The legacy of SA hostels: A complex heritage

NOMKHOSI XULU-GAMA

How can hostels serve as our heritage?

Or I should be asking, whose heritage are the hostels? Hostels as we know them were built as housing for control of dispossessed black African workers who were then considered migrant workers.

These workers were to provide cheap labour to the then industrialising South Africa. Migrant workers were inclusive of black people from the rural areas, formerly known as homelands or bantustans, who migrated to the cities for employment opportunities.

Migrant workers also included what are now known as black foreign national migrants from the African continent, mainly countries neighbouring South Africa.

Generally, for black African people to be considered foreigners in Africa, the white settler colonialists drew borders which divided the land into suitable and manageable pieces.

In the case of South Africa and many other settler colonial states, they then pushed black people into areas far away from the cities and the white settler colonialists took ownership of the majority of the land, and the most fertile.

They built hostels and compounds on the peripheries of the cities to accommodate workers who could only be in those cities on condition that they had a contract with an employer (a maximum of 11 months per year).

During that time in which they had employment, as foreigners in the city of the white man, they could only be accommodated in hostels and compounds and had to carry a pass at all times.

In the late 1980s, there was an abolishment of all the influx controls. This allowed black people to freely move around and live anywhere they wanted to. The year 1994 saw the country attaining freedom and equality for all who lived here.

These key moments (1986 and 1994) did not however bring economic freedom, which is what could see people living wherever they liked, even if that meant going back to live in the rural areas full time.

The segregation which we have witnessed during the pre-apartheid and the apartheid periods came to an end on paper; only in the everyday lived realities of South Africans does it remain. As a result, you still find black people from former reserves being accommodated in the hostels.

I refer to hostels as former single-sex workers’ hostels, although the proper name for such accommodation is the Community Residential Units, at least as from 2006. The government, in its attempt to redress the past, reunite families which were divided by the migrant labour system, eliminate the stigma and stabilise the violent political atmosphere and toxic masculinity prevalent in hostels, turned former single-sex workers’ hostels into family housing. Women’s hostels in Durban (Thokoza) and Johannesburg (in Vosloorus) have resisted this change, however.

There was an unsuccessful attempt to depoliticise hostels so that each hostel was not necessarily a representation of a particular political party, as was mainly the case in the apartheid regime. There was no attempt to de-class hostels as they continued targeting people in lower income brackets.

Hostels are characterised by overcrowding and burst sewerage pipes, high crime rates, especially violent crime. Even if these crimes take place outside hostels, the weapons used are traced back to the hostels and stolen cars are found there.

The hostels, partly because of their political and economic history, administrative neglect and socio-spatial isolation, continue to attract only the poor working class mainly from the rural areas.

In Lwandle hostel in the Western Cape, there was a proposal that a museum be established – a small section of the hostel would be made an artefact of the museum. This process was not without controversy.

A few hostel dwellers agreed to this move, but some were against it.

The hostel dwellers had to vacate the hostel in order for it to serve as a space for exhibition. It was also launched as a provincial heritage site.

Even scholars Bongani Mgijima and Vusi Buthelezi, who were residents at this hostel, attested to the fact that the idea of representation of the migrant labour system on a national scale was ambitious and misplaced. In this move, there were too many assumptions which were not necessarily based on the lived experiences of the migrant workers at the hostel.

I am unable to comprehend how the museumisation of the hostels is a celebration of our history when the current conditions of hostels are still hostile, segregationist, depressing and violent even.

If the hostels are anybody’s heritage, they are the heritage of those who established them as they still represent that which they were formed to serve: cheap labour, circular migration and divided and broken families.

Xulu-Gama is the author of “Hostels in South Africa: Spaces of Perplexity”, published in 2017 by UKZN Press. She is an Associate Professor at UCT in the Sociology Department and a Research Associate at the Durban University of Technology in the Faculty of Management Sciences. This article is written in her personal capacity.

Cape Times