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This book contributes to an international literature on children and childhood studies by providing a variety of lenses through which we can further explore children’s reflections about the worlds they inhabit. Through documentation of the reflections of life in a temporary relocation camp of six children, the research findings show the slippages in governance in post-apartheid South Africa, revealing howover-determining structures of oppression, shaped by histories of violence remain as hauntings in the lived experience of those on the margins of the state. In this way, the book offers testament to the lasting impact apartheid has left on South Africa’s populations. The stories of these children offer testament to a fluidity of identifications and repressions that criss-cross notions of what it is to be a citizen, a child, youth or adult in sites of frequent forced mobility.
“This book is a welcome and important addition to the growing field of anthropologies of childhood in southern Africa. What is striking about this text is the engagement at all times with questions of place, and centrally with the instability of place in fractured and precarious childhoods. There is also a remarkable affective engagement – Prah resists implicit calls to spurious objectivity, and instead shows through her work that the best social science is the product of both head and heart. This book should be of interest and great use not just to anthropologists but also to anyone interested in what childhood is and means in contemporary South Africa.” — Leslie Swartz, Professor of Psychology, Stellenbosch University, Editor in Chief of South African Journal of Science
“This book adds to the existing scholarship on the anthropology of children in Africa. It stands out, uniquely from the pack, in its methodological and theoretical formulations. It is provocative and so-phisticated, thus opening up previously uncharted paths in the scholarship on childhood, urban vio-lence, housing, and social justice.” — Saheed Aderinto, editor of Children and Childhood in Colonial Nigerian Histories
Efua Prah is an Associate Professor of Medical Anthropology at the University of Johannesburg. Her scholarly interests range widely, and include anthropological theorisations in critical black studies, postcolonial studies and the emergent correlations between history and reproductive justice. She is Disciplinary Editor in Anthropology for the University of Johannesburg Press and Co-Editor of Anthropology Southern Africa.
Preface; Acknowledgements; Picture Profiles of the Children; Introduction; 1-Moving Beyond; 2-Meeting the Children; 3-(re)Moved; 4-Identity; 5-Theatre on the Move; 6-Body Talk; 7-Gevaarlik! (Dangerous!) ; Afterword; References; Index