Making Freedom

Apartheid, Squatter Politics, and

the Struggle for Home

A NN E - M AR I A M AK H U LU
Making Freedom
 anne- maria makhulu

Making Freedom
| | | | |

A PA R T H E I D , S Q U AT T E R P O L I T I C S , A N D
THE STRUGGLE FOR HOME

Duke University Press | Durham and London | 2015

 © 2015 Duke University Press
All rights reserved
Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper ∞
Typeset in Whitman by Westchester Publishing Services

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Makhulu, Anne-Maria, [date] author.
Making freedom : apartheid, squatter politics, and the struggle for
home / Anne-Maria Makhulu.
Pages cm
Includes bibliographical references and index.
isbn 978-0-8223-5947-0 (hardcover : alk. paper)
isbn 978-0-8223-5966-1 (pbk. : alk. paper)
isbn 978-0-8223-7511-1 (e-book)
1. Squatter settlements—South Africa— Cape Town—History—20th
century. 2. Squatters—Political activity—South Africa— Cape
Town. 3. Apartheid—South Africa— Cape Town. I. Title.
hd7374.4.c34m35 2015
363.5'109687355—dc23
2015014082

Cover art: Untitled (Hope Chest series), by Zwelethu Mthethwa, 2012,

digital c-print, dimensions variable. © Zwelethu Mthethwa. Cour-
tesy of the artist and Jack Shainman Gallery, New York.
 Contents

Acknowledgments vii

Prologue xi

Introduction 1

Chapter 1
Migrations 27

Chapter 2
Counterinsurgency 63

Chapter 3
Transitions 95

Chapter 4
“Reckoning” 129

Conclusion
Making Freedom 153

notes 169 references 199 index 221

 Acknowledgments

I owe an incalculable debt of thanks to so many. Let me begin with my in-

terlocutors in the city of Cape Town, who made enormous contributions
to this book whether or not they came to appear in the text itself. Those
who did and who must remain anonymous and were thus renamed include
Edith, Evelyn and Evelyn (both), Ezekiel, Gugulethu, Kaizer, Lungile, Max,
Naledi, Nelson, Noluthando, Nomalady, Nomasundu, Nombulelo, Ntom-
binkosi, Samuel, Solomon, Stembiso, Unathi, Winnifred, and Xoliswa. Why
they were so generous with their time and their stories is anyone’s guess.
Besides those living on the city’s perimeter there were municipal officials
who gave of their time and knowledge. My thanks to those who shared their
insights about spatial planning, development, and housing, as well as, on oc-
casion, their recollections of what it meant to work either for or against the
old apartheid regime. My debts to Madeleine Fullard are positively unrepay-
able. Formerly at the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, Madeleine’s
continued work in the relentless pursuit of the truth on behalf of families
of the disappeared is extraordinary. Josette Cole’s longtime commitments
to the history of Crossroads have guided me through. I thank her for that.
Finally, to my South African family in Cape Town and Johannesburg—to
my cousins, aunts, uncles, nieces, and nephews—what great comfort you
afforded me; Antoinette, you, most of all.
As with all first books, monographs certainly, this one began as a doctoral
project longer ago than I care to admit. For that and its extended journey
into book form I have my advisers, previously at the University of Chicago,
to thank. These include Andrew Apter and Jean and John Comaroff. The
Comaroffs issue, as I do, from South Africa, and their encouragement and
support to those of us who were part of a generation of PhD students able to
return, for the first time post-1994, to our homeland was and continues to
be immeasurable. To them I say “baruti ba me baba tlhaga.” Within Tswana
culture the stature of “teacher” is beyond compare. Additional thanks go
to Ralph Austen, Marshall Sahlins, David Scott, Raymond Smith, George
Stocking, and Terence Turner—each in his way, in the somber and stimulat-
ing context of the U of C, taught me more than I can ever repay. At Prince-
ton, first in the Society of Fellows in the Liberal Arts and then in the Shelby
Cullom Davis Center for Historical Studies, I was afforded the time and
resources to work on Making Freedom and a collection of essays, Hard Work,
Hard Times. Special thanks go to Leonard Barkan, Simon Gikandi, Carol
Greenhouse, Mary Harper, and Gyan Prakash, as well as to my “fellow fel-
lows,” as we liked to refer to ourselves.
At Duke University, my home of the last so many years, the support and
generosity of colleagues, both within the two departments I serve and be-
yond, have been tremendous. Duke is nothing if not a hothouse of ideas,
and I have benefited greatly from the rigorous and energetic exchanges
across departments, programs, and centers. In Cultural Anthropology, my
primary home, I have been permitted a space both inspiring and unstinting.
My thanks go to all my colleagues: Anne Allison, Lee Baker, Engseng Ho,
Ralph Litzinger, Randy Matory, Laurie McIntosh, Louise Meintjes, Diane
Nelson, Mack O’Barr, Charlie Piot, Irene Silverblatt, Harris Solomon,
Orin Starn, Rebecca Stein, and Charlie Thompson. In African and African
American Studies my colleagues have been equally supportive. I would like
to thank Michaeline Crichlow, Sandy Darity, Tommy DeFrantz, Thavolia
Glymph, Kerry Haynie, Karla Holloway, Bayo Holsey, Wahneema Lubiano,
Mark Anthony Neal, Charmaine Royal, Karin Shapiro, Stephen Smith, and
Maurice Wallace for their encouragement. To my colleagues and friends
in the Concilium on Southern Africa, particularly Catherine Admay, our
programming and visiting scholars of and from South Africa have provided
such inspiration. Finally, I am forever indebted to graduate teaching assis-
tants Joella Bitter, Mackenzie Cramblit, and Samuel Shearer. Jacob John-
son, an mba candidate, also offered invaluable support in the figuring of
exchange rates, historic inflation, and the real value of wages.

viii | ac know ledg ments

 Let me say that editors have the patience of Job; at least mine has had to.
Ken Wissoker has been generous beyond compare. He and my anonymous
reviewers were meticulous in their reading and constructive comments on
the varying stages of the book project. Without them I would have been lost.
Portions of the manuscript were presented at a variety of conferences,
workshops, and lectures over the years. Sites of these have included the
University of California, Santa Cruz; the University of Cape Town; cuny
Graduate Center; Harvard University; Johns Hopkins University; New York
University; the University of North Carolina; the University of Pennsyl-
vania; Rutgers University; the University of Wisconsin, Madison; and the
University of the Witwatersrand, as well as the American Anthropological
Association, the Society for Cultural Anthropology, and, closer to home,
many conferences and workshops on the Duke University campus. I am
most grateful to the members of the departments that hosted me and to
fellow conferees and workshop participants who read my work closely and
charitably.
Research is always both time-consuming and costly, and without the
support of a variety of donor institutions, foundations, and my home uni-
versity, Making Freedom would never have come to print. At different stages
in my research I benefited from the financial support of the Princeton So-
ciety of Fellows in the Liberal Arts, the Princeton University Committee
on Research in the Humanities and Social Sciences Travel Grant, the Duke
University Arts and Sciences Committee on Faculty Research Travel Grant,
the Shelby Cullom Davis Center for Historical Studies Research Fellowship,
and the Duke University Center for International Studies Research Grant.
The Harry Frank Guggenheim Dissertation and Josephine de Kármán
Fellowships supported the writing of the doctoral thesis.
In Cape Town I made many friends, and they opened their homes and
lives to me at a time when I most needed a quiet and safe space in the midst
of often difficult fieldwork. Some cooked wonderful meals, others offered
wise counsel, and still others helped me make sense of the things I was see-
ing and hearing. For their care and friendship I must thank Birthe Bruun,
Kelly Gillespie, Patti Henderson, Steffen Jensen, Leigh-Ann Naidoo, and
Elaine Salo. Elaine’s husband, Collin Miller, raised the spirits with late
night Cape jazz jam sessions. My many interlocutors after the fieldwork was
completed made their own contributions to steering me through the thick-
ets. Patrick Bond, Beth Buggenhagen, Lisa Davis, Jack Halberstam, Neville

ac know ledg ments | ix

Hoad, Stephen Jackson, Zolani Ngwane, and Hylton White certainly come
to mind.
Finally, my family: to my father, who has seen this project through from
start to finish, words cannot express my gratitude to you for your patience
and investments in this project. To Michael, my partner in all things, I
promise you this book in any case is done; others will surely follow, and I
know you will always be my greatest support. To Stya, you know who you
are; without you Making Freedom would have been impossible. You are my
brother, my comrade. This book is dedicated to you.

x | ac know ledg ments

 Prologue

I confess to feeling ambivalent about Cape Town. It is a breathtaking city,

framed by Table Mountain—the 1-kilometer-high peak with its signature
tabletop summit—and overlooking the Atlantic Ocean. Beginning in the
seventeenth century, the “Mother City” became a first port of call for Euro-
pean seafaring traders and in due course home to colonial settlers. I recall
looking out from the Rhodes Memorial, which offers panoramic views of
the metropolitan area. This was back in 1999, three years after the start of
the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (trc). I was with friends and fel-
low researchers as well as former members of Umkhonto we Sizwe (mk)—
the disbanded armed wing of the African National Congress (anc). As we
looked out from the Table Mountain Nature Reserve in a spot just above
the University of Cape Town campus, I noted how the n2 motorway headed
southeast, toward the Cape Flats, while the m3 wended its way southwest-
ward, toward the so-called leafy southern suburbs. This physical split in the
road said so much about the success of apartheid’s spatial planning strategy
to confine blacks and Indians and coloreds to the sandy, barren flatlands
leading to the ocean, while white Capetonians enjoyed the lush, green land-
scape of those suburbs close to the mountain toward Tokai,1 a particularly
beautiful suburb situated in the foothills of the Constantiaberg range,
surrounded by small wineries and pine plantations. It struck me how ex-
plicit the “mapping” of race and entitlement was, and I joked that upon
landing on the shores of the Cape those very first seafarers in 1652 must
have imagined they had come ashore on God’s land as they looked out on
the physical beauty of Table Mountain, Helderberg, the Hottentots-Holland
mountain range, the Atlantic and Indian Oceans’ convergence at Cape Point,
and the indigenous fynbos and other exotic vegetation. And yet, as I sug-
gested to our friends, those settlers in God’s land appeared to have commit-
ted the most ungodly of acts. At first, they stole land, conquered by power
of firearms, sold human beings into slavery, and then later, much later, they
perpetuated a deeply hierarchical system, in part by splitting and separating
space and inevitably forcing the n2 and m3 motorways to diverge.
Many others have noted the deep social rifts and inequalities in South Afri-
can society generally and their acute expression in the context of Cape Town,
which is known to most outside South Africa as a playground for the affluent
(McDonald 2008; McDonald and Smith 2004; Samara 2011; Seekings and
Nattrass 2005; Thorn and Oldfield 2011; Watson 2002; cf. Beall, Crankshaw,
and Parnell 2002). Tourists come to tee off on some of the best golf courses
the country has to offer, dine at some of its finest restaurants, rent or buy
luxurious holiday homes along the coastline, get cheap tummy tucks and
then recover in the Mount Nelson Hotel, and sunbathe for hours on some
of the world’s most glorious beaches. Many white Capetonians (not all of
course) enjoy the city’s natural beauty, too, and although beaches and other
public amenities are no longer legally segregated, they are de facto for the
most part. To some extent this has to do with the city’s limited public trans-
port system, which makes getting to the coast or the mountains difficult for
those without cars. But the problem is not simply whether certain kinds
of people, specifically people from the townships and squatter areas, can
physically make the trip to Camps Bay or Clifton Beach no. 4, but whether
they see any purpose in it and whether they feel comfortable when they do.
One needs money in many of these places to feel accepted, and the subtle
and not so subtle policing of who is recognizably a consumer and who is not
often enough dictates who has access and who doesn’t. The Victoria and
Albert Waterfront is a good example. Though strictly speaking open to the
public, its combination of shops, galleries, restaurants, and condominium
complexes, which gleam with glass and steel in the South African sky, privi-
leges a purchasing power beyond the reach of the average black Capetonian.
And while waterfront supermarkets like Pick n Pay and Woolworths suggest
that just about anyone might come to do their food shopping, in reality the
combination of road access by car and the sprawling shopping complex’s se-
curity staff makes this retail space more private than public.

