Langa of Fixity and Flow

Despite the stabilising force of apartheid influx control, which divided Black populations into urban residents and rural migrants, township life in Cape Town has historically been characterised by mobile identities and rural-urban hybridities (Qotole, 2001). Langa is heavily shaped by this history, as one of Cape Town's first townships. It was originally designed to contain the Black population forcibly removed from the Ndabeni neighbourhood, as well as to house temporary migrant labourers, predominantly from the rural Eastern Cape. From its inception, it was a 'relational place', a site deeply connected to places (and ideas of) elsewhere, as those who moved or were forced to move to Langa had lives, social connections or homes in other parts of the City or rural areas, further away.

Because of this history, which weighs heavily on those who live in the township, I have been wondering how and where to introduce mobility as a lens and as a methodological tool with which to layer other features of people's lifeworlds. How to add porosity to the bounded site (in this case, 'Langa') that the social sciences so often take for granted? Where does this porosity enter, and how can it be a generative tool for our framework? Beyond layering features of spatial inequality at a settlement scale (housing type, services, livelihoods), what would it mean to 'un-bound' Langa, to reflect on it as a site connected to other sites, as a place shaped by movement within, to, and from, and not as housing a sedentary population.

A framework for spatialising the health impacts of climate change takes seriously the fact that peripheralised urban populations are the most vulnerable to climate change hazards. Emphasising mobility as a lens within this framework may challenge the idea of fixing vulnerability to a specific site (the urge to 'map') and instead consider vulnerability and coping as a more fluid process, connected to one's movement between places. This also prompts experimentation with a "mobilities paradigm", which "emphasises that all places are tied into at least thin networks of connections that stretch beyond each such place and mean that nowhere can be an 'island'" (Sheller and Urry, 2006:209). Below, I centre mobility as a lens through which to explore central narratives driving our research.

Many people I spoke to in Langa describe climate change in reference to other places in the country.

(1) In Cape Town, it is historically dispossessed populations living on the Cape Flats who are also most exposed to more frequent coastal storms, rising ground water levels, and intensifying heatwaves (Levine & Manderson, 2022; DMS NPC, 2024).

For some with family in the Eastern Cape, the unprecedented floods of mid-2025 that displaced thousands in villages near Mthatha have become a reference point that marked a shift in weather patterns. It was through discussion of the disaster that people's perceptions of climate change emerged. Lutho, a gardener at an old age home in Langa, relies on his experience of climate hazards elsewhere in the country to know that things are changing here too. "It's worse in other places now. We hear happening like what we see in Durban, never floods have caused so much damage. You know the floods in Durban and the Eastern Cape. Never have floods caused so much damage as they have, like they are doing now. Very, very irregular patterns we are noticing".

Siphelele, who is in a wheelchair due to Polio, was born in Kensington, Cape Town. After his family was forcibly removed under the apartheid Group Areas Act, his parents moved to Gugulethu and then Langa, and Siphelele was sent "home to the Eastern Cape" to complete his schooling. Afterwards, he struggled to get work due to his disability and was forced to move around the country looking for opportunities. He spent some time in Gqeberha, formerly Port Elizabeth (PE). When I asked him about how the weather is in Cape Town today, compared to the past, coupled with acrid reflection about the racism he was subjected to in PE, he noted that "Cape Town can be four seasons in a day. The same applies in PE. You call it, it's like a paper bag, you carry it, paper bag dumps you, doesn't want to carry any of your stuff, it tears. Cape Town [today] is similar to Port Elizabeth."

By invoking and allowing for experiences of 'elsewhere' to emerge in the health histories interviews, it is clear how perceptions of climate change, and the language that people use to describe these perceptions, are rooted in connection to and movement between places beyond Cape Town.

Residents' coping mechanisms are informed by their relationship to permanence; for example, someone who views life in Langa as a means to save money to invest in a home in the rural Eastern Cape may not prioritise purchasing cement to cope with winter flooding. Also, while community resilience to hazards is important to emphasise, the institutional memory of collective life should not be taken for granted, nor romanticised. For instance, an early warning system that relies on existing networks between people will not work if it assumes a stable population.

For many in Langa whose sense of home and belonging extends beyond the city, cyclical movement, leaving the township when conditions become untenable, is a common way of coping with weather hazards such as extreme cold and flooding.

For the first time this year, Nontobeko decided not to work during the winter. She sells clothes at the central taxi rank, but the average income she'd get from one or two sales a day was not worth the cost of getting sick from the cold and paying for treatment.

(2) It was in conversation with social anthropologist Dr Kharnita Mohamed that I was prompted to reflect on how treating the population in Langa as static can obscure the ways people's movements into and out of the city shape their experiences of, and responses to, climate-related hazards.

She thus couldn't afford to look after her daughter and chose to send her to stay at her sister's home in the Eastern Cape. " 'She said no, it's a relief, mama.' When she's there with my sister, my sister is nicer than I am. And I'm not working, my sister is working, they can't suffer from anything."

Nomkhitha, who lives in Joe Slovo, the largest informal section of Langa, has lived alone for some years now. Every winter, unstable electricity connections and constant leaking water inside her shack make it impossible to keep her home warm. Nomkhitha's son thus had to move out and go live with family in the Eastern Cape. "He was asthmatic. You see, that is why I had to send him home, you see, because he's asthmatic and it's really cold here. Hey ah-ah, I was so stressed. Always getting sick, asthma, always going to the hospital to get oxygen. Then I spoke with my mother, she said no, he must come here this side, because at least there it's better. Wintertime: it's not like here, I tell you."

