Finally, many thanks go to my family, my husband Martin and my friends who supported and accompanied me in many ways during these fascinating years of doing fieldwork and writing an ethnography.1 The fact that many texts about contemporary South Africa still use racial terminology often puzzles readers not familiar with the South African context. Yet South African society was and continues to be stratified along the troubling category of 'race'. Race is a social construct with meanings and assumptions that have changed over time and differ across context. In this book, when I write about race and use categories like 'black' or 'white', it is not because I believe in the biological relevance of these terms, but because, as social constructs and political categories, they shaped and continue to shape urban life in Johannesburg and to a lesser degree in Maputo as well. Whenever I refer in this book to the racial categories as introduced by the apartheid government or the Portuguese colonialists (as they were used in official discourses, official documents, laws or censuses), I capitalise them (White, Black, Native). When I use the terms uncapitalised (black, white), I refer to the racial and ethnic categories used in everyday life by the informants this book is based on. I use them as descriptive terms, just as the urban dwellers do. Because of capitalisation rules, 'Indian' is always capitalised. 10 'White', 'Coloured' and 'Native' were the initial categories used. 'Indian' (Asian) was added later (Seekings 2008: 2), 'Native' became replaced by 'Bantu' (1960) and 'Black' (1980). After 1970, the category 'Black' was again subdivided into ethno-linguistic groups such as Zulu and Xhosa (Christopher 2002, Seekings 2008: 2). In the post-apartheid phase, 'black' was replaced by 'African' in the census (Christopher 2002: 404-5). 'Black', as in the post-apartheid Black Economic Empowerment policies, refers to black, coloured and Indian today. Racial terminology was hence not consistent over time (ibid: 403).Strangely the everyday rhythms of domestic life have rarely counted as part of the 'urban', as though the city stopped at the doorstep of the home. But domestic life is now woven routinely into the urban public realm ... The rhythms of the home are as much part of city life as, say, the movements of traffic, office life, or interaction in the open spaces of the city. Its rhythms, too, need incorporating into the everyday sociology of the city (Amin and Thrift 2002: 18).workers, for example, have intimate knowledge about the everyday routines of the family they work for (familiarity), yet they do not share the same routine (normality). 20 African cities are marked by an increasing inequality and differentiation of lifestyles, but there is a lack of empirical and conceptual work on social differentiation which goes beyond uni-dimensional perspectives. Research often focused on socio-cultural differentiation with 'ethnicity' as a key concept or it focused on socioeconomic differentiation (key concepts 'poverty' and 'liveli...
