The fact that most women remained in traditional villages and homesteads was a direct result of the labour system, which both forced and lured men to the mines and factories. The so-called enslaved state of black women was sometimes condemned by white men, though it was also exploited to suit the needs of the economy. Rural women were expected to care for children and old people ‘back home’ and to look after sick and ageing husbands after they became redundant in the cities.34 South African mining bosses relied on a migrant labour system that depended on a rural ‘catchment’ area, and black men were assisted in maintaining their patriarchal powers in these rural areas. Although the South African government desired recognition as being modern, it advocated ‘traditionalism’ and tribal commitments. White and black men colluded to keep black women entrenched in ‘homestead production’ so that the aspirations of those women who had gone to the cities on their own inititative and had already been living there for many years were obstructed in every way. Single women were considered minors, and in spite of their recently found ‘independence’, they were forced to request the permission of ‘heathen’ parents or to submit to the traditional guardianship of a man if they wished to rent or buy a house in the city. Yet in spite of all this opposition, women were on the whole highly motivated migrants:
For female migrants […] migration was more likely to represent a means of escape than either a means to reinvest in the rural economy or a process of dispossession. It was a personal choice, involving flight from the controls of precolonial society initially and the deteriorating quality of rural life under colonialism and settler rule subsequently. This is in sharp contrast to the pattern of male migration, which, especially at first, represented a societal response to new pressures and opportunities and was characterised by conformity rather than challenge to existing norms and relations of power.35
It became clear that women were more permanently settled in cities than was initially expected. While men were lured back to the rural areas because of wives and children who had remained there, or because they were forced to go back after falling ill on the mines, once women left they had few ties and it was often very difficult for them to reintegrate again. The cost of their independence was high. Usually, it was impossible for them to keep their children with them, which meant that they were forced to separate, often becoming estranged after children were sent back to the so-called reserves or homelands. Once there, children were taken care of by a grandmother, sister or other family member who took over the mother’s role – many heartbreaking examples of which are covered in chapter 6, where I discuss Thula Baba (1987).
As early as the 1920s and 1930s, social scientists were documenting the stress migration was causing among black families in previously closely-knit and kinship-based communities. According to Isaac Schapera’s Migrant Labour and Tribal Life (1947) and HJ Simons’s African Women: Their Legal Status in South Africa (1968), new kinds of relationship began to develop after tribal marriages, known as ‘customary unions’, were undermined and became threatened with disintegration.36 Sex before marriage had become standard practice during the 1930s, and there were also frequent occurrences of rape and sexual abuse. Many illegitimate children were born, and respect for elders was falling away. The break-up of traditional structures weighed heavily on women. Walker, however, warns that such changes should not be judged too negatively. Women were developing creative ways to deal with change; new family structures and value systems evolved. Strong, female-centred households consisting of a woman, her children and often grandchildren were formed to compensate for the lack of a permanent male head of the family.
Because of the migration of men to the mines and a decrease in polygamous marriages, a rising number of rural women did not have husbands, and those especially who were unhappy with traditional marriage arrangements escaped to cities. The chances of finding a husband in the city were small, and so unmarried women were pushed even farther to the margins of city life.37 Having a ‘safe haven’ in the backyard of an employer’s house in a white suburb was generally the only solution.
Walker explains that the extreme subjugation of black women during the greater part of the twentieth century cannot simply be attributed to the spread of capitalism in South Africa. The Natives (Urban Areas) Act No 21 of 1923 deemed all South African towns and cities ‘white’ and defined urban black men as ‘temporary sojourners’ who had to carry passes. For decades, women were not considered important enough to include in the Act, but the Natives (Abolition of Passes and Co-ordination of Documents) Act No 67 of 1952 changed this. For the first time in the history of South Africa, black women were also required to carry passes. This provision resulted in a widespread strike by women in 1956, though Act No 67 would only be repealed more than thirty years later, by section 23 of the Identification Act No 72 of 1986.38
Elsa Joubert’s Poppie Nongena is the best-known literary example of a black woman’s resistance to laws and conventions forcing her to live in the rural areas.39 After the death of Poppie’s husband, the family’s continued presence is regarded as illegal in ‘white’ South Africa, and so they are sent from Cape Town to his homeland near East London, a place Poppie does not know. Although both traditionalist conventions and ‘modern’ apartheid laws imposed rigid social and judicial restrictions on women such as Poppie, many preferred the relative freedom offered by city life. Poppie therefore did her utmost to return to Cape Town and to sidestep restrictions so that she could at least try to earn a living by doing domestic work.
Political and Administrative Restrictions
‘Notion of the family’
What were the restrictions that black women had to deal with in the cities? Katherine Eales’s research into the administration of ‘African women’ in Johannesburg during the first forty years of the twentieth century reveals that the rules were hugely ambivalent. She shows, however, that precisely because these women did not work in industry and did not fit general assumptions about ‘the native’, they managed, in often miraculous ways, to stay out of reach of ‘native policy’ for many decades. The state had conveniently constructed a ‘way of knowing’ and speaking about ‘the native’ that related to black males only, and so no one was interested in gathering information about women, who were in any case considered far inferior to men.40 Until urbanisation started to occur on a large scale in the 1920s, white officials therefore had relatively little contact with black women, who were of course never themselves given a voice. Instead, the state ‘relied very largely on its own intelligence – information that was profoundly influenced by several centuries of Western thought premised on an indefatigable belief in the inferiority of both women and ‘natives’.41
In keeping with the stereotyping of women as either childlike and angelic or evil whores, administrators were reluctant to sanction laws relating to them. Speeches by white politicians containing references to black people related only to men. The general assumption that white women were subordinate to their husbands was transferred to the relationship of all whites with all black people. White individuals saw themselves as occupying a parental role, and so did the state itself. ‘As against the European, the native stands as an eight-year-old against a man of mature experience’, is a typical example of the prevailing rhetoric.42 The comparison of black people with children, as being in need of guardianship, assumes the superiority of whites, the prerogative of power and privilege, and the right to discipline: ‘Indeed, the notion of the family informed the administration’s conception of African social relationships.’43
The dominant assumption underlying urban administration was that black women in towns and cities were inherently inclined to licentious behaviour and that white people should not become involved in matters relating to their sexuality, which would be regulated by black men. If the presence