In recent works on intimacy and home in South Africa, scholars question the assumptions about where ‘home’ ends, and who counts as ‘family’. In calls for curriculum change and the transformation of the university (discourses that were about access for both black students and black faculty), these questions of affiliation and ‘home’ have played a prominent role. In the student protest movement of 2015 and 2016, for example, a recurring discourse was to invoke ‘our mothers, the domestic workers’. This was partly an attempt to forge links between the students’ demands and those of casualized cleaning and catering staff on campus, but the invocation of ‘our mothers, the domestic workers’ also underlined the lineage of the university as one associated with ‘the big house’ and many black students’ feelings of being tolerated, at best, in spaces that historically did not imagine them as full citizens, but instead as marginal to the home that is South Africa.

Writings about the home and familial intimacies in these works have not shown evidence of a retreat into the home secured against an imagined hostile other, but have instead developed the links between intimacy, home and activist scholarship. In this new thinking, we also see frequent references made to the role of the researcher, and to the ways in which she (or he) has gained access to the intimacy documented and analysed. These works are attuned to questions around privacy and access: who gets to write, who gets to see, who gets to be an expert on private and intimate matters. While these are questions germane to many studies of humans, South African scholarship has been particularly (perhaps uniquely) distorted in favour of white expertise, and at the cost of black subjects.

This year marks the centenary of the publication of Solomon Tshekiso Plaatje's Native Life in South Africa (Reference Plaatje1982 [1916]). In her 1982 foreword to Plaatje's book, Bessie Head wrote that ‘[m]ost black South Africans suffer from a very broken sense of history. Native Life provides an essential, missing link’ (ibid.: xiii). The nature of this ‘missing link’ is, in the first place, that the text is a document about the impact of the passing of the Natives’ Land Act of 1913, through which black South Africans were excluded from power and divested of rights. Plaatje's analyses of the private and intimate lives of families he encountered while collecting material for his book make for the most memorable passages in Native Life and, I suggest, provide us with a template for scholarship on the ‘missing links’: histories of South Africa as ‘home’ to all, and histories of the black family in South Africa.

In Native Life in South Africa, Plaatje places himself inside and alongside the fugitives and sufferers whose plight he documents. His own family at home is invoked in the conclusion to the book, and he writes of the cost to him (and them) of having spent so much time away from home writing and travelling as part of the delegation to the UK to appeal for support. One of the most evocative scenes finds Plaatje bicycling through the landscape of his birth, which had ceased to be ‘home’ (ibid.: 83). This loss makes him experience an embodied fear he remembers also feeling when his own father died; this connection between family and country recurs as a trope throughout the book. In his description of the landscape with which his relationship is being deleted before his eyes, Plaatje describes a personal fear and haunting, as if he is racing on his bicycle in front of a creature who wishes to rob him of his dignity and inner life.

But there is another crucial strand to the way in which Plaatje imagines family, and it is through his call that black South Africans be recognized as members of a greater family of human beings. This intention is motivated by a claim to being members of a family to whom obligations and affiliations have been proven. The severance of this ‘missing link’ to a shared humanity is part of what the text documents, and the fact that the plea to the British failed is now part of the way we read Native Life. The text is a letter sent, received, and ignored. ‘Shall we appeal to you in vain? I hope not!’ (ibid.: 404) we read Plaatje saying to the British public, and Native Life is a document to this dashed hope and severed connection. In this complexly coded missive (part record to provide a missing link for black South Africans, part plea for recognition of dignity) we see another way in which Plaatje's work stands as an ancestor text to many academic works in which authors document, join up, reclaim and reconstitute the missing links of black histories and futures.

A very influential art installation that gave visual presence to this argument is Santu Mofokeng's Black Photo Album/Look at Me project, originally a slide show of photographs of black individuals and groups taken in studios from the 1890s onwards. Mofokeng has written about the ways in which black people were relegated especially when they were included as members of the ‘family of man’ (as he writes in the accompanying text in the book of the same name). In other words, precisely when notions of a universal family of man [sic] have been raised have black members of this ‘universal’ family been classified as lesser members of the human family. Mofokeng's project consists of collating a ‘black family album’ from photographs gathered from scattered sources, studio photographs that provide us with an imagined past and a visual missing link to what black Victorians might have been and might have become.

