policies
enacted throughout the region during apartheid, forced families into crowded hostel spaces.
These movements, however, did not precipitate the same violent reaction from male
hostel-dwellers. While I believe the differences between the experiences of Cape and East
Rand hostel-dwellers lies well beyond the scope of this paper, the noted differences serve
to underscore the complex and place-specic ways in which hostels as a spatial technology
gure in the procreational economic geography of apartheid.
By the close of 1990, the recently unbanned African National Congress, the South
African Communist Party and the South African government established an alliance that set
aside R4 billion (US$1.2 billion at the time) for these conversions with an independent trust
established to manage the funds.
52
Proposals soon followed:
For each family unit in the hostel, one has to move 15 people to create facilities for the
community, we recommended that the opportunity for small business be encouraged and that
46 Minnaar, Communities in Isolation.
47 Sunday Times, 9 October 1990.
48 V. Van der Vliet, Traditional Husbands, Modern Wives? Constructing Marriages in a South African Township,
African Studies, 50 (1991), pp. 219241.
49 The Star, 10 March 1993.
50 Ramphele, A Bed Called Home; Jones, Assaulting Childhood.
51 D. Smith, The Apartheid City and Beyond: Urbanization and Social Change in South Africa (London, Routledge,
1992).
52 Sunday Tribune, 16 October 1990; The Star, 17 October 1990.
934 Journal of Southern African Studies
older disused buildings be used as workshops to generate self employment. Hostel dwellers that
were unemployed could be used as builders in modifying the hostels.
53
The ndings of an unabashedly sexist architectural survey argued amongst other things that:
Three types of hostel dwellers were identied: The migrant worker who had invested in the
homelands over a period of time and was not looking to settle in the city. Those with urban
aspirations who could not afford to live in the township although they aspired to move and
integrate with the community. Those men too insecure in their employment to think about
integrating into the community argued that they planned to return home.
54
A decade later, the denition of hostel-dweller has changed little. It should be noted, of
course, that the static denition does not suggest that the term has not been contested.
Indeed, as I argue here, attempts by both the Government of National Unity and the rst
ANC-led government oated proposals that were somewhat gender-sensitive and inclusive.
However, in the face of strident and violent local IFP mobilisation efforts, beginning in the
early 1990s and continuing well into 1996, the term hostel-dweller still evokes the image
of a tensile male labourer with ruralurban connections: a character right out of the
procreational apartheid script. Missing from these initiatives, of course, were the visible
and invisible hostel women; women who had been linked by association to hostels
throughout their history, many of whom were already living inside hostels. This gender-
blind approach continued to dene the hostel-upgrading question in local municipal policy
documents, the view of representative committees inside the hostel, and nally the way
in which the issue came to be dened at a national scale.
Under the leadership of the ANC, the National Housing Forum (NHF)
55
was established
to oversee the conversion of hostels. Because of ANC involvement, hostel-dwellers, at the
instigation of the IFP, saw the forum in an increasingly sinister light. A history of
grass-roots political organising by the ANC through civic organisations and the IFPs work
in the hostels put representatives of the two groups at ideological loggerheads.
56
Calls for surveys of municipal male hostel populations emerged.
57
One public survey
showed that approximately four out of ten hostel migrants considered hostel life to be the
best way for single migrants to live in the city. Further, only one-quarter of hostel-dwellers
perceived themselves to be urbanites. Additionally, at least half of the migrants did not feel
that they would like their wives or rural female companions to join them in the city. Not
surprisingly, the ndings further cemented the patriarchal tone that had dened the
hostel-conversion debate and hid from national policy makers on the NHF how hostel life
is a set of gendered social relations.
58
In June 1993, the NHF decided that hostels would
be upgraded along single-sex lines and later converted into family-dwelling units.
