An ethnography of young creatives in Itsoseng township : exploring the relationship between creative arts and non-standard employment in South

Abstract

This research project is based on four months of ethnographic fieldwork participation which I did among Itsoseng young creatives. In this thesis I explore and bring about understanding on themes of non-standard employment and creative arts among South African youth in Itsoseng Township, North-West Province, South Africa. In so doing, I show the relationship between non-standard employment and self-identified ‘young creatives’ in peri-urban South Africa by looking into ways which these ‘young creatives’ living in Itsoseng township make means to survive or get by in their day-to-day navigation of the unpleasant realities of South Africa’s high youth unemployment rate. According to Ross (2010:272) South Africa has attempted to address apartheid legacies within a neo-liberal capitalist matrix, but its consequences have been problematic, and its successes limited. These young creatives, similarly to the shack dwellers that Ross describes, have fought on for their survival in a township where the struggles of the poor are experienced daily (Ross, 2010:272). Through exploring the notion of ‘Ukuphanta’ (surviving or getting by) described by Motsemme (2011), I explored the creative arts gigs that these township young creatives work in and with, which bring about cash injection in their lives. I also discuss the stress and precarity that comes with being a young creative in Itsoseng township and I develop the locally used term ‘to atchaar’ to explain how young creatives in this research project manoeuvre around that. Additionally, discussions around the notion of world-making (Cox, 2022) and care (Van Dooren, 2014) to explain complex family relations and fictive kinship are explored in this thesis.