Street Life under a Roof by Emily Margaretten

Author:Emily Margaretten [Margaretten, Emily]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Social Science, General, Anthropology, Cultural & Social, Gender Studies, History, Africa, South, Republic of South Africa
ISBN: 9780252097690
Google: TZWJCgAAQBAJ
Publisher: University of Illinois Press
Published: 2015-09-15T05:45:42+00:00

“It's the truth.” Skora, a nineteen-year-old male living inside Point Place, is emphatic. “I'm telling you, I see things. The girls I stay with, I know them. They're sleeping with many boys, and they date many boys.”

I am not easily convinced by this one-way indictment, and so I ask Skora, “But what about the boys in Point Place?”

“And the boys, too,” Skora agrees. “But it's the boys’ thing.”

“What do you call a boy who sleeps around?” I ask.

“It's the same as the girls,” Skora replies. “He's an isifebe [bitch]. In the olden days, too, our fathers, our great-grandfathers, they had isithembu [polygamy].”

“Did you call them amasoka [pl. of isoka]?” I inquire.

“Yeah!”

“Is it good to be an isoka?”

“No,” Skora responds. “It's not right when a person is poor, because you're going to make the girl suffer.”

In the above conversation, Skora draws attention to the sexual promiscuity of the Point Place females. He then concedes that the males, too, engage in numerous love affairs. He refers to the boys, like the girls, as bitches but justifies their behavior as being a male “thing,” a prerogative passed down from their fathers and grandfathers, linked to the tradition of polygyny. Along these lines, Skora denounces the sexual exploits of the isoka as a problem not of gender inequality but of economic affordability. His explanation of why it is better not to have more than one girlfriend—or a girlfriend at all—is a common one among the Point Place males. They recognize that attracting a girlfriend for a day differs substantially from maintaining a girlfriend. Their insufficient earnings impede their ability to secure a long-lasting relationship. As Musikayisa, a twenty-one-year-old male, narrates, “I don't need a girlfriend because I'm barely surviving. Now if I get a girlfriend, what can I do with her? She'll want things. Now my money is too small to support her and me. Yeah, that's why.”

To support a girlfriend requires more than a few drinks or a few rand. It requires ongoing sustenance and material provisions that the Point Place boys often refer to through the idiom of food—particularly staple food. Such maintenance can be tiring. Twenty-seven-year-old Khaya, for instance, feels obliged to “think” for his girlfriend. No matter how meager his provisions, he must share them equally. “You have to think for them [girlfriends]. Every time you get something small, you have to take it to her. Sometimes if it's two slices [of bread], you have to take it up there to her room.” Although Khaya finds girlfriends wearisome, others, like eighteen-year-old Sandlana, take pleasure in the sustenance of these kinds of relationships: “I like to give that girl money, you see. If I give her money, she wants to eat that money with me, to share with me. And she, too, if she gives me money, I want to eat with her.” The nourishment derived from these types of relationships reflects a broader conceptualization of nakana: of taking care of one another.

Like the Point Place females, the males also link nakana to acts of domesticity and shared reciprocity.

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