HOSTELS IN SOUTH AFRICA, continuity and change

215pp., illus., paperback, UCT Press, Cape Town, 2025

ISBN: 9781991450043

Foreword by Mamphela Ramphele, author of A Bed Called Home: Life in the migrant labour hotels of Cape Town (1993).. 

An edited collection of essays on former 'single-sex workers' hostels, a colonial and Apartheid institution whose effects are still felt in South Africa today.

Contributions include:

"The Anatomy of Migrant Labour Hostels" by Julian Cooke

"Hostels and the Legacy of their Tawdry Past" by Ari Sitas

"Advocating for Socio-Spatial Justice in the Spaces of Perplexity" by Nomkhosi Xulu-Gama

"Perspectives of the July 2021 Social Unrest among Langa Hostel Dwellers" by Yonela Toshę-Mlambo and Zukiswa Zanazao

"Marginalised and Exploited: The political sociology of hostels" by Paulus Zulu

"Critical Reflections: Degendering and the crisis of social reproduction in South Africa's hostels" by Bianca Tame

Nomkhosi Xulu-Gama is Associate Professor and Head of the Sociology Department at the University of Cape Town, a Fulbright scholar, and an honorary research affiliate at the Faculty of Management Sciences, Durban University of Technology. She is former Deputy Chairperson for the South African Sociological Association and is part of the editorial collective of the South African Review of Sociology Journal. She is author of Hostels in South Africa: Spaces of perplexity (2017) and co-editor (with P. Rugunanan) of Migration in Southern Africa (2022).