Shuttling between the suburbs and the township: the new black middle class(es) negotiating class and post-apartheid blackness in South Africa

Abstract

A generation of South Africa's new black middle class shuttles between the suburbs and the townships. This has become the focus of some South African humorous essayists, among them Ndumiso Ngcobo and Fred Khumalo, on whose works this article is based. The article argues that studying the new black middle class should extend to these literary sources and approaches. The humorous essays by these two authors consistently reference metaphors of mobility and the vexed intersection of black middle-classness, consumption, racialized residential zoning and compromised status. Through the mode of humour, the essays evince the psychological burdens borne by those with township roots but who live in the suburbs, as they negotiate status inconsistency in a post-apartheid search for human dignity. Constant visits to the township and the retreat to the suburbs constitute negotiations of spatial, financial and psychic concerns imbricated in the legacies of apartheid's racialized politics of distinction.

International business and Africa: Theoretical and applied challenges, and future directions

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Migrant homemaking in Sub-Saharan Africa: from self-help housing to conspicuous construction

“…Mercer was among the first researchers to point out the importance of house construction for emerging African middle classes in different regions of the continent. Several recent studies have followed her lead (Alber 2018;Andreasen and Agergaard 2020;Durham 2020;Ndlovu 2020;Page and Sunjo 2018;Sumich and Nielsen 2020). Gastrow (2020: 520), for example, observes that for middle-class Angolans "the formal house also became the means for performing middle-classness through everyday actions."…”

Faking it or making it: the politics of consumption and the precariousness of social mobility in South Africa

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