In bodies and homes: Gendering citizenship in Southern African cities

How do the everyday contexts in which ordinary women struggle to access and maintain a place on the peripheries of the city shape experiences of citizenship? This paper explores this question in George, a periurban Lusaka neighbourhood in Zambia and through experiences of Zimbabwean migrant women’s negotiation of a place on the peri-urban edges of Khayelitsha, Cape Town, South Africa. In the logics of citizen-subjects, the experiences of these groups of women should be poles apart, the first with rights imbued in citizenship, the second migrants without. Here instead, we demonstrate the ways in which gendered political subjectivities embed in the hard, lived realities of home. In placing gender and everyday body politics at the forefront of our analysis, the paper makes visible the micro-realities of making home. We demonstrate that an assumed recursive relationship between citizenship and home, as a physical and social place in the city, is problematic. Building on debates on citizenship and its gendering in post-colonial African urban contexts, we demonstrate instead that citizenship and its gendered contestations and emergent forms in Southern African are crafted in quotidian activities in homes and everyday city contexts.


Introduction
Despite formal citizenship and rights in urban Southern Africa, the lived experience of citizenship and its benefits remain fraught and uneven, particularly for women. As Manicom demonstrates, rights-based citizenship projects produce "a fragmented and contingent subject," (Manicom, 2005: 24), which equivocally position and construct women as subjects in citizenship projects and processes. In this light, she asks us "to render visible and contestable the different makings of gendered political subjects, and the ways these inform and are integrated within policy, rights and political practices" (2005: 47). In doing so, we might disentangle "different forms of agency and moral grounds for participation that are available within different constructions of citizenship " (2005: 47). This paper takes up this challenge, examining agency in the everyday contexts in which ordinary women struggle to access and maintain a place on the peripheries of the city.
Our analysis explores women's making and sustaining of homes in two urban peripheries, the first in Lusaka and the second in Cape Town. We first examine the case of women living in George, a peri-urban Lusaka neighbourhood. In the re-telling of one woman's life history, we trace experiences over forty years, and across shifting post-colonial regimes. Second, we explore contemporary experiences of Zimbabwean women migrants, 'foreign citizen-bodies', in their trials to seek new lives, to negotiate home and a place on the peri-urban edges of Khayelitsha on the margins of Cape Town, South Africa. In the logics of citizen-subjects, these two groups of women should be poles apart, the first with rights imbued in citizenship, the second migrants without. Our comparative approach demonstrates however the parallel ways in which gendered political subjectivities embed in the lived hard realities of home, in the limits of women's access to the city, articulated in struggles to substantiate citizenship at multiple scales.
In placing gender and everyday body politics at the forefront of our analysis of citizenship, we make visible the micro-realities of making home, arguing that claims to the city can be read in relation to projects of citizenship and rights-based development in post-colonial southern African (McEwan, 2005). We build on Holston and Appadurai's (1996) argument that citizenship is a particularly urban phenomenon. Although "one of the essential projects of nation-building has been to dismantle the historic primacy of urban citizenship and to replace it with the national, [they argue] cities remain the strategic arena for the development of citizenship " (1996: 188). This significance relates to "concentrations of the nonlocal, the strange, the mixed, and the public" which allow cities to "engage most palpably the tumult of citizenship" and in which ordinary urbanites can "expand and erode the rules, meanings, and practices of citizenship" (Holston & Appadurai, 1996: 188). We build on this framing of urban citizenship and its contestations, to interrogate the uncertainties and contestations, the emergent and diverse forms (Simone, 2004;Pieterse, 2013), the diverse meanings of citizenship in lived city spaces. Here, we demonstrate that an assumed recursive relationship between citizenship and home, as a physical and social place in the city, is problematic. Building on debates on citizenship and its gendering in post-colonial African urban contexts, we demonstrate instead that citizenship and its gendered contestations and emergent forms in Southern African are crafted in quotidian activities in homes and everyday city context.

