When Elaine Salo died from cancer, at the age of fifty-four, in August 2016 her long-awaited ethnography of lives, hopes, alienation and the making of personhood on the Cape Flats remained unfinished. It is thanks to some of her close colleagues and friends that this important monograph, based on her doctoral thesis, has been published posthumously.
Elaine Salo's work is important in two interconnected ways: as both an extraordinary contribution to how we ought to understand the situated production of knowledge, and as an ethnography of working-class coloured (‘mixed-race’) people in Cape Town.
To begin with the latter, Salo's portrayal of how gendered and racialized personhood is produced vividly brings to the fore the lived experience of residents of Manenberg, a township on the sprawling Cape Flats, in the 1990s. In a richly detailed narrative, Salo shows how women, men and adolescents go about their everyday lives during weekdays; she then draws attention to the long-awaited weekends that start on Friday afternoons when schools are dismissed early so that Muslim students can attend Friday Jumuʿah prayers. While Muslims, a substantial minority among the local residents, scurry to mosque, other residents ease into the weekend pace, which releases them temporarily from the pressures of performing identities as industrious workers, housewives or students. Salo takes the reader along to the hokke, small informal house shops and hangouts in the backyards of the densely built ‘courts’ (blocks on housing estates), and imaginatively into the shadows of a narrow backyard alley where lovers find a modicum of privacy.
Salo thus sets the scene for her discussion of the expectations of gendered personhood of ‘mothers’ (mature women), mature and younger men, and, especially, younger women (‘daughters’). In two key chapters she portrays the contradictory ideologies and practices of respectable young womanhood and the more glamorous and ambitious desires of reconfigured new femininities in the early post-apartheid years.
While the dynamics of producing persons in a post-apartheid township are at the heart of the richly detailed ethnography, Salo opens up an exploration of the racialized and gendered production of persons with conceptual reflections on personhood, agency and power. This is followed by an extended historical narrative of racial stratification and urban space in Cape Town. Through this she points out the dynamics that have located ‘coloureds’ in South African history as an ambiguous social category with multiple meanings. While this history reaches back to slavery and the Cape Colony of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the mid-twentieth century delivered the decisive turn in the form of apartheid legislation through which ‘race, bodies and space became even more intimately intertwined’ (pp. 56–7). The massive forced removals of coloured and black (‘African’) Cape Town residents reshaped the city's spatial design. Salo's central argument is that this reflects social relationships of dominance and subordination, and particularly ‘the manner in which space was used to enforce the beliefs and policies about race and personhood’ (p. 57).
Salo's ethnography is remarkable for its rich detail and perceptive observation. It is outstanding too in its profoundly respectful engagement with the people she worked with in Manenberg, where she homes in on their communal understanding. This was not easy in the 1990s, and may not be easy in the 2010s because life in the Cape Flats townships has been marred by extreme levels of gangsterism, drug abuse and violence; often, the residents are subjected to a pathologizing gaze by the media and in research reports.
Salo's work, in contrast, is remarkable for compassion and sensitive relationships with the people of Manenberg. This follows from her extensive reflection on her fieldwork as the ‘native anthropologist’, as she terms it. This was a significant epistemological breakthrough in South African anthropology at the time: Salo lived fieldwork in ways ‘in which the field was home’. She ‘entered the field’ as an ethnographer who did not have to negotiate access linguistically since she already spoke the local idiom, ‘Kaaps’ (a version of Afrikaans spoken in Cape Town's townships). Salo also had prior knowledge of the area since she had worked there with anti-apartheid activists in the 1980s and was regularly updated on the issues that dominated everyday life there through a network of public intellectuals who lived and worked in the area, including her brother, who at the time served as the local Anglican parish's priest.
In the significant historical context of South African politics of difference, Salo shared the racial categorization of the people she worked with. Yet, her lived experience as the daughter of a well-to-do family and a graduate of the historically ‘white’ University of Cape Town as well as her friendship networks with people whom the ordinary residents of the township considered ‘insider–outsiders’ also posed challenges.
Significantly, Desiree Lewis, the eminent South African feminist scholar, highlights in an insightful preface to Salo's monograph her departed friend and colleague's acute awareness of the situatedness of knowledge production. Salo regarded knowledge as inevitably enmeshed with classed, racialized and gendered experiences and locations.
Salo's friends and colleagues cannot be thanked enough for making the posthumous publication of this important, long-awaited monograph a reality. The publication has added an invaluable and tangible part to the tremendous legacy Elaine Salo, African feminist and anthropologist, left as a scholar, a teacher, a public intellectual, a mentor, colleague and a friend to many.
