Managing the sexuality of urban youth: Johannesburg, 1920s-1960s

International Journal of African Historical Studies

Volumn 38, Issue 2, 2005, Pages 301-327

  Glaser, Clive ^a  

^a NONE

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EID: 33748506472     PISSN: 03617882     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: None     Document Type: Review

References (107)

1. For a good example of this work, see Peter Delius and Liz Walker, eds., Aids in Context, special issue of African Studies 61, 1 (2002). Of course, HIV/AIDS has not been the only recent public issue encouraging research in this area. For example, high levels of sexual violence, poor delivery in the health sector, and economically vulnerable single mothers (issues entangled with HIV/AIDS) have been prominent for some time
2. Charles van Onselen, Studies in the Social and Economic History of the Witwatersrand 1886-1914: Vol II: New Ninevah (Johannesburg, 1982)
3. Note also Patrick Harries, "Symbols and Sexuality: Culture and Identity on the Early Witwatersrand Gold Mines," Gender and History 1, 3 (1990), 318-36
4. See, for example: Monica Hunter, Reaction to Conquest (London, 1936)
5. Isaac Schapera, Married Life in an African Tribe (London, 1940)
6. Ellen Hellmann, Rooiyard: A Sociological Survey of an Urban Slum Yard (Manchester, 1948)
7. Eileen Krige, The Realm of the Rain-queen: A Study of the Pattern of Lovedu Society (Cape Town, 1943)
8. Laura Longmore, The Dispossessed: A Study of the Sex-life of Bantu Women in Urban Areas in and around Johannesburg (London, 1959)
9. For more detail see: Moodie, Going for Gold
10. Harries, "Symbols and Sexuality"
11. Keith Breckenridge, "Migrancy, Crime, and Faction Fighting: The Role of the Isitshozi in the Development of Ethnic Organizations in the Compounds," Journal of Southern African Studies 16, 1 (1990), 55-78
12. Zackie Achmat, "Apostles of 'Civilized Vice,' 'Immoral Practices,' and 'Unnatural Vice' in South African Prisons and Compounds, 1890-1920," Social Dynamics 19, 2 (1993), 92-110
13. Belinda Bozzoli, "Why Were the 1980s 'Millenarian'? Style, Repertoire, Space and Authority in South Africa's Black Cities," Journal of Historical Sociology 13, 1 (2000), 78-110
14. For more detail on these "native welfare" groups in Johannesburg see Kathy Eales, "Gender Politics and the Administration of Women in Johannesburg, 1903-1939" (M.A. thesis, University of the Witwatersrand, 1991), 178, 189-90
15. and Clive Glaser, Bo-Tsotsi: The Youth Gangs of Soweto 1935-1976 (Portsmouth, N.H., 2000), 21, 24-25
16. On the links between Christianity and liberalism in South Africa, see Richard Elphick, "Mission Christianity and Interwar Liberalism," in Jeffrey Butler, Richard Elphick, and David Welsh, eds., Democratic Liberalism in South Africa: Its History and Prospect (Middleton, Conn., 1987), 64-80
17. See also Bozzoli, "Why Were the 1980s 'Millenarian'?," 82-93, who argues that "welfare paternalism" characterized the management of black townships from the 1920s until the 1940s (and in an embattled, compromised form even until the early 1970s)
18. See Alan Jeeves, "Public Health in the Era of South Africa's Syphilis Epidemic of the 1930s and 1940s," South African Historical Journal 45 (2001), 80-81
19. Hellmann, Rooiyard
20. Eileen Krige, "Changing Conditions in Marital Relations and Parental Duties among Urbanized Natives," Africa 9, 1 (1936)
21. Ray E. Phillips, The Bantu in the City: A Study of Cultural Adjustment on the Witwatersrand (Lovedale, 1938)
22. See also Krige's "Pressing Problems: Illegitimacy," presented to the General Missionary Conference called by the Christian Council of South Africa, Pretoria, 26-27 June 1940, Historical Papers Library, University of the Witwatersrand (UWHPL), South African Council of Churches Collection (SACC), Acc 623/13.4
23. For an overview on attempts to prevent women from moving to the cities, see Cherryl Walker, "Gender and the Development of the Migrant Labour System, c. 1850-1930: An Overview," in Cherryl Walker, ed., Women and Gender in Southern Africa to 1945 (Cape Town, 1990), 180-181
