Maye! Maye!

Kwa Mai Mai is the embodiment of everything Johannesburg is meant to be – the City of Gold, a place where dreams deferred come true. It is a constellation of people’s cultures, imbued with beautiful memories of life in villages left behind but cherished by those who refuse to forget. This book tells the story of how cultural memory, sacredly preserved and transported to new geographies, can be used both as a cultural weapon to resist subjugation and as an economic weapon to turn those priceless traditions into tradeable commodities. The book explores how the keepers of cultural memory can use it not only to survive but to invoke the entrepreneurial and creative spirit buried deep within their souls. Moreover, it builds on the assumption that if cultural memory can be stored and retrieved through artefacts, sites, ceremonies, myths and rituals, then Kwa Mai Mai is the place where these elements converge in inspiring displays of craftsmanship, worship and healing. Yet, Kwa Mai Mai has a darker side. It is a place of painful memories and ignored pleas – where its members are in a constant battle to be acknowledged by the city that created it. This book reveals how the subversive, socio-economic order that epitomised Kwa Mai Mai turned class theory upside down. In an interesting reversal of roles, the Kwa Mai Mai community, who used to be a migrant working class, wrested the power and control over the means of production from the dominant class. Through their heightened cultural consciousness, this marginalised migrant community has reimagined new economic realities and possibilities, forever distancing themselves from the painful, repressive past.

Sipho Sithole is a cultural anthropologist and a Research Fellow at the Johannesburg Institute for Advanced Study (University of Johannesburg). He holds a PhD degree in Anthropology from the University of the Witwatersrand. As a published author, his research interests are music and society, culture and heritage, marginality and belonging, migration and integration, post coloniality and re-imagining, as well as the creative economy.

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