A further aspect of Mofokeng's project is that these archives are ‘illegible’ to certain regimes of looking; but through new approaches and methodologies, he writes, these images might become readable in different ways – as a supplement to the missing link. This is no simple fantasy project. The point is that the histories of the academic disciplines are implicated in, and mutually constitutive of, certain regimes of looking at black people as subjects. Mofokeng's album is a provocation to such histories. The photographs, he documents in the text included at the back of the book, have been scanned and enhanced (made whole), and (in the version I am reviewing here) printed on thick, textured paper and gathered in a beautiful clothbound book: a dignified product marking, and laying claim to, histories of complex black subjectivity.

A dominant reference in discussions about privacy and domesticity, wherever South African matters are discussed, has been Njabulo Ndebele's 1984 paper ‘Rediscovery of the ordinary’, later taken up in the seminal collection Rediscovery of the Ordinary: essays on South African literature and culture (Reference Ndebele1991). This essay is often misquoted, or cited in defence of a certain retreat into private worlds at the cost of more engaged ways of being and writing. Rather than an escape into personal (that is, apolitical) domesticity and ordinariness, Ndebele's paper is instead an activist agenda for transformation and for the cultivation of self-reflective scholarship and modes of living.

Perhaps Ndebele's most astute interpreter has been Pumla Gqola (in particular in her writings on spectacular masculinity and gendered violence; for some examples, see Gqola Reference Gqola2009; Reference Gqola2016), who has interpreted the comments about the ordinary and the spectacular in scorching feminist analyses that confirm Ndebele's insights as, in fact, an injunction to greater, not lesser, forms of activism. The rediscovery of the ordinary, understood this way, is related to the responsibility to forge and connect up the ‘missing links’ of the intimate lives of black individuals and families. The most innovative recent scholarship on and from South Africa interprets this to mean that the rediscovery of the ordinary requires tunnels to be built between activism, academia and personal choices. Ordinariness understood in this sense is an excavatory project that requires an insistent and activist engagement – not least with the ways in which knowledge is configured and disseminated, access negotiated and expert status established. In this sense, the ordinariness of the title is to be read as an injunction to ways of thinking and writing about black histories in South Africa as ‘ordinary’, an approach that requires the disciplines to question historical legacies that characterize black histories and individuals as ‘not ordinary’, not of ‘here’, not ‘at home’ in the academy. To put this differently, the future requires black presences in scholarship not as subjects to be discussed but as agents who will determine and set research agendas, occupy professorial offices and head research units.

A word that has appeared with striking frequency in recent writings about South Africa is ‘intimacy’, and many of these references go back to Ndebele's call to introspection and self-reflection. In an influential piece published just two years after the democratic transition in South Africa (‘A home for intimacy’; Reference Ndebele1996), Ndebele provides a narrative of returning to South Africa only to find his childhood home gone, the township redesigned so much as to be unrecognizable. This piece has deliberate echoes of Plaatje's narrative of the landscape that seems not to remember its son (Plaatje Reference Plaatje1982 [1916]: 83). In this piece, Ndebele writes about how home, for black South Africans, became ‘the shared experience of homelessness, the fellow-feeling of loss and the desperate need to regain something’. While celebrating a new sense of ‘the whole land’ as ‘home’, this capacious home has also, in the intervening decades, been emptied out of some things and values. The loneliness that results from decades of deliberate attempts at the destruction of the black family has resulted in what he calls ‘the demise of intimacy in our history of sensibility’. Rediscovering the ordinary, interpreted in this way, is a commitment to personal and scholarly practices that excavate and build ‘a home for intimacy’. This ordinary ‘home’ is therefore not a room in which doors and windows are shut and the interior space claustrophobically barred; instead, this ordinariness is a self-conscious place from which to view and analyse the home: its suppressed histories and the missing links that need connecting up. This is worth underlining: the family and the home need to be historicized, mapped and analysed from the ‘home’.

