South Africa, Past, Present and Future

Gold at the End of the Rainbow?

Tony Binns, Alan (St Mary'S University College) Lester, Etienne (Rhodes University, Grahamstown, South Africa) Nel, Alan Lester, Etienne Nel

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2014
• Print ISBN:
  9781138167100
• eBook ISBN:
  9781317880394
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Political Economy
• Index: History

This is the first book to combine a discussion of post-apartheid development initiatives with an extended historical analysis of South Africa's dynamic race, class, gender and ethnic identities. Bringing together the research of an historical geographer and two development geographers, the book enables us to locate the post-apartheid transition in a broad historical and spatial perspective. Within this perspective, the limitations as well as the achievements of South Africa's current transformation are highlighted.

Chapter 1
Introduction

Economic and social boundaries

This book has been written by one historical geographer (Alan Lester) and two development geographers (Etienne Nel and Tony Binns). There are inevitably differences in our approaches and styles which will become apparent in the separate chapters which we drafted. Partly, our differences stem from different scales of analysis. The treatment of a broad sweep of history in this introduction and in chapters 3, 4, 5 and 9 necessitates the identification of general themes, patterns, connections and arguments. The descriptive ‘setting the scene’ in chapter 2 and the more detailed treatment of the complexities of government policy over the last six (post-apartheid) years in chapters 6, 7 and 8, however, give rise to a more empirically laden and ‘factual’ rendition. Nevertheless, through our close co-operation, we have striven to ensure that the book as a whole hangs together, providing a coherent and, we believe, a reasonably comprehensive account of South African society and its geographies in the past, the present and, as far as is possible to predict, the future. By combining our specialisms, we have tried to transcend academic enterprises which are all too frequently pursued in isolation, thus hopefully generating new insights. These are pulled together in particular in the concluding chapter 9. Here, rather than simply summarizing what has gone before, we interpret the current, post-apartheid, transition in South Africa in the light of the country’s previous, apparently ‘structural’ transformations. This long-term analysis suggests that whatever pot of gold the emergence of the ‘Rainbow Nation’ (as post-apartheid South Africa has popularly been called) heralds, it is unlikely to be distributed very much more evenly than the country’s wealth has been in the past.

The most obvious result of our endeavour to link the past and the present in this book is an awareness of the ways in which the legacies of colonialism and apartheid constrain both current and prospective development programmes. One of our central objectives is to explain how the relative deprivation of people currently living in places such as former ‘homelands’ and townships in South Africa was shaped by the politics of the past, and why it remains intractable. In order to assist those readers who are relatively unfamiliar with South Africa’s social and spatial structures, we have included not only a ‘setting the scene’ chapter (2), but also summary boxes between chapters 3 and 4 and 5 and 6, which distil some of the key inherited features of South Africa’s human geographies - features whose origins are discussed at greater length in the historical chapters 3 to 5.

A second, related objective of the book, pursued in chapter 8, is to demonstrate how the new black-led South African government’s attempts to deal with the social structures and geographical spaces of exclusion can be seen in comparative context, particularly that of the African continent as a whole. This objective in turn means that we make a particular point of considering South Africa’s historic and contemporary connections with other places in the world. Indeed, in the concluding chapter, we argue that such connections have been vital in many ways to the maintenance of South Africa’s extreme forms of inequality.

An awareness of South Africa’s position within a wider, global political economy, brings us to another, deeper strand of analysis connecting those sections dealing with past, present and future in this book; one which ranges beyond a simple rendition of apartheid’s legacies. This concerns our ideas about the underlying processes by which social groups are formed and the means by which they compete and cooperate. All individuals in all societies act within and across certain created ‘social boundaries’. These boundaries consist of the differences which mark off one set of individuals from another to create social groups, each with a particular history, sociology and geography of relative privilege and deprivation. Neither historical analysis nor development studies can progress without a realistic appraisal of dynamic boundary-forming mechanisms; that is, the means by which competing or co-operating social groups are demarcated. Shifts in the definition of social groups inform the key changes of the past, and the parameters within which future development will occur. South Africa represents a particularly rich terrain in which to study the kinds of social group boundaries which were originally formed under colonialism, since it was the first part of the African continent to be extensively colonized in the modern era and the last to make the transition from white minority to black majority governance.

Of course, the ways that individuals coalesce and interact within and across social group boundaries are not predictable. Historians are in a process of continuous debate as to the most important forms of co-operation and competition in the past, while development specialists find the identification of contemporary social boundaries and prescriptions for a more benign and inclusive society similarly contentious. Perhaps the greatest criticism of modern, universal prescriptions for ‘development’, is that they overlook social boundaries which have been constructed differently in different regions. With all their complexity and contingency, however, certain features of social boundaries can be identified - features which inform both the historical and the contemporary sections of this book. The remainder of this introduction sets out what we see as the most significant social group boundaries which have shaped, and which continue to shape, South African society, with a few examples (elaborated in the following chapters) of the ways in which they have done so.

