‘Most people going to work in the morning are from outside,’ Mandla, a pastor in his early forties, tells me as we stand outside his double-storey shack. ‘The people from here don’t work,’ he continues, using emphasis to guide my understanding. Mandla lives with his wife and two young children, works as a boilermaker during the week, and leads a small Zionist church on weekends. His assertion is a common refrain. I am often told that compared to immigrants and newcomers (outsiders), locals (insiders) are ‘lazy’ and ‘choosy’ when it comes to finding wage employment. The roadside pickup point on the perimeter of the settlement, where people wait in the hope of being picked up for labour-intensive day jobs, is a frequent reference point in these conversations. Many contrast it with the street corners where young men are seen, at least by some, to be ‘just sitting’. Mandla even offers to attach a camera to the roof of his shack so that I can see with my own eyes that it is outsiders, and not insiders, who leave the settlement in the early hours of the morning to look for or do work outside the settlement. Mandla is, of course, only referring to work as wage employment – which involves a spatial division between work and home – and not to the work of hustling or brokering we explored in the previous chapter.

The idea that locals are choosy when it comes to finding wage employment is one I encounter again and again in my conversations with residents of all ages, genders, and nationalities. Kagiso, the founder of the youth-run NGO discussed in chapter 2, tells me that young people from Zandspruit tend to ‘relax a bit’ when it comes to finding work compared to newcomers, who face greater ‘pressure to find jobs’. At first, I view with suspicion comments like this that conflate people’s residential status as insiders and outsiders with the likelihood of them being in wage work. I question whether these comments do not reproduce historical stereotypes of ‘hard-working’ migrants and ‘lazy’ locals. During apartheid, employers widely regarded township youth (who worked and lived in urban areas under the section 10 laws) as cheeky and unreliable and preferred to hire rural migrants (outsiders) whom they perceived as harder-working, cheaper, and more submissive and respectful.