In his foreword to the recent edited collection by Megan Jones and Jacob Dlamini (Categories of Persons: rethinking ourselves and others), Ndebele starts his reflections – as he does so frequently – by placing himself on a journey. The purpose of the metaphor in this case is to imagine the self from the outside (Ndebele writes of seeing an image of the plane in which he is travelling projected on a screen inside the cabin). This image (the body in a cabin with other bodies, staring at a representation of the collection of bodies, needing to imagine the self as separate from, but also part of, the collective) is used to analyse how, since 1994, South Africans have met ‘one another in various contexts’ in public life. This encounter yields ‘intimacies of mutual suspicions and discoveries; understandings and misunderstandings; opportunities lost and recovered; regrets and triumphs’ – doomed to live in and acknowledge a ‘fatal intimacy’ (pp. xi–xii). Staging such a public sphere, write the editors, is part of the project of their collection.

In many discussions of a shared public life, Paul Gilroy's (Reference Gilroy2004) theorization of ‘conviviality’ has been much cited (in this collection, see Jones, p. 42; also, for a representative use, Mbembe Reference Mbembe2016), but Ndebele is after something less optimistic and more unsettling. The qualifier ‘fatal’ to describe the intimacies of shared space is meant to mark and accentuate the ways in which the intimacies of the black family and the black self have been in conflict with, beleaguered by, and brought into question through other versions of the self, in particular hostile white selves. The intimacy Ndebele theorizes shows awareness of what he calls elsewhere the ‘international umbrella of whiteness’ that has protected whiteness (white subjectivity, white zones of intimacy, inherited white privilege) in South Africa. Instead, he argues for an approach that analyses intimacy as something potentially ‘fatal’. This vision of the public sphere resists the utopian horizon so dominant in much writing about race in South Africa, and the book is presented as an invitation to readers to enter this intimately conflicted future, and to imagine conflicting regimes of looking as both ordinary and necessary.

In numerous scholarly discussions in the last few years, intimacy has been described and analysed (and some of those instances are discussed below). Much cited versions of intimacy are those by Mark Sanders in his book Complicities (Reference Sanders2002) and Sarah Nuttall's conceptualization of Entanglement (Reference Nuttall2009) in her book of the same name (‘a condition of being twisted together or entwined; it speaks of an intimacy gained, even if it was resisted, or ignored or uninvited … [entanglement] is a term which may gesture towards a relationship or a set of social relationships that is complicated, ensnaring, in a tangle, but which also implies a human foldedness’). Kerry Bystrom, in her work Democracy at Home in South Africa: family fictions and transitional culture (discussed below) and in her collaboration with Nuttall in Cultural Studies (Reference Bystrom and Nuttall2013), quotes Homi K. Bhabha on ‘interstitial intimacy’; Terry Kurgan uses the term ‘intimate exposure’ to describe the ways in which private selves are documented in the virtual public space of the Hotel Yeoville project (discussed below); Anne-Maria Makhulu (whose book Making Freedom is also discussed below) uses the term ‘intimate violence’ (p. xxi) to mark the many challenges to making home faced by the communities whose lives she documents, and with whom she talks about the meanings of home.

Makhulu's book Making Freedom: apartheid, squatter politics, and the struggle for home documents the efforts of black families to make homes in the squatter camps and illegal settlements around Cape Town, and the contingent forms of intimacy available to them. Makhulu's book is informed by the politics of shack dwellers’ movements such as Abahlali baseMjondolo, often translated as ‘the people of the shacks’, but the collective term abahlali means, more powerfully, ‘those who stay’, stressing that these humans and their families are not passing through but are people who live here and are making homes. Mamphela Ramphele's evocatively named A Bed Called Home: life in the migrant labour hostels of Cape Town (Reference Ramphele1993) was a similar project and hugely important in laying the ground for studies of the kinds of ‘homes’ apartheid prohibited and created. Makhulu's project is intent on the daily practices of making a home, caring for the self and for others (p. 29). Her attention to the ways in which homes are decorated (p. 162), for example, does not attempt to aestheticize, but instead documents the ordinary decency of everyday lives (and deaths).