24. Marc Epprecht suggests that the inclination to restrict movement was not at all clear-cut in the case of Basutoland from about the late 1890s through to the late 1920s. For a number of reasons, he argues, South African authorities were sympathetic to the freer movement of women from Basutoland and did not always cooperate with chiefs. Many chiefs were half-hearted on the issue and some quietly tolerated and even supported women's mobility. The driving force behind the restriction of mobility came from the Basutoland administration. See Epprecht, "This Matter of Women Is Getting Very Bad": Gender, Development and Politics in Colonial Lesotho (Pietermaritzburg, 2000), 86-93
25. For a fascinating discussion on the same theme in Southern Rhodesia, see Diana Jeater, Marriage, Perversion, and Power: The Construction of Moral Discourse in Southern Rhodesia (Oxford, 1993), especially Chapters 5-7
26. Walker, "Gender," 188
27. See also Eddie Koch, "Doornfontein and Its African Working Class, 1914-1935: A Study of Popular Culture in Johannesburg"(M.A. thesis, University of the Witwatersrand, 1983), 47-48
28. and Ellen Hellmann, "Social Change among Urban Africans," in Heribert Adam, ed., South Africa: Sociological Perspectives (Cape Town, 1971), 160
29. For an overview of the motivations of Basotho women, see: Philip Bonner, "Desirable or Undesirable Basotho Women? Liquor, Prostitution, and the Migration of Basotho Women to the Rand, 1920-1945," in Walker, ed., Women and Gender, 234-39
30. Epprecht, "This Matter of Women," 80-85
31. Eales, "Gender Politics," 9; also 147-48, 171, 179
32. and Bonner, "Desirable or Undesirable," 232, 247
33. Eales, "Gender Politics," 191
34. Bonner, "Desirable or Undesirable," 248
35. Glaser, Bo-Tsotsi, 22-23
36. Johannesburg City Council, Minute of the Mayor, 1938, Report of the Manager, Native Affairs Department, p. 296
37. See Deborah Gaitskell, "'Christian Compounds for Girls': Church Hostels for African Women in Johannesburg, 1907-1970," Journal of Southern African Studies 6, 1 (1979), 49-50
38. On the so-called "Black Peril" scares, see van Onselen, Studies: New Ninevah, 45-54
39. For a similar phenomenon in Southern Rhodesia, see Jeater, Marriage, 186-89
40. Jonathan Hyslop, "White Working-Class Women and the Invention of Apartheid: 'Purified' Afrikaner Nationalist Agitation for Legislation Against 'Mixed' Marriages, 1934-1939," Journal of African History 36 (1995), 6
41. Susanne Klausen, "Medicalized Contraception and Sexual Tension: The Race Welfare Society and 'Poor White' Women's Resistance to Eugenic Birth Control in Johannesburg, 1932-1941," Sex and Secrecy Conference, University of the Witwatersrand, June 2003, 6
42. Karen Jochelson, "Sexually Transmitted Diseases in Nineteenth- and Twentieth-Century South Africa," in Philip W. Setel, Milton Lewis, and Maryinez Lyons, eds., Histories of Sexually Transmitted Diseases and HIV/AIDS in Sub-Saharan Africa (London, 1999), 221
43. These issues are expanded in Karen Jochelson, The Colour of Disease: Syphilis and Racism in South Africa, 1880-1950 (Oxford, 2001), Chapters 3 and 4
44. See also V. P. Steyn, "Prostitution and Houses of Ill-fame," Memorandum presented by Probation Officer to the Senior Probation Officer, Department of Social Welfare, 1 April 1939, Central Archive Depot, Pretoria (CAD), VWN 1065 SW449
45. Comments of F. T. Howarth (MP, Rosettenville) reported in Cape Times and Die Burger, 23 Feb. 1939
46. Hyslop, "White Working-Class Women," 63
47. See Susanne Klausen, "'Poor Whitieism,' White Maternal Mortality, and the Promotion of Public Health in South Africa: The Department of Public Health's Endorsement of Contraceptive Services, 1930-1938," South African Historical Journal 43 (2001), 53-54, 58
48. Klausen, "Medicalized Contraception," 2-3
49. See, for example, Edgar H. Brookes's address at St Paul's Church, Durban, 9 July 1934, reported in South African Outlook, 1 Aug. 1934, 178
