From South Africa and Back: Segregation, Land, and LGBTQ+ Rights in South Africa
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Nicole le Roux has always been drawn to stories. And when the first official LGBTQ+ shelter of Cape Town changed leadership, they knew there were remarkable stories to be heard as new leaders began to expand who the shelter served.
“The leadership [of Pride Shelter] totally changed, and it went from a white, conservative leadership, unofficially serving only white people, to a shelter run by women of color and serving everyone. So, there have been a lot of complicated challenges that the new leadership have been experiencing.”
Originally born and raised in South Africa, le Roux came to the United States to study at Hampshire College. Their undergraduate work focused on storytelling, and how stories can be a form of activism and community-building by challenging silences around anti-blackness and other types of oppression.
After finishing college, Le Roux returned to South Africa to work with non-governmental organizations doing community-building work in the country. Through their work with NGOs, they started to understand the complex dynamics between national and international funders and organizations on the ground and started to question why, in Le Roux’s words, “certain things were funded but not others.”
Le Roux continued studying these dynamics by returning to Massachusetts and getting a master’s degree in international development and social change at Clark University. While at Clark, their advisor recommended that they continue their studies and pursue a PhD at UMass Amherst. Le Roux is now a PhD candidate in the Department of Educational Policy, Research & Administration.
The flexibility of the education program at UMass has allowed Le Roux to also work with faculty in Women, Gender, Sexuality Studies and pursue questions at the intersection of community-building, queer activism, knowledge production, and non-profit work with an ethnographic study in their home country. With the help of a Graduate School Fieldwork Grant and education department funding, they were able to return to South Africa to pursue their research questions.
While Le Roux didn’t initially know if they would work with Pride Shelter, thanks to previous connections with the director, as well as a deep respect for their mission, they ultimately decided to focus their research there.
Established in 2014, Pride Shelter provides temporary housing for LGBTQ+ adults during periods of crisis. They offer programs to their residents, which provide mental and physical health support, and run community programs to help reduce gender-based violence and homelessness in Cape Town. It is also one of the few places in the country where transwomen can access safe shelter support. Le Roux’s research is an ethnographic study which focuses on the Pride Shelter and the challenges its staff are facing in the moments after its leadership transition, as well as how the historically white community is responding.
Spending time at the shelter is essential for understanding the challenges they face. So, for their research, Le Roux spends two or three days a week working pro bono for the NGO, attending staff meetings, conducting interviews, fundraising, marketing, coordinating volunteers, and tagging along to events.
“It is only over time that I can learn what the staff feel is really important,” Le Roux said. “Things unfold really organically. I just have to be here, and talk to people, and suddenly my day is full.”
Le Roux takes directions from the staff in terms of what meetings and events are appropriate for them to attend. “I help whenever they ask me for help, based on the skills that I bring, because I feel that ethical research requires that I give something back rather than just take information from Pride Shelter,” said Le Roux.
Le Roux also does archival work to learn more about the history of the area and the government policies that have shaped the community over time, as well as conducting interviews with local land justice and LGBT+ activists. “All of these interviews and archival work are informed by what I find out in my ethnographic research – the different methods complement one another.”
Le Roux’s background in NGOs originally got them interested in challenges the staff of the shelter has with funders, the local government, and with the surrounding community. Over time, however, Le Roux’s focus started to switch.
“With ethnography, you adjust your questions based on what is actually coming up in the field,” Le Roux said. Critically, the shelter is based in one of the first areas made predominantly white through colonization, and as a legacy of Apartheid, South Africa is still a very segregated country. Le Roux emphasizes that this historical context is essential in understanding the challenges faced by the shelter today.
“This shelter is in a community that many of its patrons don’t have access to, and it’s breaking the norms of where people are, because of how segregated the country still is.”
What became apparent with the case of the shelter is that in South Africa – because of its historical legacy of colonization and Apartheid - land issues and patterns of land ownership are related to many other inequalities, such as racial inequality, and as demonstrated by Le Roux’s ethnography, LGBTQ+ rights.
“The theft of land, how it happened, and how it continues to happen is an important issue,” Le Roux said. In this context, the existence of Pride Shelter – a queer, women of color-led organization in the heart of an exclusive, historically white part of Cape Town – is an act of LGBTQ+ resistance and a reclamation of space.
Specifically, Le Roux’s research has centered around how heritage sites and memorials are being used in post-Apartheid Cape Town to maintain racial exclusion and separation. The shelter currently faces enormous pressure from both the community and local politicians to re-locate, with the heritage laws and property values being used to justify these demands. “The challenges that Pride Shelter faces is part of a broader strategy to justify segregation,” Le Roux explained.
Furthermore, the administrative policies that maintain exclusion are likely to get worse as climate change disproportionately impacts already disadvantaged communities, Le Roux emphasized. “Heritage sites are based in areas that are of strategic value – being on higher ground, with accessible rivers, and so on. What resources people have access to, such as mental health service or water, has a lot to do with where people live,” Le Roux said.
Looking forward, Le Roux believes that the activism work and creative organizing in South Africa can be useful for other countries with colonial memorials.
“South Africa has a very strong activist history and a uniquely progressive set of LGBTQ+ laws because of the movement work of feminists and LGBTQ+ activists,” they said. “Learning from this specific context will provide a useful case study – including for activists in the United States.”
Le Roux’s dissertation is bringing together all these elements: historical patterns of land ownership and inequality driven by colonization and Apartheid, the international and national politics of funding a shelter, and a reckoning with LGBTQ+ rights – and how all these dynamics come into play and create challenges for the first official LGBTQ+ shelter in South Africa.
But at the core of their work, stories are still the key. Le Roux says they love hearing people’s different perspectives and following the threads of their research. And despite all the struggles of the shelter and its community members, Le Roux describes how these stories can emanate a “defiant joy;” a fierce resistance that is full of laughter.
“I love hearing people’s stories, and making space for stories about resistance,” Le Roux said. “The stories people tell about land and about LGBTQ+ people matter.”
Written by Raymond Caraher, PhD candidate in Economics, as part of the Graduate School's Public Writing Fellows Program.