'To live this poor life': Remembering the Hottentots Huisie squatter fishery,Cape Town,c.1934-c.1965

The paper provides a social history of a Cape Town squatter fishing settlement, Hottentots Huisie, drawn primarily from the oral histories of its inhabitants before their forced removal under apartheid Group Areas legislation in the mid 1960s. Such use of oral history has fallen into disfavour with South African social historians, increasingly suspicious of the 1980s orthodoxy that all underclass biography is reducible to the essences of 'community' and 'resistance'. The life histories of Hottentots Huisie's inhabitants defy such easy categorization. Family not 'community' sustained the fishing economy. The tenuous economic base of squatter families, however, produced a robust patriarchy seeking to maintain male control over the labour of women and children through monopolization of the folk biology of fishing and its cash rewards, backed up by violence. Second generation squatter girls, however, refused domestic indenture to fishermen by deserting Hottentots Huisie for the greater freedom and opportunity of Cape Town's urban economy, dooming the settlement to extinction regardless of forced removal. Similarly, squatter 'resistance' to bureaucrats and bosses can also best be characterized as 'everyday' and took the form of squatting and crayfish poaching whose aim was 'working the system to their minimum disadvantage'. Ironically, the act of forced removal created the surviving Hottentots Huisie 'community' of memory.