CHAPTER 4

Crisscrossing Contradictions, Compromises, and Complicities

Navigating

Contradictions shaped the partnership. To work together, we navigated tensions in the neighborhood, in the university, and in the city. We had to confront or work around things that were hard to discuss, that could not be spoken about. We saw, felt, debated, and engaged crass inequality, deprivation and wealth, comfort and hardship, the violence and inequality that fragmented our city. To work together, we navigated a conflicting and challenging, iniquitous, and sometimes-violent terrain.

Our neighborhood partners, for instance, had to navigate our presence, the logics and purpose of bringing me, and my students, into the neighborhood, into homes and local intimacies, a presence that clashed at times with existing neighborhood hierarchies and demands. Students discovered difficult truths in the neighborhood and navigated the contradictions of the academy. I was thrust into positions of authority—sometimes beyond my expertise—and supposed neutrality, drawn on to be loyal, sometimes outside of my comfort zone. The mode of our partnership sometimes collided with university processes and norms. The Civic, its activism, and our research partnership were located in a conflictive and contested neighborhood terrain, as well as in a broader—sometimes violent—city politics, a terrain and politics that far exceeded the partnership itself.

To sustain the partnership, to complete our work together, to bring about productive outcomes, we had to compromise. But compromises, the choices and complicities they elicited, were risky. They were full of hazards, embedded in contexts that were hierarchical and conflicting, contested in varied ways. This broader terrain exceeded the partnership itself.

Ek Is Die Baas!

As we took a seat in Gerty’s living room, Masnoena rushed in. She pushed her way into the center of the small room. A quick exchange proceeded in Afrikaans; voices rose. Aunt Gerty interjected: “Ek is die Baas,” I am the Boss! A tense argument unfolded about Agste Laan and Valhalla Park, about who had the right to work where. Was Agste Laan part of the neighborhood, the Civic’s turf, its territory? Shouting ensued. The air could have been cut with a knife. Gerty turned to me and said, “Sophie, please leave. Just leave now. I will sort this out and I will call you. This is nothing to do with you. Just go, now, immediately!” I left, stung by this sharp and radical turn to what had felt like a productive afternoon.

It had begun well. With some visiting colleagues, I had traveled from campus to Gerty’s house in Valhalla Park, zipping down the highway to Modderdam Road, onto Valhalla Park Drive, entering Angela Street, driving past the library, the clinic and community center, the fish shop, over the speed bump, and through the traffic light to reach Gerty’s home. We were meeting to start the preparatory work for our forthcoming project in Agste Laan, the relatively new, and rapidly growing, informal settlement in Valhalla Park.

With jackets and layers on to keep the chill out, as a group, on foot, we headed to Agste Laan. The settlement was nearly a year old. We walked through it, around the edges and in its interstitial spaces where people were building homes. A young man hammered in pallets to construct his wall; another fixed his roof on this cool but sunny winter afternoon. A middle-aged woman was connecting her home to electricity, intertwining and duct-taping a precariously strung cable. Our aim was to map and demarcate areas for research, not an easy, or straightforward, task.

There was no map for the settlement, so we started from scratch, roughly and approximately. Some streets were obvious, well established. These were the places we started. Stone Road ran parallel to the formal roads of Valhalla Park. It was the first place where families built, the site where the settlement started. Long Street, a diagonal dusty road, was demarcated, sufficiently wide for vehicles to make their way across the field. It stretched from the edge of the settlement on Modderdam Road to its far edge, which backed on to the formal houses of Valhalla Park. At the junction where Long Street met Stone Street, a gathering site marked the space for a weekly food pantry for settlement families run by a Valhalla Park mosque. It was another useful landmark on the map. We followed and traced out Lorna Road, a well-established but narrow footpath named after Lorna, a founder settler, whom we met sitting in the sun outside her house. We maneuvered around the tarmac of the former netball court, around which families had neatly built homes. In this manner, we made our way through the settlement, drawing and marking the hard features on our base map, determining sensible boundaries to designate research areas, writing thick descriptive notes to describe them: “By the house with pallets, up to the polka dot fence.” Led by Gerty, we spoke with residents as we cut through not-so-clearly demarcated front and back yards, clambering behind and between shacks with our papers, scrawling and tracing out an increasingly detailed map. We explained to residents about the forthcoming project, the students we would bring with us, our reasons for wandering in and out of the settlement.

The map we traced and built would be the template on which the research would unfold. Eventually, we were satisfied that it was workable, reliable enough and navigable by the research teams of students and Valhalla Park partners who would start the following week. We returned to Gerty’s house, making our way back along the rough, sandy stretch of Stone Road, moving back on to the harder surfaces of the formal part of the neighborhood. As kids headed home from school, we passed Shruu’s Tuck Shop, Aunty Fadielah’s shop, and the cheek-by-jowl maisonettes that populated the formal part of the neighborhood.

But, back at Gerty’s house, at the end of the afternoon, the process had gone awry. The project had been stopped. Gerty had sent me home. I waited it out, worried and stressed. Practically, on the one hand, my course depended on this project. It was at the core of my curriculum. On the other hand, this conflict felt nasty and difficult, and I cared a lot about the people involved. In the meanwhile, I delayed the project start, informing the students, in part, about what was going on.

