South African Cities, Gender and Inventions of Tradition in the Late Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries

The argument of this chapter is that for those interested in gender and the urban experience, Eric Hobsbawm’s concept of the ‘invention of tradition’ can be usefully deployed in exploring the rules, rituals and regular practises – in other words, the ‘traditions’ – associated with the teaching, maintenance and promotion of appropriate gender behaviour. This would certainly seem to be so in understanding elements of gendered experience and identity in the towns that were fashioned or re-fashioned by the process of British colonialism. Some of these gender traditions were learnt elsewhere and brought to South African cities by the likes of immigrants from Britain or migrants from rural Africa. All such groups came from patriarchal societies, albeit of differing kinds. ¹ Political and social patriarchal traditions were then frequently adapted or, especially in the case of indigenous Africans, subject to almost revolutionary change in the urban context, not least in terms of divisions of labour. New traditions were more frequently invented in the city, the site of numerous, rapid or radical examples of innovation, than in the countryside.