53 The Daily News, 18 October 1990.
54 Daily News, 8 October 1990.
55 The NHF was originally given the responsibility to orchestrate the upgrading of 180 public hostels throughout
the country. Their provision also included an Emergency Intervention Programme for hostels with living
conditions so bad that they present a threat to the health and safety of residents. As a national joint initiative, the
hostel programme represented one of the most enlightened statements on hostels thus far. In gender-neutral terms,
it acknowledged that migrant labour is likely to continue in the future South Africa. Further, it suggested that
the hostel question in the long term must be part of a wider development programme that extends beyond its
physical borders. Finally, in conjunction with the departments of local housing, it calls for a two-pronged approach
to hostel upgrading; a short-term emergency upgrading and a long-term reconguration of spatial arrangements
within hostels.
56 New Nation, 23 February 1992.
57 Business Day, 21 July 1992; The Citizen, 21 July 1992.
58 See C. Oliver-Evans, Prole of an Employer Hostel in the Western Cape, in Minnaar (ed), Communities in
Isolation, pp. 114142.
Malevolent Traditions 935
Conclusion
By relocating the hostel and associated violence within a broader framework, the argument
laid out here has sought to re-imagine the ways in which violence in hostels between 1990
and 1995 affected men and women. Further, I have sought to document that violence in this
context is a social process tied to the politics of femininity and masculinity in a society
caught up in social change and the politics of transformation. However, arguing that a crisis
around the perceived erosion of heteromasculinity resulted in a period of protracted
violence in hostels in the early 1990s does not diminish the contributions of others to this
debate. Rather, this study seeks to show that violence is, in part, the result of a challenge
to the heteropatriarchy encoded on the apartheid landscape. This study has also sought to
critique the notion of a homogeneous hostel community on two fronts.
First, people living inside the hostels are not isolated as much of the literature
suggests. In fact, the lives of people living inside hostels are deeply implicated in both
contiguous and far-ung geographies. By examining these linkages within the context of a
procreational economic geography, the different ways in which heteropatriarchal power
circulates through these networks has been brought to the foreground.
Second, this study has argued that the hostel is, and always was, a gendered community
and that analyses that fail to unpack the gendering of hostel space miss a great deal about
the complex social systems that operate within their walls and connect them to the outside
world. Admittedly, not all hostels experienced an invasion of women hostel-dwellers as
was the case in Kwa Thema. It should also be remembered that the complex national
geography of hostels throughout South Africa in the rst half of the 1990s also refracted
local histories and the politics of place. Hostels in KwaMashu in KwaZulu-Natal and Langa
in the Western Cape, for example, incorporated families and reected families lives in less
violent and more visible ways. However, the absence or presence of women and families
does not preclude analysing the hostel as a gendered space. As Moodie and Breckenridge
have shown, hostels are places where masculinity and power are contested.
59
Further, what this discussion has sought to reveal is the extent to which a disenfran-
chised community, such as the one that occupied hostels like Kwa Thema in the early
1990s, was deeply divided. The rush for power and legitimacy within the hostel was in fact
worsened by calls for legitimate leaders from the hostel community. In Kwa Thema it
was clear that there was in fact no legitimate power structure within hostels. Well-inten-
tioned policies by the NHF, in some cases, bestowed legitimacy on sometimes completely
inappropriate political operators.
Finally, by locating the Kwa Thema hostel within the procreational geography of
apartheid, we gain a new way of seeing contemporary hostel politics. First, the hostel is an
interconnected node on the landscape. Its meaning extends well beyond its walls, and at
times its symbolic meaning as a battery of masculine Zulu labour is more important than
its reality: a fractious, divided, sometimes chaotic but always gendered population. Second,
by examining the hostel as part of the procreational geography of apartheid, we are able to
interpret the marginalisation of women hostel-dwellers from contemporary hostel conver-
sion debates. Not least of all, the analysis laid out seeks to challenge historical racialised
accounts of South Africa between 1948 and the present that fail to employ gender, sex and
space as analytical categories.
GLEN ELDER
Department of Geography, University of Vermont, Old Mill Building, Burlington,
VT 05405, USA. E-mail: gelder@zoo.uvm.edu
59 See footnotes 14 and 19 above.