The following week I received a call from Gerty. “Soph, can you call the councilor please?” she said. “Nas Abdul Abrahams. He wants to speak to you.” I agreed. I asked Gerty if she knew what he wanted to speak to me about. She did not respond directly with details. In the meantime, before I had a chance to call Nas, Masnoena telephoned. She told me in no uncertain terms, “Sophie, look, you cannot come with your students, you cannot. Agste Laan residents will barricade the neighborhood; they will barricade the entrances to Agste Laan. They will. You cannot come. I just wanted you to know this. I want you to know that they will toyi-toyi, march, against you.” Oh! I was nonplussed and shocked. “How did this come about?” I asked Masnoena. “What is this fight about? Please help me understand.” She too responded opaquely.

That evening I called the councilor. He replied in a friendly tone of voice, “Yes, Sophie, hello.” He explained, “Look, my dear, I know that you are doing good work. But really, we did not struggle for democracy for this. We did not. You do not know with whom you are working. They, the Civic, are not a representative community organization. They are not. They claim to be, but that is not the case. So let us be clear, you cannot work in Agste Laan. You really cannot. You cannot continue in the way that you have done in past years. You cannot give the Civic, their friends and families, jobs. This is not how we work here.” The concrete issue that had catalyzed this broader politics, in part, revolved around who had the chance to work on these projects. Who had access to the pay, a small but significant sum, compensation for twenty hours of work, perhaps enough money for some groceries to feed a family for a few weeks at most? In these circumstances, with work scarce, the matter of this access had blown up, expanded into a neighborhood issue.

I discussed the problem with the councilor and the possible ways we might go forward with the research, suggesting, “Could I perhaps come and see you in person? Could we not hire some Agste Laan people to join us on the project? Could this be a way forward?” Perhaps, Nas replied, adding he would get back to me later with a response. Gerty and a few of our Civic partners met with the councilor and with leaders of the settlement in the days ahead. Later, they described this meeting as a fight, a storm of accusations. The outcome of the meeting, however, was a clear and productive compromise. Gerty contacted me to present a way forward. Could I add six people to the roster of Civic activists working with us? These six new partners would come directly from Agste Laan.

I could.

Six additional settlement partners were recruited and introduced into the project and our process. Aunty Fadielah was the chairwoman of the Agste Laan Committee, a shop owner and resident in Valhalla Park next to the entrance to the settlement. We were also joined by Andy, a resident of Agste Laan, a flamboyant cross-dresser with immense personality, who carried us all along with his humor and spark throughout the project to come. Sylvia was recruited, a tall woman with presence, one of the founder members of the settlement, her hard life written on her skin. Nawaal joined us, a quiet and shy then–mother of two who lived in the settlement at the intersection of Stone and Long Streets. The last addition was Shereen, a bubbly, rotund woman, who embraced us with her good energy and who brought along her friend and neighbor to round out the group. This officially selected group of Agste Laan residents merged seamlessly, as far as I could see, into the Civic partnership.

What drove this set of negotiations? There was certainly more to this conflict than the politics of hiring partners. A range of legitimacies came into question: a mix of politics and identities, of claims to represent and the right to authority. Gerty felt her legitimacy challenged as head of the Civic, her status as a legitimate leader of the neighborhood placed in question at a moment in which the neighborhood had expanded. Its limits and territorialities had shifted in the process of land occupation and the building of the informal settlement. At stake for Masnoena, for Aunty Fadielah too, was an assertion of leadership, of an attempt to stake a claim to be recognized. Others were organizing less visibly to get access to jobs, to have a small opportunity to link to our project and partnership, to the university perhaps too. But the most likely reason for this organizing was to access the small financial compensation, the pay that this particular job opened up. The councilor, a Democratic Alliance representative, a man formerly of the African National Congress, thrust his oar in to assert his legitimacy as the leader of the neighborhood, as the official voice, the sanctioned representative of democracy, and the man with the neighborhood at heart. Where was I in this mix? A vehicle, a vessel for competing agendas, for these negotiations and debate; I was both present and absent, symbolic perhaps, both contested on the one hand and personally acceptable on the other.

Delayed by a few weeks, the project relaunched with a welcome to the Agste Laan participants and reintroductions in the settlement itself. In the following weeks, I reflected on my ready agreement to this compromise, made under the threat of expulsion from working in the area, from our project going ahead. On the one hand, our new partners from Agste Laan were keen to participate and key to the undertaking of careful and legitimate research in the settlement. They felt like an excellent addition to the team of partners. Yet the politics of this argument and my own positioning in it left me needing to know more. I delicately probed further. Was Masnoena a turncoat of sorts, telephoning me neutrally, yet stoking the fires of discontent in Agste Laan? Was this part of her personal frustration with Gerty’s powerful presence, her authority on matters “Civic”? What was Nas’s agenda? To reassert himself in a place where he was in the fabric, but not visible, part of the neighborhood, a long-term resident, but in need of a clearer political presence himself? And what was my own position in this mix? How should I understand the trust that I thought we had rebuilt? I was only tangentially part of the conflict, for some a scapegoat, an entry into an argument over what was a long-standing tension and dispute. What were my own interests? On a practical level, I had to make the teaching happen, with class days and the semester rapidly passing. More importantly, I wanted to sustain my research partnership with the Civic and, perhaps more importantly, with Gerty, my close collaborator and friend.