xii | prologue
 Chatting with friends in Lower Crossroads informal settlement—only a
few weeks after my trip to the Table Mountain Nature Reserve—about their
weekend plans and whether people would be “going to town,” I met with
a perplexed silence. On further prodding I was reminded that everything
took money: the long taxi ride into town from the Flats, the restaurants and
shops that most would not even dare to enter, never mind the museums and
galleries. What exactly was it that I thought people would “do” in town; what
purpose was to be served by going on a Saturday afternoon; whom would
one be visiting? “That’s for white people to go to town like that,” someone in
the group observed. This perhaps distinguishes Cape Town from other cities
and, in particular, Johannesburg, where a growing black middle-class works
and plays. But Johannesburg is also, cliché though it may be, genuinely an
“African” city in a way that Cape Town isn’t. Whatever people’s income brack-
ets and employment status, one rarely has the sense that black residents of
Johannesburg feel somehow unwelcome downtown or even in the swank
Nelson Mandela Square in Sandton City Shopping Center. Johannesburg is
abuzz with hip young black people of every class and income bracket. There’s
a vibe about “Jozi” that Cape Town lacks (Bremner 2004a; Nuttall 2004). As
Sarah Nuttall and others have noted, young African residents of Johannesburg
have taken up a loxion kulca (location or township culture) that enables an
imagining of possibilities, of cultural expression, of upward mobility.
This isn’t to say that the same isn’t true of Cape Town’s townships—there
is a distinct location or township culture there, too—but Johannesburg
does offer the possibility for a kind of continuity between the culture of
the location and the culture of the city as a whole that seems continually
foreclosed in Cape Town, where the distinctions between black and white
modes of life remain stark. It surely helps that Johannesburg has a long and
gritty history of mining and migrant work, of polyglossia, and cosmopoli-
tanism. Further, as Lindsey Bremner has argued, “to be black and living on
the edge is not necessarily to be poor” (2004b, 42) in Johannesburg, because
the city’s edge can very often serve as the link between opportunities and
mobility. I’m not convinced the same can be said of Cape Town’s periphery.

| | | | |

In 1979, my father moved our family to Botswana, where he served as bishop

for the Anglican diocese.2 Though a man of the cloth, my father was no
stranger to the ins and outs of global refugee politics. Serving on the Africa

prologue | xiii
Desk at the World Council of Churches in Geneva during the mid-1970s, he
worked closely with displaced persons from all across the continent but also
took an interest in the growing southern African refugee crisis, especially
those fleeing the system of apartheid. These were largely young men and
women who had never been afforded educational opportunities at home
under the oppressive system of Bantu education, which was designed to
“de-skill” black South Africans en masse.
At the time, I was only vaguely aware of my father’s involvement in the
anti-apartheid struggle—specifically his involvement in a variety of initia-
tives to funnel assets into South Africa, predominantly from the Norwegian
government, and to assist in the escape of dissidents and their resettlement
in foreign countries, where many young exiles sought training in military
strategy or in higher education. Nor was I fully aware of the intricate details
of the refugee networks, their source of funding, or the practicalities of relo-
cating activists, never mind the efforts to support them. Still, I was, in some
limited sense, conscious of the enormity of the situation across the border in
South Africa and in the adjoining Frontline States. I read newspapers avidly
and precociously, including the now defunct Rand Daily Mail, listened to
South African radio in all its complicated and not so very complicated cen-
sorship and bias, sometimes ending an evening with Our Boys on the Border.
A program mostly directed toward whites, Our Boys on the Border covered
the correspondence and news from young men in combat in Namibia (then
South West Africa), Angola, and Mozambique and was both a testament
to Cold War anti-Communist sentiments and a little old-fashioned. There
were late night visits from “friends” and “relatives” seeking refuge on the
Botswana side. Some came from Lusaka (headquarters to the African Na-
tional Congress in exile), and these were generally very serious encounters
that occasioned discussion in the garden, since my father was never sure if
the phone or the house was secure. All this sounds like cloak-and-dagger
subterfuge, and in part it was. But really, the frequent reception of people
coming across at Tlokweng, just to the southwest of Gaborone, or organiz-
ing for someone to carry cash back into South Africa was mostly done in an
effort to attend to the most basic needs of those fighting the good fight on
the other side of the border (see, e.g., Schaap 2010).
My father always opined that revolutionaries had to be fed, clothed, and
sheltered and their children cared for; at times, they also needed their bills
paid. To the degree that formal organizations and collective action were
effective, their success was rooted in the most fundamental requisites of

xiv | prologue
the household. Rather than work against the grain of the funders and sup-
porters of “the struggle,” who mostly gave to formal bodies, my father tried
to get money to members of many different groups, as well as individual
families, churches, and social services programs. With the aid of the Nor-
wegian Foreign Ministry, money went to various radical Left and African
nationalist organizations, among them the African National Congress, to
pay their phone and electricity bills; the Pan Africanist Congress in Dar
es Salaam; members of the Black Consciousness movement still operating
within South Africa’s borders; and families whose primary breadwinner was
in detention and no longer able to put food on the table. This ideological
agnosticism would ultimately earn my father the label of an anti-anc man,
but for what it was worth, he held to this position “religiously,” if I may say,
and in a sense it became an article of faith.
This is where I believe my own interest in the politics of the everyday,
both in apartheid and post-apartheid South Africa, probably finds its origi-
nal inspiration. I have often described my research on squatters and the
phenomenon of urban informal settlement as a kind of theology of the poor,
albeit a secular one, a theology in its turn inspired by the writings of that
great secular theologian Karl Marx—certainly the so-called early humanist
Marx—who aspired to make material a philosophy of pure contemplation
and yet at the same time remained a thinker of great philosophical and thus
contemplative depth. I have been equally inspired by other social theorists
who either followed or diverged from Marx’s dialectical materialism (as will
become apparent in the pages that follow) and who sought to understand
the causes of systemic and emergent inequality and were concerned with
the forms of consciousness that made the world appear either as it should
be or in great need of transformation. That being said, Marxian analysis
cannot, by any measure, account for the kinds of politics of life and forms of
life to which this book addresses itself. And as will become quite apparent
in the course of Making Freedom, class analysis, specifically, cannot explain
most thoroughly or completely the politics of land grab, illegal settlement,
and everyday struggles to survive that together make up what I would like to
call a “politics of presence” on the margins of the city of Cape Town.

| | | | |

Apartheid was a constitutionally ordained and legally enforced system of

racial discrimination, and those who fought against it became its heroes

prologue | xv
and martyrs, while the most defiant among them were spectacularly victim-
ized, as the proceedings of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission would
later reveal. Beginning in 1996 and concluding in 1999–2000, evidence of
the state’s hand in detentions, torture, disappearances, and murders built,
day after day, week after week. At the same time, apartheid generated con-
ditions in which blacks, coloreds, and Indians (so-called non-whites) suf-
fered materially the consequences of a system that functioned by a logic of
racial discrimination to create distinct classes of people.
Still, despite the many assertions I make about the politics of squatting
as having its basis in an urgent “materialism,” Making Freedom is not pri-
marily concerned with conditions of abjection. On the contrary, I argue
that notwithstanding the meagerness of life on the periphery of Cape Town
(both during apartheid and in the new democratic era), squatters mobilized
and continue to mobilize a whole array of everyday strategies in making lives
of tremendous meaning. Such practices, in the past at least, presumed the
future possibility of emancipation from the strictures of the system of influx
controls (those statutes that restricted individual movement). That the ho-
rizon along which such cultural practices have been engaged has changed
so dramatically since the end of the apartheid era is also the focus of much
of what follows. How is it, with democratization and the transition to a
constitutional system in which rights and entitlements in citizenship be-
came so critical, that grinding poverty on Cape Town’s periphery not only
persisted but also deepened? In part, I propose that South Africa’s turn to
democracy in 1994 coincided with the adoption of free market reforms that
were anti-poor and that neoliberalization in the Mother City (to be distin-
guished from the neoliberal policies of other cities) followed a very particu-
lar course—a point cogently argued by David McDonald in World City Syn-
drome: Neoliberalism and Inequality in Cape Town (2008; also see Brenner
and Theodore 2002).
Historically deemed a “liberal” city owing to the prominence of so-called
English-speaking South Africans in economic and political life, white Cape-
tonians were nevertheless guilty of the worst forms of racial paternalism
(Bickford-Smith 1995). As Making Freedom tries to show, it was in the Cape
that influx controls were most stringently enforced, in part owing to a se-
ries of preexisting circumstances: long distances between the Cape and the
Transkei and Ciskei homelands, which facilitated the exclusion of Africans,
as well as job reservation policies that favored colored labor. It surely didn’t

xvi | prologue
hurt the city’s reputation that it was distant from the seat of administrative
power, Pretoria; nestled between mountain and ocean, Cape Town was a
place of great natural beauty and somehow remote enough to give it the
appearance of operating above the fray. But Cape Town was no less an apart-
heid city, whatever its liberal claims.
The racial politics of Cape Town don’t begin and end with black-white
relations, of course. What makes the Cape unique, at least one of the things
that makes it unique, is the presence of a large colored population. So what-
ever the parochialisms of the English-speaking community, Cape Town is
actually incredibly diverse. Coloreds have lived almost everywhere in the
city and just beyond its limits: in the now rather diminished Bo-Kaap (for-
merly the exclusive home of Cape Muslims) bordering the central business
district—much of it sold off to wealthy whites and re-delimited as the Cape
Quarter—on the Flats, long home to colored farmers and, beginning in
the mid-1960s, communities displaced from the City Bowl, and finally, be-
yond the city proper, out in the Winelands toward Stellenbosch. From Cape
Malay cuisine to the muezzins’ call to prayer, reaching from the Flats to the
center of town, to the old colored fishing families based in Simon’s Town to
the very particular timbre of Cape Afrikaans, Cape Town’s colored popula-
tion in a sense defines the city. Demographically, coloreds are in a majority
given former job reservation (the Coloured Labour Preference Policy), seg-
regation (Group Areas), and pass laws (Natives Urban Areas Act). Language
most tellingly indicates something of the force of colored influence: of the
province’s population of approximately 4.5 million, 49.7 percent speak Afri-
kaans,3 20.2 percent speak English, and 24.7 percent speak isiXhosa.4
Quite apart from their cultural impact, coloreds have often perversely
influenced the outcome at the ballot box. Since 1994, the province has
been led first by the New National Party and, since 2009, the Democratic
Alliance against a general tide of anc support across the other provinces.
Historically, coloreds were molded as a constituency, a community, and a
type of citizen through a set of welfare interventions in housing, educa-
tion, and institutions addressing social “deviance.” In his book about the
colored Cape Flats, Steffen Jensen argues that coloreds, beginning in the
1930s, were the focus of a series of commissions of inquiry, consistent with
a broadly biopolitical project in which coloreds were “managed” at the level
of population. Jensen goes on to propose that such efforts produced a “col-
ored citizen” well integrated into the institutions of welfare, punishment,

