Here to work: the socioeconomic characteristics of informal dwellers in post-apartheid South Africa

by Mark Hunter & Dorrit Posel, 2012

Government policy towards informal settlements in South Africa reflects a tension between two approaches: recognizing the legitimacy of informal settlements and aggressively removing these so-called “slums”. Drawing on nationally representative household survey data and interviews with 25 individuals relocated from an informal settlement to a “transit camp”, this paper argues that more detailed attention should be paid to the changing connection between housing, household formation and work. Whereas cities in the apartheid era were marked by relatively stable industrial labour and racially segregated family housing, today the location and nature of informal dwellings are consistent with two important trends: demographic shifts, including towards smaller more numerous households, and employment shifts, including a move from permanent to casual and from formal to informal work. This study is therefore able to substantiate in more detail a longstanding insistence by informal settlement residents that they live where they do for reasons vital to their everyday survival. The paper also highlights the limitations of relocations not only to urban peripheries but also to other parts of cities, and it underscoresthe importance of upgrading informal settlements through in situ development.

“A failed man”: Mark Hunter’s Love in the Time of AIDS — a must read

Zackie Achmat, Writing Rights

Mark Hunter’s Love in the Time of AIDS: Inequality, Gender and Rights in South Africa provides the most rigorous analysis of the HIV epidemic that I have read. Revolutionary in its approach, Hunter’s account of the HIV epidemic interrogates the practices and impact of intimacy, sex and marriage over time through political economy and anthropology. He shows an inextricable link between the collapse of apartheid and the male-led household in Mandeni industrial township and Hlabisa’s rural villages in KwaZulu-Natal where adult HIV prevalence approached 40%.

Love in the Time of AIDS: Inequality, Gender, and Rights in South Africa

by Mark Hunter, 2010

“ Beautifully, powerfully, and movingly written. The best analysis I have seen not only of the reasons for the HIV/AIDS pandemic in southern Africa, but of its wider socioeconomic, cultural, and political dynamics.”

– Shula Marks, School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London.

“One of the most exceptional studies of the response to HIV and AIDS.” – Richard Parker, Columbia University

In some parts of South Africa, more than one in three people are HIV positive. Love in the Time of AIDS explores transformations in notions of gender and intimacy to try to understand the roots of this virulent epidemic.