Soliciting sailors: The temporal dynamics of dockside prostitution in Durban and Cape Town

Journal of Southern African Studies

Volumn 35, Issue 3, 2009, Pages 699-713

  Trotter, Henry ^a  

^a YALE UNIVERSITY   (United States)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

ACCULTURATION; CONTAINER SHIP; CULTURAL INFLUENCE; LANGUAGE; PROSTITUTION; RISK ASSESSMENT; SHIPPING; TRAWLING;

CAPE TOWN; DURBAN; KWAZULU-NATAL; SOUTH AFRICA; WESTERN CAPE;

EID: 75649125340     PISSN: 03057070     EISSN: 14653893     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1080/03057070903101904     Document Type: Article

References (41)

1. This comparative data comes from R. Gardiner (ed.), The Shipping Revolution: The Modern Merchant Ship (Edison, NJ, Conway Maritime Press, 1992), pp. 42-62.
2. The focus of dockside activities shifted from the Point to the Bayhead in Durban, and in Cape Town from the Victoria & Alfred Waterfront to the Ben Schoemann docks near Woodstock.
3. In South Africa's case, port restructuring coincided with the implementation of the Group Areas Act. Coloured and African residents of Cape Town's Docklands (District One) and District Six, Port Elizabeth's South End and Durban's Point - all dockside communities - were forcibly evicted to distant townships just as containerization was taking hold.
4. A. Vigarié, 'From Break-Bulk to Containers: The Transformation of General Cargo Handling and Trade', GeoJournal, 48, 1 (May 1999), p. 7.
5. B. The classic account of pre-containerisation dockside port cultures around the world is S. Hugill, Sailortown (London, Routledge & Kegan, 1967). For an example of life aboard a general cargo ship.
6. see A.W. Kinghorn, Before the Box Boats: The Story of a Merchantman (Emsworth, Kenneth Mason, 1983).
7. This is a favourite quote from Durban's dockside prostitutes to describe the transience of their seafaring clients.
8. These nightclubs were started by Greek immigrants in the 1970s just as the dockside communities and their suikerhuisies (brothels, literally 'sugar houses') went into decline. Two clubs from that era remain open today.
9. The seminal contribution to the importance of maritime networks for international cultural transmission is P. Linebaugh and M. Rediker, The Many-Headed Hydra: Sailors, Slaves, Commoners and the Hidden History of the Revolutionary Atlantic (Boston, Beacon Press, 2000).
10. For a historiography of dockside prostitution in South Africa, see H. Trotter, 'Dockside Prostitution in South African Ports', History Compass, 6, 3 (May 2008), pp. 673-90.
11. Club owners discourage local men from entering the clubs because they have been known to interfere with the business between the women and the sailors. However, the clubs allow a handful of local regulars to patronize their establishments so long as they behave.
12. For more demographic details, see H. Trotter, 'The Women of Durban's Dockside Sex Industry', in R. Pattman and S. Khan (eds), Undressing Durban (Durban, Madiba Publishers, 2007), pp. 441-52.
13. In the early evenings, before going to the clubs, I met foreign sailors at the Mission to Seafarers, a churchsponsored centre for social, recreational and spiritual enjoyment in the harbour. There I conducted one or two in-depth interviews each evening and joined in numerous group conversations. This allowed the sailors to talk about issues such as sex, prostitution, family, work and money without the distraction of loud music or flirtatious sex workers.
14. For a more comprehensive ethnographic account of my research into this nightlife, see H. Trotter, Sugar Girls & Seamen: A Journey into the World of Dockside Prostitution in South Africa (Johannesburg, Jacana, 2008).
15. In years past, some women also walked the quays looking for business on the ships, but security measures since 11 September 2001 have made loitering on the docks virtually impossible.
16. Club owners place temporal restraints on the women, insisting they arrive by 10 p.m. and depart only after 2 a.m., or pay a R100 fine. The fine encourages the women to solicit during prime hours and recoups the presumed loss of alcohol sales from sailors who depart with the women early for sex. Thus, even though the women use the clubs as pick-up joints, the owners are able to secure their share of the sailors' earnings too.
17. They also choose this casual attire because it camouflages their occupation from the communities that they live in. They do not want to advertise their work while travelling. If revealing clothing guaranteed business success, they would wear it (even if they had to change clothes at the club), but since the men almost always outnumber the women by a larger margin than in Durban, getting attention does not require great effort.
18. The women say that most sailors prefer having sex without condoms. They often grant this privilege to the seamen for the sake of obtaining greater fees, building emotional bonds and enhancing the possibility of securing them as repeat-clients. Both parties understand the risks involved and few are surprised when pregnancies result.
19. At any given time, about half a dozen clubwomen solicit with swollen stomachs. Such casual riskiness, coupled with the often-visible results of such behaviour, makes paternity claims a reasonable part of dockside discourse. That is to say, seamen do not find it odd if women direct paternal responsibility at them. Of course, pregnancy constitutes a major burden for the women, but they try to take advantage of the financial opportunities it briefly offers them in their relationships with the seafarers.
20. More than that, she manipulates a sailor's ego with such a claim, because it proves that he is 'virile' and 'masculine'. If he craves such ego gratification, a sailor may accept paternity, but if the baby represents more of a burden than a joy he will probably deny it. And if he hears that she was with someone else at around the same time as he was, he will be difficult to persuade. Thus a woman must be careful not to name men who are at the club at the same time or who sail on the same ship. She must be sure to space out her paternity claims as the sailors come and go.
21. Few women are proud of this ploy, but most feel the sailors do not deserve better because they are serial paternal offenders whose pattern is to impregnate and abandon, leaving the women to care for the children by themselves.