Here her work differs markedly from some other projects that aim a camera lens into shack homes to find in the ways these have been decorated an inspirational ‘shack chic’ aesthetic. An extreme (but representative) example is the photo book actually called Shack Chic (Fraser Reference Fraser2002), with colourful decontextualized details that draw from the vernacular of aspirational home magazines and do not encourage the consumers of the images to reflect on the ethics of displaying the private homes of marginalized families in this way. Makhulu's focus is different, and aims instead to historicize these homes as evidence of acts of resilience and resistance, and to present the individuals and families as not abject. For the cover of the book, an image from Zwelethu Mthethwa's photographic series Hope Chest has been used. Mthethwa's project has a near identical urge to document without glamorizing (see, for example, the interview with Okwui EnwezorFootnote ² ), and the recurring image of the ‘hope chest’ (traditionally a container for linen and clothing organized by women in preparation for an imagined future) is visually evocative of the work of recovering and rediscovering the broken chains of history.

Makhulu's book makes another important intervention. The visibility of books about the children of the struggle generation has created an archive of the impact on home life of political activism. Makhulu writes in her acknowledgements of the families of the disappeared, and of how she learned only later in life of her own father's political work, invisible to a child's eye and – crucially – secret at the time, and so not part of the intimate family memory. The point she wishes to make with these references is that revolutionaries and activists are (and were) all members of families, and that these families needed and now need care.

To see those living in informal settlements as individuals entitled to dignity, and as humans with complex interiority, is part of a process of understanding how violence is expressed in contemporary South Africa, and what the prehistories are of the many intimate acts of violence that leave their mark on home lives. A subject not discussed often enough is the ways in which being male or female facilitates access to research topics. Makhulu writes of where a woman researcher can go (p. xxii) and of the avenues open to her (an academic based at a university in the USA, visiting a city she knew as a child, and with access to a comfortable and safe home at the end of a day of research and interviews) to move freely, entering and exiting the settlements and driving home in the evenings. These comments frame the project and provide new avenues for thinking through access, intimacy and power. The research in this book aims to connect up, rather than seal shut, the domestic spaces.

Kerry Bystrom's Democracy at Home in South Africa: family fictions and transitional culture is an original and wide-ranging study of what she calls ‘transitional artworks’ produced in a time of ‘transitional culture’. The term is meant to invoke the obvious meaning of artworks that respond to the political and social transition in South Africa, but also the psychologized meaning of an object of comfort. Bystrom's book is attuned to, and seeks out, instances of comfort, moments of repair (p. 57), recuperation (p. 82) and recovery (p. 85), and references the tending of wounds (p. 79). While thus analysing artworks and projects in search of healing and repair, Bystrom's argument is that what is needed in scholarly and activist work is more attention to and greater emphasis on ‘negative affect’ (p. 156). The emphasis falls, in other words, on the wound as much as on the healing of the wound. Bystrom refers to Sara Ahmed's evocative terminology of ‘sticky’ and ‘leaky’ affect (Ahmed Reference Ahmed2004), with the implication of wounds and bodily rupture. Hers is an original approach, and the detailed analyses of case studies will make this a useful resource for those wanting to understand better some of the manifestations of home and domesticity in contemporary South African culture.

Her book aims to document and analyse recent (and the material stretches from 1994 to 2014 – after the Marikana massacre, but before the start of the #RhodesMustFall student movement) ‘aesthetic configurations of home spaces’, her scope microscopic rather than the macro-vision of the many studies of South Africa in the time of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission. Why, she asks, did the transition ‘unlock such a profound investment in the personal? What is at stake in aesthetic representations of private life in moments of public upheaval?’ (p. xii). Bystrom's chapters on Santu Mofokeng, Zanele Muholi and Mary Sibande provide some valuable context for these artists, and her bibliography will provide the groundwork for many projects and theses to come on these exciting and revolutionary artists. The book ends with a statement more utopian than many of the arguments found in earlier chapters (p. 160) and with a metaphor of the ideal new home of and for scholarship: what is needed, writes Bystrom, is to create windows rather than to build walls. It is a powerful image, although some might claim that black subjects have always had people peeping through their windows. The crucial shift that is needed is for access and the academic gaze to be theorized, and for the disciplines to acknowledge their own complicity in such regimes of looking.