In our productive compromise, I became part of a solution, a vehicle for a debate, part of a broader turf and territorial argument. I did not hold power or authority in this context. My academic authority, its legitimacy, sat somewhere far on the periphery of this conversation. The debate had to be navigated. There was a cost, but it was absorbable, the compromise was productive. In the longer term, it made the partnership more solid. I was told later that the argument cleared the air to a certain degree in the neighborhood, too. It did not address the turf, the legitimacy question, but it made other conversations and working relationships possible.

Don’t Worry Lady, I Have a Gun, I’ll Shoot!

These were the words a policewoman said to me, as I and the three other judges of the Klopse competition were surrounded and body-guarded off the field in Mitchells Plain, late one unseasonably crisp summer night. Herded carefully, shuffled to our cars, parked strategically (as I realized later) next to the dirt road, an unofficial exit out of the stadium that bypassed the now angry crowds of Klopse troupes, competitors discontent with our adjudication.

This was the end of a six-week adventure of sorts. I had been a judge for the Klopse Board, organizers of the competition in which the Valhalla Park minstrel troupe took part. The board had invited me to judge, despite my concerns about knowing little about Klopse. No, they had assured me, “You are neutral. You are from the University of Cape Town. You will be excellent.” I had been allocated the judging of the troupe banners and the boards, constructions along the theme of the carnival that each troupe designed, built, and held aloft on a pole at the front of their march. I had helped too with the assessment of the Klopse Jol, the march that each troupe performed to demonstrate their unity, discipline, and rhythm. The other judges, all of them musicians, assessed the singing and the music, a more detailed and difficult terrain about which I knew nothing.

We had sat each Saturday for a month, under a canopy at the front of the stadium, as the troupes competed. This competition had reached its culmination, its apex, that night, marked by our move from the canopy to a caravan, in the simulated shape of a Castle Lager six-pack of beer. This was where the night had gone wrong. The results were expected imminently. Yet, it turned out that the chief adjudicator had not added up the results weekly. We were “locked” in the six-pack of beer, desperately adding up result numbers, figuring out the order of prizes. Much had gone amiss. I had my results completed, but really the board and the banner were the minor prizes, not heavily contested and relatively easy to assess. The music was a different story. The minutes ticked by; half an hour gone. I sweated. The temperature inside the tin can rose; the crowds outside were increasingly vocal. The master of ceremonies reassured them that surely “the judges will soon be done.”

Two long hours later we emerged. It was pitch dark outside; the troupes merged around us; a circle cleared on the field where the Klopse Board organizers stood. They handed us a microphone. I started. For the banners, winner of third place; second place; first place . . . Then the music awards were announced. One troupe kept coming first. Disbelief was visible all around. I watched my friends in the Valhalla Park troupe grow fidgety at first, then outraged. Gerty stood in front, arms outstretched, legs planted wide. Her presence grew, seemingly to contain the anger, to stop her troupe from revolting. I was a target, one of four. A sinner, a traitor, I was tarnished with the same brush. I had betrayed their trust. How could Aziza, the young girl who sang a solo for the Valhalla Park Troupe, not have won, she had a voice like an angel, she was even bringing out a CD? How could, how could, how could? The questions multiplied, they resounded and echoed around the dark stadium. What was I doing here? The tension amplified, time slowed down, and then sped up, as we were surrounded and shuffled off the stadium grounds.

As I drove down the sandy dirt road out of the stadium and then accelerated down Vanguard Road out of Mitchells Plain, I felt an urgent need to get myself home, to insulate myself from the raging critique I knew was stirring in the buses as they rattled down the road back to Valhalla Park and back to neighborhoods, from Delft to Athlone, and across Mitchells Plain. Forty minutes or so later, I arrived home. I felt finished. “How did it go?” my family asked. I recounted the contestation of our adjudicating. My husband, a Capetonian, laughed and then explained that all Klopse results were contested, fought over, always the height of controversy. In other words, this conflagration was par for the course.

I returned to Valhalla Park three days later. It was one of our last research days for our project on Klopse. Our partners were subdued. They were angry with me but kindly trying to pretend otherwise. The questions and the interrogation seeped out in muted form as the afternoon went by. “What were you thinking, Sophie? Were you helping them cook the books, is that what you were doing for two hours?” How could you be complicit in that? That was the bottom line. The neighborhood assessment was that the judges had organized for X Troupe to win overwhelmingly. This was the traitorous act of which I had been accused and convicted.

My protestations and explanations did not amount to much, although everybody assured me that I was right in my judging of the boards and banners (my partners excelled in these categories). I reflected on my assessment, my own predisposition toward Valhalla Park, in this juggling of roles as judge, research partner, and friend. These details were intimate to me, part of the research we undertook in this period. They shaped my thinking, my own loyalties to my friends in the troupe, to their commitment to Klopse, and the hard, almost impossible, organizing work it took to make it happen.

