- Life in South Africa’s HostelsCarceral Spaces and Places of Refuge
Migrant hostels were salient features of capitalist development in South Africa since the discovery of minerals in the late nineteenth century. They were cornerstones of the migrant labor system and influx control, which were premised on the segregationist principle that Africans could only be temporary sojourners in (white) urban areas when their labor was required. The hostels that are the subject of this article were mostly constructed from the mid-1950s, namely, during the apartheid era, and constituted an important plank in the government’s policy to maintain migrancy among the non-mining African labor force. At the same time, the expanding industrial economy required a settled workforce, which led the government to acknowledge that a section of the African population could be permanently urbanized. New townships, with family housing, were established on a large scale to accommodate this group. It was also in these townships that a new generation of migrant hostels was erected by municipalities and private companies for single migrants employed in municipalities, in the secondary economy, and as domestic workers.1
This article is based on an oral history project that emanated from a joint research project between Khanya College and the History Workshop at the University of the Witwatersrand and included postgraduate students from the social sciences as well as photography students. The project, informally known as the “Hostels Research Project,” was undertaken during 2008 and 2009, during which time life history interviews were conducted mainly with residents who had lived in hostels since the apartheid period. The project aimed to record the views of female and male hostel dwellers about their everyday experiences and memories of living in the hostels. Based on the collection of these life histories, the arguments presented here emphasize the variegated experiences mainly of the inmates residing in the women’s hostel in Alexandra, a township in the north of Johannesburg. The article concurs with the established view of hostels being places of extensive control over black lives that also entrenched multiple forms of exclusion in urban spaces. Yet, during the process of conducting our interviews and research, my students and I encountered an intriguing paradox. While there was a unanimous critique of the degrading prison-like conditions endured by hostel dwellers, many interviewees also expressed nostalgia for the order and control that prevailed at the height of the hostel system from the 1960s to mid-1980s, and they lamented the subsequent decline of the hostels. The latter view was especially pronounced among women, who perceived the hostels as places of refuge from the township and who had attempted to transform the [End Page 427] bed-holds in the dormitories into livable spaces. In this endeavor, however, they constantly came up against the constraints of the state’s influx control policies and the prison-like design of the hostels.
Hostels were designed to perpetuate a condition of temporariness, even when inmates resided there for most of their working lives. They also played an important part in the work cycle of employees for whom a place in the hostel primarily meant proximity to work and a bed to rest. Hostel life was defined by the denial of domesticity compared to the townships where houses were built to engender family life. The hostel system was thus premised on the state’s policy of denying migrants a sense of belonging in the urban areas. For the state, migrants’ experiences of home—domesticity, familial relations, and intimacy, among others—were to be enjoyed only in the rural areas. Furthermore, hostels were designed as spaces of surveillance, in which all facets of inmates’ lives were subject to control through carceral technologies and a network of formal and informal administrators. In this context, as this article explains, hostels were therefore places of abode but always less than a home.
A Brief History of Hostels
Mine owners initially introduced closed compounds in the mid-1880s on the diamond mines of Kimberley, in the Northern Cape Province of South Africa, in order to maximize control over African miners, to minimize the cost of labor reproduction, and to segregate African workers from their white...