Street Life Under a Roof: youth homelessness in South Africa by Emily Margaretten
In Street Life Under a Roof, anthropologist Emily Margaretten takes the reader into the precarious life worlds of extremely marginalized youth in Durban, South Africa. Through her detailed ethnographic vignettes, we gain insight into ‘the institutional inequalities and interpersonal abuses that characterize the lived experiences of youth homelessness in South Africa’ (p. 5). Focusing on a group of young men and women who are in one way or another affiliated with Point Place, an abandoned building cum self-run shelter located near the waterfront, the book examines the complex factors that compel young people to live a life on the streets in post-apartheid South Africa.
In the introduction, we learn that youth in South Africa disproportionately suffer from the effects of growing inequality, and that the highest unemployment rates are to be found among those between the ages of fourteen and thirty-five. Referred to in policy speak as ‘idle youth’ or NEET (not in employment, education or training), such youth refer to themselves as ‘just sitting’. The book highlights the ways in which youth set up ‘structures of domesticity at the very edges of public acceptability’ (p. 8). Margaretten argues that the young people she studied, despite having few prospects, actively struggled to survive in a context of extreme poverty, violence, gender inequality and sickness, and, just as importantly, to give their lives meaning through interpersonal relationships characterized by love, friendship, care and material support. [End Page 644]
The author spent a full decade between 2000 and 2010 conducting research with street youth in downtown Durban, including two years of intensive thesis fieldwork. Her long-term engagement with the young people she studied gave her the opportunity to present a longitudinal perspective of their lives. Despite this, as a reader, I thought she could have paid more attention to the passage of time, including, for example, discussions of shifting political contexts, changing HIV treatment regimes, or the ageing of her research participants. Accompanied by her research assistant Ofentse, Margaretten undertook participation observation of the daily lives of street youth, including sometimes sleeping in the streets and at Point Place. Additionally, she interviewed more than 100 street youth and travelled to their home areas to speak with relatives in an effort to add depth to her understanding of the circumstances that led to particular youth ending up on the street. Although the author should not be faulted for her thoroughness, the reader sometimes gets the sense that Margaretten was searching for clear, causative explanations to counter the often vague and ambiguous answers that participants provided to her questions. Most likely this was a result of researching dissembling youth who were vested in telling her only partial truths, but sometimes the approach comes across as overly empiricist.
Following the introduction, the book’s six chapters are divided into three parts. The first part describes the institutional nexus to which the youth are subjected, including homeless shelters, various branches of the city government, health clinics and the police, as well as the ways in which street youth stand in as kin for one another. Relying on ‘strategies of relatedness’, differently positioned youth establish networks of belonging in an attempt to secure the vital necessities: a safe place to sleep, clothing and food. Through Margaretten’s descriptions we see how age and gender matter, with older street youth looking after the younger ones, and females taking on domestic tasks such as cooking, cleaning and doing laundry, while males are expected to provide a safe place to sleep and material goods.
Part 2 provides more nuanced analysis of gendered relations, with one chapter devoted to the perspectives of Point Place females and another to those of the Point Place males. In my opinion, these are the stand-out chapters of the book, as we get to see the ways in which a longing for stability, care, love and respect, together with a longing for material goods, leads to tenuous heterosexual partnerships that put both men and women at risk of HIV and violence.
In Part 3, the author links the youth to their families and homes. Exploring narratives of witchcraft and disgruntled ancestors, she outlines spectral events that contribute to young people leaving their families and homelands to come to the city. She also offers material explanations: poverty and the death of one or more parents being the most common. What I like about this part of the book is that it challenges assumptions about street youth as being entirely without family, without a home. We see parents and grandparents who long for their children to come home, who do not seem able to grasp fully why their children sleep on the streets. Sometimes, spectral reasoning is the only thing that makes sense.
Overall, Margaretten’s book offers an important glimpse into a complex and daunting social world. Her work should be read by those interested in youth studies, street ethnography and urban studies. The book’s clear writing style would make it suitable for bachelor degree-level students in anthropology, geography, sociology and urban studies. [End Page 645]