A few weeks later, I was called to the adjudication assessment meeting. It took place on a hot Sunday afternoon in a crèche next to the Joseph Stone Auditorium, on the corner of Jan Smuts and Klipfontein Roads in Athlone, about halfway between Valhalla Park and where I lived. I was worried. I actively distanced myself from my musical colleagues, even physically removing myself to the end of the trestle table. I accounted for my judging when called to do so. I needed to salvage my partnership, redeem myself, move forward productively. My narration of events separated out the “banners and the boards,” my judging task, a strategy that emphasized subtly and, at the same time, starkly that I was not “with them,” the other judges. Conscious of my own maneuvering, I cast myself as innocent in the conflict at hand. I watched too as my friends, the Civic partners, collectively and, it seemed to me, quite systematically, disrupted the meeting. Zaaida asked the critical questions, in a voice of steel, quite unlike how I knew and thought of her. Another partner caused consternation and raised his voice. Gerty stormed out. This was a well-orchestrated and effective dismantling of not just the adjudication but also the board, its legitimacy and reputation as a committee capable of organizing a decent Klopse competition.

It was foolhardy, a mistake, to put myself in the position of “judge” and adjudicator. Why was I surprised that my judgments clashed with our partnership, with our liaison and its commitments, the critical collusions and loyalties that sustained its working? Yet, this politics was not actually about me, and some of it was not about the other judges on the panel, sitting further down the trestle table. It was a politics of community organizing, of Klopse, the Civic’s struggle to assert its voice, to maintain legitimacy in the neighborhood and in the city.

To whom was the academic accountable? What roles did I play? Never the objective neutral researcher, in a partnership I was partner, friend, and researcher. A colleague, and every now and again, a judge.

Disquieting Differences in a Wilted, Waterless Garden

The law enforcement vehicle, in tandem with the subcontracted company paid to disconnect the water, had pulled up on the curb outside the township house. They had taken out their equipment, opened the water meter on the street, and publicly inserted a stopper to limit the household’s access to water. Neighbors and residents had observed; the family felt humiliation. They could not afford to pay either their water debt or the reconnection fee. In the neighborhood and in the Civic, there was an argument about what such families should do.

Could they survive on the water dripping into the bucket, slowly, all day long? The immediate effect was a water shortage: the inability to do laundry, the need to limit cooking, to cut out cleaning. This change in habits was hard within their home and painfully visible to neighbors. In the longer term, their pride and joy, their garden, wilted. It had been planted and nurtured by the family’s deceased grandmother, the original occupant of the house—the family felt torn, hurt by the desecration of their grandmother’s memory and publicly humiliated as the garden died slowly, in view, day after day. They lived on the drip, limited to a bucket or two of water a day. They felt the paralysis and disempowerment of such limited access, the private hardship and the public nature of their cutoff and its effects, its emotional consequences.

Should the family reconnect illegally? They explained that they were fearful, conscious of the possibility of legal recourse and criminalization. Nearly everybody had water debts and hardly anybody could reconnect legally by paying off a portion of arrears and the reconnection fee. Some families chose to live on the drip, while supplementing their water access. They lowered their heads by going to the informal settlement next door, a place where there were standpipes and water was not metered. They requested permission. They begged for access to the water tap, carrying water back to a formal home, feeling individually the humiliation of this “step down” from formal service. Others suggested that families should live within the free basic water allocation, the fifty kiloliters per household the city allocated without charge, conserving water usage, individually embodying the city logic of “careful” use, of living “responsibly,” within a person’s means, as a “good citizen” should. For some Civic members, for Gerty and many of our partners, the solution was obvious: “Reconnect, it is so easy. Know your rights.” You just need a “baboon spanner” and a “struggle plumber” to reconnect.

Sitting in Gerty’s lounge, we discussed these competing ways forward, this debate in the neighborhood and city. Gerty told us about “the long stories that people tell” and proclaimed that “you shouldn’t be ashamed,” but she was not in an easy spot herself. She was positioned ambiguously. As a formal representative on the city’s ward forum, its subcouncil, she could not break the city’s laws. She was caught in a game in which she could not reconnect publicly and so sent residents to others for help. In the subcouncil, she could report maintenance problems and water leaks, but she could not challenge the city’s water policies directly. Neither could she challenge the broader social discourse that a person was a criminal if they did not pay, or an irresponsible citizen if they were not “water-wise.”

The two students working on the project felt torn by the debate, caught in the moral recriminations thrown in each direction by our neighborhood partners. They were taken aback that Fatima, their liked and respected neighborhood research partner, and Gerty took opposite positions. The students worried about the research, about the pain the questions evoked, about the debate in response to this family’s and others’ suffering. They felt caught too in the hard impossibility the family faced living on the drip, the impossibility of their living conditions, making do, by the city’s design, with only a dripping faucet for a water supply.

This research project revealed the pain characteristic of the debate in which it swirled. We were complicit in the inequalities and injustices we lived with, in my—and in most of my students’—easy, taken-for-granted access to water; in the things that could be sorted, compromised productively, even if it was difficult; and in the conflicts we had to live with outside our control.

