Rural returns: Youth domestic migration, gender, and visual media in South Africa

Abstract This paper examines the influences and gendered life aspirations of a group of young Xhosa South Africans. Through ethnographic fieldwork with 17 young people in the Eastern Cape city of East London, I demonstrate the influence of visual media on their migration to the city and subsequent disillusionment with urban life that has led to a desire for rural return. Within these desires, the young women discussed here long for elements of “traditional” Xhosa life while explicitly eschewing marriage. African feminism allows us to situate their longings for rural return, without marriage, as a decolonial statement that rejects capitalist fantasies of individual accumulation and the nuclear family in favor of relational and interdependent forms of meaning‐making. These young women imagine radically different futures for themselves while incorporating longstanding elements of Xhosa tradition—but recast these allegedly patriarchal practices as distinctly feminist ones. This is an intervention in the theoretical conversations about marriage in sub‐Saharan Africa, which thus far have offered explanations for the practice's decline that focus primarily on economic factors. These reimaginings of gender, kinship, and space promise to have important ramifications in the future of South African social formations. Beyond South Africa, this paper taps into a larger global discourse of postponing or eschewing marriage that promises to have ramifications far into the future.