50. Steyn, "Prostitution," 18, 28
51. See Hyslop, "White Working-Class Women," 61-62, 64
52. Jochelson, "Sexually Transmitted Diseases," 222, 228
53. Eales, "Gender Politics," 145
54. Eales, "Gender Politics," 15
55. David Chidester, "The Politics of Exclusion: Christian Images of Illegitimacy," in Sandra Burman and Eleanor Preston-Whyte, Questionable Issue: Illegitimacy in South Africa (Cape Town, 1992), 154
56. UWHPL, Archive of the South African Institute of Race Relations, AD 843, B56.4, text of an address by G. Ballenden to the Conference on Urban Native Juvenile Delinquency, 1938
57. Carr, quoted in Eales, "Gender Politics," 179
58. See Deborah Gaitskell, "Housewives, Maids or Mothers: Some Contradictions of Domesticity for Christian Women in Johannesburg, 1903-1939," Journal of African History 24 (1983), 253
59. See also Miriam Janisch, "Christian Teaching in Relation to the South African Social Order," Pamphlet 4 published in preparation for the Conference on Christian Reconstruction, Lovedale 1-3 July 1942
60. For more detail on women's hostels see Gaitskell, "Christian Compounds."
61. For more detail on women's prayer unions see Deborah Gaitskell, "'Wailing for Purity': Prayer Unions, African Mothers, and Adolescent Daughters, 1912-1940," in Shula Marks and Richard Rathbone, eds., Industrialization and Social Change in South Africa: African Class Formation, Culture and Consciousness 1870-1930 (Harlow, Essex, 1982), 338-57
62. Deborah Gaitskell, "Devout Domesticity? A Century of African Women's Christianity in South Africa," in Walker, ed., Women and Gender
63. For a detailed account of prayer unions in the 1950s see Mia Brandel-Syrier, Black Women in Search of God (London, 1962)
64. Gaitskell, "Wailing for Purity," 349, 352
65. For a discussion of extramarital sexuality, see Peter Delius and Clive Glaser, "The Myths of Polygamy: A History of Multi-Partnership and Extramarital Sex in South Africa," South African Historical Journal 50 (2004)
66. Henri Junod was one striking example. See Henri Junod, "The Safeguards of African Family Life under Tribal Conditions" paper presented to the General Missionary Conference, Christian Council of South Africa, Pretoria, 26-27 June 1940, UWHPL, SACC, Acc 623/13.4
67. See also Eileen Krige, "Pressing Problems: Illegitimacy" in the same collection of papers
68. For a discussion of Christianity's failings in sexual education, see Gaitskell, "Wailing for Purity," 341-42; 345-47
69. Chidester, "The Politics of Exclusion," 156-57
70. See Natasha Erlank, "The Problem of Sex: Africans and Sex Education in South Africa, c. 1910-1950," Sex and Secrecy Conference, University of the Witwatersrand, June 2003, 6-7
71. Junod, "The Safeguards of African Family Life," 6
72. See UWHPL, SAIRR, Report of the Fifth European-Bantu Conference, Bloemfontein, July 5-7, 1933, 63-64
73. Gaitskell, "Housewives, Maids and Mothers," 248
74. Gaitskell, "Wailing for Purity," 347
75. Deborah Gaitskell, "Upward All and Play the Game: The Girl Wayfarers' Association in the Transvaal, 1925-1975," in Peter Kallaway, ed., Apartheid and Education: The Education of Black South Africans (Johannesburg, 1984), 246-47, 252-53
76. Gaitskell, "Housewives, Maids or Mothers," 246
77. Gaitskell, "Wailing for Purity," 344
78. See also Phillips's recommendations in The Bantu in the City, 169-171. Gaitskell points out that one of the problems sex educators faced among Christian converts was a reluctance to talk openly about sex. Ironically, in their quest for respectability, many converts had absorbed a particularly prudish Victorian Puritanism. Many Christian educators, like Phillips, wanted to introduce much greater candor into the discussion but found that it was extremely difficult to shift the attitudes of converts who had learned to conflate sex with obscenity. Audiences often refused to participate out of embarrassment. This was particularly true of the atmosphere in manyanos