A Partner, a Land Invader, a Ward Forum Member

Uncle Dan was dictating his assessment of his student group to Zaaida. It was only in that moment that I realized he was not confident in writing. I came across them sitting at a coffee table in the departmental tearoom, relaxing before the final student paper session they had come to the university to attend. Their conversation looked intense, a quiet but focused back and forth. Zaaida was the scribe, carefully recording what he wanted to share with his students. He had been a partner and participant since the start, a key cog in our partnership. Year in, year out, I had handed him an assessment sheet. Unintentionally, I had excluded him. In this spare hour, he had the space and time for a little privacy to complete the assessment in conversation with Zaaida. I blushed; I hoped they had not noticed me observing. There were so many things I might have misread, things I realized I did not know.

Dan was a deeply religious man: faith and his Christianity permeated everything he did. He was timekeeper on our projects, a gentle disciplinarian, keeping our groups organized and accounted for in every project; checking our departure and arrival times, keeping us honest about the work we had to complete. Gerty’s right-hand man, Dan had been integrated into the Civic’s work, drawn in, one of just a few men who were actively engaged on a daily, weekly basis, year after year.

Over many conversations over the years, Dan had shared in his quiet way slivers of his life. His hard struggles living in his mother’s house in a backyard, on the one hand a parent and husband, on the other still a child in his mother’s home. His subsequent many moves from backyard to backyard, the insecurities that marked him daily, his subservience to those in the house in front, at their mercy for access to the toilet, to water and electricity. He embraced our research on backyard life because this was his story, his experience. He found validation in documenting his and others’ experiences: committing to moving into a settlement, to building a home and fighting to stay in what became Sewende Laan, these acts made him an activist. Simultaneously, he was a land invader, the city’s tag for his search and claim to have a home of his own, a place where he could rest and raise his family of girls, and his youngest, a son.

At the end of a research session, after the students had piled onto the bus and departed, waved off and out of the neighborhood, Dan told me quietly that he could aspire to be the councilor. He was clear that he did “council” work in his monitoring and maintenance, in the guidance he offered to neighbors, in his leadership roles in the Sewende Laan Committee and in the Civic, and, of course, in the ward forum itself. He was so pleased to represent his community. But he felt a deep-seated tension, particularly in relation to the city’s code of conduct. He explained, “I had to sign that I would not go against city council policies as a ward forum representative. But this I can’t do. I am representing Sewende Laan as well as Valhalla Park. I am a land invader, and a ward forum member. I have a home because I invaded land. I have a secure place to live with my children and my wife, because I was part of the Sewende Laan struggle. But I am a ward forum member too.”

He signed the code of conduct but was not willing or able to revoke or cover up what he was required to do to live, to sustain himself and his family, to build his community. Against “council policy,” they were acts that meant he had, in fact, broken the law and the code of conduct. This mix and its irreconcilable tensions troubled him.

A land invader, a ward forum member, a cog in the network that sustained the neighborhood, a shack dweller, a neighborhood partner, a father, a man of the church. These roles sustained and legitimated him. In between were contradictions that shaped what he could and could not do. On this intimate terrain, and through this long-term engagement, I was conscious too of what I could and could not know, of the assumptions that shaped my work in this partnership despite my best intent, of my and the city’s complicities, the contradictions we made visible in this work together.

Fear, the Complicities of Xenophobia

In Agste Laan, two Somali traders fled out of the back entrance of the shack, running for cover when we arrived to interview them. The research group, the students particularly, were devastated. Their presence, their wish to interview these traders, had generated fear. Literal and epistemological violence suddenly held visceral meaning. The home-based business research project was completed in the context of a violent and jagged debate about the place and legitimacy of so-called foreigners to run small businesses. In the context of massive national tension, xenophobic signs were all around us as we mapped out local businesses and interviewed families about their histories and struggles, what they faced making a living in this informal and small-scale economy. There were no easy divisions between the politics “out there” and the politics of our partnership. No easy smoothing over or reconciliation of this angst and anger, the “us” and “them”; simmering, sometimes under the surface, sometimes violently present. Across the partnership, we held different views on this debate.

Our interviewing was tense, however carefully we tried to craft it. Should so-called foreigners be allowed to work in this neighborhood, to run their businesses? Some of our partners were vehement: foreigners operating businesses in this neighborhood were not legitimate businesspeople; they should not be there. Others appreciated that foreigners needed to trade, to do business, to work; they also valued the cheaper prices that these new informal shops offered. They liked the array of goods they sold.

Everywhere we interviewed, neighborhood businesses were struggling. Social welfare grants were largely the only source of income, a small trickle of pennies and rands patching up household budgets. Households had to make more money, to try and sustain a business and obtain the necessary cash to put a pot on the table. But local, long-term, resident-run house shops were not competing on prices. Their costs were too high. They struggled to stay viable, to stay open. Many had closed. One city narrative was that small “local”—in this case, Valhalla Park—business owners had been outcompeted by newcomers. But they could not afford to stop running their businesses in the neighborhood. And, as the story became more specific, its angst and anger took shape, as did its target: Somali businesses, “foreigners,” interlopers who had infiltrated the neighborhood.

