Book Review: Becoming Men: Black Masculinities in a South African Township

Abstract

In Becoming Men: Black Masculinities in a South African Township, the author Professor Malose Langa presents a rich and detailed understanding of poor black South African men and their raced and gendered lives. The book is based on 12 years of longitudinal research in Alexandra township in Johannesburg where the author journeys with young men as they grow from young boys to becoming men within their township. This long-term engagement with the field, a rarity in academic work today, makes a unique and important contribution to the study of men and masculinities from a Global South perspective. Beginning with Alexandra township, Langa explains how townships are colonial constructions built for the racial segregation of black South Africans. In contemporary post-apartheid South Africa, townships continue to be deprived spaces with high levels of poverty, unemployment, and poor infrastructure. From this historical and social context of the township living, Langa is interested in finding out how young boys become men within such a township and what factors shape their masculinities and lives. To answer this central question, Langa traverses the everyday lives of township boys, studying their relationship with families and women, sexualities, fatherhood, work as well as their contradictory moral and social worlds, to produce a rich and humanizing account of young black South African men from Alexandra township. Langa’s book demonstrates the heterogeneity in young men within the township and he complicates our understanding and workings of township life and its gendered norms. In the book we meet tsotsi boys (naughty/violent boys) as well as academic boys, we also meet sex-jaro boys (popular with girls), Christian boys, cheese boys (rich boys) as well as some gay boys. Hence, Langa puts forward a dynamic and diverse understanding of a township living as well as township masculinities. Malose Langa.