Translocal Lives: Gender and Rural Mobilities in South Africa, 1970–2020

ABSTRACT

Rural spaces in South Africa remain crucially important to the material, emotional, and cultural wellbeing of many South Africans, and many ‘rural’ lives have long been highly mobile and dynamic. Women in rural areas, in particular, provide diverse maintenance work that sustains translocal households – entities that sprawl across rural, peri-urban, and urban space. This article situates South African mobilities, especially those of women, in the historical context of the past fifty years, exploring the changing nature of connections between rural and urban lives of Black South Africans through the lens of a village in a former ‘homeland’ in northeastern Limpopo Province. Whereas analyses tend to focus on migrants, often viewing rural people as immobile or out of step with modernity, the focus here is on those who remain principally rural yet maintain mobilities of diverse kinds. Rooted in the qualitative methods of oral history, social history, and gender history, the article provides a fine-grained analysis of rural households, the lives of those who remain in or return to rural areas, and rural contributions within translocal households and economies.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 Those who return to rural locales most often during their urban sojourn are more likely to return permanently. One meta-study revealed that predominant reasons for return to rural locales include illness (27%), loss of work (18%), retirement (15%), and work found closer to origin household (15%) (Posel and Marx 2013).

2 Village name is changed to protect the privacy of community members. While population statistics disaggregated by gender are not available for the village, a majority of adult inhabitants are women, owing to long-term patterns of labour migration and the longer life expectancy of women. Statistics for the municipality, Greater Tzaneen Municipality, are revealing: 96% of the population is Black African and there are 100 females per 94 males. Men slightly outnumber women in the 20–29 age brackets (reflecting women’s higher employment rates and high mobility in this cohort). The female preponderance grows markedly above age 30, in part reflecting women’s rural household responsibilities: women are 54% at 30–34 years; 57% at 35–39; 61% by 45–49 (RSA 2019d). Research participants have requested that their names be included in my research outputs, as is common practice in oral history research as a means of acknowledging and honouring the contributions of research partners. To protect the privacy of the wider community, in this essay I use first names only. Commentaries and quotations are drawn from recorded interviews and conversations with those identified by first names: individual farmers, age cohorts, and focus groups at Hleketani Community Garden in Jomela between May 2012 and December 2019; rural youth living in or returning from the city, May 2016 (Andrew and Livers) and May 2020 (others). Recordings and field notes in the possession of the author. Most interviews were translated by Basani Ngobeni, while a minority were conducted in English.

3 In the first years of research 27 women worked at the farm, which was founded in 1992. The number has fallen slightly due to aging and the drought crisis (Vibert 2016) but we continue to interview some retired farmers. Twenty-four women remain formal members of the project.

4 Many argue that the meaningful rate is the ‘expanded’ rate of 38.5%, including ‘discouraged job seekers’ (Webster 2019). Unemployment is highest among youth, from school leaving to 35. Numbers are higher still as a result of COVID-19.

5 In line with much recent scholarship I view borders as processes – e.g., Van Houtum and Boudeltje (2009); Amilhat-Szary and Giraut (2015).