prologue | xvii
and labor and that this “management” was quite distinct from the forms of
extreme violence and coercion meted out to Africans (Jensen 2008, 21–22,
39; also see Ashforth 1990).
Without a doubt black, colored, and white Capetonians experience the
city very differently in view of their uneven access to public amenities, insti-
tutions, and jobs. In the townships, the commute between home and work
is both long and costly. Most making the daily trip to jobs in the suburbs
and central business district use the system of kombi taxis, which are ex-
pensive and not always roadworthy. The train and bus, while less expensive,
are also unsafe, either because they have not been serviced or because of
limited security; many commuters try to avoid the state-owned train com-
pany (formerly Spoornet and now Transnet Freight Rail), particularly after
dark, for fear of being mugged or worse.
A great deal has been written about the politics of service delivery and
denial (Bond and McInnes 2007; Desai and Pithouse 2004; Gibson 2012;
Pithouse 2008), specifically the frequent suspension of electricity and water
by local authorities in the face of nonpayment by ratepayers on the Flats.
The resort by service providers to prepaid meters has inevitably shut off
vital services to those who cannot afford them. And while nationwide pro-
tests against the corporatization of local state functions stem from condi-
tions of poverty that make it virtually impossible for the poor to pay for
services, the general view in official circles is not that market-orientated
reforms may be unsuited to the complex post-apartheid economic climate
but rather that the failure to pay rates is consistent with a “culture of non-
payment,” dating back to the rent and consumer boycotts of the 1980s. This
is an astonishing position in the face of the country’s unemployment rate of
about 25.6 percent,5 Cape Town’s 30 percent poverty rate, the highest rate
of any city in the country, and a poverty rate of 77 percent in the Eastern
Cape, the predominant geographic origin of in-migration to Cape Town and
the second poorest province in the country (Bähre 2011, 373).
The broader picture is equally uneven. At the national level there re-
mains much evidence of the post-apartheid state’s efforts to redistribute
wealth, if not in the form of actual reparations, certainly through the de-
velopment of infrastructure. The state has delivered housing, social grants,
and welfare to its citizens, yet at the same time the adoption of market
reforms has had, as McDonald and Smith have proposed, “far-reaching im-
plications for South African cities” (2004, 1461)—and rarely positive ones

xviii | prologue
at that (cf. Ferguson 2007). Housing, for instance, has often been slow on
delivery and almost always poor in quality, even though a robust housing
policy, a cornerstone of the post-1994 government’s efforts to make restitu-
tion for the past, is something on which the anc has long campaigned. This
is due partly to the decrease in capital transfers from national to local states
and partly to the outsourcing of construction to private companies, whose
primary concern is not equity but the bottom line.
Cape Town’s winters are cold and damp, and the flood-prone Flats only
add to the constellation of public health challenges, including chest infec-
tions, which are widespread and in the most serious cases tubercular, both
as a consequence of poor baseline health and the prevalence of hiv/aids
(see, e.g., Nattrass 2004; also see Fassin 2007).6 Access to decent schools
and hospitals remains uneven across the city, and in the townships these
tend to be overcrowded and poorly equipped, with teachers and nurses
being inadequately trained. During my first stint in the field, 1998–99, and
then again in the early 2000s, I was frequently told that to be hospitalized
was a death sentence. The logic was faulty, of course, but in practice to
seek medical care was to submit to long waits in casualty, to the possibility
of having to sleep out in the corridors, and finally to be sent home with
little more than a Panado (acetaminophen). Only the very sick ventured
to hospital—so, yes, in a sense, to go was to never return home.
Early attempts to redistribute assets and reprioritize budgets, a “peace
dividend” of sorts, never really came to pass, and the Cape metropolitan
area remains “remarkably skewed along race and class lines” (McDonald
and Smith 2004, 1477). Relatedly, the city has remained a deeply violent
place. The Western Cape’s murder rate, for example, was 48.3 per 100,000
for 2013–14 (the last year for which statistics are available), far outpacing
Gauteng Province at 26.2 per 100,000, which is perceived, at least, as more
dangerous. It also far exceeds the national average of 32.2 murders per
100,000 for the same period.7 South Africa has enjoyed a long and varied re-
lationship with violence, though its codes and meanings have changed over
time and as the country transitioned from a colonial to a postcolonial order.
If political violence was most common during the 1980s, intermittent taxi
wars, gang violence, and more intimate aggressions like domestic violence,
murder, and rape have come more recently to characterize the South Afri-
can scene (Steinberg 2000; cf. Comaroff and Comaroff 2006).8 The debate
over whether there has been an escalation in violent crime since the end of

prologue | xix
the old order has never really been resolved. Some note that South African
society has always been shot through with cruelty and aggression—on the
shop floor, at the missionary school, prison, mental hospital, and home,
in the confrontations between a gun-wielding state and its stone-throwing
insurgents. The role of municipal breweries in raising revenue in the town-
ships, the use of alcohol in the mines to dull fear and encourage labor com-
pliance (see Van Onselen 2001), and the shebeen (tavern) brawls that seem
to be such a part of daily life in the townships suggest a historically specific
relationship between violence and high levels of alcohol consumption. But
it is the intimacy of so-called contact crimes that makes one wonder about
the relationship of violence, racism, and poverty.
Leslie Bank has cogently argued that family relationships were system-
atically reordered in the 1980s with the rise of the culture of the comrades,
or amaqabane. While the migrant labor system, single-sex hostels, and the
feminization of poverty in the reserves all played their part, it was the in-
tensity of protest politics and how they were taken up by young people (es-
pecially men) that informed the changing role of parents and children in
relation to one another. Leslie Bank notes that so-called traditional forms
of marriage were steadily eclipsed by live-in arrangements (ukuhlalisana),
which had a direct bearing not only on the spatial arrangement of domestic
space—the expansion of shack settlements and backyard tenancies where
young people sought to live independently—but on the relationships be-
tween parents and their teen and young adult children (2011, 130–31).
Further, the mobilization of communities via block committees and other
civic organs often created continuity between the comrades, the domestic
sphere, and township central committees. To the degree that such youth
politics were ascendant, the role of the comrades in consumer and rent
boycotts had a direct impact on matters of home and young male authority.
“At each level, disciplinary structures were set in place, which dealt with
cases ranging from political dissent to domestic disputes as these spheres
interpenetrated each other” (93).
Bank also proposes that young men were dictating not only to parents
what they could or could not do but also to wives and partners. They were
likely to stipulate where relatives and spouses could shop in the context of
the consumer boycotts, for example. For some of my interlocutors these
questions resonated, and in one instance, a former comrade admitted that
he had once forced a woman who defied the boycott to ingest the contents

xx | prologue
of her shopping bag while he watched, including a bottle of cooking oil!
Those forms of masculinity that emerged in struggle, what Clive Glaser has
identified as “struggle masculinity” (2000), were at times threatening and
could lead to physical violence, while such excesses of highly sexualized
conduct became critical to the very essence of protest politics.
Bank and I carried out research in different parts of South Africa—he
worked in Duncan Village, just outside East London in the Eastern Cape,
while I worked on the periphery of Cape Town—and to the degree that these
were shaped by distinct local histories, the dynamics of the domestic sphere
were also rather distinct. Bank reasons that the growth of shack areas might
be connected quite practicably to ukuhlalisana arrangements in which
women, in a sense, risked “shacking up” with male partners—this without
guarantees of social respectability afforded by marriage. Beginning in the
mid-1970s and early 1980s such arrangements were also predominant in
Crossroads and Brown’s Farm and other shack areas in Cape Town, but
given the stringencies of the system of influx controls in the Western Cape,
shack areas became a space of emancipation and possibility for a slightly
older generation of migrant workers and hostel dwellers, too many of
whom desperately hoped to reconstitute preexisting family arrangements
with wives and children.
I mention such transformations in domestic arrangements because I
think these are critical to any understanding of the ways in which violence
comes to be expressed in contemporary South Africa. That so much crimi-
nal violence is personal, intimate, and physical surely bears some continuity
with shifting relations of domesticity and sexuality dating back to at least
the 1980s, if not significantly earlier. Whether such shifting relations of in-
timacy can account for the prevalence of violence in the home in South
Africa is unclear, though I would venture to say there is surely a connection
between the two. Apartheid was terrifyingly destructive at the level of the
everyday; it permeated the social and the intimate. Tellingly, rates of sexual
offense, specifically, are extremely high in South Africa. At the same time,
qualification is called for: one, the fact that sexual offenses are reported
and recorded already speaks volumes of the state of policing and criminal
statistics gathering in contrast to other countries, certainly across the con-
tinent; two, the expansion of the definition of “sexual offense” in the Sexual
Offenses Act of 2003 and 2007 has opened up the possibility for recognizing
“that men, women, and children are potential victims” (Salo 2010, 36; also

prologue | xxi
see Salo 2007).9 Still, the question of how to reckon with the fact that rates
of sexual violence in the Western Cape, for example, have reached as high
as 229.9 per 100,000 (the highest rate across the provinces in 2004–5)
remains, whatever the gender of the victims involved.10
Such considerations had significant bearing on my research—the places I
was able to go (accompanied or alone), how I got to those places (mostly with
private transport), and the fact of deeply fractured social relations, such that
where I lived and where I worked might as well have been separate worlds.
Despite my best efforts to convince friends on the Flats that I should live with
them, specifically in Philippi East, and despite offers of rent that most desper-
ately needed to supplement very small or absent household incomes, no one
seemed to want the additional responsibility—that and the fact that space
was certainly at a premium because of the average size of rdp core homes.
I would eventually move to Observatory, a formerly white working-
class suburb, close to the city center. From my host, Patti, someone who
cares very deeply about South Africa, I learned invaluable lessons about
both white and black. Her experience during the anti-apartheid struggle,
mostly within the student movement in the 1970s and then in radical the-
ater, taught me other kinds of things about opposition politics, as distinct
from the radical street protests of the townships.
In any case, whatever the degrees of separation between South Africans of
different complexions, I gleaned from living on Arnold Street many things
about “white lefties,” about the challenges of living in post-apartheid South
Africa where, in fact, it was becoming harder and harder to reach across the
divide separating black, white, colored, and Indian. If in the past “politics”
was a reason for gathering, organizing, and conjoining lives across the racial
divide, the urgency that had attended such activities had dissipated, and
in Cape Town post-1994 there was a palpable sense of a reimposed separa-
tion as people retreated into mostly private spaces (Morphet 1995). This
was a subject of many late-night dinner conversations at home and with
other researchers and colleagues, including my very good friends Steffen
and Birthe; Elaine and her husband, Colin; Madeleine, through whom I
gained entrée to the Truth Commission; and many others besides. Truth-
fully, at the end of long days in the field in Brown’s Farm, Philippi East,
and Crossroads, as well as some of the older nearby townships, including
Nyanga and Gugulethu, it was a relief to clamber into my little car and head
home along the n2 motorway. At the same time, every single night I felt a

