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In South Africa, the Government of National Unity (GNU) will have pressing issues to consider when it gets down to business in the weeks ahead. Questions of spatial development, economic growth and inequality will be central among them, as well as persistent rural poverty. As a centralist liberal coalition, the GNU will support existing ANC policies that stimulate markets, attract investment and support urbanisation. They will reject the ethno-populism of eMkonto we Sizwe (MK) and their associates and focus on building the urban economy. But in refocusing the liberal development agenda of the past they will have to consider policy challenges, like the failure of the ANC urbanisation and housing strategy to create sustainable urban livelihoods and communities for the poor. They will also consider the value of a Basic Income Grant (BIG) for vulnerable households and the future direction of rural development in the country.
One of the largely unrecognised and unintended consequences of the state's urbanisation strategy[1] in cities since apartheid has been the rise of 'displaced urbanism'[2] in the former homelands, fuelled by thwarted suburban desire and limited citizenship in the cities. The widespread modernisation of domestic architecture across the former homelands has been a striking feature of post-apartheid South Africa. Today these landscapes are much more than the forgotten remnants of the colonial past. They are aspirational, post-apartheid landscapes of investment, which are heartlands of support for explicitly the anti-liberal, Africanist and populist parties like MK, the Economic Freedom Fighters (EFF), and even sections within the ANC.
This article explores the complex interconnections between urbanisation and persistent post-apartheid investment in rural homesteads [3] in South Africa as sites of aspiration and belonging, yet equally places of persistent hunger and poverty. It warns against viewing rural areas as remnants of the past or failed agrarian landscapes by highlighting how much spaces embody aspirations for the future for those with homes there.
Liberalism and the urban-rural divide
Throughout history, and especially in settler societies, liberals have championed the city as an engine room of modernisation and development. They have conceptualised cities as places where individuals become alienated from the baggage of rural social ties and realise fully-fledged individualism that supports self-serving rationalism and market capitalism.
Since Independence, urbanisation in southern Africa has occurred without alienation from rural heartlands. Socialist villagisation programmes, in Mozambique and Tanzania, struggled to get families to move away from their ancestral land, while in South Africa weak post-apartheid urban growth has not provided a viable platform for an effective urban transition. This means many urban poor and working-class families across southern Africa still live between the city and the countryside. Through mass urbanisation since apartheid, waves of new urban immigrants found places to live in the cities of South Africa but have often not settled permanently or acquired the citizenship they expected. Thus, they continue to invest in rural homemaking in the homelands where they can access space to build and basic services cheaply on communal land. They also feel secure building close to family and relatives. Today these landscapes are much more than the forgotten remnants of the colonial past. Many academics and policy pundits have missed the power and intentionality of displaced urbanism in South Africa and its claims for citizenship. This oversight is one of the reasons populists like Zuma, with his house in rural Nkandla, made such significant strides in the 2024 elections.
The rural house as an anchor
In South Africa, there are different words for house and homestead. In Xhosa, indlu is the word for the physical structure of a house, while the word umzi refers to the homestead as a material, social and spiritual complex. Access to the umzi is generally considered essential, especially in times of crisis when the world has turned upside down, such as during Covid-19. Due to history and colonialism, there are no umzis in urban South Africa, only indlus. The umzi was never permitted to grow here because it was seen as a threat to civility. Under colonialism and apartheid, the umzi was associated with agrarianism supported by rural families as a form of resistance to proletarianisation. It was also promoted by the settler state and white ruling class to reduce the cost of the reproduction of African labour. Residual agrarianism thus propped up settler capitalism and was underpinned by the migrant labour system.
Today, social grants do the work of homestead fields and gardens, which are used less frequently than in the past. The imperative of agrarianism is thus less important to the umzi as it runs mainly on cash. In the cities, the African indlu takes various shapes and forms ranging from shacks to apartheid bungalows, to Reconstruction and Development Programme (RDP) houses and suburban villas. There are more places for Africans to live in the cities than before, but these houses are often not considered the best, or most appropriate, places to build a home, come of age, bury the dead, or host a family ritual. In a country where the current phase of urbanisation has come with a great deal of death through HIV and Covid-19, and where urban precarity is seemingly intractable, many are reluctant to give up rural homes, which anchor families in the communal areas. These places continue to carry positive associations, especially those with members born there, and offer home spaces where rent and rates are not required. Today, social grants are available in most households to subsidise the cost of food.
