Joan Wardrop

Private Cooking, Public Eating: Women street vendors in South Durban

The diverse cultural spaces of eThekwini (Durban), South Africa, reflect the accommodations and daily cultural negotiations made by the residents of a city whose demographies represent the complex inheritances of interactions between a long history of colonial segregation, nearly 50 years of formal apartheid policies, rapid modernisation, and global networks of migration, production and exchange. This article explores the heavily gendered spaces in which the street food which is characteristic of many areas of the city is produced. ‘Kitchens’, whether a paraffin stove on the street or in an ‘informal’ settlement shack, or dedicated space in a modern flat or house, locate and position borrowings, appropriations and imitations in ingredients, techniques and recipes, between diverse cultural traditions. The cultural performance of identity links the private and the public, the kitchen and the spaces of consumption. Food, and the making of food, are inscribed with ethnicity, with understandings of what is ‘real’, of authenticity and tradition.

The impact of visa status and Medicare eligibility on people diagnosed with HIV in Western Australia: a qualitative report

BACKGROUND In Australia, temporary visa holders are ineligible for Medicare and subsidised antiretroviral drugs. Additionally, HIV testing is not mandatory for visas unless applicants seek work in the health sector. We sought to understand the impact of HIV and issues of access and adherence to antiretroviral therapy (ART) in people holding temporary visas and permanent residents. METHODS Data were gathered from interviews with 22 participants. Information concerning medication adherence, side effects, CD4 T-cell count, viral load and rate of response to generic drugs were collected. RESULTS The mean age was 33.4 years (±s.d.=6.0), 21 out of 22 were from HIV-prevalent areas in East Africa and Asia, 14 out of 22 were on temporary visas, 12 were ineligible for Medicare, 14 out of 22 were diagnosed during health screening, 19 out of 22 risk exposures were in country of origin, 8 out of 17 were taking generic ART at an average cost of

Notes from a tense field: threatened masculinities in South Africa

180 per month, adherence was excellent and self-reported side-effects were relatively infrequent. Participants applying for visa continuations and permanent residency were fearful, believing their HIV serostatus would prejudice their applications. Patients cited belief in ART efficacy, were motivated to maintain therapy and were anxious about lack of access to treatment in their countries of origin. CONCLUSION Adherence to antiretroviral drugs in Medicare-ineligible HIV-infected individuals is excellent despite limited access to treatment. The threat of visa non-renewal and the likely failure of applications for permanent residency result in considerable anxiety and confidentiality concerns.

Speaking out loud: Muslim women, Indian Delights and culinary practices in eThekwini/Durban

Violent crime affects every South African resident. How can crime so affect a culture, so inscribe its topographies, that it becomes possible to say these words out loud? Whereas the apartheid state was so inexorably present, reaching deep into individual lives, the post-apartheid state seems now unaccountably absent, abdicating responsibility for safety and security to private companies, the new growth industry of the post-apartheid years. Analyses of the effects of crime in South Africa often draw on government statistics, journalistic accounts, ministers’ statements, and the narratives of victims and criminals, while exploring the political and socio-economic dimensions of a situation which neither communities nor governments have successfully confronted. This essay proposes a different agenda; one based not on the false certainties of immediate causation but rather on the tenuous, subversive, almost invisible traces left by crime. Seeking to read the cultural contexts within which violent crime has flourished, the essays aim is to understand the role of threatened masculinities in the perpetuation of violence beyond the time of apartheid and political struggle. While considering the poetics of traumatic memory and of living with violent crime, the essay seeks to create a non-hierarchical text within which the interplay of diverse modes of discourse challenges a contemporary idealising of the new South Africa. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork for two long-term research projects (policing in Soweto, 1994–1998, and more recently on memory, identification and place in Durban) as well as on readings of external texts, such as the powerful and disturbing play Relativity: Township stories by Mpumelelo Paul Grootboom and Presley Chweneyagae, the essay explores a culture profoundly traumatised and disempowered.

A descriptive study of the experiences of lesbian, gay and transgender parents accessing health services for their children

I asked, ‘Did your mother teach you to cook?’ Almost an hour later, time consumed by mutual reminiscences of Indian Delights, stories of the tastes and textures and colours of food and life in Durban, at last when I thought it would never be answered my question swam back up to the surface of our conversation: ‘You know, then I lived with my oldest sister, not my mother. Her mother-in-law taught me.’ Too heavy a shift of register, the answer dropped into the bubble of conversation we had made around ourselves, imposing another reluctant silence. I could not ask more, not then. Deliverance came through other stories. We talked about the subtly different combinations of spices that women even from the same family choose to use, and the embodied pleasures of walking into a kitchen steamed up with the smells of several dishes all cooking at once. And for the moment we avoided returning to a family narrative of separation, loss and melancholy.