This powerful strand of anger is what drove Somali traders to flee their shack when the interview team arrived. A few months after we completed our project, the tensions exploded. Petrol bombs were thrown at five Somali shops, some in rented front rooms of homes, others in shacks in front yards; the shops were burned to the ground, left as shells, with blackened windows and damaged interiors, the businesses eradicated violently. In the aftermath, a Civic partner described these ruins as surreal. Another partner disputed the “petrol bomb” language the media had used to describe the expulsion of Somali traders. Another claimed it was an internal neighborhood fight. It may have looked like xenophobia, but in fact those traders rented from a notorious gang leader. And those families that had allowed them to locate a shop in their front room or to put a shack or container on their property, well, they had no choice. They owed this man, this gang lord, money; they had to fund drug habits. These rumors and interpretations, these complicated tentacles, linked tensions together. The gang lord was not someone to mess around with; after the bombings, he was convicted and jailed for four murders in the neighborhood. Was this xenophobia or a turf war, a product of gangs and the competition to sell drugs, internal to the set of networks through which the traders had come into the neighborhood?

The Civic held contradictory views on these issues. They were, at times, the face of resolution, negotiating and brokering peace, and of negotiation. I arrived at Gerty’s home one day as three Somali traders emerged with her from her bedroom. They had been negotiating bringing in a new shipping container to sell from, discussing where it might be located, and its hours. In the moments before the petrol bombing, the Civic tried to find some resolution; it warned traders that tensions were increasing. They let foreigners know that it was time to leave, to get out, that “we cannot protect you anymore.” Yet, in another moment, the Civic claimed it had founded, even inspired, the xenophobia, and it had done so to protect locals, to address the literally physical and emotional challenges of putting food on the table, of making sure that family businesses did not close, that “foreign interlopers do not steal these opportunities away.” Sometimes the same Civic members soothed and stoked these flames—tensions that drove and quelled this violent debate.

Was this project a mistake? Was it a political error to do this research on local businesses, in this period, in this partnership? Were we not complicit in these conflicts? We had a moment of relief, partial success in the neighborhood-based party at the end of the research project. We had invited everybody interviewed to join us. One group had gone out of the way to really express their concern and interest that a Somali trader, whom they had interviewed, attend the party. He was hesitant. He did not agree to come. Then, Angelo, our partner Margie’s son, arrived with this man and his wife. They entered late, quietly. Angelo had persuaded them to join us at this neighborhood party in the local crèche, despite its potential unpredictability. He guided them to a table. The students who had invited them brought the family a plate of food and sat with them. It was a moment when it felt like our interviewing had not been so damaging, like it might have built a little thread of something. In this context where nothing was clear, where much was violent, this couple was quietly and visibly present. They were part of our conversation.

Discomforting complicities were intimate and powerful in this debate, in its contestation, in our partners’ and our different positions. Our project itself exacerbated these tensions; it was shaped through them.

A Complaint

Our teaching and research process required all sorts of forms of management and gatekeeping. Gerty and I were joint keepers of our partnership. It worked in part because our turf and territory were clear. It worked because we trusted and respected each other, because the partnership and its projects were important to both of us.

But, today, I was alone in Gerty’s house for the first time ever, entrusted with Wafeeqah, who was then nearly one, on my lap. I was the leftover babysitter, not by design but by necessity. Every adult in this house had to fill in for missing neighborhood partners. We had arrived from campus, each student research group ready to head out to do household interviews. Yet not all our partners were there. A number were missing, including Gerty. She had been at the day hospital and was now in the bus company offices sorting out the buses for Klopse. These were all crucial things, emergencies, everyday needs, urgent community business.

Somebody had to stay home with the baby. Leaticia, her mom, was at work elsewhere. In this moment I was that “somebody.”

I sat with Wafeeqah. I had never been in this house by myself when nobody else was home. It felt strange. The normally busy and bustling house was quiet, silent. Sandwiched in a row of upstairs-downstairs maisonettes, the house shared walls with neighbors on both sides. I could hear the neighbors through the kitchen wall, people passing in and out on the street outside. I felt torn and a bit vulnerable. I tried to pretend otherwise: to be relaxed, to play, and to sing a song, to entertain this little girl. On edge, I waited for someone to return to the house so I could hand over the task of babysitting and get back to the research work.

Before we departed back to campus, I raised the query of who had missed the session with Mina. She was our timekeeper, our HR expert, we joked. She kept the records of who had attended, what time they arrived, what they should be paid. By design, she was my first port of call when this sort of issue arose. Mina passed the message on to Gerty, as a complaint.

Gerty requested that I remain behind at the end of the session, after the students returned to campus in the bus. After everybody had departed, she called me into her bedroom, a small slice of personal space in this busy, well-used house. Although I had sorted out payments there and observed others entering and emerging for past meetings, this time was the first instance I had been requested to meet there. It was a moment when she called me to account. At issue was my critique, through Mina, of the missing partners the previous week, implicitly, of her own absence.