During Covid-19, many living in cities returned home when they lost jobs, could not pay rent, or when schools closed. In the Eastern Cape, we found that rural household sizes ballooned from four to six members during the pandemic, especially in the migrant-sending areas of the former Transkei. The lack of economic recovery after Covid-19 has trapped many reverse migrants in rural home spaces over the past few years. This has contributed to the rise in rural crime, drug use and hunger. But at the same time, these landscapes no longer look and feel agrarian like they did 30 years ago. Hunger here is hidden behind an advancing veneer of modernisation and suburban emulation. Over the past 20 years, families have made huge investments to refashion the rustic rural indlu into the suburban house, which challenges indigenous architecture forms and embraces urban aspirational citizenship. The new rural indlu is not a hybrid[4] form that combines the past and the present. It is a simulacrum of suburbia, and its values are copied from the palimpsest of global suburban styles.
Displaced urbanism as emulation
The most dramatic evidence of this process is seen in places like Mpumalanga, close to jobs on the mines and the Gauteng economic hub. Here Tuscan-styled suburban houses with columns, arches and tiled rooves transverse the landscape as far as the eye can see. Doubters should visit places, like Bushbuckridge, and stand on a hill to survey the landscape.
In the more remote parts of the former Transkei in the Eastern Cape Province, where wattle and daub rondavels dominated the landscape as late as the 1990s, the transition to new brick-and-mortar suburban-style rural housing is also striking. But here it is less a matter of one type of structure replacing the other but of the co-existence of different, disarticulated architectural styles on homestead sites. The displaced urbanism here augments rather than displaces what is already there. What is also striking about these new homes is that they are not located in RDP housing estates, as per the state policy, but on family land close to ancestral graves. Poor infrastructure and roads have pushed some to move closer to main roads, but always in the vicinity of older family homes. In this way, families bring the house of izinto (things) closer to the house of izinyanya, the ancestors. The house of abantu, or people, is divided between the rural and urban areas with older residents and young children staying at the rural home and adults living in urban areas in indlus of one kind or another.
In the Eastern Cape, homestead sites often contain multiple structures, including old rondavels used for ritual and livestock enclosures or kraals (often empty) for engagements with ancestors. The new modern suburban houses project family standing and aspiration[5]. Some are so precious and new that they are not used unless family members are home from the city or there is a special family occasion. Everyday life in rural areas is often still lived in the outbuildings around the modern house where the older generation prefers to stay.
The material culture of the rural homestead today shows little evidence of agricultural ambition even though demarcated gardens still exist on site and the material debris of agrarianism is still scattered in the yard. The focus of investment recently has been on the house of izinto, which exists in dialogue with the other infrastructures on the site. The conversation is no longer something that occurs across the urban-rural divide but is situated within the umzi. There is also evidence of modernisation in ritual houses as rondavels are often reconstructed as hexagonal structures with tin or tiled roofs rather than thatched ones. Some livestock kraals have been refashioned from rough building timber rather than wild branches. The yards show signs of suburban emulation with lawns and small trees around the modern house. The assemblage is defined more by juxtaposition than integration. In this way, the different values and orientations of different parts of the umzi remain in conversation.
There is a tension here between differentiation and equivalence. Thus, although new houses are architecturally similar in that they have columns at the front door and adopt a similar suburban look, they are different in size and aspiration. Some have garages and are more middle class[6] and ostentation than others. They project different levels of wealth and family prestige. This creates tensions within villages as older hierarchies are broken down.
In the past, the differential status of homesteads was shown by the number of beasts in the kraal, not by the size or shape of the house. Status is now primarily read off the wall of modern houses that are often curiously empty as life is lived around them rather than in them. The image below is of the rural homesteads that were constructed in the rural Eastern Cape by the workers' union that represented the miners who died during the Marikana massacre in 2012.
