Dala what you must

: Tracing Vernacular Practices of Togetherness within Families and Neighbourhoods in Cape Town

Abstract

This dissertation contributes an alternative theorisation of urban togetherness. Located in a Southern city, Cape Town, one marked, fundamentally, by historic and on-going structures of separation, it explores how togetherness might be approached through how people always already practice togetherness through familiarity despite difference. It also pays attention to how urban togetherness is enacted both in physical and digital public spaces. More specifically, the dissertation traces vernacular practices of togetherness performed by Coloured people in Cape Town, practices which emerge as responses to the demands of everyday life as people dala (do) what they must to get by. While ‘Coloured’ is a pejorative, racial slur in many parts of the world, in South Africa it is an official, although contested, category used to describe a group of people whose history and presence evades simple binary categorisation. It embodies a complex entanglement of difference and familiarity woven together as a creole identity. Coloured peoples’ vernacular practices of togetherness are explored through two entry points, each resembling varying degrees of urban familiarity: the family and the neighbourhood. Methodologically, the dissertation draws on 12 months of in situ and remote fieldwork, including face-to-face family interviews and observations of WhatsApp based neighbourhood mutual aid groups formed in response to COVID-19. Findings from this research coalesce three insights. First, togetherness within Coloured families and neighbourhoods in Cape Town is an embodied practice, a ‘doing’ (dala) learnt through repetition. Second, this embodiment is conditioned both by physical and virtual spaces: togetherness amongst Coloured families and neighbourhoods is shaped by the historical processes of residential displacement under apartheid, the immediacy of life in the place that is the Cape Flats, and the remoteness of engagement through digital spaces. Finally, the practices of togetherness performed within Coloured families and neighbourhoods evidence themselves as inherently ambivalent. Cities, thus, are as much about the always already small acts of practicing unity, harmony, and hope as they are problems of rupture, conflict, and trouble.

Date of Award	21 Jun 2022
Original language	English
Awarding Institution	University of Bristol
Supervisor	Susan M Parnell (Supervisor) & Mark Jackson (Supervisor)