A bed called home: Life in the migrant labour hostels of Cape Town

In this study, Dr Ramphele documents the lives of the hostel dwellers of Cape Town, for whom a bed is literally a home, for themselves and their families. The migrant labour hostels of South Africa, and of the Transvaal in particular, have attracted international attention in recent years for their violence and degrading conditions. Yet, as Dr Ramphele shows, many of the hostel dwellers are peace-loving people who have developed strategies to deal with their impoverished environment. She describes the constraints - political, ideological, social and economic, as well as physical - faced by the hostel dwellers, and explores the emancipatory possibilities of their situation. Dr Ramphele argues that one of the most important social and political tasks facing South Africa now is empowerment, which depends upon exploring these possibilites and extending people's spaces.