It was not an easy conversation. Its subtext was a debate about who worked on these projects, who had entry into the partnership. This question was Gerty’s turf, located in her role of drawing together a team in the neighborhood. Across projects, and across the years, there were ebbs and flows of partners working on the projects. Koekie had a job looking after her granddaughter once her daughter returned to work. Lefien moved in and out of projects, sometimes busy with piecework seamstering, outsourced from downscaled textile factories in Salt River, Cape Town’s old industrial hub. Rosemary, Aunty Washiela, Naomi, Masnoena, early project stalwarts, moved on, in part a reminder of their busy lives, in part a reflection of shifting roles in, and relationships with, the Civic. I shared my concern about Gerty’s role in the project, too. She was part of a research team with a student, but did she have time for this role, to work with him? As a rule of thumb, these negotiations and decisions were Gerty’s territory as coordinator of the Valhalla Park team. Gerty was clear: I had overstepped. I had trodden on her turf, her right and need to choose who worked, to assess who was best, what her role should be.

We both backed down. We reached a safe, productive, compromise: she could play a different role in this project. One partner was taken off the list; an uncontentious choice as he had to work so could not really participate anyway. Two additional people were asked to join the project, brought onto the list, one to replace the departing partner and another to be a backup if Gerty could not be at a research session herself. This solution we could both manage. These compromises made the projects work. They were also a sign of wear and tear, the labor of running the partnership, the small dynamics that needed to function inside the partnership itself. Not a simple question of logistics, or management, of doing this or that, these dynamics shaped trust, confidence, what we could and could not know, could and could not see, or make visible. These layers, this work, lay at the heart of the partnership itself.

Didn’t You Wonder Why? Neighborhood Crime and Violence

“Didn’t you ever wonder why the Civic do not run a neighborhood watch? In Valhalla Park, surely this is an obvious thing to do. There’s so much crime.” The vice principal of the local high school tossed this pointed question at me as we stood together outside the Cape Town Television Offices, where he had taken part in a panel discussion against the planned closure of his school by the Education Department. He insisted on repeating this rhetorical question again: “Haven’t you wondered why they don’t run a neighborhood watch?” Valhalla Park resident Ashraf nodded his head as the vice principal provided the answer: “The gangs won’t let them, they can’t. The Firm won’t let them. They are the real authority in this neighborhood.” The Firm was the syndicate of powerful businessmen (and some women) who ran the city drug trade, a network that linked the neighborhood into citywide channels of selling and using.

These tensions subtly arose, when, for instance, students engaged critically with issues of gangs, gangsters, and violence in Valhalla Park. “Who told you that?” was a common response. “That’s not right, we—the Civic—resolved the gang problem.” As problems with violence increased in the latter years of the partnership, these responses were harder to sustain. The most powerful gangster from Valhalla Park, the head of the Firm, Colin Stanfield, passed away from cancer. Though he stayed in the leafy suburbs in Rondebosch where I lived, his family was resident in Valhalla Park. There he was a hero, a protector, a patron, a source of school fees, a facilitator and funder. In the city beyond, he was a gang boss, a scoundrel to some, a known criminal who had served prison time and avoided other charges, the leader of an illicit network of drug dealing. The Civic was one small local cog in a broader context, one in which the Firm was powerful, operating at scale, across a broad urban and regional territory.

Was this conflict and the Civic’s position as simple as the vice principal’s account would suggest? The Civic could not operate in opposition to the Firm, but this neighborhood politics was complex and layered. The Civic members worked with Stanfield; they relied on and deeply appreciated his support. To show their respect, and as a mark of his and their centrality in this neighborhood, they organized the transport for his funeral, close to two hundred buses that brought people from all over the city, from the region beyond, to the Valhalla Park sports field where a memorial was held, the site where the housing project would eventually be built.

In the intervening years following Stanfield’s death, much changed. His sister held the reins of his empire in the immediate aftermath, but she herself passed on. As control devolved to the next generation, there was a fight, a struggle for leadership, a splitting of this family legacy. For a period, it tore the neighborhood apart. The official Civic narrative asserted gangsterism had been solved in the neighborhood, as the organization itself brokered peace in 1994. They called the competing gangsters to account. They negotiated an accord, one that held up to a point. Yet, this narrative frayed around its edges, depending on whom we spoke with.

The Firm was present across this neighborhood, a publicly unspoken set of links and connections. A more subtle distinction was at work, one that separated out those who controlled the drug trade, the Firm, from those who were gangsters, involved in violence and criminality. This was a topic in our partnership often swept under the rug. The vice principal elaborated, “Look, I know the Civic has been widely successful in housing. I acknowledge that. But, you know, the gangs and the Firm don’t give a damn about housing.” His message was clear. The Civic was only one of several entities, a small one, operating amid a set of powerful forces, competing powers that shaped and broke the neighborhood, shaped and broke young people’s bodies and minds. The vice principal’s concern reflected the pandemic of petty crimes and burglaries fueled by tik (methamphetamine) addictions in the neighborhood and city. More immediately, he was motivated by the dead body he had found outside the school gate as he had arrived at work the Thursday before we spoke. The spate of murders occurred with increasing regularity, a hard and harsh reality that increasingly shaped the lives of our research partners, the neighborhood, and this part of the city.