Citizenship in post-colonial Africa
In Africa, as elsewhere, scholarly work on citizenship has been, until recently, the focus of political science and legal studies, with only minor consideration in other social science disciplines. Much of this work has debated the implicit assumption that formal citizenship rights are necessarily recursive and translate meaningfully into practice (see Young, 1989Young, , 1997. Instead, the focus has shifted so that increasingly the everyday meanings of citizenship have been taken up by a variety of fields, such as, for instance, critical anthropology (Comaroff & Commaroff, 1999), feminism, (Manicom, 2005), and transnational and migration studies (Sichone, 2008); and cultural studies (such as Mbembe & Nutall, 2004). McEwan (2000) highlights ways feminist theorists have also "explored alternative notions of radical and substantive democracy contributing to shifting notions of citizenship", with a growing interest among political and feminist geographers in the scales and spaces of citizenship.

Gender and citizenship in the African context
In post-colonial Africa, "women are citizens according to national constitutions and they usually have the right to vote" (Schlyter, 2009: 11). However, the literature points to manifold challenges in African women's efforts to access or fully exercise their citizen rights (Gouws, 2005;Hames, 2006;Nyamu-Musembi, 2007;Schlyter, 2009). Women's movements for peace (Gbowee, 2011) for national liberation (Hassim 2006;Tripp et al., 2008), for suffrage (Ramtohul, 2015), and against homophobia (Salo & Gqola, 2006) have drawn from feminist theorising during the 1990s that has analysed citizenship "as plural and multilayered, embodying the recognition of multiple identities and associated new claims for distributing and redistributing the rights and practices linked with citizenship" (Young, 1990, cited in Perreira, 2005. Despite this proliferation of research, what Perreira (2005) has described as "useful for providing a general framework for understanding citizenship," she stresses that "there is a need to understand the realities of women's lives in specific African contexts". Through this focus on everyday lived experience she argues we can develop grounded theory on citizenship. More recently hate crimes targeting lesbians in South Africa (Salo & Gqola, 2006) and gay communities in Zimbabwe (Epprecht, 2005) have highlighted the necessity of examining the gendered meanings of citizenship through women's and marginal men's lived experiences. In this paper we take forward this dual impetus to ground notions of citizenship and its inclusions and exclusions in the everyday and to consider how the gendered crafting of citizenship shapes and is informed by women's actions and their experiences.
Part of the character of the sub-Saharan African post-colonial state are the dilemmas and social complexities of dealing with African traditions and Western modernities (Halisi et al., 1998) and the tensions between communitarian and the modernist ideas of citizenship. In her introduction to the volume Gender Justice, Citizenship and Development, Mukhopadhyay (2007) explains that post-colonial dilemmas "have had and continue to have a profound effect on the way women's rights, equality and citizenship are conceived and fought for" on the African continent and elsewhere (Mukhopadhyay, 2007: 8). In discussing the exclusion of women from full citizenship status, Nyamu-Musembi (2007) differentiates between formal and explicit exclusions, pointing to how women may have formal citizenship but are often unable to enjoy substantive citizenship. "Here, formal citizenship is understood as the relationship between the state and the citizen, whereas substantive citizenship is that which goes beyond the confines of formal politics and law to encompass the economic, social and political relationship between social groups and structures of power that mediate the standing of individuals in the polity" (Mukhopadhyay, 2007: 7). Nyamu-Musembi (2007) draws on examples of women's inability to pass on their national citizenship to their spouses or children after marrying foreign nationals from across the continent, to suggest that the denial of full citizen status to women appears the norm in practice despite legal amendments that expand women's formal rights (Nyamu-Musembi, 2007;Mukhopadhyay, 2007: 7). Importantly, they highlight the 'covert and unacknowledged gendered asymmetry in citizenship" (McEwan, 2001: 53, cited in Nyamu-Musembi, 2007) that leads to failure to implement rights where they exist or to a lack of acknowledgment of women's contributions to nation building and social cohesion more generally (2007: 176). These issues are made more complicated when merged with customary and religious law and practice.
Post-colonial African states have introduced legal reforms to improve the citizenship status of women (Halisi et al., 1998: 337) especially in the aftermath of independent nationalist struggles such as in Mozambique, South Africa, Namibia. However, the formal recognition of women's citizenship is the first step in an uneven, unpredictable often contradictory process towards gender equitable citizenship (McEwan, 2001: 53;Naggita-Musoke, 2001). Nyamu-Musembi concludes that in general "domestic relations still do not come under state scrutiny and within the domestic sphere 'private patriarchies' continue to pose practical hurdles to the realization of full citizenship by women" (2007: 177).