A project referenced in Bystrom's book, and which clearly influenced her argument and thinking, is the interactive space that came to be known as Hotel Yeoville. Like other projects conceptualized by photographer and academic Terry Kurgan, Hotel Yeoville was a collective and ‘live’ project, where people (most but not all migrants into South Africa) were invited to come and write down their stories and map their journeys to Johannesburg. In the book that has been published, many of the photographs and personal stories are collected, alongside essays on the project. Hotel Yeoville engages with the difficult questions around home, xenophobia and the public sphere that can be created and inhabited through new technologies; part of the project was also to provide internet connections through which individuals could contact those at ‘home’ while at the same time engaging in the administrative tasks needed to establish newly arrived presences. The way in which diasporic lives are mapped and charted in the Hotel Yeoville project is thus generative of new ways of imagining home, and of forging surprising links.

Nicky Falkof's Satanism and Family Murder in Late Apartheid South Africa: imagining the end of whiteness (published in a very slightly revised form as The End of Whiteness: Satanism and family murder in late apartheid South Africa in a South African edition (Falkof Reference Falkof2016)) is a highly original book, and the reach of the argument about the meanings of whiteness go well beyond whiteness studies. Falkof's book traces, through her incisive scrutiny of media archives – press and other popular materials that are often not analysed in scholarly literature – two ‘epidemics’ in discourses about white Afrikaner identity in the late apartheid era. The plagues of family murder and Satanism (with the attendant fears of contamination, spread, and alien attacks on a healthy body) are read, in the tradition of Luise White's influential study of vampire discourses (Reference White2000), for what they reveal of the anxieties around shifting power and the end of white domination in South Africa in the last years of apartheid.

Both editions of the book have appeared in English, and there is a long Anglophone tradition of books on Afrikaner history and identity. In Antjie Krog's work (most of it written in English, even when she analyses questions at the heart of Afrikaner identity), there has been an insistence that this archive, too, is in need of revision (see, for example, her essay in Jones and Dlamini's collection, discussed above). An Afrikaans language edition of Falkof's book would raise parallel, but revealingly different, questions compared with an edition of the book in, for example, Xhosa. The submerged theme of the correct language in which to write and think would be worth pursuing for this project (as for most others discussed in this essay). Afrikaans and Afrikaner identity have a literature around them that is very different from the tradition from inside, and while Falkof has read these Afrikaans-language texts (for example, the works of Afrikaner apologist historian Hermann Giliomee (see, for example, Giliomee Reference Giliomee2004)), it would nevertheless be interesting to see what young Afrikaans-speaking readers would make of this book, and what they would make of the intimacies negotiated and accessed. The rise of the Afrikaner middle classes (and the decline of a certain Afrikaner world) would make a fascinating counterpoint to the current academic vogue for analyses of the ‘emerging’ black middle class.

Falkof's work develops a brilliant contextualized analysis of the Afrikaans language nostalgia around the ‘border wars’, a disturbing and burgeoning industry. The section of the book that shows how discourses of violence in the home typified black and white perpetrators develops theoretical insights that are generative of new approaches to many cases from South African news feeds about violence. The book does not include references to the Oscar Pistorius trial, but the insights of the argument illuminate exactly the danger faced by Reeva Steenkamp: had the house she spent the night in not had such extreme security against an imagined and anticipated intruder (steel doors, a burglar alarm, a cricket bat, a gun), she would probably not have died. Falkof's argument shows that Afrikaans popular press discourses of peril directed at the Afrikaner home are often the subtext to explain violence within that home.

The second strand to the argument shows how these discourses psychologize the ‘epidemics’ in white-centred discussions, and how white perpetrator violence is presented as something individualized, isolated and often a response to hardships. In contrast, black perpetrator violence is imagined in these texts as faceless and unexceptional and remains unpsychologized. Falkof's work is attuned to the violence inside the home, but she analyses this violence with eyes open to the intimate violence of the public sphere, and to the intersecting and competing discourses around domesticity and manliness. Hers is an approach with an extremely wide reach in South African studies, and opens new avenues for research and future doctoral studies.