xxii | prologue
pang of conscience for leaving and for what felt, at least at the time, to be
the utter impossibility of bringing together the two worlds—of research and
postresearch friendship and hospitality.
That, of course, changed over time as I met and made fast and furious
friendships, shared stories and research findings, and grew to love this mag-
nificent city despite all its injustice and fragmentation. My fieldwork neces-
sarily jumped from site to site and institution to institution, again reflecting
how disconnected the city really is: from the planning department of the
City of Cape Town to the offices of Ikapa to the Truth and Reconciliation
Commission and, most critically, to those settlements bordering the south-
ern side of Lansdowne Road between Duinefontein Road and the r300.
Whether such a “method” constitutes a method as such is unclear. What I
very quickly intuited, however, was that there had to be a way of drawing
lines of connection between otherwise starkly separate spheres of urban
life: between the kinds of rhetorical and ideological work of planning and
policy; between claims to a participatory process in urban transformation
even as plans continued to be mostly imposed from above; between a past
that was defined, in part, by efforts to control populations through removal
and displacement and a present in which the terms of human settlement
were being radically renegotiated. If that meant chatting with civil engi-
neers, councillors, local residents, and self-appointed “community” represen-
tatives, then so be it. If it meant delving into the murky past of insurgency
and counterinsurgency efforts on the Flats and I had to hightail it to the
archives and finagle my way into the trc, then so be it, too.
In the end, this patchwork of “sites,” negotiated by moving up and down the
n2 (for that matter the m3 as well), made for the richest of ethnographic ex-
periences, if on occasion a jolting sense of the disjuncture in perceptions held
by such different kinds of people. Ultimately, however, it was the significance
of those stories of a long and enduring struggle to a “right to the city” (see
Harvey 2008; Lefebvre 1968) and through this a right to family that seemed
most compelling. Over the course of time I spent longer and longer days on
the Flats than more or less anywhere else. And as I did, the significance of the
politics of life and the forms of life that define everyday experience in Cape
Town’s informal settlements became the centerpiece of my research efforts.
It is equally the central ambition of Making Freedom to understand their po-
litical significance in apartheid and post-apartheid South Africa.

prologue | xxiii
 Introduction

Making Freedom is an ethnographic study of domestic worlds in Cape Town,

beginning in the 1970s through the lead-up to the end of the liberation strug-
gle and the start of the transition after 1994. By “domestic,” I mean to imply
very little about the internal composition of households—whether extended
or nuclear, patriarchal, or single sex, as in the case of the mining compounds
and company hostels (Donham 2011). Rather, my concern rests with the very
many necessary risks and labors in constituting a domestic scene of whatever
sort during apartheid in what was then called “metropolitan” South Africa.
To that end, I examine the efforts of squatters to anticipate and then live the
terms of democracy and how living democracy shaped the emergence of a
politics of home, or ikhaya, as both an affective and material reality.
The creation of homes as spaces both implicated in and autonomous of
the conditions of apartheid—as a system that most fundamentally manipu-
lated black family relations—provides a window onto a politics of opposi-
tion beyond that of the liberation organizations. Homes would become a
terrain of struggle. And as was evident during fieldwork in Lower Cross-
roads (located in the Eastern Node) (see map i.1), people afforded a tre-
mendous amount of effort in the building and maintaining of both shacks
and backyard “bungalows” as an expression of genuine care and value for
their homes, or emakhaya (the plural form of ikhaya). Notably, emakhaya
 e
D riv

Vanguard D rive
ve
Ma

ut s
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Valhalla D rive
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S ettlers Way Fo r e Sm E ric a D
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rP rt
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International
Road

ark w a y

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Airport
yra R

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ain
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Main

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ton R
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oo e Roa Klip
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ll Road er S
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t re e
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n Road Japhta K . M ase
CENTRAL NODE NODE

ay
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ben
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erm
Road
e

al R
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ntein R o ad

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pR Fifth Ave oad
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Kli M o rg e n s t e r R

ri ve
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Av ip
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D riv

ad
p oor t
0 2 Kilometers We s
ad ad
R et r e a t R o e Ro
0 2 Miles Spin

MAP I.1 Wetton-Lansdowne-Philippi Corridor. Courtesy of Mapping Specialists Ltd.

is both the plural and locative form of home and suggests not simply many
homes or the place where homes are located (i.e., the townships or loca-
tion) but homes in the countryside. In other words, the locative form sig-
nals the fact of homes here and there, in the city and in the country, and
in so doing indexes a much longer history of migration and displacement.1
Relatedly, informal settlements without services, so-called greenfields,
continue to be understood as sites for those more or less cast out of soci-
ety. Greenfields go by the name ezimbhacwani, which refers to the place
for those without claims to home or citizenship; that is, displaced persons
(refugees), or imbhacu. This realization of the intimate connection of home,
politics, and belonging organizes Making Freedom.
In the spirit of home as a place in the city that yet signifies a whole his-
tory of movement between town and country, I open this chapter with a
chance meeting, on a return trip to Cape Town in August 2004, with former

2 | introduc tio n
Crossroads headman Sam Ndima. Ndima had long maintained a home in
the shantytown on the city outskirts, yet before he settled in Crossroads in
the mid-1970s he, like many others, traveled back and forth between Cape
Town and the Eastern Cape.
On the morning of our first meeting, Ndima sits in his backyard, qui-
etly holding court, while several womenfolk prepare food and wash clothes.
They keep the open fire well stoked, attend to several potjies (three-legged
cast-iron pots) filled with mielie pap (ground maize) and samp (succotash),
and hang mounds of laboriously hand-washed laundry. Wooden benches
line the wattle fence, and the men, mostly senior Crossroads men, wait pa-
tiently to speak directly with Ndima, who remains closest to the fire. It is
late winter, and though the Cape sun warms by midday, the damp that con-
tinues to rise from the sandy, waterlogged earth keeps everyone in woollies
or overcoats; one or two are wrapped in blankets.2
Ndima had organized a gathering of male elders to discuss housing sub-
sidies and site allocations in the township. Twenty years earlier, as a local
headman in Crossroads squatter area,3 he had put the same leadership skills
to use brokering stays of eviction in the Magistrate’s Court, arranging for
the reallocation of plots, and, very often, dealing directly with the Black
Local Authority (bla)4 to organize shelter and temporary papers for new-
comers. For all Ndima’s largesse, then and now, I would come to learn that
his advocacy bore a complicated relationship to the state, to apartheid, and
indeed, to those who settled along with him on the city limits.
He has lived in Crossroads squatter area since 1975, the year of Crossroads
founding, when he first settled in the bush at the intersection of Klipfontein
and Lansdowne Roads—an intersection from which Crossroads derived its
name (see map i.2). Incredibly, he remained in what would later come to be
known as Section One—this despite apartheid-era evictions and later post-
1994 efforts to “decant”5 the settlement before plots and road grids were
laid down and Reconstruction and Development Programme (rdp) homes
were built as part of an early presidential lead project following the demo-
cratic transition.6
I was interested in the history of informal settlement in the Western Cape,7
and Ndima was necessarily one of the most prominent past squatter leaders
and, more than likely, the longest surviving. Was he a “reliable” witness in the
strict sense? Probably not; but he was surely a very real witness to history.
And whatever the nature of his responses to the Truth and Reconciliation

i ntrod u ction | 3
 N2
Klip
fon t D. F. MALAN
NY5 ein Airport
Roa
d

Mill
ers R
oad
KTC
NY3
Term Nyanga S ett
inus lers
Klip Way
Roa

Mahobe Drive
d fo n
te i n
Sithandatu Road Roa
Nyanga d
Gugulethu Extension

Emms Drive
Nyanga Nyanga Old
East Bush Crossroads
New Portland
Nyanga Crossroads Cement
Station
Industrial
Area
Lansdowne Ro
ad Brown’s
Farm

MAP I.2 Old Crossroads. Courtesy of Mapping Specialists Ltd.

Commission (trc) when called upon to testify in 1997 (these were vague at
best),8 his story and that of those who worked with him had already been
corroborated. His role in headman Johnson Ngxobongwana’s Cabinet,9 as
well as the part he had played in organizing attacks against young comrades
(youth activists) and their families—attacks that eventually rid the settle-
ment of 70,000 people in 1986—was well known. Just as well known was
his collaboration with the South African Police (sap) and Defence Force
(sadf). Much of this had come to light in other depositions and hearings
and through the sustained work of the research department at the Commis-
sion. Besides, Crossroads interested me not only for the state crackdowns
and spectacularly violent conflicts of the mid-1980s and early 1990s but,
just as critically, for its deep history of quotidian struggles for residence
rights, permits, and a sense of home.
While the main focus of Making Freedom is the “quiet encroachment of
the ordinary” (Bayat 1997a, 7–8)—namely, the steady expansion of periur-
ban settlements on the outskirts of the city of Cape Town from the 1970s to
the early 2000s—Ndima serves as a through line of sorts. His involvement
with the squatter leadership, coupled with his sustained engagement in
squatter struggles, guides my account of the complex politics of illegal oc-
cupation and permanent settlement of the urban margins. Making Freedom

4 | introduc tio n
is a history of families and communities who defied pass laws and, at times,
became embroiled in state counterrevolutionary war. The critical role of po-
litical organizations in the struggle to end apartheid—the African National
Congress (anc) and United Democratic Front (udf) among them—has
long been acknowledged. But what Making Freedom highlights is a history
of battles for access to the city for and on behalf of African migrants, of their
combining of work and domestic life, and of a broad array of everyday prac-
tices that ultimately transformed the geography and demography of Cape
Town and, eventually, forced changes to apartheid law itself. Africans, by their
sheer presence, the book argues, would change the course of history.
My turn eventually comes, and Ndima takes me into his rdp cinderblock
home, which has been extended in the back, doubling the original floor plan
and apparently occupying two plots.10 He perches on a well-worn sofa and
from time to time a rather handsome cockerel struts his way into the living
room, flutters his wings enough to alight on the worn armrest, and begins to
cluck. Ndima eventually gets up and moves slowly across the room to fetch a
bag of feed from which he casually scoops a fistful of seeds and strews them
on the linoleum. For now we are left uninterrupted as this bird with fiery
russet crown hunts and pecks. I offer my business card. Ndima calls to his
daughter to bring him his glasses, which are oversized, a relic from the early
1980s. He squints at the fine print. He pauses and then looks over the rims
as he comments that he is an uneducated man and that he may not be able to
answer my questions. I have already heard this refrain; Ndima is said to have
reported much the same thing to one of the trc lawyers burdened with the
unfortunate task of deposing him. A form of speech, a mode of deference—
or is this a way of refusing to speak of the past by denying full knowledge of it?
Ndima’s story of crossing the country in search of work, as I would soon
learn, echoes the stories of many black South Africans who faced innumer-
able challenges in seeking gainful employment in metropolitan South Africa
under the color bar and later formal influx controls (statutes restricting the
free movement and settlement of Africans). And like many others of his fel-
low countrymen, Ndima had inevitably moved back and forth between the
city and the country, in so doing not only putting down roots in Cape Town
but combining rural and urban lifeways (Comaroff and Comaroff 1987).
This way of living both here and there—in a continual movement between
them—might account for the wattle fence around the property, his beloved
cockerel, and the meeting of male elders I had encountered earlier in the

i ntrod u ction | 5
day. It all had a feel of the “customary” about it, however reinvented and
repurposed for city life.
Ndima would go on to explain his multiple journeys back and forth
between the Transkei and various cities—a kind of “culture of mobility”
(Ngwane 2003, 683)—an experience that ultimately defined his life and
livelihood and the lives and livelihoods of so many blacks during much of
the twentieth century:11