Negotiating gendered citizenship in Southern African cities and towns
We bring this scale of analysis and sensibility to our analysis of the everyday gendered negotiation of citizenship in Southern Africa cities. We build particularly on a body of work from the Southern African Gender Research on Urbanization, Planning, Housing and Everyday Life (GRUPHEL) research programme, conducted between 1995 and 2005 on housing as shelter and home. This work highlights the material and intangible social aspects of human settlement in peri-urban areas, including features such as housing structures and access, provision of services, as well as use of space and living conditions. The research findings clearly illustrate that women's citizenship cannot be analyzed by focusing on women public activities alone. Women's crafting of their citizenship begins in the process of negotiating their own and their more vulnerable dependents' statuses in the home. The home, par excellence, is the space associated with the biological and social reproduction of self, through family, and inter-generational continuity. It is, as well, the place from which both men and women 'imagine' their links to a wider collectivity such as 'the community' and 'the nation'. Women embody and perpetuate these links in a tangible material sense through marriage and reproduction that should locate them in potentially powerful positions. Yet customary and formal juridical rules of marriage reduce women to perpetual minors and dependents upon men in the home, so that women cannot be recognized as agentive persons in their own right. For example, wives often have to ask for permission from husbands and sometimes sons at home if they want to participate in public activities. Women are often the ones who dominate neighbourhood groups fighting for housing and related services (Ismail, 2015). As importantly, intimate familial relationships enacted and negotiated in the domestic sphere take primacy in delineating women's activities, circumscribing their experiences of citizenship in relational, material ways. These restrictions occur despite women's principal contributions to the households' economic and social wellbeing (Schlyter, 1999, Chipeta, 2005Schlyter, 2006). Women have to negotiate their place in the home with a male head of household or with male landlords (Sithole-Fundire, 1995). In the Zambian context, Munalula (1998: 263) argues that "gendered home ownership is a critical economic factor in disempowering women". Home ownership affects power relations within a marriage and a household; and, denial of property rights "perpetuates social injustice and has created a powerful system in which gender and generational inequalities are reinforced and institutionalized by the state, society and family" (Mapetla et al, 2007: 13).
In much of the research on the meanings of home in Southern Africa emphasis tends to be placed upon home as a site of memory, work that tracks histories of belonging (see, for instance, Rassool & Prosalendis, 2001). Others focus on the home as a site through which we can understand systems of social networks and already constituted gendered respectability (see Salo, 2003Salo, , 2018Ross, 2009). In this literature, home spaces are conceptualised at various scales, informed as much by the social and cultural meanings imbued in the physical space, as by the materials used to construct them. The gendered character of home making through women's quotidian actions are, however, less explored. Moreover, the contemporary canon on home, citizenship and belonging rarely examines the quotidian embodied practices of negotiating 'home' as a central process that both shapes and constrains the crafting of citizenship.
Spaces of home, as well as the wider neighbourhood and city, are not only physical and material but also constructed, negotiated and reproduced, key elements that constitute the gendered character of citizenship (see Birdwell-Pheasant & Lawrence-Zuniga, 1999;Oldfield et al, 2009). They can also be sites of violence. The literature on gender-based violence and queer struggles for acceptance at home (see Wieringa et al., 2007) thus question the implied assumptions of the safety associated with home. This work asks us to consider the ways a politics of intimacy at home is tied up with the claims to and the struggle for substantive gendered citizenship. Lastly, for a significant portion of the population in the continent's growing urban centres, migration forms part of their experience and of their relations extended across space, reflecting inter alia, increasing transnationalism due to annulment of citizenship, failing economies and conflict due to repression and militarism (Landau et al., 2010). Migration is often motivated primarily by the search for sustainable livelihoods; and migrants' identification of host countries are informed by assumptions about the possibility of negotiating home and community in the new spaces they relocate to. Migrants' experiences and imaginings of making a new home as they move from one geographical context to another is an important arena for exploring the meanings of urban citizenship as these are formed in quotidian activities and are gendered in the process of locating and negotiating home.
We build on this literature by exploring the micro politics of space, and space making as these inform subjective interpretations, contestations over, and constraints of citizenship and identity in everyday practice in Southern Africa (Oldfield et al, 2009: 3). How do women negotiate experiences and processes of making home, with limited resources and infrastructure, as well as in contexts of intimate gendered politics in households in Southern African urban peripheries? In such contexts the challenge of substantiating citizenship is immense; it underlines the importance of exploring and documenting the gendered everyday ways in which women negotiate and craft citizenship in practice.