The workers and their families choose the house designs. The image below presents the house built for Mamush, the green blanketed, Xhosa rock-driver, who led the workers against the state. In preparing for battle at Marikana, the workers consulted their ancestors on the koppie (hill) before confronting the police and army in the valley.
Hunger and the rural house in crisis
Following the wave of Covid-death and rural hunger, investment in the house of izinto has slowed because families are paying closer to their ancestors. They say sorry for neglecting custom and spirituality in pursuit of izinto and explain how the state stopped customary practices during Covid. To restore hope and order, families have invested heavily in rituals to re-integrate them at home and connect with their local communities. This form of housebuilding[7] has produced new debt in a difficult time and has even aggravated hunger because scarce resources were used to appease the ancestors.
Building a rural house is thus no simple or uncontested matter. There are always competing interests and priorities, especially in times of adversity. Today some members still favour investing in the built environment, while others want to prepare for future rituals (and death). At the same time, funds must always be available for food security and provisioning. Women in urban and rural areas create different funds for these aspects of house building. There are burial societies for rituals, grocery clubs for food, church groups, savings clubs for school uniforms and stationery, and dedicated building stokvels (saving clubs) for house construction. One source of anxiety in rural areas is that poverty after Covid has left many families "too poor to join". During the pandemic, membership in most of these voluntary associations and stokvels was suspended. This meant these clubs had to be started up again in 2021 and 2022. Intense debates raged locally about the debts of the intervening period and the terms for re-establishment. Some of those who belonged before cannot rejoin so hard choices have to be made about where family funds could be invested. After Covid-19, access to grocery clubs and burial societies are priorities, but relatives with jobs do not want to give up on the dream of rebuilding the house.
To understand hunger after Covid-19, we have come to realise that poverty in these settings can be both absolute and relative; absolute in the sense that there is often not enough to go around and relative in the sense that access to resources is also a matter of relatedness. Even in the same household, hunger can result from a lack of consensus about how to use funds, or because debts consume available cash. It could also result from disagreements about whether to invest in bricks, church membership or food. This contestation over which aspect of housebuilding to support has been exacerbated by the state's decision to target specific vulnerable groups, like unemployed youth and young mothers, during and after Covid-19. This has placed money in the hands of household members who had not previously been the main decision-makers, leading to contestation over whether funds are "properly" managed. Those who are "too poor to join", which is aggravated by debt and the cost of supporting children, are increasingly isolated and cannot find the conviviality needed to survive. In the Eastern Cape, there have been several high-profile cases of maternal filicide where a mother kills her children and commits suicide, which illustrates the consequence of social exclusion and the burden of poverty on women. Increased alcohol use by women is another symptom of their incapacity to cope and manage the house of abantu.
In rural taverns, many women now spend their days drinking to forget and to share their pain with others. Increased drug use and addiction amongst rural youth are also symptomatic of the loss of hope. In remote areas, men create drug houses as alternative versions of the house with their own invented masculinities, power hierarchies and codes of behaviour. Gender and generational tensions and GBV are heightened by scarcity in the face of expectation.
In the current crisis of social reproduction at the margins, hope and desperation intertwine as new forms of building co-exist with exacerbated poverty and hunger. The absence of the state as an active presence in these places exacerbates the crisis and precarity. But even under such extreme conditions, many continue to build the house of izinto, while others struggle to assemble the resources "to join" and stay alive and connected. But many others now find themselves outside the supportive structures of shared poverty and turn on their bodies to numb or remove the pain.
National housing policy, agrarianism and the BIG
In the new Housing White Paper for South Africa, circulated a few months ago, there was no discussion of displaced urbanism and the complex dynamics of African homemaking, nor the differences between housebuilding and homemaking as social practices in urban and rural South Africa. Neither does the White Paper acknowledge that suburban house construction had been more successful under the leadership of families in rural areas than as a state-led process in the cities. This is because the White Paper takes state-supported urbanisation as its sole focus of attention rather than urbanisation and urbanism in general in South Africa. In the former frame, the authors often see state-funded urban housing failures as simply a result of spatial inequality within cities, the lack of public transport and urban unemployment. Displaced urbanism of the countryside is airbrushed out of the picture.