I was born in the Eastern Cape, once the Transkei, near Willowvale.12 I
came to Cape Town many years ago, first settling in Kensington, before
Langa was even built.13 I don’t remember the year exactly, but what I
do know is that it was a very long time ago. And although I was already
an ikrwala [a “new man”]14 I wasn’t married, not yet. I came looking for
work. Previously, I had traveled to Johannesburg in search of a job. I
returned from Johannesburg to the rural Eastern Cape to undergo cir-
cumcision. Later, after several trips back and forth between Jo’burg and
the Transkei, I headed for Cape Town—first working as a construction
worker and then as a petrol station attendant.
We Africans had to move around in those days. After living in Kens-
ington I went to Gugulethu when houses were first built there.15 I was
to be married and was assigned a house and a plot, but I was living with
someone else, because the woman I was supposed to marry was still in
the Eastern Cape. She tried to come to the Cape Peninsula but was pre-
vented from doing so by law. You see, there was the problem with the
police looking around for people who didn’t have passes. And so she was
repeatedly arrested and sent back to the Transkei. And that forced me to
leave Gugulethu, a formal township with brick houses, to come to stay in
the bushveld (bush or scrub) in Crossroads; it must have been in about
1975, long before Crossroads was settled by so many people.16
When I arrived, there were only four other shacks in the bush. The
people who lived there had passes, even though their wives didn’t,17 but
the point was that you could come to Crossroads to hide from the author-
ities. I asked my new neighbors what I ought to do. And they said, “Do
you have an ax, because if you have an ax, then you can build a house of
your own.” After that, people started to come into the area. At first they
were few in number and then there were more and more. And as long as
you had a panga (a scythe) and you could cut away bushveld, you could

6 | introduc tio n
 build. Soon I had a big yard, and some of the people who couldn’t afford
to buy building materials came to live with me. Others built their own
structures, and I encouraged them to build them inside my yard.18

Ndima’s early years on the move in the Cape, Transvaal, and Transkei
cover a period of monumental transformation in South Africa: the Great
Depression years; South African world dominance in gold production; the
subsequent abandoning of the fixed gold price (Worden 2007, 65); and the
growing war industry. As Nigel Worden has previously argued, the war years
afforded black workers increased bargaining power (71), complicating the
picture of peasant proletarianization and the notion of surrender to min-
ing and manufacturing interests. The migration of Africans to urban areas
said just as much about the weaknesses of an economy unable to control
rural labor as it did the power of corporate capital. And indeed many chose
to leave the confines of the reserves in search of employment in the cities.
By the 1970s Africans not only lived temporarily in urban areas; many
had settled in the country’s major cities, whether legally or not. This was a
decade of deepening instability as the country became increasingly isolated,
immediate neighboring states were decolonized, and a global energy crisis
significantly affected an already shaken economy. Though cheap black labor
had long formed the basis of South African corporate profit, racial Ford-
ism (Gelb 1987)—that very peculiarly South African regime of industrial
accumulation—had begun to break down. If Fordism enabled workers to
serve as engines of capitalist growth, assuming both their capacity to pro-
duce and to consume goods (see in particular Keynes [1936] 2008), the
system of migrant labor, job reservation, and influx controls that in part
might explain the difficulties Ndima faced in 1975 made that “classic feed-
back between increased consumption and increased productivity” more or
less impossible (White 2012, 400; also see Makhulu 2012). Black workers
confronted incredible odds in finding gainful employment, but beyond that
many refused the work available to them precisely because of the exploit-
ative relations of the wage and the racism of the shop floor that defined
African workplace encounters (Barchiesi 2011).
A series of questions follow from the fact of hundreds of thousands of
Africans settling on the city limits. Where did people live, how were they
able to access formal housing and plots? Black Capetonians in the 1970s
would not have been the first to respond pragmatically and, on occasion,

i ntrod u ction | 7
strategically to the machinations of Group Areas (segregationist legisla-
tion), influx controls, and the racial hostilities of employers—a particularly
lethal trifecta. Their reactions echo traditions of past urban struggle, per-
haps the best known of which involved James Mpanza’s bid in the 1940s for
land and housing in Johannesburg. He and his supporters would go on to
establish Masakeng19 squatter camp in Orlando East. Mpanza was also the
founder of the Sofasonke Party (meaning “we will all die”) and championed
the cause of better housing for Africans in the city of Johannesburg (see
Bonner 1990, 1995; Pithouse 2008; cf. Parnell 2003). In his style of leader-
ship he was hardly distinguishable from Ndima and a series of equally char-
ismatic figures who would emerge in places like Crossroads and Brown’s
Farm three decades later and whose supporters were drawn from the settle-
ments themselves. I say this only to outline that a tradition of grassroots pol-
itics already existed, one on which Cape Town’s shack dwellers drew either
consciously or unconsciously. It is also the case that such practices have
endured in the post-apartheid era, informing countless protests against the
state’s failure to deliver housing, redistribute land, and provide services (cf.
Turner 2013; Walker 2008; also see Walker et al. 2010).
There are worrying continuities with apartheid, certainly. Thus, despite
the advent of democracy, segregation in neighborhoods and poor housing
stock in formerly black Group Areas endure. The reasons for such failures,
as we will see, are far thornier than the pat admonition to “speed delivery”
would suggest or the notion that the problems the state confronts in amelio-
rating the injustices of the past are simply issues of complexity or insufficient
capacity.
For all that, the degree to which housing for the period beginning immedi-
ately after the war, specifically informally and self-built housing, sustained
the reproduction of labor power remains a key question in understanding
that paradox of apartheid as a system built on black labor that was at one
and the same time sequestered at a distance from those centers of industrial
production that that very same black laboring class helped to sustain. In
the 1970s, the role of independently built homes and communities was at
the center of debates about whether “aided self-help” policies, in their most
radical guise, might wrest autonomy from the state and capital or whether
in fact such ideas were largely utopian, ignoring that squatting essentially
represented a mechanism for subsidizing or even cutting the social wage.
Further, the notion that self-built housing existed solely within circuits of

8 | introduc tio n
use rather than exchange value and that these were not in some way impli-
cated in expanding relations of commodification signaled, for many Marxist
scholars in particular, a radical misconstrual of processes of urbanization.
It was surely a mistake, they argued, to imagine, in the spirit of the likes of
John F. C. Turner, one among a number of so-called participatory architects
of the 1960s and 1970s, that cities might be understood on their own terms,
as if emerging and operating independently of the modes of production (see
in particular Turner and Fichter 1972; cf. Burgess 1978).
Inasmuch as rising inflation and declining living standards in the 1970s
constituted the basis of widespread and intensifying discontent, these
prompted a range of responses—in the sense not of being reactive but of
actions that immediately and directly addressed particular conditions. Such
“contentious politics” (Tilly and Tarrow 2006) would eventually take on
ideological and organizational form but in the first instance emerged from
the daily degradations of deepening poverty.20
To make home or to invest in forms of domesticity demands attention to
care of the self and care of others—techniques not only encompassed by the
realm of oikos, “mere life,” but also by an emotional and affective disposition
suggesting an investment in a social world beyond the strictures of poverty
and want (see, e.g., Weeks 2011).21 This was all the more difficult under
apartheid, and yet shack dwellers, like Ndima, in Crossroads and countless
other settlements engaged ordinary practices of home- and place-making
(Ginsburg 1996). These efforts were related yet distinct from the outright
confrontations with the state and arguably shed light on the experience of
apartheid beyond that offered by otherwise standard accounts of protest
politics in the period leading up to the negotiations of the early 1990s (see,
e.g., Seekings 2000; cf. Bozzoli 2004).
For if official efforts focused primarily on the African family—conceived
in broadly heteronormative and patriarchal terms—sought to disable the
reproducibility of a population that threatened to overrun the city and to
dismantle white privilege, squatters challenged the logic of the reserves as
purported sites of African reproduction. Understood in those terms, the
biopolitical function of the state, however uneven, appears to have been
the preservation and management of populations with an end to making
life into labor, object, and reproducible capacity but only insofar as the geo-
graphical limits of such a project might be controlled. Beyond that, the state
both denied and acknowledged the fundamental value of black life to the

i ntrod u ction | 9
sustainability of the society as a whole, insisting that the labor of reproduc-
tion take place elsewhere, outside the sites of the centers of both economic and
political power—that is, beyond the sightlines of metropolitan South Africa.
How one might go about undoing something so utterly flesh and blood,
so genetic, as the control over the where and how of the reproduction of life
remains unanswered by the fact of a new constitution, a new dispensation,
and efforts to offer restitution for the past. Beyond questions of political rec-
ognition and representation or those of material restitution, South Africa
strikes me as struggling with the highly complex work of restoring social
relations, beginning in the domestic sphere and building outward to the
society as a whole. This is quite a different claim than, say, that of the Far
Right in its efforts to instantiate “family values” as the building blocks of so-
cial values. Arguably, South Africa is haunted by a past in which the domes-
tic sphere was so thoroughly compromised through forced removals, influx
controls, and segregation as to make the domestic a space of contestation.
This would take on a variety of forms, and as we will see (chapters 1 and 2),
generational and gender forms particularly.
By now it should be fairly evident that the focus of this book is a do-
main of life and struggle beyond formally organized politics. My interest
in squatters and their varied strategies for staying put and making home
derives precisely from the sense that much of what got done in the midst of
the liberation struggle—and in fact contributed to that struggle—occupied
a space of the ordinary. It follows that I stress the nature of everyday life
not only as a basic struggle for survival but as a struggle for a full life, a
life of pleasure, and a life of satisfaction precisely motivating those much
larger battles against the system of domination. After all, as my father long
insisted in those years spent in Botswana, revolutionaries must lay their
heads somewhere, wash, eat, and restore themselves for the fight ahead;
they require moments of tranquility, joy, and even farce.22 Yet a yawning gap
remains between how we understand the processes of reproducing revolu-
tionaries (in whatever form) and the pursuit of their cause. In part, I would
suggest, this gap can be explained by a long-term fascination with the “spec-
tacular” in both life and letters in South Africa (see, e.g., Ndebele 1994) in
which the “ordinary” has been frequently sidelined. Striking a balance then
between the concrete legal and economic challenges facing shack dwellers
and these moments of beauty, wonder, and decency is the aim here (see
Ross 2010; also see Boo 2012; Perlman 2010).