An Endpoint

Could we sustain this partnership, this way of working together in this progressively violent context? With increasing shootings, with the fraying of gang leadership, and the proliferation of increasingly younger recruits, we reached a point where we drew our research projects to a close. The pressure and risk had become too great for our partners. The Civic could not bear our weight, the responsibility of navigating us safely through the neighborhood.

Funerals punctuated the weeks and months, the latter years.

What next, who next?

These repetitions were the rhythm of our updates. Innocent bystanders dead. Shot doing normal daily things. A young boy caught in the crossfire; in the shop down from the hall, the night before the High Tea, the Civic fundraiser we attended. Oscar Loggenberg dead. He went out to buy coffee and sugar from a house shop around the corner from his own home. Shot in the leg first. I’m told he called out, “I’m not a gangster,” and was then summarily shot in the head, left to die on the road. His wife heard the shouting. She heard the shots. She did not think it was him. His father-in-law found him lying on the road, dead, covered in his own blood, another life taken away. A neighbor saw the shooting, she ran after the gunmen, the boys who shot Oscar. She followed them into Sewende Laan, lost them in the settlement. She knew their names and was willing to talk, despite the risk. She was a brave woman, a neighbor, and a friend. Uncle Charlie and Aunty Doreen—stalwart Klopse and Civic members—Oscar’s parents, were heartbroken. Uncle Charlie never recovered. A few months on he passed away, too.

Umar, our partner Fatima’s son, was shot in 2014. He went to the shop on the street corner to buy his mother a small birthday present. He was shot dead on his way back home. I called Fatima the afternoon after his funeral. She was flattened, devastated. A few months later, our partner Aunty Fadielah’s son, Mogammed, was killed. He had been shot in Shruu’s, her shop, in the front part of her house. She had to keep working there, living there. She lost her husband to murder in this house as well.

Old wounds split open, new wounds created.

Heartbroken, Aunty Fadielah had to keep going.

How did you go on when your son had been shot, walking to the shop to buy you a bag of chips for your birthday? When your son had been shot, on his way home from work, walking across the field, caught in the crossfire when looking up to see where gunshots had come from?

Shot, gone, forever.

Families devastated; lives lost, forever.

Zaaida asked me, rhetorically, “How do you walk down the street outside your house when a twelve-year-old walks past you carrying a gun, when he checks you for looking, for noticing? When he talks to you like he’s in control, when he shows you his gun again when you try to put him in his place?” How do you go on when a boy in his early teens is shot sixteen times in the head, shot because he belonged to a gang, shot in retaliation for his own violent, heinous, brash acts? How do you go on when a kid’s impetuousness, twelve-year-oldness, is held in check, embellished, and destroyed by a gun and by the bullets that shattered his skull? How do we make sense of kids killing kids?

How do we make sense of this violence: at night, in the morning, next door, on the street, on the way to school, to mosque, on the way home from church? Ten or so short kilometers from campus, from my home, a world away.

Eventually, the partnership came to an end because of a world bigger than it, a broader topography, the conflicts that shaped this neighborhood, city, and society.

An Empty Fridge

I hunted for my water bottle before leaving Gerty’s house at the end of a research session. It was hot and I needed a quick drink before I headed into the traffic and home. I had left it somewhere. It was not by the sofa or on the display unit by the television. I checked in the kitchen, it was not on the counter, by the sink, or by the stove. Leaticia called out from upstairs: “Soph, I put your water in the refrigerator so it will be nice and cold.” I opened the fridge, bare empty shelves. I opened the freezer, where my recycled water bottle sat, a solitary item in an utterly empty freezer; a dire shortage of food a hard reality in this home.

I could not refuse this stark reminder of material realities in this home. I could not refuse the inequality that underlay the partnership, a consistent and critical reminder of the limits of our collaboration and research. However creative, incisive, or productive, our work together could not address the material differences, the economic inequalities that divided us, the inequities of income and life that we navigated in moving between university and community, between my home and this home in Valhalla Park. These were ever-present inequalities, ever-present struggles. These contexts and their hard tensions shaped our partnership. We found and felt them out, we meandered through and stumbled over them. They emerged in the ever-extending and always partial ways in which we came to know each other and work together.

Coda—Contradiction

To keep the partnership going in the neighborhood meant working in and between invitations and refusals. We worked amid real conflicts. A research lens on a question could divulge, lay bare, expose. We sometimes caused harm in exploring questions. It meant working on some topics and not others. We could turn some everyday contradictions into research questions. In some we could see and acknowledge our complicities, the tensions that the partnership generated. Some were conflicts from which we had to look away, too dangerous to touch, too dangerous to research. Yet, whose questions counted? To which invitations did we respond? Whose refusal was reckoned with, when? When did refusals become visible, a conflict, something to engage with, something to avoid?

The contours of our research shifted in the contradictions between the research lens and the contradictions and compromises of politics and activism. In this mix of epistemology and politics some things became clear, others remained opaque, unnamed, not known. In teaching through the partnership, we found ways to work within these tensions.