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Acknowledgements
This paper is drawn from the author's doctoral research (Harrison 2003). Sixty in-depth interviews and seven focus groups were conducted with residents in an inner-city neighbourhood between January 2000 and August 2001, three of them conducted by the author and four by a research company. The author is grateful to Jo Beall and Sue Parnell for permission to use the field data collected by Progressus as part of a study undertaken under the auspices of ESCOR Commissioned Research on Urban Governance, Partnership and Poverty in Johannesburg (Beall, Crankshaw, and Parnell 2001). These data were analysed through the use of a computer-assisted qualitative analysis package Atlas TI. Thanks to Dennis Rogers at the London School of Economics and Political Science for his input. The views expressed in this paper reflect those of the author.
Notes
1. The criminal element in Yeoville, particularly the foreign residents, were, unsurprisingly, apprehensive about chatting to me, fearing that I was part of the police force. This insecurity was exacerbated by a police raid on immigrants in the inner city of Johannesburg in early 2000. Notwithstanding these difficulties, I was able to make contact through my informants. Since I ensured complete anonymity for the interviewees, hence this paper makes no reference to specific individuals.
2. Closer social networks in urban townships can also serve to protect individuals involved in criminal activities.
3. Dennis Rogers argues that there must be rival networks operating within the inner city. In the course of the fieldwork, no reference was made to these rival networks. If anything, interviewees stressed the utilitarian nature of these relationships (interviewee 33, 18 May 2001 and interviewee 53, 1 August 2001, both in Johannesburg).
4. The original definition of a tsotsi dates from the 1940s, and referred to a ‘flashily dressed African street thug’. Nowadays the term is used to refer to individuals involved in street crime.
5. ‘Home-boy ties’ refers to the ongoing relationships African urban dwellers have to their place of origin. These ties are used for mutual aid among the group (Harries-Jones Citation1969: 298).