In the case studies below, we track the ways women craft their citizenship, contingent upon the range of opportunities that are presented to them by existing socio-economic and cultural factors, as well as their efforts to work around and through similarly structured constraints. We reflect on dynamics in the context of women's experiences of and claims for substantive formal citizenship over forty years in George Compound, a peri-urban area of Lusaka, and, second, in Zimbabwean women's negotiations of home making and the expansion of claims to substantive citizenship rights to homes despite national exclusion as formal extra-national migrants in Khayelitsha, Cape Town.

Gendered citizenship: Navigating peri-urban Lusaka and Cape Town George 1
Lusaka the capital city of Zambia dates back to its colonial origins as a railway siding established in the early 1900s on the railway line transporting copper from Northern Zambia to South African ports (Mulenga, 2003). The city's population has increased incrementally since its founding but expanded rapidly after Zambian independence in 1964. The demands for housing in Lusaka have always been greater than the provision of formal dwellings. The growth in informal housing during the colonial period was driven by the colonial authorities attempts to curb permanent African residents in Lusaka prior to 1948 because the latter were not considered full citizens of the empire. Lesiglative reform in the post war colonial period recognised the presence of Africans in the city without the requirement of the colonial state to provide formal housing for them. The African Housing Ordinance Act provided African workers the right to live permanently in the urban centre, whilst the Self Help Housing Act did not require formal building standards in the informal settlements. By the 1950s informal settlements expanded to consist of authorised and unauthorised informal housing areas, due to the post-war economic boom in the country. Matero and Chilenje were the first informal settlements to be established followed by Chalama and George compound. The colonial state did not provide basic services to these settlements and provision of basic services such as a safe water was only addressed by the independent state together with international development agencies in the 1970s and 1980s (Mulenga, 2003;Schlyter, 2009). These attempts at improvements were perceived as and branded by the ruling party the United National Independence Party as the fruits of post independence development.
In the 1970s, the squatter area George compound was dominated by the United National Independence Party, UNIP. Party leaders who allocated plots to the migrants who sought work and newcomers from all over the country as they migrated into the city. The process of allocation was tied up with the nation-building project as plots were allocated to male heads of households regardless of ethnic affiliation. The slogan associated with this process was: One Zambia -One Nation. Families that Anne Schylter interviewed in 1968 were, with a few exceptions, apolitical and inactive in party politics, but accepted partly leaders as "urban headmen". The women took an active role in creating the new home. While the men were in wage work they made the mud bricks and supervised bricklayers. They purchased and carried roof sheets on their head from town. Many of them engaged in petty trading outside their home, but they defined themselves as dependents and not working.
The area was legalised and upgraded during the second half of the nineteen seventies with support by the World Bank and with an impressive degree of participation organized by the local party organization. Women were active and demanded water, schools and clinics. The men's concerns were somewhat different, reflecting their everyday life of work outside the neighbourhood; they prioritized roads and transport. The possibility to deliver improvements strengthened the local party organization. Zambia was now a one party state and the party came to fill a role in the urban governance as the lowest level of local authorities.
The party supported women's participation by having a chairlady elected in each section of the compound. It is true that the women were supposed to support the male leaders and take care of social issues. Never the less, the party supported women's active citizenship by providing a space where they could voice their concerns and speak up in public. However, few men appreciated or supported the women's public activities and wives were pressured to limit participation in local authorities. Therefore, most chairladies were women who were heading their own households. Although they had the burden of both breadwinning and care for their families they took on a lot of community work. From the national women's organisation the UNIP party members in the peri-urban areas were urged to safeguard morality and women's role primarily as mothers -they were the mothers of the nation.
Until the early eighties the growing economy, based primarily on the export of Zambian copper, provided employment mainly for men and made it possible for most families to improved their living standards. There was food in the pots in most Georgetown households, and many houses were rebuilt in concrete blocks, extended, and gradually furnished. Many women seized the opportunities to craft their citizenship as active participants in party and community activities, not only in the role of submissive, hard working mothers of the nation.
