Mothers on the move: manyanos and the social history of transportation in a South African homeland township, 1963–1990

ABSTRACT

Histories of bus boycotts and of the taxi business in apartheid South Africa have been told with male activists and taxi entrepreneurs as the protagonists. Women’s oral histories reframe transportation history to include the experiences of commuters. This article is a history of travel by African Christian women’s organizations (manyanos) in the township of Mdantsane. Township infrastructure presented barriers to these social organizations, but in the 1960s and 1970s manyanos adapted their mobility practices to attract members. The bus boycotts of the 1980s and the growth of the taxi industry were connected to protest against the apartheid order. However, this revolution in transportation had ambiguous consequences for commuters. As dissatisfied commuters in the late-apartheid urban landscape, manyano women continued to innovate travelling strategies to maintain local and long-distance connections. Their experiences show that commuters, as well as governments and transport-owners, shape the possibilities of urban travel in twentieth-century Africa.

RÉSUMÉ

Les histoires des boycotts du transport en autobus et des compagnies de taxis en Afrique du Sud à l'ère de l'apartheid ont été racontées par des hommes activistes et entrepreneurs de taxi comme protagonistes. Les récits oraux des femmes recadrent l'histoire des transports pour y inclure les expériences des navetteurs. Cet article porte sur l'histoire des déplacements des associations de femmes africaines chrétiennes (Manyanos) dans le township de Mdantsane. L'infrastructure des townships comportait des obstacles à ces organisations sociales, mais dans les années 60 et 70, les Manyanos ont adapté leurs pratiques de mobilité pour attirer des membres. Les boycotts du transport en autobus des années 80 et la croissance de l'industrie du taxi étaient liés aux protestations contre le système de l'apartheid. Cependant, cette révolution dans les transports a eu des conséquences ambiguës pour les navetteurs. En tant que navetteuses insatisfaites dans le paysage urbain des dernières années de l'apartheid, les femmes manyanos ont continué à innover dans leurs stratégies de déplacement pour maintenir des connexions locales et à longue distance. Leurs expériences montrent que les navetteurs, de même que les gouvernements et les propriétaires des compagnies de transport, ont façonné les possibilités de déplacements urbains en Afrique du vingtième siècle.

KEYWORDS:

• South Africa
• apartheid
• transportation
• women
• oral history

MOTS-CLÉS:

• Afrique du Sud
• apartheid
• transports
• femmes
• histoire orale

Acknowledgements

I am grateful to the interviewees who welcomed me in their homes and shared their stories. Phelisa Mtima ably assisted with translations for some of the interviews; this article owes its origins to her intellectual curiosity and dedication to uncovering the complexity of Mdantsane's history.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1 Race is a social construct, and the terminology of racial categories changes over time. In South Africa, the terms “African,” “Indian,” and “Coloured” (i.e. of mixed racial ancestry) were at one time legal categories assigned by the state. However, these terms continue to have meaning in post-apartheid South Africa. In this article, “black” is used in the Black Consciousness tradition, to refer to all people of colour. “African” refers to people from southern Africa who speak Nguni and Sotho-Tswana languages. In the Eastern Cape, the dominant Nguni language is isiXhosa.

2 See the list of interviews with the author below. While church archives have usually not collected records from local manyano branches, the Queenstown branch of the Methodist women’s manyano is an exception. Its minute-books from 1938 until the 1980s are part of the Methodist Collection at the Cory Library of Rhodes University in Makhanda. These local manyano records provide detailed record of weekly meetings, special events and conferences.

3 Plan of Neighbourhood Unit 1, Box 476, Mdantsane Planning Files, Eastern Cape Provincial Archives (ECPA), Qonce (King Williams Town), South Africa.

4 The rail line was operated by South African Railways, which was entangled in a long-lasting bureaucratic dispute over its service to Mdantsane. The East London (EL) City Council wanted the trains to run more frequently to take pressure off the bus system, but the Interdepartmental Committee for Non-White Transport ruled against this, for reasons that are not apparent in the archival record. For this reason, the trains never accounted for a large portion of Mdantsane’s commuter custom. See Minutes of a Meeting between EL City Council, EL Chamber of Commerce, and National Road Departments, 13 June 1968. (26) N13/2/1/4/4/1, Box 475, Mdantsane Planning Files, ECPA.

5 The Queenstown Methodist Women’s Manyano, whose detailed records have been preserved, provides a point of comparison. In 1959, the Queenstown Methodist manyano had 291 members. Rhodes University, Cory Library, Methodist Collection, C5: Box 4, Minutes of the Quarterly Session of the Queenstown Manyano, 27 August 1959.

6 “Mdantsane Hit by Transport Costs” (Daily Dispatch 1966). Income statistics for Mdantsane in the early 1960s are not available, but in 1960 in East London’s segregation locations, “the majority of households record[ed] a per capita weekly income of less than R2” (Pauw 1973, 28–29). Statistics on household income in Mdantsane in the mid-1970s suggest that this average income had remained the same (Black, “Economic Development in the Ciskei,” 1980, 21). In the early 1960s the monthly rent for a standard four-room house in Mdantsane was R6. Monthly transportation costs for a single commuter could easily equal R6, so it is probable that for many households, transportation took a larger part of the monthly budget than rent (Mayer and Mayer 1971, 295).

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada [grant number 752-2020-0068] and by the Department of History and the College of Social Science at Michigan State University.

Notes on contributors

Katie Carline

Katie Carline is a PhD candidate in the Department of History at Michigan State University. Her research interests include women's history, urban history, religious history and the history of consumer culture in Africa.