Roger Southall's The New Black Middle Class in South Africa is a book with a slightly different sense of the role of scholarship for community. Attempting to shift attention away from consumerism and the freedom to spend newly acquired wealth, his study of black middle classes in South Africa contextualizes these individuals differently. The lives he describes are recognizable from novels such as Kopano Matlwa's Coconut (Reference Matlwa2007) and recent speeches and writings by Panashe Chigumadzi,Footnote ³ although his bibliography cites few references from popular and print culture. This absence of specific references to publications and statements by those the book describes and analyses is perplexing. The bibliography is slightly claustrophobic and has too much of a sense of an outsider perspective. When Southall thanks ‘all those people who lent of their time by participating in focus groups or by being interviewed’, this reader wishes that these participants and informers were more clearly visible. It seems a pity merely to say that ‘they are too many to list’ and so to thank all those nameless people he interviewed collectively (p. vii). In some of the later chapters the author admirably pulls through discussions to very contemporary topics such as the student movement, but at other times it feels like an opportunity has been missed and there is not enough of a sense of intimate lives accessed. The individuals discussed in this book have written about their own lives, and Southall's work would have been richer had these voices found a place in the text.

An extraordinarily fresh approach that challenges many of these ways of writing about black identities comes from Kopano Ratele, arguably the leading scholar on masculinity in South Africa. Ratele has written evocatively about the intimate sphere in a number of his essays, perhaps nowhere more affectingly than in his essay on being father to a black son who grows up speaking English (‘Does he speak Xhosa?’ in Jones and Dlamini). In his new book, Liberating Masculinities, he provides an introduction to studies of masculinity, places South Africa in global conversations (including, crucially, African scholarship), sets new research agendas and suggests innovative directions for future scholarship. The work is a leading representative of the activist trends in scholarship, and he argues not only for new disciplinary approaches to manhood but also for the need for everyday lives to develop (and keep developing) progressive and ‘healthier’ models of masculinity (p. 9, 17). Most striking, perhaps, for discussions of intimacy and the home is the chapter ‘Ayashisa amateki’, in which Ratele evokes vividly his birth home and the ‘child behind the research we conduct’. The amateki of the title are a fantasy pair, and in the chapter he explores the relationship he, as a small child from a cash-poor home, had to this imagined pair of All Star shoes. Ratele's style (like that of historian Jacob Dlamini in his very influential Native Nostalgia (Reference Dlamini2009)) is experimental and evocative. More important is how he, like Dlamini, develops the self-reflexive voices that Ndebele called for, in particular from black men.

Ratele's argument takes issue with many studies of, and on, ‘the rising’ black middle classes, arguing that scholars and activists have to try harder, to see more, to understand better, to ‘listen up’. Writing about his own formation (and constant re-formation), from boy to man, he points out that his (fluid) class formation is just one dimension of the making of the man and the scholar. Class identity and consumer patterns cannot be understood without the deeper and more complex understandings his own book pushes forward. This book should be essential reading for anyone interested in the fashionable topic of black consumerism and the so-called middle classes in Africa. It provides a crucial reorientation of perspective, and cautions against research agendas that will mean that the disciplines merely replicate and exaggerate existing limiting assumptions, through thinking about young black men in predictive ways, and about class and consumerism as fixed and fixing categories (p. 89). Ratele's book demands that researchers pay attention; but crucial here is also an understanding that some scholars will have an advantage, will have developed (and will continue developing) the skills that will make their access to the intimacies documented not merely a peeping through windows but documents that are conceptualized and written from inside the intimacies of the homes.

This does not necessarily lead us to a utopian horizon, but instead to an acknowledgement of the many broken links in access to knowledge, the violence inherent in the dissemination of knowledge, and the fatal intimacies, both historical and current. In the years to come, new research agendas will be informed by scholarship not written in English and with bibliographies that build activist tunnels into many rooms and homes. If the metaphor of a house or home is to be used, as many of the writers discussed here have done, knowledge will be produced from within the house, not by peeping through the window and stealing the intimate secrets of those inside. The books and projects discussed in this review show what the research agendas for the future can and will look like, in an academic environment that builds the tunnels between home and university.