79. See CAD, UOD 2007 E226, exchange of letters between New Education Fellowship and Department of Education, 1935-1937
80. The practice of offering new housing on a family basis was, of course, not confined to the Witwatersrand. See, for example, Christopher Saunders, "From Ndabeni to Langa," Studies in the History of Cape Town, 1 (1979)
81. on the development of Langa township in Cape Town, and Anne Mager, Gender and the Making of a South African Bantustan (Portsmouth, N.H., 1999), 47-71, on the "model" Zwelitsha township in the Eastern Cape
82. City of Johannesburg, Director of Social Welfare, Annual Report for 21 Nov. 1939-30 June 1940, 16, 22
83. For an overview of birth control efforts among whites in the 1930s see Klausen, "Poor Whitiesm," 53-78
84. For more detail on the BMH see Catherine Burns, "Controlling Birth: Johannesburg 1920-1960," South African Historical Journal 50, 2004, 170-98
85. See Hyslop, "White working-class Women," particularly 57-72
86. Jochelson, "Sexually Transmitted Diseases," 221
87. Jochelson, The Colour of Disease, Chapter 1
88. Jeeves, "Public Health," 83-84
89. Jochelson, "Sexually Transmitted Diseases," 224-26
90. Jochelson, "Sexually Transmitted Diseases," 229
91. See, for example, S. P. Viljoen, Report on the Inter-departmental Committee on Native Juvenile Unemployment on the Witwatersrand and in Pretoria (Pretoria, 1951), 6
92. Jochelson, "Sexually Transmitted Diseases," 232
93. For an overview of Ducktail subculture see Kate Mooney, "Ducktails, Flick-knives and Pugnacity: Subcultural and Hegemonic Masculinities in South Africa, 1948-1960," Journal of Southern African Studies, 24, 4 (1998), 753-74
94. See Kate Mooney, "The Conundrum of Discourses on Youth: Knowledge, Power and State Responses to the Ducktail Subculture in the 1950s," unpublished paper presented to the Institute for Advanced Social Research, University of the Witwatersrand, October 1999, 2-3
95. and Clive Glaser, "The Mark of Zorro: Sexuality and Gender Relations in the Tsotsi Youth Gang Subculture on the Witwatersrand," African Studies 51, 1 (1992)
96. For a comparison of tsotsi gangs in East London, see Mager, Gender, 146-72
97. and Anne Mager and Gary Minkley, "Reaping the Whirlwind: The East London Riots of 1952," in Philip Bonner, Peter Delius, and Deborah Posel, eds., Apartheid's Genesis 1935-1962 (Johannesburg, 1993), 229-51
98. Bonner has also described the somewhat different phenomenon of migrant, and recently immigrant, Basotho ethnic gangs on the Rand known as Russians. In the late 1940s and 1950s they too were notorious for sexual coercion and harassment in Witwatersrand townships. See Philip Bonner, "The Russians on the Reef, 1947-1957: Urbanization, Gang Warfare and Ethnic Mobilization," in Bonner, Delius, and Posel, eds., Apartheid's Genesis
99. See also Clive Glaser, "Whistles and Sjamboks: Crime and Policing in Soweto, 1960-1976," South African Historical Journal 51 (2005)
100. David Goodhew, "The People's Police Force: Communal Policing Initiatives in the Western Areas of Johannesburg, circa 1930-1962," Journal of Southern African Studies 19, 3 (1993)
101. For a broader analysis of African urban working class families in Johannesburg striving for respectability in the face of a generally uncaring central state and destabilizing influences such as gangs see David Goodhew, Respectability and Resistance: A History of Sophiatown (New York, 2004)
102. See UWHPL, SAIRR Collection AC623, file 11.1. "Home and Family Life," 1964-1974
103. Barbara Klugman, "Decision-making on Contraception Amongst a Sample of Urban African Working Women"(M.A. thesis, University of the Witwatersrand, 1988), 28
104. For a similar debate at around the same time in Southern Rhodesia, see Amy Kaler, Running After Pills: Politics, Gender, and Contraception in Colonial Zimbabwe (Portsmouth, N.H., 2003), Chapter 2
105. Burns, "Controlling Birth," 176, 197-98
106. Klugman, "Decision-making," 101
107. Barbara Klugman, "The Politics of Contraception in South Africa," Women's Studies International Forum 13, 3 (1990), 267-268