Leslie Bank

End of an Era: Africa's Development Policy Parallax

On the eve of the twenty-first century, the international media’s cameras, in search of fireworks-illuminated skies and the bonhomie of crowds wishing each other a prosperous future, passed over African cities and its still darker countryside. Devoid of spectacle, African hopes for the future were primarily perceived in terms of international debt relief. The only African fireworks that received televised coverage world-wide during the millennium year issued from civil wars and unrest that flared up around the continent, notably in Sierra Leone, Congo, Ethiopia, Eritrea, Zimbabwe and Ivory Coast.

Living Together, Moving Apart: Home-made Agendas, Identity Politics and Urban-Rural Linkages in the Eastern Cape, South Africa

Paul Rabinow’s concept of ‘middling modernism’ provides a useful starting point for analysing the spatial and social transformations associated with the implementation of post-war urban development planning in South Africa. Rabinow argues that the key departure of middling modernism as a form of urban planning is that it no longer focuses on “regulating and ameliorating a locale and its inhabitants, but rather on treating both as a matter to be formed and normed at will” (1989:345). It is not concerned with “the isolation and rectification of islands of pathology” but with providing “a blueprint for the scientific administration of modern life” (ibid:344). The intention, he claims, is to create abstract sites where “all reference to older modes of life, to history, to the sedimented place of memory, and to sociability [have] been eliminated” and where the “the central point of the city [has] been reserved for public administration” (ibid:358). This form of modernism thus imposes itself from the outside without taking cognisance of local conditions, values and practices. It seeks to create “New Men freed, purified and liberated to pursue new forms of sociality which would inevitably arise from correctly designed spaces and forms” (Rabinow 1995:60). In order to achieve this, Rabinow suggests that urban housing policy emerged as the central locus for the interaction and macroand micro-knowledge and power (ibid:63).

The Rhythms of the Yards: Urbanism, Backyards and Housing Policy in South Africa

Modernist planners became thieves of memory. Faustian in their eagerness to erase all traces of the past in the interest of forward momentum, of growth in the name of progress, their drive-by-windscreen surveys of neighbourhoods that they have already decided to condemn to the bulldozer, have been, in their own way, as deadly as the recent drive by gang shootings in Los Angeles. Modernist planners embracing the ideology of development as progress, have killed whole communities, by evicting them, demolishing their houses, and dispersing them to edge suburbs or leaving them homeless. They have killed whole communities by not understanding the loss and grieving that go along with losing ones home and neighbourhood and friends and memories. (Sandercock 1998:208) When watching the news, you find that the government is only concerned with shack dwellers. What about us? We are sitting with big expectations that they will build us houses. We have grown so old sitting in the backyards. Backyard shack-dweller, Johannesburg, 1999

Angry men and working women: gender, violence and economic change in Qwaqwa in the 1980s

Abstract The paper attempts to contextualise and explain an extraordinary incident of public violence which occurred in Qwaqwa in the mid‐1980s and which involved a collective assault on working women by unemployed men in the bantustan town of Phuthaditjhaba. To explain this event, the paper explores the changing material context and cultural constructions of households in this bantustan over time. The central argument developed below is that, while the actions of the unemployed men were certainly a direct response to their deteriorating employment prospects, the violence itself cannot be explained without appreciating, firstly, the differential impact of changing material conditions on the culturally specific understandings of gender relations in urban and closer settlement households and, secondly, the manner in which these changes challenged existing notions of masculinity in Qwaqwa.

Men with Cookers: Transformations in Migrant Culture, Domesticity and Identity in Duncan Village, East London*

This article is concerned with understanding current transformations in migrant culture and identity in South African urban areas. It approaches the topic by revisiting Philip and lana Mayer’s classic study of migrant culture and identity in the Duncan Village township of East London. The article uses the their work as the starting point from which to construct a detailed historical analysis of the tranformations in amaqaba migrant culture in the city from the 1950s to the mid-1990s. The first part of the paper attempts to show that the Mayers greatly underestimated the resilience of this cultural form in the face of far-reaching social and political change in East London. In documenting the survival of amaqaba culture well into the 1980s, it focuses not only on the external forces that shaped migrant responses to change, but also on the internal social dynamics and relations that facilitated cultural reproduction. The second part of the paper is devoted to an analysis of the decline of amaqaba culture as...