Since this study is not concerned with statistical accuracy, selection of respondents was based on availability and access, especially because the area of study has experienced large-scale mobility due to expropriations and resettlement. Furthermore, since this research is an attempt at reading and being aware of the multilayered and multifaceted forces at play in the private property ownership debate, the depth and theoretical relevance of the interview rather than the numbers of interviewees is of crucial significance (Terre blanche & Durrheim 1999-:
168). Thus interviews were not an end in themselves but served as “arenas within which particular linguistic patterns can come to the fore”, also, meanings arrived at from the interview will be viewed as “products of a larger social system for which these individuals act as relays” (Terre blanche & Durrheim, 1999: 153).
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The purpose of my selection of participants was to identify a population that would afford me an opportunity for an in-depth study of how property-owners lived. Further, the way I posed my research question called for selection of families that would provide rich information in this regard (Neuman 1997; Wengraf 2001). Alexandra would provide understandings of both continuities and discontinuities of a legally exceptional space in urban South Africa. Alexandra survived as a predominantly African township, but there was a shift in property ownership from private to sovereign regime, as properties which initially belonged to individuals became government property. For this reason, I limited my selection to family members of former property owners who never left Alexandra in order to understand their experiences of living in the township right through the changing property ownership regimes.
Although I initially aimed to select families that have lived in Alexandra Township from the earliest possible period, that is as close to 1912 as possible, I ended up speaking to family members who were available and accessible as in some instances, families had moved while in other instances, families were reluctant to speak to me. In spite of this, the experiences of the family members I interviewed jointly shed light on how the occurrence of the different property regimes in Alexandra Township have impacted on the social construction of property ownership by bommastandi. Further, the cumulative effects of various disruptions and dispossessions that were experienced by these families provide today – albeit with hindsight – a rich memory and sense of how these families understand themselves, their origins, in particular their link with Alexandra and in some instances, with other places.
I further intended to interview families who are as multigenerational as possible.
These families would highlight issues of succession and inheritance as well as reflect how gendered – if at all –property acquisition and dispossession was. I hoped that the multigenerational families would afford me an opportunity to “cross-reference” as well as access differing views of similar experiences which are generation based (Wengraf 2001). I was interested in what happened to the property in cases where the parents divorced or died.
Through discussions with available family members some of these concerns were addressed.
Talking about themselves and their relationships to the property the respondents often provided a wealth of information on family networks both in Alexandra and elsewhere and
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how these family members were linked to the property.45 These networks would reveal how resources were contributed and or shared in acquisition and use of property.
Before going to the field I assumed that the profiles of these families included experiences of various property regimes. My point of departure was that the respondents would all have had a communal property ownership background as well as possible familial links with it. This view was informed by land restitution debates that present Africans property relations as necessarily communal (Cousins 2002; Kariuki 2004). Cousins (2002) refers to private property ownership as “UnAfrican”This view that African property ownership is communal is critiqued by Widlok (2000), Mitchell (2002), and Berry (2002).
I also presumed that I would in my interviews get different pockets of respondents from various property ownership regime backgrounds such as communal, sovereign and possibly private, who would then jointly provide a whole which would comprise traceable sources of their regime of origin. But also, I assumed that there would be definitive boundaries between freeholders and tenants. Finally, I also assumed that property ownership impacted on a family‟s social economic class, with a high likelihood for the economically well off living in freehold. This influence is from my readings on urban Africans which largely use poor material condition of Africans in rural South Africa as a major factor when explaining their presence in urban areas. However, I found a much more complex situation.
Families who bought property came from multiple property relationship backgrounds.
Some had been tenants both in farms and non-farm urban properties. Others owned urban properties in places such as Sophiatown while others owned farms. Some came from communally owned villages. Most importantly, memories of these previous places were not necessarily immediate to all the respondents. Some of it was lived through stories told by parents and grandparents (Nyamende 1996: 193-196). Also, the boundaries between the owners and non-owning families were blurred. First, even though a property would on paper belong to a family – in that a member of that particular nuclear family held title to the property – purchasing that property and access to it in some cases might have been a joint effort among extended family members. Second, living or staying in that property was not only limited exclusively to the family members of the title-holder and their tenants. There were various arrangements where extended family members would live in the property
45 This network proves to remain important even at the time of writing. A survey(2007) conducted by Sara Charlton of the Department of Town & regional Planning at the University of Witwatersrand and myself for the Alexandra Renewal Project is looking at families in Alexandra who view elsewhere as home and how this served to inform housing provision for them in as far as tenurial rights were concerned.
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without necessarily paying rent. These arrangements were determined by conditions of familial agreements which were not necessarily written.