Rich RDP and shack landladies in Cape Town do not retire in Claremont or Camps Bay as often as they return to Tsolo or Butterworth in the Eastern Cape, leaving their urban businesses in the hands of others who recycle the profits into the rural landscape. In the RDP estates and townships of Cape Town, rank-renting rather than homemaking is a scandalous business that preys on the vulnerability of migrants and foreigners who have no options but to pay the asking price. Many shack landlords and ladies prefer urban informality to formal compliance with municipal bylaws and planning rules because it allows for more outbuildings and higher rents. The politics of defiance that undermines formalisation keeps the apertures open for rural repatriation. RDP re-urbanisation and displaced urbanism in rural areas are thus closely intertwined. As a result, the aerial photographs that counterpose high-density shack lands and middle-class suburbs in cities, such as those featured on the cover of Time Magazine, are startling, but also misleading because they fail to capture the leakage of rents, earnings and remittances out of cities into rural areas, where families buy valued forms of citizenship cheaply.
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Flats for rent by an owner living in the rural Easteren Cape on an urban RDP site in a housing estate in Cape Town (photo: Leslie Banks ) and Time Magazine cover, May 2019.
The lack of opportunity and support for family farming in rural areas also shuts down the possibilities of rural diversification away from building houses. The desire for a return to agrarian investment is low in these landscapes, but when families finish building their suburban houses one wonders what they might be interested in investing in next. Expanded opportunities for family farming in and around rural homesteads might present a new frontier for re-agrarianisation in these areas.
The other issue that has re-emerged in the public debate with the creation of the GNU is the promise of a BIG by converting the current Covid Special Relief grants into something more substantial and permanent. This will reduce hunger but will do little to assist diversification and development in rural areas. Finding a balance between mitigating hunger and supporting place-based development in rural areas is critical for the future.
Based on the above, it seems clear that the GNU should revisit the new housing policy for South Africa to better understand the complex urban-rural entanglements and interconnections in South Africa. More thought and action are needed to align state development policy with popular interests, aspirations and family-led investments in rural and urban areas. The future of South Africa might be better served (as has been the case in Asia) by the greater and incentivised intertwining of the rural and the urban over the next five years than by an entrenchment of the urban-rural divide.
References
[1] Meth, Paula, Goodfellow, Tom, Todes, Alison and Charton, Sarah 2021. Concepetualising African Urban Peripheries. International Journal of Urban and Regional Research. 104, 987-1007
[2]Mosiane, N., and Götz, G. (2022). Displaced urbanisation or displaced urbanism? Rethinking development in the peripheries of the GCR. GCRO Provocation #08, Gauteng City-Region Observatory, April 2022. DOI: 10.36634/SVRW2580
[3] Bank, Leslie 2023. The Spirit of Gifts: Public housing, citizenship and the ambiguities of home in South Africa Transformation: Critical Perspectives on Southern Africa, Volume 112: 164-192.
[4]Mukhopadhyay, Partha, Zerah, Marie and Denis, Eric 2020 Subaltern Urbanisation: Indian Insights for Urban Theory. International Journal of Urban and Regional Research, 44. 4: 582-598
[5]Hann, Chris 2022 Economy, emulation, and equality: Sociogenesis in the postsocialist capitalocene. HAU: Journal of Ethnographic Theory 13, 1: 6-20
[6] Gastrow, Claudia 2017 Cement citizens: housing, demolition and political belonging in Luanda, Angola. Citizenship Studies, 21, 2: 224-239.
[7] Beihl, Joao and Neiburg Federico 2021 Oikograhy: Ethnographies of House-ing in Critical Times, Cultural Anthropology, 36, 4: 539-547.
Leslie Bank is an Extraordinary Professor at Walter Sisulu University, a consultant at the Human Sciences Research Council and the Principal Investigator of an IDRC-funded Women-RISE research project on Covid recovery and reconstruction in the rural Eastern Cape in South Africa. He is the co-author of Covid and Custom in Rural South Africa (Hurst Press, 2022) and a co-editor of Migrant Labour After Apartheid (HSRC Press, 2020).