In the early nineties with the introduction of structural adjustment and the contraction of the economy, most households had seen their hopes for a better quality of life in Georgetown fade. The neighbourhood was impoverished and services were not maintained. In the election the Movement for Multiparty Democracy, MMD, won a landsligh victory. Many residents were enthusiastic over the new window of freedom. But already a few years later the celebration of democracy had silenced. There was no change towards a better living standard. A few of the informants, especially the male street vendors, appreciated the freedom from local party leaders who previously had put restrictions on their activities. Street vending had not been allowed, but women's small businesses had been tolerated. Now, the women could not compete with young "businessmen", who introduced new types of goods and had a more aggressive way of selling.
Other residents of all ages blamed the MMD for not building a local organisation. They would certainly vote but saw no other way to engage in an active citizenship. Youth in secondary school (a minority as most children only get a few years of schooling) in George compound understood the change of political system and did not expect a local organisation, but they were ambivalent in their views. The same young girls could first express despise against all politics and politicians and then talk with great engagement about the need for women politicians. This feminist view of young girls was not shared by most women and men in George compound, who felt that peri-urban areas and poor people needed a strong leader: "A strong leader is a man. Non one listens to a woman" (see Schlyter, 2009).
Most young people felt that they lived in an area excluded from society. They did not know any politicians or any way to make their concerns visible. They knew that they were allowed to vote, but they found it was too complicated to get a voter registration card, so many did not even try. In this multi-party society there is no invited space for residents of George compound to actively contribute in the political arena. The exception is the Residential Development Committee, invented by the City Council, but there is only one committee for the huge residential area of at least 60 000 inhabitants. The sub-committee for water appoints tap leaders to control the water taps. Women dominate as tap leaders as they do whenever there is voluntary work to do.
Women in George compound certainly have some agency to craft citizenship through their struggle for home and community. They form informal networks within which a high degree of mutual solidarity is practiced. But increasing overcrowding with additional rooms and houses filled with multi-generational families or renters, and numerous cases of too early deaths also create conflicts sometimes channelled into accusations of witchcraft. Over a long period, residents of George compound have experienced increasing poverty. Strikingly, though, the upward swings in the national economy, for instance, as China's demand for copper spurs a revival in the copper mining industry, has not made any tangible changes to them. Many old women have seen their dream of a comfortable life of retirement fail in their old age. They continue to work long and hard, as their children have passed away leaving them with dependent grandchildren. With the disaster of AIDS the old people continue to work and carry on in the community as leading citizens.
Zambian women have been made symbols of the nation -however that symbolism has been confined to and centred on women citizens as mothers and wives alone. Like other postcolonial nationalist discourse elsewhere on the continent (McClintock, 1995) women's roles as the nurturers and mothers of the Zambian nation. This discourse remains symbolic as the economic and social value of women's home making activities are ignored. The substantive meanings of citizenship with regards to women's quotidian activities in the home and their attempts to suture together the formal and practical claims to citizenship, to knit together their own and their dependents' well-being in the home to the well-being of the nation is overlooked by the state. Consequently, they have been offered a limited form of citizenship by the state, constitutionally, in customary law and in real material ways.
Women who have tried to penetrate the political arena have, in many ways, been reminded that they are inappropriate citizens because of their gender. Many restrictions to women's active citizenship are rooted in the private sphere, shaped by patriarchal household relations, and the practical ways in which neighbourhood, city and national politics are organised. Women were active in Georgetown informal settlement as members of the UNIP initiated upgrading committees in the aftermath of independence in the 1960s -however these women often participated in the face of male relatives' censure. We draw on the life history of one woman Mrs. Mwanza, a single head of a Georgetown household because her narrative remains emblematic of ordinary Zambian women's lives in the informal settlements in the peri-urban periphery of Lusaka.
Mrs. Mwanza and her then husband built a small mud house in Georgetown compound on the back of independence and the rise of the United National Independence Party that ruled Zambia between 1964 and 1991. She and her then husband became active in the local UNIP branch. However despite UNIP discourse encouraging women's active political participation, most Georgetown men censured their wives participation because of the injunction that prevented respectable wives from addressing men directly. Mrs. Mwanza like other wives, were active from the backstage, providing support for the meetings in which men were the main actors. She only accepted the position of chairperson once her husband left her for another woman. During the 1970s when Georgetown was identified alongside other informal settlements for upgrading, the women mobilised the settlement population to attend the planning meetings. Here decisions were made about the type of upgrading that would occur. Here too the gendered divide in the decision-making was evident. While women wanted improvements in water infrastructure and a health clinic, the men wanted tarred roads and public lighting (personal communication, see Schlyter, 2009).
