Hostels in South Africa: Continuity and Change

Hostels are colonial, apartheid institutions which served to accommodate and control the presence and movement of black people in the cities as they straddled the rural and the urban spaces for employment purposes. They are one way in which the capitalist economy addressed the black working class’s urban housing needs, controlling their reproduction, exploitation and oppression. Hostels as institutions were wedded to the social, cultural and political formations in the country. Hostels were classed, sexed, gendered and racialised spaces of oppression and exploitation, firstly of black men by the whites and later of black women by whites and men as well. Hostels were an extension of the compound system, a much tighter humiliating system of control was established in the mines to house the migrant mineworkers. I called them spaces of perplexity; others called them communities in isolation; an extension of the rural; total institutions; segregated and gendered spaces; violent and volatile spaces; sites of violence and repression; sites of significance. The government has tried to make homes from hostels and called them community residential units. Hostels are a reflection of the perplexities, the paradox of blending the new with the old without eliminating the old, and sometimes having the old seemingly overcoming the new. Hostels are places of political struggle, struggle for a livelihood, struggle for accommodation, and struggle for economic development as people are seen establishing their small businesses which are sometimes located in informal settlements. This study relied on ethnographic research and it argues that the continuity and change in the hostels demonstrate a new kind of dependency whereby black working class was dependant on the hostel for income, housing and protection or “safety”, now the working class continues to have dependency because there is free housing, water and electricity.