Leaving the city, seasonally, is one way of surviving Joe Slovo. After a week of heavy rain, I was walking through the settlement with Lwandile, a local resident and member of a community risk management group. He wanted to show me the damage caused by ponding water. Every few streets, we walked past an empty house, its doors ajar. Inside, the water was ankle-high and still. Lwandile explained that the residents had moved back to their family home until the rains subsided; they had no choice.

Exposure to excessive rain, ponding water, and being forced to move is mediated by demographic vulnerabilities. Lwandile and Akhona, another participant living in Joe Slovo, struggled to find any elderly people living there to recruit for a 'health history' interview. They explained to me that at a certain age, it becomes too difficult to maintain a home in the settlement. The labour of continually sweeping water out of their homes is too exhausting, and many people thus have to move away from Cape Town in their old age.

Moving is not the only example of how rural-urban hybridities shape coping practices and responses to health hazards. Kay, a Langa-based gardener and recycler, described his life in Langa and his household's health over the years by frequently referencing memories of life in the Eastern Cape. Kay relies on specific herbs to keep his family healthy. During the COVID-19 pandemic, he began giving the elderly women in his community mhlonyane leaves (African wormwood, known for its medicinal properties). He explained to me that it was because he grew up in rural Eastern Cape that he knew about the healing properties of the plant, and that it was also others who had experience in the "rurals" who were the first to catch on. Kay's lifeworld is not limited to urban life, and his understanding of managing health and hazards in Langa is embedded in his connections to his rural home.

Furthermore, it is not only mobility to and from Langa that is relevant here, but also mobility within the neighbourhood. Langa is shaped by a "constancy of movement" at the settlement scale: people and between 'matchbox' brick and mortar houses, upgraded flats, former hostels, backyards and informal settlements (De Satge, 2014:133). Exploring this feature of mobility presents an opportunity to enrich the comparison of vulnerability across housing typologies and other material spatial features and reveals how movement between homes in Langa is both a coping strategy and a feature of precarity.

Asanda is a single mother who has made a home in a prison cell of an unused juvenile detention centre. The centre was abandoned and has subsequently been ('illegally') occupied by people confronting the housing deficit in Langa. Each winter, she sends her young daughter to stay in her father's brick-and-mortar home, a street away. As soon as the rains have stopped, her daughter is less susceptible to asthma attacks, and she comes home to live with her mum.

For Lutho and Edwina, their lifeworlds have been shaped by constant forced mobility, in turn shaping their experience of change in Langa over time. Lutho, a gardener at one of the old-age homes, has had to move his whole life. "I grew up in Langa. I grew up in different places; different places mean different streets. Because we never really had a fixed address because my parents were struggling to get a house, so we moved from place to place." Edwina is one of the beneficiaries of a government-subsidised house, which was part of the controversial N2 Gateway housing project. For her, being relocated from a shack she had built herself in Joe to a subsidised flat, left her more vulnerable to harsh conditions than before:

"I was taken from down there, I was put in here, lived here without my consent because… I was already sick, yet they put me in a house that has stairs. I am sick, I won't be better at the top. I am suffering from asthma, and I use inhalers for asthma. I'm still sick and using pills." Edwina associates her worsening arthritis and asthma with harsh winters and the fact that she had to move from her shack in Joe Slovo.

Without engaging with the multiple meanings of mobility in Langa, one risks concealing the underlying logics and politics of accessing resources, housing, and networks in the neighbourhood. When I began fieldwork, hanging out at the Lerotholi food garden, I quickly learned of the 'two Langas': formal and informal, Ward 51 and Ward 52. At that point, I had already planned to interview households from a range of housing typologies. Through many conversations with Mpilo, he revealed how the spatial differences between the 'two Langas' were attached to assumptions about ephemerality and permanence: that people living in ward 51 constitute a class of 'Langa-borners', and those in the informal sections of ward 52 are 'amagoduka', 'temporary migrants' from the Eastern Cape.

Thus, while two households living in shacks may be similarly exposed to flooding and wind, a claim to a generational legacy in the settlement (for example, a family living in the backyard shack of their parents' home) may determine one's legitimate claim to space and routes to accessing support. In contrast, those in Joe Slovo, the largest informal settlement in Langa, are labelled 'amagoduka', attaching a status of ephemerality.

By highlighting the salience of the Langa-borner–amagoduka binary, I do not intend to essentialise it (as just discussed, where people stay in Langa is fluid). Rather, it is interesting to note how the status of rural migrancy and mobility (which during the 80s political struggle in Langa was associated with co-option by the apartheid regime by township-born youth) remains politically relevant (De Satge, 2014).

This political undercurrent played out during a meeting for a community risk management project I attended. Halfway through, the disaster risk officer pointed out that only one person in the room (out of nearly 30) was from Joe Slovo, despite recruitment processes designed to incorporate representatives from across Langa. He dismissed claims that the Joe Slovo representatives weren't interested, as he was privy to political tensions between the 'two Langas' and the potential gatekeeping in the recruitment process.

A mobilities lens can be used to nuance the many layers of a climate-health-spatiality risks and vulnerabilities framework. It reveals that it is not only where people live that matters, but also from where they came and to where they are going, whether this movement be real or imagined, recurrent or linear, that matters. Particularly in Cape Town, a city built on regimes of dispossession and criminalisation of itinerant, black populations, mobility is central to the lifeworlds in vulnerable urban settlements.