During the 1980s the economic downturn in the lives of ordinary Zambians cut deep as structural adjustment took hold. The UNIP local structures continued to exist in the local context but increasingly the decisions taken in these for a were not, or could not be taken up by more powerful politicians and policy makers at the municipal or national level. Consequently, local membership dropped to precipitous levels and Mrs Mwanza elected to leave the organisation. In the classic actions associated with structural adjustment state subsidies on services such as health and education were eliminated, and the Zambian Kwacha was devalued She like other women, sought to increase household incomes through informal economic activities such as selling fresh produce from small stalls in the compound even as she strived to meet her domestic responsibilities at home. At this time her marriage broke down and she was left with the added insecurity of supporting a household with minor dependents who were still at school. In addition, the meanings of home had acquired precarity. The state only recognised men as formal property owners, so her husband remained the owner of the home she occupied under precarious conditions.
In impoverished contexts such as Georgetown, women's embodied citizenship in the everyday link up with their right to be recognised as political agents actively claiming citizenship rights independent of their relationship to men as wives, and daughters. The Georgetown women have attempted to claim citizenship in the context of the constraining nationalist discourse of motherhood by taking their nurturing roles from the private into the public sphere. In the afterglow of independence during the 1960s the Goergetown women were active participants in the political institutions available in the local context. This was especially apparent during the years of structural adjustment and economic decline in the 1980s. During this time they expanded the passive, respectable connotations of motherhood through their activities in the economic sphere as informal traders and through their claims to safe shelter and sanitation Although women's unpaid work providing support for their own dependents as well as child orphans in the family, or the elderly and their social networking cements and develops their community, their work remains unrecognised as of immediate political, economic or social value by the state, the men in the women's households or even by women themselves. So in their crafting of citizenship women in George are not primarily claiming for rights or participating in political structures. They are contributing to the community in their everyday life. Old women looking back at their lives in George put great pride in having contributed to their community as honest and decent citizens. They have developed a sense of contributory citizenship.
Crafted in community and in everyday experience across much of a lifetime living in George Compound, this set of experiences sits in interesting contrast with the contemporary experiences of Zimbabwean women migrants, the focus of the following discussion.

Migrant women's struggles for body and home
Migration forms a key part of the urban experience of a portion of women and men in African cities. It offers some key insights into the micro politics of space, access, identities and citizenship on the continent because migrants are often rendered marginal and vulnerable by the uncertain citizenship status within the spaces they migrate to. Migrants' experiences as they relocate to 'new' spaces contribute to understanding urban realities and citizenship through nuanced exploration of strategies and everyday practice (see Matshaka 2009Matshaka , 2010Matshaka , 2018. This section of the paper draws from research in the South African city of Cape Town with young migrant Zimbabwean women on how the body and identities are negotiated in the micro spaces of home and community in the context of migration. Looking at the material and social realities of the young women who are part of the current wave of Zimbabweans who since the year 2000 are migrating and resettling in the geographically socioeconomically marginalised areas of South African cities widens our exploration of micro experiences at the level of the gendered body and provides a critical insight into 'citizenship' and, in the case of transnational regional migrants, its everyday crafting of exclusion in particular (Lefko-Everett, 2007). In this section we consider how women, who in the context of transnational migration are marginalised by their legal or economic status, negotiate the microstructures of home and community.
Due to multiple motivations, a woman leaves Zimbabwe, arrives in Cape Town under varying circumstances and finds home in the peripheral spaces of the host city. Not only do these circumstances determine the situations the women find themselves, but they also shape the options open to them in responding to their new and often changing living situations. This is in the context of scant decent low-priced housing as well as the migrant's own often limited and precarious financial resources linked to either unemployment or job insecurity and the necessity to stretch the often-poor remuneration to meet living costs in the migration context while remitting back to Zimbabwe. The physical and material condition of the dwellings that the migrant women occupy in the less affluent township neighbourhoods on the Cape Flats, often limited shared formal or informal rented spaces which are not designed or adequate for occupation by multiple people, shapes the negotiation of day-to-day practices and arrangements such as how a mixed group of women and men sleep in a single room.
