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On bad days in the East Rand, writes Glen Elder, associate professor of geography, the smelters and factories in the rusting industrial section of South Africa produce a bruise-yellow haze that suffocates everything except the piercing beams of taxi headlights.

After conducting extensive fieldwork in the region to write his new book, Hostels, Sexuality and the Apartheid Legacy (Ohio University Press), the South African-born Elder knows the suffocating and obscuring aspects of life in East Rand well but he also is aware of its sites of ingenuity and hope. And so he chose to conduct research at the KwaThema Hostel complex, which was built decades ago to literally keep 7,000 black male migrant workers in their place, but has now transformed, encapsulating key aspects of the South African experience both before and after apartheid.

As the system of racial repression crumbled, Elder argues, women and their children, often Zulus from other regions, used their new freedom of mobility to move to the hostel in hopes of finding work as laborers and domestics. The migration has fundamentally altered the character of KwaThema (and other migrant labor housing), but the women remain, for official purposes anyway, hidden in plain sight.

These women not attached to men were almost invisible, says Elder. They lived these almost illegal shadow lives.

The geographer speaks in the past-tense advisedly. Although it has been little more than ten years since he began his fieldwork, the 30 women whose stories inform the books analysis have suffered terribly since then. In 1999, when Elder began another round of follow-up interviews, all but one of the 30 women were HIV-positive. Two-thirds of them were dead.

But in the middle of all the sadness are really cool stories of people working and making lives for themselves, says Elder, describing how the women turned their hostel quarters into sites for micro-industries ranging from beer-brewing to clothes-mending. An intelligent government policy would be to look at how these smart and intuitive women did this and help them. But instead, the state wanted to transform hostels into family housing. Women were ignored in the planning. There were assumptions that all households have children and are headed by males.

Imposed spaces
As he spent time around the hostels talking with the women and with planners, Elder began to see the weird ways that unquestioned sexist and heterosexist development plans can hold back great ideas. He recalls a meeting where planners discussed hostel upgrades with stakeholders, men. After the meeting, Elder pointed out the women gardening outside to the planners, who essentially shrugged.

There was this assumption that these were not appropriate families, that poor, uneducated single moms should have nothing to do with decisions, he says.

Race and ethnicity, obviously, are key categories in both contemporary South Africa and during the apartheid regime. But as he looked at the hostel and the economic, social and regulatory forces that created and sustained it, Elder became convinced that gender, specifically a deeply engrained heteropatriarchy that sought to reinforce its favored types of families and roles, was crucial to understanding the geography of both the hostel and the country at large, which is scarred with phony homelands, segregated townships and gated white neighborhoods.

Gender theory therefore became crucial to framing his mountains of data into a harmonious whole. It was, he says, the best way to step back from the minutiae, and look at the underlying patterns. One of those patterns was HIV. South Africa is the worlds most HIV-infected nation, and the poor Zulu workers that Elder studied are among the countrys most infected citizens. In his conversations and observations, Elder found that the women were not promiscuous risk-takers. The source of the widespread HIV infection was, as it is so many other places, poverty and new mobility. This deadly poverty is abetted by a society whose elites prefer to ignore and cordon off poor women except for when their domestic labor is convenient.

Something is keeping women poor in South Africa and its killing them, says Elder. We need to understand their systematic disenpowerment.

While painful aware of this darker reality of life in South Africa, Elder maintains that he is positive about his country's prospects. The governmental myopia toward its interlocking assumptions about gender, sex and race after apartheid belies its more progressive, experimental approach to issues ranging from land redistribution to justice.

He applauds the remarkable truth and reconciliation commissions that probed the truth about apartheid-era crimes, and he calls the countrys new constitution the worlds most democratic, offering protection based on race, sexual orientation and health status. But, he makes clear, apartheid still mars the landscape. The hostels, which once facilitated the system with a convenient source of disposable labor, are a small example of that. Freedom of movement is changing them, but old habits of mind (and huge structural problems in education and public health) have kept that change from being pure progress.

But in the midst of them, resourceful women, parents and grandparents, though officially invisible, still managed to create new lives for themselves and transform a once male space. The government, Elder thinks, could begin to see them more clearly and listen to them, perhaps offering small loans, better security and health care, and quarters that fit a multiplicity of family configurations. Listening to women and giving them more tools to improve their lives from cash to female condoms could slow the spread of HIV and further erase the stain of apartheid from the land.

I remain optimistic about South Africa, he says.

Onward with Elder
Elders book came out in June, as he began a yearlong sabbatical that will find the professor helping to host a major conference of southern Africanists in Burlington in early September, working on fellowship in Montreal, and spending some time in South Africa to work on new projects there. Elder is also trying to develop a new Vermont-based study, possibly something involving HIV in the Northeast Kingdom. The geographer also recently won a 2003-2004 Kroepsch-Maurice Excellence in Teaching Award; look for a profile of his classroom approach in a future issue of the view.

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