ABSTRACT
This chapter presents the complaint discourse was motivated, consciously or unconsciously, by several reasons or rather it accomplished different purposes at the same time. It looks at complaining as a way to express one's experience of and one's feeling about being old in an urban African residential area, Cape Town's Khayelitsha. The chapter provides the relationship between the language of complaint and processes of identity management by considering how older people 'use' this rhetoric to give coherence to their threatened social identities and biographies. Most Khayelitsha residents are Xhosa-speaking. The complaint discourse often took on a certain performative quality. Complaints about their treatment by the hands of public officials should therefore be read as an act of resistance against these readings of their older selves and as a claim to their own authorship, confirming their identity for themselves. The language of complaint was not incidental to the attempts of older people to construct identities for themselves.