10 | introduc tio n
Making Freedom: The Politics of Domestic Life in Cape Town

In the following pages, I pay particular attention to practices of settlement

and homemaking, identifying what residents of a series of contiguous town-
ships and informal settlements on the city limits regard as a condition of
freedom or “having rights” that, though admittedly limited in their scope,
transform the terms on which migrants and now former migrants access the
city. Even today, the “right to the city” is contested, and squatters continue
in their battles for access to the urban environment, encountering one an-
other “concretely” (Merrifield 2011, 473) in negotiations over the terms of
establishing permanency. Meanwhile, city officials, property owners, and
“citizen” taxpayers resist their incursions.23 Ndima’s experience is signal.
Through his “politics of encounter” (Merrifield 2011, 473) with others, par-
ticularly in light of what followed his settlement in Crossroads as he built
a home in the scrub, Ndima sought the help and counsel of neighbors and
extended his yard and guardianship to newcomers, which ultimately served
as the building blocks of waves of subsequent settlement.
Insofar as such struggles persist today they take the form of banal, often
antisocial, and illicit activities that range from land occupation through the
stealing of electricity to performing upgrades on homes for which title deeds
and secure land tenure are lacking (cf. Holston 2008). Together, these prac-
tices not only serve to overcome conditions of material deprivation but at
the same time enable actors to claim belonging and recognition or, follow-
ing Holston, a mode of citizenship (Holston 1999). Such practices also have
far-reaching consequences for the very nature of city life, for the form the
city takes—just as direct squatter action forced the hand of apartheid-era
authorities, which left an unmistakable mark on the urban environment
and urban politics across the national map. Understanding these marginal
spaces as both reflections of political-economic conditions and as spaces
through which identity, citizenship, and alternative social agendas emerge
and are fought over remains central to Making Freedom in its effort to better
explain urban struggles both before and after the political transition from
apartheid.
To that end, the book is organized chronologically, beginning with a
history of migrancy and dispossession and concluding with an account of
certain of the significant transformations that came with democratization
in 1994. Geographically, my observations stem from time spent on the Cape

i ntrod u ction | 11
Flats, that sandy wasteland to which Africans and coloreds were previously
removed, during a period of research conducted in 1998 and 1999 and then
intermittently through 2006. During the course of this study, many of the
places in which I initially carried out fieldwork were either razed entirely
or rebuilt, at times bringing original residents back to those settlements
and townships and in other instances mandating they move elsewhere
entirely.
Most of my field research was carried out in an area south of Lans-
downe Road24 in a number of neighboring informal settlements, including
Brown’s Farm, Philippi East, Island, Thabo Mbeki, and Luzuko. North of
Lansdowne Road I spent time in what is now referred to as Old Crossroads
to distinguish it from New Crossroads, a formal township that was com-
pleted in 1981, as well as Nyanga East, Gugulethu, ktc (Kakaza Trading
Centre), and Langa (see map i.2). Together this area, which covers wards
33–36, is considered a single subcouncil (subcouncil 13) and functions to
deliver municipal services, including sewage, waste disposal, water, health
care, roads, traffic safety, and housing. The subcouncil is one of twenty-four
such subcouncils and an outgrowth of the trend toward the decentraliza-
tion of local government functions. Broadly speaking, settlements to the
south of Lansdowne Road have tended to be shack settlements; certainly
in the late 1990s and early 2000s many were still informal, while some of
the older brick-and-mortar townships lay to the north of this main arterial.
In part, I hoped to understand population movement between the older
townships and the squatter areas and the ways in which a combination of
factors—including repressive state policies, demographic shifts in the Afri-
can population, and increasingly strident anti-apartheid politics—had to-
gether shaped residence patterns on the outskirts of the city between the
mid-1970s and the early 2000s. Borrowing from Thomas Blom Hansen’s
work on Mumbai, my focus on townships and neighborhoods as “objectified
units of governance” followed from their dual status as key units of analysis
and social experience (Hansen 2001, 13).
By the 1980s even legal residents of the formal townships might opt to
strike out into the bush, most often in search of additional space and inde-
pendence from parents and grandparents as township households grew two
and three generations deep. Additionally, the steady breakdown of influx
controls under pressure from waves of in-migration from the countryside
had given rise to the need for temporary transit camps. By 1983, overcrowd-

12 | introduc tio n
ing in Crossroads and adjacent shantytowns prompted authorities to extend
provisional legal status to residents willing to decamp to Khayelitsha, ap-
proximately twenty-five miles outside the city, where a tent town was set
up in an area referred to as Site C. Khayelitsha has become Cape Town’s
largest settlement, with an estimated 400,000–410,000 residents. Combin-
ing areas of informal settlement and formal housing, Khayelitsha embodies
many of the paradoxes of apartheid urban planning (Mabin 1992; Smith
1992a, 1992b; also see Cook 1992). Though designed as a temporary camp,
Khayelitsha ultimately insinuated itself into the deep fabric of the city, in-
controvertibly denying apartheid norms of influx control, eviction, and en-
dorsement out to the homelands.
Beyond the informal settlements themselves, I spent significant periods
in the municipal offices of the city of Cape Town, in the offices of local
project managers (generally civil engineers), at the then headquarters of
the Truth and Reconciliation Commission on Adderley Street, and at the
Western Cape Archives on Roeland Street, as well as the University of Cape
Town Library. Both dispersed and firmly settled—one of the contradictions
of illegal land occupation—shack dwellers survive given a careful balanc-
ing act between firmly entrenching themselves and at times succumbing
to enforced mobility. Recognizing this to be the case, I too moved back and
forth across the city, tracing an archive of informal settlement that was both
written and unwritten.

The Right to the City

If dispossession remains one of South Africa’s most pressing issues, a funda-

mental question follows: what do we mean by poverty, assuming we intend
to transcend standard pathologizing discourses that reduce the poor to a se-
ries of aberrant behaviors? To be poor is to experience deprivation and vul-
nerability, certainly, but those experiences can occur only in a place. Claims
for redress from deprivation are also made in or from somewhere—whether
Rio’s favelas (Perlman 2010), St. Petersburg’s squats (Höjdestrand 2009), or
on Cape Town’s outskirts (Ross 2010). This also means that how we think
about poverty has to be squared with the ways in which it may be different
to be poor in different places, even while conceding that certain human
needs are universal (cf. Arendt 2006). Such differences of experience are
particularly pertinent to the way I want to think about cities generally and

i ntrod u ction | 13
South African cities specifically: as spaces in which citiness itself is very
often generated from the margins as much as from the metropolitan center.
The poor go to work, they shop, they build neighborhoods and schools, they
make music and cook, they even dream. They are, in other words, utterly
central to the making of city life. In recognizing their centrality I think that
we can move some theoretical distance from the tendency to parochialize
the poor, to imagine that their struggles are somehow banal, delimited by
the local, and that these conditions are essentially self-inflicted (see, e.g.,
Booth 1989; Franklin 1997; Himmelfarb 1995; Marx 1990; Wilson 2009).
We might consider the ways in which Capetonians on the margins of that
city, while living with lack, aspire to worldliness through the renaming
of township neighborhoods to reflect a consciousness of elsewheres or a
memory of the struggle and the condition of exile, as in references to Paris,
Khayelitsha, and Lusaka (formerly anc headquarters in Zambia), Nyanga,
respectively. I see such aspirations as ultimately claims to universalization
(albeit enunciated from some place specific) and a demand for recognition
in the terms of national and even global citizenship.25
In South Africa, poverty has a very particular relationship to its opposite—
to the capacity for accumulation—suggesting that inequality is as defining
of urban life as pure lack. In sum, poverty is a politics. Cities everywhere
increasingly conform to patterns of extreme inequality—to cities of walls
(Caldeira 2000) on one hand and “slums” (Davis 2006) or ghettos on the
other—consistent with circuits of capital that are at once concentrated
and uneven (see, e.g., Merrifield 2011).26 Few urban centers offer afford-
able housing, comprehensive public transport, or ease of access to work. In-
stead, the working poor travel long distances to places of employment in a
proliferation of exurbs and edge cities, their commutes the consequence of
“spatial mismatch” between central business districts and dormitory areas.
Or prompted by the near total absence of job prospects, many engage in in-
formal work, most often closer to home. This combination of sprawl and de-
limitation promotes patterns of moving around and staying put. Cape Town
is no great exception. To get to work in the city and the formerly white
suburbs, most residents of the Flats make use of a costly network of largely
unregulated kombi taxis or of the overcrowded and sometimes dangerous
buses and trains, which are cheaper.27 Large numbers also simply stay put,
operating from backyards, homes, and the street to sell food, small wares,
haircuts, and phone cards, whether from converted shipping containers or

14 | introduc tio n
home-based spazas (small shops). To be sure, the expansion of both the
informal sector and informal settlements speaks volumes, not only of a
rocky political transition and the market reforms that accompanied it but
also of an enduring history of black poverty and joblessness that is concen-
trated in former Group Areas (see Skuse and Cousins 2007; also see Tabak
and Crichlow 2000). “We cannot,” in fact, “understand urban growth and
settlement in the periphery, or the specificity of urban ecology, without
an explanation of how the informal sector operates” (Keyder 2000, 120).
Cities are necessarily sites of the production of “surplus,” both in the
sense of a surplus product or value and the production of redundant popula-
tions as capital moves increasingly into a speculative phase (Harvey 2008,
2010). One articulation of redundancy centers on those who live on the
urban margins beyond modes of formal employment and who live, conse-
quently, with increasing precarity, very often becoming superfluous to the
workings of capital (see, e.g., Arendt 1994; Mbembe 2004; cf. Makhulu
2010); that is to say, they are excessive of the pragmatic needs of capital at
any given moment. The notion that actual communities or populations are
rendered redundant also suggests they suffer a general invisibility, making
it virtually impossible to make effective rights claims.28 Yet shack dwellers
persevere in doing, thinking, feeling, and striving for themselves and those
they care for in ways that exceed the concept of superfluity in any straight-
forward sense. Further, though these modes of living precariously and con-
tingently would indicate very little overlap with the ostensibly “productive”
work of capital, many are implicated in forms of toil (piecemeal or menial)
that represent the building blocks of a much larger structure of organized
work (see, e.g., Appadurai 2002). Estimates for the late 1990s already sig-
naled that approximately 10.5 billion rand (r) in revenue originated in the
informal sector in the sale of clothes (presumably many of them second-
hand) as well as food (Yoffie and St. George 1997, 11).29 Evidently, street
vendors and owners of local township spaza shops were remarkably active
as small-time entrepreneurs. In the course of the chapters that follow, the
notion of work at times intersects with what is conventionally understood
as “class struggle,” as in the 2012 miners and Cape farmhand disputes.30
Squatters are also seen to engage questions beyond work itself—for example,
service delivery, housing, and land, issues that ground (very literally) other-
wise abstract democratic ideals inasmuch as these represent rights claims
concerned with material well-being.31

i ntrod u ction | 15
 All that being said, what do Capetonians do, say, struggle over, and claim
for themselves? Primary among the demands made by residents of Cape
Town’s many periurban settlements and townships is, predictably, the right
to housing as well as access to education, health care, jobs, and general
welfare. Nationally, such claims have engendered a number of social move-
ments, including the Treatment Action Campaign (tac), South African
Homeless People’s Federation (sahpf), Landless People’s Movement (lpm),
Anti-Privatization Forum (apf), and Anti-Eviction Campaign (aec),32 all
of which derive their energies and motivations from the struggle over ac-
cess to basic and fundamental needs, most notably housing and services, as
well as health care. These struggles differ in some respects from the sorts
of struggles articulated in much of the literature on the “right to the city”
(Lefebvre 1968, 1996) in which “micro” or “do-it-yourself” urbanisms—
graffiti, community gardens, farmers’ markets, and skate parks—define a
field of practices that are assumed to be transformative even as their small
scale and highly local investments make them vulnerable to appropriation
by capital. By contrast, South African cities have become sites for pushback
against neoliberal policies that relegate the poor to former Group Areas,
townships, and informal settlements. In Cape Town, the “vision, investment
and struggle” (Parnell 1996, 91), in making home and in creating dignity
through home, function to challenge the legacy of apartheid, as well as an
emergent post-apartheid geography of private interest.
When Lefebvre first conceived of the right to the city in Le droit à la
ville (1968), he was not speaking simply of access to the urban environment
but to a full life within it (however defined). His work gestured toward
the possible outcomes of urban struggles, though it never fully articulated
what these might be. In other words, the project was essentially intransi-
tive. Inspired not only by Lefebvre but by Robert Park (the Chicago urban
sociologist), David Harvey has since refined the notion of the struggle for
the city by considering the relationship between human life and the urban
environment and how remaking the one must, inevitably, involve remaking
the other.
The question of what kind of city we want cannot be divorced from that
of what kind of social ties, relationship to nature, lifestyles, technolo-
gies and aesthetic values we desire. The right to the city is far more than
the individual liberty to access urban resources: it is a right to change

