God forbid! White people are moving into the townships! Crime will go up! Property prices will go down!” This was the greeting Wits doctoral fellow Detlev Krige received when he announced to his companion at a drinking hole in Rockville, Soweto, that he was about to become a neighbour.
A year later Krige is thoroughly at home in a part of Soweto not that different from his previous perch in Johannesburg’s northern suburbs. There are rose gardens and water fountains, he said.
‘Several taverns or restaurants, some with DStv, are located within walking distance, and cheers and shouts from the Soweto Cricket Oval reach my room during weekend fixtures. On Sunday mornings, when I am reading the papers, I often hear jazz and classical music streaming from my neighbour’s expensive sound system.”
Krige was delivering a paper entitled Rockville? It’s Like a Suburb Mos! at a conference on current township life at the Wits Institute of Social and Economic Research (Wiser) last week.
It was a lively event with contributions from musicians, filmmakers and journalists, as well as academics, all trying to pinpoint what characterises townships 10 years after democracy should have made them redundant. A fifth of black households still call townships home while many who have moved into the suburbs retain ownership of their township houses.
Is the township a state of mind? Or simply a cheaper place to live? Or, as borders between townships and the cities they were created to serve become permeable and the music, style and culture of ikasi (locations) suffuse the metropolis, is there much difference between them?
Yfm plays kwaito and hip-hop from the Rosebank Zone. In the Stoned Cherrie shop window opposite, struggle icons such as Steve Biko and 1950s Drum magazine covers adorn designer T-shirts.
The conference raised as many questions as it answered, a reflection perhaps of the deep state of flux of its subject. Crime in townships is a big problem but, said Wiser researcher Ivor Chipkin, establishing democratic forums and encouraging community participation in gangster- infested townships could help.
His study of Manenberg in the Western Cape, where such forums existed, showed a drop in gangster violence and a change of attitude among youth who had hero-worshipped gangsters.
Tygerberg, another gangster-infested former coloured township, showed no such decline in gang violence because it did not have a community participatory forum. ‘The Tygerberg municipality focused on collected house-hold arrears and taking defaulters to court,” said Chipkin. ‘Gangster violence was also pur- sued through an intensified policing campaign and there have been no changes in gang violence in the area.”
Townships as repositories of language, that crucial cultural icon, was a running theme. Sifiso Ndlovu of the South African Democracy Education Trust explained how the introduction of Afrikaans as a language of instruction at his Soweto school in 1976 goaded him and thousands of others into life-changing protests.
Yizo Yizo director Angus Gibson, said that as a monolinguist (he speaks only English well), he felt humbled by the multiplicity of languages spoken in a place such as Soweto. ‘There is a complexity of language in the townships that reflects the complexity of townships.”
Prudence Carter, assistant professor at Harvard University, reported on her survey of mobility and cultural identity in high school learners in a paper entitled What’s in a Coconut (ie. Brown on the Outside and White on the Inside)?
So-called ‘coconuts” are mostly found among learners in former model C schools who speak English and are perceived as looking down on their neighbours who go to township schools. ‘Language is the biggest component of cultural identity,” said Carter. Yet many [former] model C schools do not even offer indigenous languages.
Other indicators were taste in food. ‘Coconuts” prefer pizza to the ‘African pies” favoured by their township school colleagues; they dressed in expensive, imported clothes and some showed a disinclination to help with household chores, having absorbed from their white classmates the expectation of domestic help. They listened to heavy metal or rock rather than kwaito.
Yet, Carter found, there was little difference in aspiration between township and former model-C learners: most aspired to join the professional or managerial classes.
The former model-C kids, she felt, were prepared to sacrifice culture for a better shot at realising their aspirations. They believed they were getting a better education, which made it more likely that they would get to university and, as a result, land better jobs.
The biggest cultural sacrifice, particularly for girls, seemed to centre on the seemingly frivolous arena of hair. While township schools were quite happy to allow dreads/braids/twists at any length, long or short, some former model C schools forbade any ‘fancy hair”.
‘It’s the first thing black girls tell me when I ask them what they don’t like about their school,” said Carter. ‘They say, ‘there is not a lot we can do with our hair and what we can do is disallowed’.”
Most teachers in these schools are white. Their underlying fear, said Carter, seemed to be that white kids would also want fancier hairstyles. ‘In townships we tend to idealise things,” said one speaker. ‘People don’t cook on weekends any more. They just go to funerals, dressed to kill, with their cellphones on. Then they criticise the food and leave as soon as they’ve eaten.”
This was echoed by journalist Lungile Madywabe, who said ‘the wonderful phenomenon of knowing one’s neighbours, bonds enforced through funeral schemes and stokvels” remains one of the positive aspects of township life. But the flip side to this was that antisocial behaviour, such as playing loud music, ‘is often met with passivity even though many detest it”.
‘Many people still dump refuse in the streets despite the fact that the local government gives people mobile containers in which to dispose of their waste, and provides weekly garbage collection.
Some residents use these containers for substitute wardrobes. Whenever people complain about these things, it is in buses or taxis or hushed tones in the neighbourhood. This, for me, represents a society that is uneasy about itself.
‘The easy way for those who have money is to abandon the township for the formerly ‘whites-only’ areas.” But, said Krige, most young men he knew viewed the suburbs as boring. ‘In the townships, as one friend told me, you can do whatever you want, whenever you want, wherever you want.”
This conflict gave rise to the phenomenon of ‘sleeping in the suburbs and living in the township”: that is, former township residents who converge on townships at weekends in their BMWs and 4x4s to party. And it might explain a recent finding of the Township Residential Property Markets Study — that only 7% of township property had changed hands in the past 10 years, according to the Deeds Registry.
Many families keep their township house even after they have moved to the suburbs. It remains the emotional heart of the family. But, as Krige pointed out, ‘there is no ending or conclusion in the township. Life just goes on.
‘And, like anywhere else, it is about people.”
Sizwe samaYende and Liz McGregor are writing fellows at the Wits Institute of Social and Economic Research