22. Such temporal opportunism also allows the women to fabricate paternity claims out of nothing - so-called 'phantom pregnancies'. Some women - more often the hard-core drug addicts careless of future consequences -include paternity claims in their solicitation arsenal even if they are not pregnant.
23. That a client's attractiveness can drive down the price suggests that the women sometimes seek enjoyment in sex, not just pecuniary reward. In certain cases, cost is never mentioned due to the cultural preferences of the client. Japanese sailors, for instance, are said to take this as an insult to their personal sense of generosity. Allowing such clients to believe that they are merely being generous for an evening of 'intimacy' - rather than that they are paying cash for sex - helps substantiate the idea that the interaction was 'authentic' and not polluted by commoditisation. Other nationalities often appreciate settling the costs upfront.
24. Going to the ship, which was a very popular option in the past, has been made very difficult due to strict security measures initiated since 11 September 2001. The International Ship and Port Facility Security (ISPS) Code bans all non-essential personnel from the commercial harbour, including prostitutes. Whereas previously the women could actually solicit from the quays and the gangways, today they are banned from the harbour. Although some do sneak onto the ships sometimes in Cape Town with the collusion of taxi drivers and security guards, they face stiff fines if they are caught.
25. Women who have also worked in other sectors as streetwalkers or agency escorts say that local and foreign white men are more likely to request 'kinky' activities than the sailors. They say that most seamen just want a conventional sexual encounter - i.e. 'missionary position' intercourse.
26. Although Cape Town women charge higher fees than their Durban counterparts, both groups earn a similar monthly income due to the higher volumes of the Durban trade.
27. In other outdoor prostitution sectors (on the streets, at truck-stops, around mining hostels), sex workers are often unable to insist on condom use due to the threat of or actual violence by their clients. This threat is absent in the dockside trade, however, as the women enjoy greater power vis-à-vis their transient low-status clients.
28. See H. Trotter, 'Navigating Risk: Lessons from the Dockside Sex Trade for Reducing Violence in South Africa's Prostitution Industry', Sexuality Research and Social Policy, 4, 4 (December 2007), pp. 106-19.
29. Abortion is surprisingly rare, especially in Cape Town. For a variety of moral, religious, social, logistical and financial reasons, most dockside sex workers see their pregnancies through to term. Childbirth - confirming one's motherhood status - can offer a road to redemption, in that some women see their moral and social salvation through their children. For an extended discussion on this topic.
30. see H. Trotter, 'Why Don't Prostitutes Abort Their Fetuses?', available at http://www.sugargirlsandseamen.com/2008/01/why-prostitutes-d.html, retrieved on 4 April 2009.
31. After watching their four colleagues wither away and die from AIDS-related symptoms, many Durban women attributed their demise to the sorcery of a prostitute who was said to have cast spells on them. They believed that this woman was jealous of the others and used 'black magic' to kill them. They felt certain that their colleagues died as a consequence of human intention.
32. M. Zhao and M.S.V. Amante, 'Chinese and Filipino Seafarers: A Race to the Top or the Bottom?', Modern Asian Studies, 39, 3 (July 2005), p. 551.
33. For two months in 2003 I sailed on two container ships, from Long Beach, California, to Le Havre, and from London to Cape Town. On the first ship, the German officers and Tuvaluan (Pacific Islanders) crewmen spoke English with each other, though neither had native fluency. On the second ship, British officers and Filipino crewmen spoke together with fluency. They assured me that knowledge of 'maritime English' was essential on internationally-crewed container vessels.
34. Though Filipinos do come to South African ports with the greatest regularity, they speak excellent English due to their history of American colonisation and long-term involvement in the international shipping trade.
35. According to older prostitutes and club owners, Japanese sailors 'paid by the wad, not by the bill'; they 'treated rands like it was Monopoly money'; they 'threw it around like play money'.
36. This information comes from retired dockside prostitutes I have been interviewing since early 2006. Women who specialised in the Japanese trade were called 'Jap jollers', those who partied only with Japanese. Some married Japanese men and moved to Japan. Most have children from Japanese sailors.
37. Typically, when a woman enters the nightlife, she learns the language that is most useful at the time, sticking to it the rest of her working career even when its usefulness declines as dockside demographics change. Japanese, Taiwanese and Korean were previously the languages to learn; now they are Chinese and Indonesian. Although Vietnamese sailors are occasional clients, they are exceedingly poor, so no woman has yet felt it worth the trouble to learn their tongue.
38. For more on these impulses, see D. MacCannell, The Tourist: A New Theory of the Leisure Class (New York, Schocken Books, 1976).
39. This should not be confused with the cultural 'dumbing down' process described in T. Cowen, Creative Destruction: How Globalization is Changing the World's Cultures (Princeton, NJ, Princeton University Press, 2002).
40. Although seeking the lowest common denominator (LCD) can indeed atrophy locally distinctive cultures, Durban's dockside women use the LCD for practical financial purposes when working among foreigners while still maintaining rich cultural lives with their own ethnic associates.
41. If the sailors were black Americans, this might be different. Some coloured women who were prostitutes in the 1960s and 1970s reported to me that their direct association with black Americans - people who inspired their contemporaries' cultural imagination - increased their prestige in their communities.