Men with cookers: Transformations in migrant culture, domesticity and identity in Duncan Village, East London

This article is concerned with understanding current transformations in mig rant culture and identity in South African urban areas. It approaches the t opic by revisiting Philip and Iona Mayer's classic study of migrant culture and identity in the Duncan Village township of East London. The article us es the their work as the starring point from which to construct a detailed historical analysis of the transformations ill amaqaba migrant culture in t he city from the 1950s to the mid-1990s. The first part of the paper attemp ts to show that the Mayers greatly underestimated the resilience of this cu ltural form in the face of far-reaching social and political change in East London. In documenting the survival of amaqaba culture well into the 1980s , it focuses not only on the external forces that shaped migrant responses to change, brit also on the internal social dynamics non relations that fac ilitated cultural reproduction. The second part of the paper is devoted to an analysis of the decline of amaqaba culture as a rural resistance ideolog y in the city in the late 1980s and its reconstruction as an urban resistan ce ideology predicated on the defence of particular urban spaces, identitie s and power relations. The paper concludes by considering the significance of the analysis for the understanding of migrant identity politics in South Africa ill the 1990s.