Minga Mbweck Kongo: Centering Khayelitsha through water

HUMA Doctoral Seminar Series

Speaker: Minga Mbweck Kongo (University of Cape Town, South Africa)

Dr Kongo will discuss social relationships created around unequal municipal water distribution in South Africa. Using incompleteness and conviviality as a framework, he investigates residents’ use of water to sustain their livelihood and build personhood. Incompleteness and conviviality foster the release of potential and inspire creativity. Every social and organizational category–race or ethnicity, place or geography, class or status, gender or sex, generation or age, religion or beliefs is incomplete without the rest of what it takes to be human through conviviality. The paper centres Khayelitsha through an ethnographic research methodology and contextualizes townships concerning water. Through the challenges faced during fieldwork, particularly regarding maintaining ethics in the human subject, Minga Kongo acknowledges the difficulties in situating himself as an outsider through the study’s research methodology. Within the incompleteness of access to water, people engage in conviviality and mobility to enhance their life situations and better their lifestyles. Lockdowns (in the context of COVID-19) also highlighted the problem and incompleteness of conventional research methodology. They forced the ethnographer to devise creative ways to conduct fieldwork research while adhering to the prescribed instructions from national health authorities and observing research ethics.

 Reading: Resilience in a complex adaptive environment: Water scarcity and adaptation in Khayelitsha, South Africa. Minga Mbweck Kongo in Bouncing Back. Critical reflections on the resilience concept in Japan and South Africa. (T. Enomoto et al. (Eds), Langaa RPCIG, 2022). Article made available with the kind permission of the author

About the speaker: Minga Mbweck Kongo is an anthropologist and postdoctoral fellow at HUMA – Insitute for Humanities in Africa at the University of Cape Town (UCT) with research interests in water sociality, mobility, urbanism, illness and climate change. He holds a BSc in Biomedical Science, an Honours degree in Social Anthropology, and a Master’s in African Studies. His PhD degree research focuses on water in Khayelitsha, Cape Town. Kongo has published three book chapters; the first is ‘Water and Sanitation Inequality in Africa: Challenges for SDG 6’ (in: Africa and the Sustainable Development Goals, 2020). The second is ‘From Amakwerekwere car Guard to a South African Citizen: An Autoethnographic account’ (in Citizen in Motion, 2019). The third is ‘Resilience in a Complex Adaptive Environment: Water Scarcity and Adaptation in Khayelitsha, South Africa. Kongo is the author of the forthcoming book titled: Belonging and Uncertainty: An autoethnographic account of a car guard in South Africa and co-author of the article 'Structural xenophobia: The lived experiences of migrants from African countries living in South Africa'.