Nonetheless, as pointed out earlier women craft their citizenship in different ways depending on what opportunities their environment offers them. In order to relocate in the urban peripheral spaces of Cape Town, the current wave of the young Zimbabwean migrant woman makes use of varied relationships, which are utilised in varied ways. Beyond the more traditional support networks such as 'close' family members and spouses, in this context, migrant women's support base and networks of access are expanded to include other preexisting social relationships which were previously considered casual acquaintance or 'distant' kin relationships but are now activated, rekindled and redefined to include new expectations and obligations. Narratives of access demonstrate that women rely on networks, including friends, 'extended' family members, acquaintances from their home neighbourhoods or whom they share some history or background such as former school mates or people from the same rural home. In the absence of networks based on close kinship or friendship ties or in cases where reliance on these is not possible or desirable, a migrant woman is able to access shelter through connection with the cross border trader from her home neighbourhood or a friend of a friend for example. In addition, the expansion of informal networks for access and support also comes to include new contacts or relationships established in the migration context based on shared nationality or shared networks. The redefined and newly established networks that migrants draw on are not only useful in finding lodging but continue to be a platform of support, cooperation and collectiveness beyond the early days of migration, playing a central role in meeting their general day-to-day needs with women sharing lodgings and other resources with other migrants. These Zimbabwean migrant women create, adopt and reinforce diverse networking strategies, which allow them to access accommodation and survive.
The experiences of young Zimbabwean migrant women confirm, in line with existing studies the role of social networks in the everyday life of different groups of women and men and their bearing on living situations and well-being (Schlyter, 1996). Literature on urban experiences has demonstrated that for women in particular, networking and solidarity in everyday life are important assets which are mobilised for their survival in urban areas, and to help them meet expected gender roles such as being homemakers (Beyene, 2005). Muzondidya (2008) has argued that among Zimbabwean migrants the extension and solidification of social networks and emphasis on collectiveness are important aspects of their culture of survival in South Africa, an aspect illustrated by the experiences of the women who were part of this research. This research revealed how, although social networks and the "accumulation and consolidation of social capital" (Beyene, 2005: 3) through collectiveness and communality with these varied and extended networks is key to the migration experience, these networks are also complex, involving multi-faceted, gendered negotiations. The migrant women's accounts of their experiences within the homes where they are located as dependent or hostess, junior in-law or distant relative, reveal how, while they open up possibility to find a home, to maximize agency through shared information and cooperation (such as sharing household costs), the diverse relationships which migrant women draw and rely on within these spaces of home also have constraints.
Whether with kin on non-kin, pre-existing or new, these relationships are neither simple nor straightforward, but instead are demanding, gendered and linked to markers of status in relation to other members of the household, such as being a recognised spouse versus a 'temporary' live in girlfriend. In addition to never being perfect of straightforward, these relationships with networks of support or cooperation are also precarious often due to the strains which emerge as a result of the new material and social demands on these relationships in the migration context, with individuals who previously did not share households or resources now adopting this practice in response to changed circumstances. For example, young women often are forced to share the limited space of home with a mix of male and female kin and strangers. Gendered social norms such as those surrounding domestic roles as well as definitions of female respectability, length of tenure, ability to contribute to material costs also have bearing on the ways in which these relations and everyday interactions are negotiated in this migration context.
The young women's experiences also demonstrated the work that is involved in the day-today interactions in maintaining the gendered reciprocal relationships that exist within these households where migrants share or contribute to each other's costs and domestic labour. This work takes different forms such as having to adopt conciliatory stances or having to bear with uncomfortable situations such as bearing with a 'romantic' relationship which you perceive as morally unacceptable such as an extra-marital affair, in order to maintain one's access to a roof. The patterns of reciprocity demanded by the relationships women draw on are costly to their personal comfort and often require compromising of community as well as individual values similar to the example above. As a result, the situations some of the women live in are not only physically uncomfortable but also socially undesirable. The negotiation of complex day-to-day living situations and relationships that they negotiate require the women, to some extent, to re-evaluate, re-negotiate, compromise and re-work different aspects of their customs, sensitivities and identities. For example, with migrants sharing whatever limited space is available, the women have often had to re-evaluate aspects of their upbringing by sleeping in same space as adult male kin or even male strangers. The multifaceted negotiations involved complicate any simple reading of reciprocal relationships among migrants in the home and the community spaces they occupy.
