| dc.description.abstract | This study explores the lives of Kanana residents, an informal settlement in Gugulethu
Township on the outskirts of Cape Town, South Africa. It pays particular attention to their
everyday lives to dispel negative and simplistic representations of informal settlement
residents when they collectively take part in protests. Although there are extensive reasons
for the protests in the informal settlements, the media and the South African government have
reduced these protests to portraying them as demands for “service delivery”, and furthermore
as criminally induced protests. I point out that this problem is partly due to scholarly work
that does not engage these misleading representations and illustrate the lives of shack
residents in the ordinary, when they are not protesting. Thus the focus of this thesis is life
beyond protests. I argue that the lives of shack residents who participate in the protests are
complex. As opposed to negative and simplistic representations, this thesis illustrates that one
needs to be immersed in the lives of shack residents so as to understand them as identifiable
human beings who make meaning of their lives. I explore their lives in the shack settlement
further and argue that these human beings live their ordinary harmonious lives centred on the
practice of greeting. To highlight the complexity of life of protesting informal settlement
residents this thesis makes a point that there exist unsettling realities in the shack settlement;
unsettling realities that make residents feel to be less of human beings. Kanana residents,
therefore, draw from these perpetual unsettling realities to organise and protest.
This thesis is based on ethnographic research, which was conducted between September 2015
and February 2016. During fieldwork, I observed and interacted in informal conversations
with Kanana residents. With the main co-producers of this work, I carried out their life
histories and further in-depth interviews. | en_US |