16 | introduc tio n
 ourselves by changing the city. It is, moreover, a common rather than
an individual right since this transformation inevitably depends on the
exercise of a collective power to reshape the processes of urbanization.
The freedom to make and remake our cities and ourselves is, I want to
argue, one of the most precious yet most neglected of our human rights.
(2008, 23)

Cities, as Harvey has noted, offer very particular opportunities to those

making claims to social goods, affording those who agitate for those social
goods a space—a public space for opposition (see, e.g., Brenner, Marcuse,
and Mayer 2012; Harvey 2012; Marcuse 2009; McCann 2002; Merrifield
2011; Mitchell 2003; Purcell 2002). But in contrast to the kinds of conten-
tious politics whose central preoccupation is the dismantling of gentrifica-
tion, private real estate, and the restitution of the commons—a predominant
focus of cities in the “global north”—growing demands for housing and wel-
fare by postcolonial populations point to the significance of the right to the
city for struggles in the “global south” as well (see, e.g., Chatterjee 2004;
de Souza 2010; Gidwani and Reddy 2011; Simone 2005; cf. Chakrabarty
2000).
If the predominant mode of development in African cities is informal
and unplanned, giving rise to new modes of life, livelihood, and leisure
beyond the organizing infrastructures of formal architecture and design
(see, e.g., de Boeck 2011; Jackson 2010; Simone 2010), an emergent post-
colonial literature of African urbanism focuses on two divergent if organiz-
ing principles of city life: crisis and ingenuity (cf. Makhulu, Buggenhagen,
and Jackson 2010). African urbanites must continually improvise in the face
of uncertainty, insecurity, and general infrastructural breakdown (see, e.g.,
Larkin 2008), and as a consequence the ways in which their social and po-
litical worlds are constructed relies precisely on the tenuous nature of the
built environments in those places (see, e.g., Amin and Thrift 2002).
This concern for the African city reflects, in part, a growing consensus
that urbanization, even in a developing continent, holds an increasingly im-
portant place in social life, as evidenced by the emergence of megacities such
as Lagos and Cairo, as well as the rapid growth of secondary cities, including
Kigali (Rwanda), Goma (drc), and Kanos (Nigeria), to name only three.33
Interestingly, southern Africanists have long been attuned to the question
of urbanization owing largely to the region’s industrialization following

i ntrod u ction | 17
the discovery of gold, diamonds, and other metals (Gluckman 1958; Mayer
1963; Wilson and Mafeje 1963). But save for the work of a handful of schol-
ars (Abu-Lughod 1981; Cooper 1983; Ferguson 1999), much of the literature
of the last several decades reflected, instead, a rural bias, a bias that has only
recently shifted to permit a renewed concern with African city life in places
as disparate as Johannesburg, Arusha, and Abidjan (Newell 2012; Nuttall
and Mbembe 2008; Weiss 2009).34
South Africans, for their part, are engaged in efforts at reimagining an
urban form consistent with the constitutional Bill of Rights. The “freedom
to make and remake” the city, however, assumes several things. From a social
and economic perspective the new political movements—the Anti-Eviction
Campaign, Anti-Privatization Forum, and South African Homeless People’s
Federation, for example—are necessarily opposed to a second wave of post-
apartheid reforms that underscores the role of the private sector in develop-
ment (see, e.g., Maharaj and Ramutsindela 2002).35 From a civil-political
perspective, the persistence of segregation (though no longer legally
enforceable) calls for repairing the Manichean and highly fractured racial
form of the urban environment. On the bleeding edge of such a politics,
shack dweller organizations, like Abahlali baseMjondolo (AbM),36 have de-
veloped a practical and “living politics,” which, they argue, serves to human-
ize the world around them. This is a Fanonian politics in which the forgot-
ten, the marginal, and the disenfranchised are acknowledged and a politics
that insists upon a genuinely “democratic” society through housing, land,
and other reforms (Gibson 2012; also see Fanon 1963; Pithouse 2006).37
Essentially such a politics hinges on the indissociability of geography and
democracy or what I would choose to call “the geography of freedom.”38
Black Capetonians prefigured the new housing politics, beginning in
the 1970s, when they defied pass laws and residential zoning by settling
in Crossroads, Brown’s Farm, Nyanga, and other parts of the Flats. At
the same time, theirs were claims about domicile that began in opposition
to the state—specifically, opposition to influx controls and Group Areas
legislation—in other words, to apartheid itself, even as such opposition came
to be expressed locally and particularly. Organized around building and
sustaining settlements and battling evictions and demolitions, squatters
began with basic struggles that were complicated by competing allegiances
to progressive and liberation organizations and, in some instances, even to
covert collaboration with the state. For many, deciding to squat on vacant

18 | introduc tio n
land represented the only way of reuniting families in the face of pass laws
that prohibited the permanent settlement of most Africans in metropolitan
South Africa. This was certainly Ndima’s avowed reason for moving into
Crossroads. But beyond that, townships were also incredibly crowded, and
some families struck out into the bush in search of additional living space,
less so because they were “illegals” in search of a modicum of cover from
the apparatus of surveillance. Others, mainly younger people, chose to es-
cape the strictures of “custom,” leaving parents and grandparents in the
townships in order to “shack up” with partners and lovers.39
Through the 1980s, illegal land occupation continued to reshape the urban
environment and the conditions for black domestic life. Newer, posttransi-
tion organizations doubtless draw on the strategies of popular apartheid-
era protest, including those earlier squatter struggles; they also draw on
much longer-standing traditions of opposition, for example, women’s anti-
pass law resistance that first emerged in the 1890s. In the provinces, a system
of passes and permits was already being instituted in the late nineteenth
century to track and record the movements of blacks. Protests against the
new pass system drew on an impressive coalition across ethnic and class
lines to collect petitions, to organize delegations, to engage in protest
marches and public pass burnings. As modes of opposition counting on
broad representation that exceeded the assumed limits of a largely Afri-
can middle class, this “culture” of protest spread across the South African
countryside (see in particular Gasa 2007; also see Walker 1982, 1990). It
also had intergenerational effects, drawing on the memories of parents and
grandparents to communicate to children a sense of the imperatives of ear-
lier struggles that would, in turn, inform their own decisions in the face of
injustice.
Histories of struggle have shaped all manner of contentious politics,
even those of the so- called new social movements in contemporary South
Africa. Cleaving to a sense of the novel, scholars of those movements
have insisted that their emergence has been specific to addressing post-
apartheid circumstances. Yet as different as democracy and apartheid are,
the actual repertoires of struggle are quite similar. The recruitment and
organizational strategies of apartheid-era civic organizations and the new
social movements—the Anti-Eviction Campaign among them—are virtu-
ally indistinguishable, leading me to further doubt the necessary novelty
(and optimism) that seems to inform the scholarship of the present (see,

i ntrod u ction | 19
e.g., Desai 2002).40 I question too the preoccupation with organizational
membership—an ostensible measure of the size and efficacy of a given
group—raising very particular questions about what is assumed to con-
stitute belonging to a given body under conditions that are already so pre-
carious as to dictate continually shifting individual and collective disposi-
tions toward belonging to almost anything (see, e.g., Höjdestrand 2009; cf.
Bakunin 1972; Coleman 2013).
Acknowledging how tenuous such political solidarities and agendas are,
this book focuses primarily on otherwise singular efforts to establish and le-
gitimate claims to a place in the city even as these may, at times, overlap or
come to be encompassed by the efforts of formally recognized organizations
such as the Federation of the Urban and Rural Poor (fedup) with which
the South African Homeless People’s Federation is affiliated. Arising from
the threat of eviction, shaky tenancy, and other daily assaults on domestic
security, Making Freedom looks to largely unformalized protests that draw
on longer, organic traditions of everyday struggle for home.
Again, I believe Ndima’s story is instructive. Hacking down bush to make
way for a small shack was only a beginning. Ndima reunited with his wife;
he also gained some relief from the hypervigilance of the authorities, who
regularly raided the townships in search of pass offenders. True, this was a
gamble, and he swapped the relative comfort of Gugulethu for the freedoms
of the bush. But that was only a starting point. Crossroads residents, Ndima
included, hauled water, hewed wood, built fires, cooked in the open, and
went about ablutions and the disposal of night soil. Residents desiring pri-
vacy at home led some to erect dividing walls and partitions inside the cor-
rugated shacks they had only recently built. They needed light and airflow
and so bought and installed windows, doors, and ceilings, too: markers of
distinction and care on the one hand and an investment in a future on the
other. As Rebecca Ginsburg has argued, people upgraded homes “defying
the spirit and intent of [laws] by renovating their houses as though they
meant to stay” (Ginsburg 1996, 130). This investment in staying put (by
whatever means), the attention to self-care and care of others—the nurtur-
ing of “deep roots in shallow soil” (Perlman 2010, 24–40)—remains the key
focus of this study.

20 | introduc tio n
“The Quiet Encroachment of the Ordinary”

If until this point I have argued that the old apartheid legislative framework
determined who lived in cities and, more dramatically, where, policies in
the Cape Peninsula were particularly exacting (see chapter 1). The 1955 Co-
loured Labour Preference Policy (clpp), which reserved jobs for coloreds,
created additional obstacles for Africans seeking work within the provin-
cial boundaries of the Cape, ending at the Eiselen Line.41 Notwithstanding
these limitations, the period 1968–72 saw a 200 percent increase in avail-
able employment as the postwar economy expanded. These opportunities
existed, however, in tension with construction freezes in the townships
after the early 1970s, alongside systematic attempts to remove squatter
settlements in the Cape Metropolitan Area, which would come to define
the Cape (later the Western Cape) as a region most especially hostile to
Africans. Not only is the Western Cape still home to the country’s largest
squatter population,42 Africans remain a minority.
In the mid-1970s dozens, then hundreds, and eventually thousands of
homeless Capetonians, following a steady “molecular” logic (see Bayat
1997b, 57), flocked to Crossroads and other parts of the Flats, boldly ignor-
ing draconian legislation dictating that African families live their lives apart
from one another—men laboring in the towns, women caring for children
in the reserves. Indeed, for those who moved to the bush-at-the-crossroads,
later to take on both national and international significance as a major
symbol of defiance, theirs was a largely pragmatic struggle, even as the
consequences of opposition would eventually redefine the law. Squatters
unwittingly made history but not as they might have hoped; rather, doing
so “under circumstances directly encountered, given and transmitted from
the past” (Marx 1991a, 15). Taking up scythes, cutting through the dense
undergrowth, and building homes, squatters decisively changed the course
of history, reshaped the contours of the city, and ultimately contributed to
the demise of pass laws in 1986.
A considerable body of recent work on cities focuses on what Asef Bayat
has called “quiet encroachment” (Bayat 1997b, 57; 2000) on the urban en-
vironment, encroachment very much consistent with long-standing prac-
tices of reclamation of land and residential settlement in apartheid and
post-apartheid South Africa. For Bayat, major global restructuring of rela-
tions of work in tandem with the attrition of social subsidies has created

i ntrod u ction | 21
marginalized classes very often living on the city outskirts and engaged in
practices of subsistence, casual work, and grassroots activism that impinge
on the city. He defines this process as follows:

