MALAIKA MAHLATSI

I’ve been following the discussion around how black people have turned the Fourways Farmer’s Market into a place of partying and boozing with great interest. It is an important discussion, but the level at which it has been pitched is problematic, in great part due to its lack of historical analysis.

The argument is correct – black people generally turn intimate spaces of convergence into spaces of groove. It doesn’t happen only with farmer’s markets, it happens with public beaches, hiking trails, theme parks, picnic spots etc. Black people generally struggle with gathering in public spaces without turning these into groove.

But this is not where the discussion should end. To fully understand why this is happening, we must understand how our geo-histories as a people have shaped how we engage with the world, socially, physically and spiritually.

As geographers, we often speak about a concept called the socio-spatial dialectic. The socio-spatial dialectic conceptualises the complex interrelationship between social and spatial structures. It contends that the spatialities produced by societal processes themselves have causal influence over those processes.

To understand why black people turn spaces into groove, we must understand how spaces have shaped the behaviours, experiences and thinking of their people. Many black people, including those of us who have since moved to leafy suburbs, grew up in townships. That is where our socialisation happened.

Townships were never designed as places where families could thrive, they were designed as places to house a reserve army of black labour that could work in the mines and in white homes. They were designed as functional concentration camps. They are close enough to CBDs and white suburbs to enable black people to travel there by public transport, to work, but far enough that black people don’t disrupt white existence.

All this is the reason that townships don’t have spaces of family oriented recreation such as bird watching sanctuaries, picnic areas, theme parks etc. The houses are too close together, often leaving no room for kids to play in the yard. Kids play on narrow streets that they share with vehicles. There aren’t even any trees for people to sit under in the shade.

The second issue is that populating townships with taverns was an intentional strategy by the apartheid regime to fragment black families. The Nationalist government owned liquor outlets in townships. The intention was to have black men in those taverns, away from their families and, importantly, from participating in the liberation Struggle. It was also to justify police and military presence in townships. The Nationalists knew that there is a causal relationship between alcohol and violence.

And so, if you got black men drunk enough, they would fight, stab and kill one another, and generally be rowdy. This would then necessitate white apartheid police and soldiers coming into townships to “maintain order”. In reality, they were performing surveillance on the activities of liberation fighters and their families. It was also a psychological tactic to instil fear. The long-term consequence is that liquor became integral to socialising.

This is the context in which we must understand why black people turn farmer’s markets into groove. It’s a deep-rooted issue that is linked to history and how this has shaped black society. Those who grew up in the suburbs, and those who have since moved there, have divorced this analysis from their arguments. They do not recognise the fact that their appreciation for family oriented spaces is the result of them living in areas with the physical, economic and social infrastructure to support this.

Rather than simply argue that black people are turning farmer’s markets into groove, we should be arguing about how, if at all possible, townships can be re-designed to make them fit for family habitat.

First published in The Sowetan on 22 July 2022. Re-published in herri with kind permission of the author.