Prof. Noor Nieftagodien of the University of the Witwatersrand, South Africa, gave a public lecture at the American University of Cairo on Sunday, concluding his visit to Egypt in the context of a two-day workshop organised by the AUC.

The talk focused on squatter movements in 20th-century South Africa, particularly in the 1940s, and their role in urban politics.

Prof. Nieftagodien situated his topic within the context of “hidden histories” that take on a perspective beyond dominant historical narratives. In this context, South African squatter movements appear as compelling objects of study.

Although these movements have, in part, left sparse records, due both to their high rate of illiteracy and widespread scholarly neglect before the 1970’s, they can be shown to have played an important role in reshaping urban South Africa.

Squatter movements and women as subaltern agents

The talk aimed to show that the dominant historiography of urban policy has largely neglected the role of squatter movements, seeing them merely as appendages to more official institutions like the state or the African National Congress.

This has led scholars to ignore many key processes, such as the complex internal dynamics of the squatter movements, their role in urban politics as catalysts of discursive change, and their relationship with the state, in which their “visibility and invisibility” was negotiated.

The 1940s were crucial in this regard, as they saw the first major urban revolution in South African history. In preceding decades, according to Prof. Nieftagodien, cities were symbols of white privilege: the 1923 Native (Urban Areas) Act stated that black South Africans were only to be considered “temporary sojourners” in cities, and could only enter to tend “to the wants of the white population”.

This segregation created an image of the black South African as rural, traditional and inherently alien to urban life.

This ideological rationalisation of racism was disrupted in the 1940s, largely due to profound economic changes. For the first time in history, the secondary industry replaced mining as South Africa’s most important economic sector.

This meant that cities became increasingly to depend on low to medium-skilled black South African labour staying permanently. The increased migration of black South Africans to the cities meant that for the first time, they outnumbered the urban white community, challenging the image of an all-white city of previous decades.

More importantly, this increased migration was mixed in terms of gender. Previously, only male black South Africans had moved to the cities as temporary labourers, but with this more permanent migration of families, women were for the first time moving in equal proportion.

The settlement of families meant that women were starting to play a central role in urban politics, largely an informal one.

According to Prof. Nieftagodien, this indicates a bifurcation of urban policy. On the one hand, there is the formal side, which includes the relationship of movements like the ANC with the state authorities.

On the other hand, there is the informal agency in urban politics, which was heavily influenced by both women and the squatter movements.

This informal influence of women can be traced through the “yard”. There were yards behind every township house, often containing shacks that were managed by women, and they became the centre of a subaltern political sphere.

While the men were often rather conservative, women were the ones facing the everyday difficulties of precarious housing in the older, overcrowded townships, they were therefore often much more enthusiastic about the squatter movement than their husbands, who were sometimes “beaten” to join the squat movements, according to Prof. Nieftagodien.

A clash of narratives

This entire sphere is missed by the current dominant historical narrative about the 1940s in South Africa, which focuses entirely on the ANC and its activities.

However, the squatter movement was also a mass phenomenon: Prof. Nieftagodien estimates that there were over 100,000 squatters in South African cities by the mid-1940s.

The most important of these movements was led by James Mpanza, the founder of the township that later became known as Soweto, today the most famous of the townships.

These squatters, more than the ANC, asserted black South Africans “right to the city”, as Prof. Nieftagodien calls it. This not only entailed the right to be present in the city, but the right to appropriate it and to become part of it.

The arrival of the squatters thus represented a challenge to the dominant narrative of an all-white urban South Africa, and it was not one that could be easily ignored.

Although the apartheid state set up after 1948 meant a continued stigmatisation, white South Africans were fundamentally dependent on black labour, and this paradox meant that the black presence in the cities was partially unavoidable.

A closer look at the squatter movements further evidences a more complex and nuanced relationship between black South Africans and the state. The post-apartheid ANC-dominated narrative easily gives the impression that black South Africans were (and, to an extent, still are) automatically against the state.

Yet the squatter movements built up their own police corps, their own courts and their own entry checkpoints to the townships that they founded.

This clear social organisation shows that the squatters were not fundamentally opposed to the state, but rather, as argued in the lecture, that they craved more visibility and a share in a new and more just urban project in South Africa.

On the surface, the squatters merely demanded public housing, but this would seem to include a discursive demand for inclusion and visibility in urban life.

The existence of such implicit demands is corroborated by subsequent events. When the apartheid state did provide housing in the 1950s, the radicalisation decreased among black South Africans, as their isolation from urban life diminished, this isolation being a key incentive for radicalisation.

This process also illustrates the dissociation of the ANC-led narrative from the “hidden history” of the squatter movements. The 1950s saw an increased radicalisation of their demands and activities, just as the squatters, on the contrary, became less radical.

Thus, the 1950s are nowadays generally understood as a period of radicalisation for black South Africans, whereas the reality seems to have been much more nuanced.

A case for a richer history

The main point of Prof. Nieftagodien was thus to show that a more nuanced understanding of historical processes is needed, as evidenced by this topic in South African history. He stressed that a complex narrative could help us to understand the country’s current situation well.

He illustrated his point by linking up his narrative with current events: South Africa was the site of more than 12,000 protests in the fiscal year 2012-2013, according to a statement by the minister of police in September 2013.

Yet many of these protesters are also happy beneficiaries of social grants from the state. This mirrors earlier squatter movements’ complex relationship to a state that they rejected, yet simultaneously emulated in their new townships.

This complexity escapes the ANC-dominated narrative completely, yet this does not entail that the ANC and the squatter movements conflicted with each other in practice, as the squatters agreed with many of the ANC’s policies.

It simply shows that these movements, and the women in the townships, were at times acting outside of the ANC’s control, and understanding this agency is crucial to fully understand the history of 20^th century South Africa.

A last point further illustrates the importance of “hidden histories”. When asked about the recent outbreaks of xenophobic violence in South Africa, Prof. Nieftagodien traced the origins of such xenophobia back to the dominant nationalist post-apartheid narrative.

He also blamed the political notion of black South Africans as criminals, a leftover stigma from the apartheid that still survives in South African political discourse.

The fact that a young, armed black man symbolises both the heroic resistance against the apartheid and the violence of the black South African communities is a paradox, but can be resolved by considering all the relevant historical narratives.

Prof. Nieftagodien is a senior lecturer in the History Department of the University of the Witwatersrand. He also serves as the Chair of the History Workshop, is a member of the university Senate and serves on the board of the South African History Archives.