The types of struggles I describe here may best be characterized as “the

quiet encroachment of the ordinary”—a silent, patient, protracted, and
pervasive advancement of ordinary people on the propertied and power-
ful in order to survive hardships and better their lives. They are marked
by quiet, atomized, and prolonged mobilization with episodic collective
action—an open and fleeting struggle without clear leadership, ideology, or
structured organization, one that produces significant gains for the actors,
eventually placing them in counterpoint to the state. (Bayat 1997a, 7–8)

Though not exclusively the concern of scholars working in the south,

the focus on practices of spatial reappropriation—a focus that has wed
questions of citizenship and urban theory—has stimulated a rich Southern
Hemispheric literature in particular. Lesley Gill’s book Teetering on the Rim
depicts residents of a rapidly encroaching El Alto, on the periphery of the
Bolivian capital, La Paz, continually claiming rights of belonging while at
the same time negotiating an ever-restructured space of neoliberal policies
and state directives (Gill 2000; also see Lazar 2008; Low 2000). Sarah Nut-
tall and Achille Mbembe’s account of post-apartheid Johannesburg depicts
a city of migrants, nightlife, consumer desire, and danger, in the sense of
a metropolis reimagining and reconstructing itself by way of its margins
(Nuttall and Mbembe 2008). James Holston has documented practices of
“autoconstruction” on the Brazilian urban periphery to show how these
constitute a mode of “insurgent citizenship” as residents maintain their right
of tenure and in so doing redefine the terms of post-1985 Brazilian democ-
racy (see Holston 2008). Janice Perlman, similarly, has shown the ways in
which favelas (to be distinguished from “slums”) enable claims on prop-
erty, place, and political recognition (Perlman 2010). Beyond this a growing
body of Africanist literature has broadened and enriched the field of urban
theory, generally by taking account of the ways that uncertainty and insecu-
rity stand as the basis of innovative and highly adaptive everyday practices
(see, e.g., Murray 2008; Robinson 1996, 1998, 2006, 2011; Simone 2010).
This newer work, whatever its geographic focus, in its preoccupation with
precarity stresses much more general patterns of urban transformation (see,
e.g., Castells 1983; Dawson 2009; Hardoy and Sattherwaite 1989; Kandil 2011;

22 | introduc tio n
Perlman 2010; Resnick 2011; Wacquant 2008). Recent un reports, including
the un-Habitat 2006 report43 and un Millennium Goals, likewise emphasize
the significance of a global demographic shift as more than half the world’s
population (approximately 3.3 billion) urbanizes. These dramatic changes—
both cause and consequence of conditions of growing marginality—situate
South African cities in a much larger story even as local patterns of segrega-
tion, exclusion, and urban management persist in shaping the kind of city
that is the subject of Making Freedom (see, e.g., Seekings and Nattrass 2005).
Contemporary squatter struggles speak not only to local histories of
dispossession, then, but to similar histories elsewhere. Township politics,
while representing highly local and particularist battles over resources and
recognition (Harvey 1996), simultaneously derive many of their energies
and anger from conditions of deepening neoliberalization as local markets
are opened up to global capital (see in particular McDonald 2008; cf. Ber-
ner 1997). Drawing both on much longer histories of demands for justice in
matters of housing and land, as well as contemporary activisms, the arc of
struggle stretches back decades, at the very least to the 1980s,44 and possibly
even to the war and early postwar periods. In insisting on a right to the city
and a place in the national society, shack dwellers continually remind their
fellow citizens of “the importance of the politics of space, the importance
of popular control over communities and movements, and the importance of
[their] criticism of how elites, in and out of the state, on the right and on the
left, habitually fail to accept the agency of those who are, in Fanon’s terms,
the damned of the earth” (Gibson 2012, 53; also see Fanon 1963, 145). To
some, such radical engagements seem politically implausible, even as land
occupation and anti-eviction efforts represent a significant social force. This
suspicion surrounding urban activism is not new: “tellingly both the Af-
rican National Congress (anc) and the Communist Party of South Africa
(cpsa) tended to approach shack dwellers rather gingerly and remained
uncomfortable with the prospect of any serious alliance” (Pithouse 2008,
66), even in the 1980s (the heyday of the struggle) when alliance building
was essential to the overall success of the liberation movements.
The rejection of shack dweller agency as such has generally relied on
the drawing of a sharp line between what squatters did in their daily lives
and the strategies of political organizations. Yet I was continually struck by
people’s accounts of their double role, in both organizational politics and
in the organization of the squatter camps, and how the interpenetration of

i ntrod u ction | 23
the two domains necessarily drew on an understanding of land occupation
as foundational to the possibility of other kinds of claims. Just as living in
Crossroads or Brown’s Farm during the apartheid years offered a toehold
in the city and a way to seek employment as well as access to an urban life,
living in Crossroads in the 1970s and 1980s provided the very terrain of a
politics of the street: of popular protest, subterfuge, the concealment of ac-
tivists on the run, and so on (see, e.g., Bundy 1987). In other words, political
activism and claims to place were interdigitated. The same could be said of
the present. In a time of ongoing negotiations with the state over the provi-
sion of housing, the very emplacement of the “camp” signals a relationship
between daily practices of life and the claims that squatters make to the
rights and benefits of national belonging.
During the so-called time of the comrades (Bank 2011, 32) this inter-
digitation of home life and the politics of settlement were often quite ap-
parent. Nombulelo and Noluthando, both women in their early thirties
when I first met them in 1998, were self-professed comrades in the 1980s.
They spoke of a slow and steady progression toward political consciousness
from living in Crossroads and going to school in a neighboring township
and through the increasing contact they enjoyed with already well-seasoned
activists, many of whom were said to move back and forth across the border,
operating in exile in the training camps for Umkhonto we Sizwe (the mili-
tary wing of the anc) in Angola and Zambia. Yet what eventually propelled
them into the ranks of the comrades was Nombulelo’s arrest. She was inter-
rogated in Bishop Lavis Police Station (adjacent to Valhalla Park and Bon-
teheuwel), while Noluthando was subsequently fingered by a neighbor and
picked up on her way home from school. Noluthando’s story was particularly
striking for the ways in which her attempt to hide from the police prior to
being arrested relied on values of communal help and support by other resi-
dents of the squatter area. There are interesting parallels here with Andrea
Muehlebach’s recent framing of voluntarism in post-Fordist Italy, which
she understands in terms of the engagement on the part of a public in a
kind of affective labor for social good (Muehlebach 2011). In South Africa in
the 1970s and 1980s, a similar ethic of collective care, though motivated by
entirely different historical circumstances, was already substantially in play.
Noluthando would recall a second incident, in Nyanga Township, dur-
ing which the police had intervened to break up a gathering, beating people
with sjamboks (leather whips).45

24 | introduc tio n
 The meeting was held in Nyanga, I don’t remember exactly where, but
the police came to the meeting and beat us. We ran away and I tried to
hide in the nearby home of a woman. She was outside gardening and
as I passed by her house I asked her to please be quiet. I went into the
kitchen—there were dishes in the sink and so I started washing the dishes
as if I were a member of that household. The police passed by. You see,
these were things we were doing; the things we learned to do.

Later, I asked Nombulelo and Noluthando whether people were always

willing to hide them. Noluthando was equivocal: “It really depended.
Some people were willing to hide you; others just told you to keep going,
to pass their homes and go elsewhere. And that was because people were
frightened.”
This sense of a shared project, if not always leading to willing and total
participation on the part of others, stands in stark opposition to card-carrying
membership or ideological affiliation with, say, Black Consciousness or the
African National Congress. The everydayness of politics drew strength from
an organic and ever-evolving set of needs and demands on the part of or-
dinary people in the course of daily life in distinct contrast to the kinds of
activisms of the shop floor, mass rally, or public funeral. At the same time,
to the degree that squatters were themselves members of political organiza-
tions, those organizations (as I have already suggested) were not always as
willing to link arms with squatters.
By the late 1990s, following the transition to democracy and with the state’s
effort to deliver brick homes, this earlier mode of politics—in which shack
dwellers combined housing and formal organizing—persisted. In observing
that “the majority of people are living in shacks,”46 Noluthando conjoined
the necessary activism that went with squatting to the persistence of “struc-
tures” and civic organizations, including the South African Civic Organ-
isation (sanco). “For us, living in the shacks,” she insisted, “we have to
have these structures.” To be sure, while sanco and other “civics” survived
in form (cf. Lucas 1995), their aims had been completely transformed, not
least in view of the role that such organizations played in mediating be-
tween communities and the state in the interests of delivering homes and
infrastructure and, in so doing, they redefined the relationship to the state
as one less between individual citizens than with populations. It was as if
they had outlined the conditions for “political society” (Chatterjee 2004).

i ntrod u ction | 25
 This returns us to Bayat’s notion of “quiet encroachment.” For Bayat, in-
formally organized “disenfranchised groups carry out their activities not as
conscious political acts; rather they are driven by the force of necessity—
the necessity to survive and live a dignified life.” This is in stark contrast to
Gramsci’s conception of a passive revolution which ultimately “targets state
power” (Bayat 1997b, 58). Instead, the very often protean and “free-form
activism” of urban militants—including squatters, street vendors, and
others—leads instead to a protest politics based on singular motivations
over and above higher-order imperatives. That over time individuals may
formalize their activities coalescing as a group is in itself a significant aspect
of this activism-from-below. Tellingly, the most powerful urban social strug-
gles in the early 1990s took the form of land invasions that helped reshape
metropolitics, but only insofar as these emerged from singular motivations.
Making Freedom is likewise concerned with such efforts by squatters to
create domestic lives—their labors in securing places to build, the actual
building of homes, the reckoning of accounts both moral and monetary
(see, e.g., Guyer 2004; Nelson 2009), and a whole series of ongoing nego-
tiations of city life as a right of citizenship (Mumford 1989, 119–57).

A Few Words about the Structure of the Book

Chapters 1, 2, 3, and 4 are organized chronologically, tracking in parallel the

historical process by which a cluster of squatter camps emerged on the pe-
riphery of Cape Town and the degree to which the movements of individu-
als and families across the national map from rural outpost to metropolitan
center informed the changing demography of the city—its edges, limits,
and politics of informalization. “Migrations,” “Counterinsurgency,” “Transi-
tions,” and “ ‘Reckoning’ ” also situate and ground an emerging politics of
illegal migration, struggles both insurgent and counterinsurgent in the
context of a broader national level struggle against apartheid in the 1980s.
Concluding with the democratic transition and a reckoning with its now
more than apparent disappointments, Making Freedom ends with a consid-
eration of the consequences of economic liberalization and those modes of
accounting—both material and ethical—that shore up the gap between the
material limitations of lives lived in a post-wage work age and the persis-
tence of dreams of social reproduction and overcoming.

26 | introduc tio n