As they move from their home country eventually finding and maintaining home (for varying periods) in peri-urban areas of Cape Town, migrant Zimababwean women negotiate multiplex conditions and relationships. The material and social expectations, concerns and discourses that shape the young women's realities are not only about negotiations around documentation that regulates their stay in the country, relationships with ordinary citizens in relation to broad issues such as competition over scarce jobs, or ensuring they send remittances home. Also central to migrants' everyday gendered concerns, negotiations and everyday crafting of residency are questions about where will I sleep tonight, how will I get my kin to contribute to electricity costs, or is my partner being faithful, the everyday material and relational micro-politics in homes.

Crafting gendered citizenship
Although a woman's right to her body should be the absolute foundation on which citizenship is built, it has seldom been included in analyses of citizenship. Yet, in increasingly impoverished peri-urban areas, negotiations for citizenship start with women's bodies and are forged in the private sphere in homes. By having homes and women's bodies as starting point in our analysis we reveal how women struggle for agency through everyday negotiations within their families. With poverty, a heavy workload and duties of nurturing and nursing, women's citizenship is constrained. In line with Borges (2006), our approach pays attention to how women, in George Compound, Zambia and as migrants in Khayelitsha, Cape Town, negotiate everyday categories, formulas and processes to meet their visceral needs. Moreover, the everyday negotiation of the domestic and immediate community space presents an interesting site for understanding gendered negotiations of limited material conditions as well as norms, identities and relationships which form part of local subjectivities and everyday crafting of citizenship.
Women in George and migrant women in townships on Cape Town's 'Cape Flats' have remade their social networks, to craft a place and a way to live. Through community work in George, women have developed a strong sense of citizenship that emphasizes contribution to the common good rather than claims on the state. Migrant Zimbabwean women have marginal rights as non-citizens, yet they have forged community, nonetheless, remaking themselves in this challenging context. Certainly, in light of women's long-term experiences in George compound in Lusaka and as migrants in the townships of Cape Town, Sassen's (2002) argument that globalisation produces spaces with new de-nationalised possibilities for citizenship for women appears surreal. To a degree the middle-class women's movements have been emboldened. Their objects are both non-state institutions such as donors and international organisations and the state, to which they continuously and sometimes successfully make claims. Their claims and campaigns may meet a positive resonance among the peri-urban women, for example the protests against destitution of widows in Zambia. But normally township women are not included in the campaigns and their view of themselves, as citizens, have not much to do with claim making. Instead they put their pride as citizens in what they contribute to their community. They are in their struggle for home crafting a contributory form of citizenship, practices that gender citizenship in relation to critical everyday needs, resources, and practices and politics in and from which women build and negotiate their citizenship intimately, publicly and politically (Manicom, 2005;Gouws, 2005).

Conclusion
In our examination of the crafting of citizenship in contemporary urban Southern Africa, we argue that citizenship and its body politics are informed by the contested interplay between women and men as they imagine, inhabit and gender space, strive to access scarce material resources, and negotiate relationships within households and communities located in broader political and social urban and national economies. We conceptualise 'body politics' as the negotiation of power via the body, processes that operate sometimes directly (for instance, violently), but also processes that work at a symbolic and representational scale. At the same time, we analyse body politics in its materiality, played out in homes and neighbourhoods, in the depravity and possibility of material conditions on the margins and peri-urban edges of our cities. Body politics are also constituted relationally: within households and families, community processes and in neighbourhood and civic politics, through access or a lack thereof to state resources, or through interventions by the state. In these processes, power relations are constantly negotiated through everyday acts on, in and through the body.
The focus on everyday experiences of so-called marginal women and their bodies on the edges of Lusaka and Cape Town grounds our understanding of urban citizenship and the discourses, practices and contestations about belonging that emerge through gendered tropes of home and being at home. The comparative discussion in this paper engages intentionally with particular places and times to examine the micro-relations and politics of women's everyday lives. Built on ethnographic theorisation across the region, we draw together varied tactics and strategies that women enact and perform in their everyday lives in peripheral urban places. A gendered analysis of citizenship built in material and political experiences of belonging on the edges in Southern African cities counterbalances discursive strategies of universal development and globalization that too often write out and efface gendered negotiations that situate women's lived experience and shape agency.