Households, history and black urbanisation: Response to Graaff∗

Support for research which gives rise to this note was supplied by the Senate Research Committee, University of the Wltwatersrand, the Richard Ward Foundation of the same university and the Human Sciences Research Council. Views expressed, however, are those of the author alone.

In the literature on black urbanisation in South Africa, the notion prevails that specific and conscious state actions ‘contained’ black urbanisation. A sophisticated statement of the contained urbanisation view is found in the work of Charles Simkins. Simkins employed a narrow definition of ‘urban’ settlements; by broadening the definition of urban, Johann Graaff suggested that a much higher proportion of the black population is urbanised (albeit displaced) and concluded, among other things, that relatively few persons would seek to move to other urban places as a result of the removal of influx control. Graaff underestimated the scope of informal urbanisation, in part by arbitrary exclusion of non‐bantustan informal settlements, and in part by the neglect of much of the effectively non‐rural population of many ban tustan districts.

However, urbanisation is not in the end a statistical problem. Reclassification of settlements tells us nothing at all of the ways in which the people in those settlements actually live, or why they live where they do. In order to understand ‘urbanisation’ in South Africa, to grasp the factors which have produced its present state and to assess its likely future, alternative methods must be employed — as Graaff noted, ‘another way of thinking’ is required. Only by consideration of the nature (and history) of households — their reproduction, rural connection and ‘urban’ labour involvements — could a fuller understanding of the ‘non‐rural’ be developed.

Notes

Southern African Research Program, Yale University.

Support for research which gives rise to this note was supplied by the Senate Research Committee, University of the Wltwatersrand, the Richard Ward Foundation of the same university and the Human Sciences Research Council. Views expressed, however, are those of the author alone.