maye! maye!: the history and heritage of the kwa mai mai market

This book presents an analysis of Johannesburg’s Kwa Mai Mai market, which was once known to regulars as ’a place of healing’ and has experienced numerous changes of significant national transformation over time.

It explores how the Kwa Mai Mai community, formerly a working class of migrants, reversed roles and took control of the means of production from the dominant class. Through their heightened cultural consciousness, this marginalised migrant community reimagined new economic realities and possibilities, forever distancing themselves from their painful, repressive past. This book chronicles the significance of cultural memory and discusses how it can be used as a weapon to not only resist subjugation but also to invoke entrepreneurial and creative spirit.

Written out of the collective observations and interpretations of his ethnographic research spanning four years - Sipho Sithole’s ’Maye Maye’ is dedicated to marginalised communities and those who, despite operating on the fringes of the economy, have sought to create their own fortune and destiny.

Print edition not for sale in Sub Saharan Africa.

Sipho Sithole is Cultural Anthropologist and 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. 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.