This article by Leslie Downie on gendered housing imbalances was written for the Transaction Support Centre and originally published by Cities Alliance. Cities Alliance is the global partnership fighting urban poverty and promoting the role of cities.
South Africa’s housing policies and laws strongly promote equal rights. As part of the democratic transition since the end of apartheid in 1994, a truly commendable edifice of laws has been developed to address discrimination against women. Yet unequal gendered outcomes remain. Why? The devil seems to be in the data. Official documentary evidence is often necessary to prove or enforce land and housing rights. Much gender discrimination has its roots in state record-keeping processes that have rendered women and children’s interests less visible. This is true both for records from the apartheid era, and for a number of years post-apartheid. How the facts about vulnerable women were captured in the past can have a more profound impact on women’s housing rights than current laws designed to protect their equality.
Throughout the world it has been common practice for officialdom to prioritise recording the narrative of men’s lives. This is rightly described as ‘history.’ Narratives about women (‘herstory’) are often absent in state records or cleaned out as irrelevant when bringing information forward. The stories of South African women in low-cost housing today are particularly at risk in this regard. South African housing is still heavily influenced by the contorted social engineering of the apartheid state, prior to its demise in 1994.
During apartheid, race-based laws only permitted ownership for people recorded as being ‘white’ in most of the country. Other races held land under other, much less secure, forms of tenure. Land itself was described geographically along racial lines, with particular areas designated for particular groups. This kept other races and their land needs and rights suitably invisible, and women more so – and this carried over into the data, as data fields for capturing race, marital, and cohabitation information were geared to facilitate apartheid social engineering.
Read the full article for more on gendered housing imbalances.