Race and class

First, we can note the general coincidence between the allocation of scarce economic resources and the boundaries marking perceived social, cultural and physical difference. All societies are materially unequal, and, as we will see in chapter 2, and more particularly in chapter 6, South Africa’s is more so than most. Economic resources are concentrated among what is, relatively, a very small group. Since its colonization, the most obvious boundary defining privileged and excluded groups in South Africa has apparently been a ‘racial’ one. From the nineteenth century (if not before) until recently, the material privilege of South Africa’s ‘white’ colonists and most of their descendants has been more or less sustained, legitimated and consciously understood by them as an inevitable by-product of‘racial’ difference.

This ‘racial’ difference, however, is far from objective. Even prior to extensive colonization, the scientific attempts of European scholars to categorize the world’s population rigidly by race were always destabilized by the arbitrary boundaries which had to be drawn between supposedly discrete racial ‘types’ (Banton 1987). Hall (1987) notes that only about 10 per cent of humankind’s genetic variability lies behind those characteristics normally ascribed to ‘racial difference’, and extensive interchange between regional gene pools, especially over the last five hundred years of colonial and post-colonial ‘contact’ has broken down many of the genetic distinctions that there once were between isolated concentrations of people. As the case of South African ‘Coloureds’ (people commonly identified as being of ‘mixed race’) shows particularly starkly, in a colonial context of imprecise genetic exchange, ‘racial’ boundaries have had to be constructed and reconstructed deliberately, and ‘artificially’ through time. This means that both blacks and whites have been socially and culturally, rather than ‘naturally’ or biologically defined. Correspondingly, in South Africa and elsewhere, it has taken the exercise of social and political power to define and defend privilege according to ‘race’. Perhaps the most frequently cited manifestation of the artificiality of South Africa’s racial boundaries concerns the reclassifications which occurred on an annual basis during the apartheid period (1948–c.1990). Even under a state system explicitly geared to racial classification and separation, each year hundreds would successfully apply for reclassification to a different and supposedly ‘naturally’ distinct racial group (West 1988; Unterhalter 1995).

Although ‘racial appearance’, however arbitrary it may sometimes be, has constituted the most obvious of modern South Africa’s social group boundaries, it has never been the only one, and it has always operated in association with other kinds of socially constructed difference. During the early colonial period, in which the Cape was administered by the Dutch East India Company, one can make a case that descent and religion, rather than skin colour, were seen as the most important determinants of status. By the late eighteenth century, however, as we will see in chapter 3, apparently ‘racial’ distinctions between colonists and darker ‘others’ were being deployed to defend minority privilege. More significantly for our purposes, since the late nineteenth century, the ‘modern’ boundaries of class have both reflected and guided wealth production and distribution, and these distinctions of class have become entangled with those of‘race’ in various ways (see Bundy 1992).

In our analysis, we avoid the deterministically Marxist view that capitalist class boundaries exist objectively, just as we avoid similar assumptions about ‘racial’ differences. Rather, we agree with E. P. Thompson, who sees class not as something fixed or given, but ‘as something which … happens (and can be shown to have happened) in human relationships’ (Thompson 1980: 8). His point is that relations of production and consumption, relations between the classes controlling resources and those who have been dispossessed of them, emerge not according to some abstract ‘logic’ of capitalism, but through specific historical struggles within particular societies. As Thompson continues, these relationships ‘can only be studied as they work themselves out over a considerable historical period’ (Thompson 1980: 11).

While we accept that notions of both class and race difference are socially and culturally constructed in these ways, the interaction between them remains problematic. A superficial impression of modern South African society would indicate a basic divide between a white capitalist class and ‘labour aristocracy’ on the one hand and a dispossessed black proletariat on the other. But such a pattern is, and always has been, immensely complicated. Three features of South African society in particular have long disrupted any neat coincidence between race and class. First, the continuing existence of a vast African peasantry which has by no means been completely dispossessed. Although, during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the prosperity of that peasantry was being whittled away by increasingly powerful colonial states and by influential capitalists, often acting in conjunction, it was still resilient enough to remain ‘uncaptured’. By this, we mean that Africans were able to force certain concessions on the part of the colonial state and capital, including continued (if diminishing) access to land (Cooper 1981; Lacey 1981; Marks and Rathbone 1982). Many Africans who have been migrant or even apparently fully urbanized workers for some time, still see themselves as members of remnant, rural-based chiefdoms, the identities of which are traced back to the pre-colonial period. They endeavour still to recreate a subsistence in which they will be at least partially autonomous of capitalist employers (Trapido 1971; Beinart 1992; Delius 1996). As Cell argues, such peasants ‘are not proletarians or even lumpen-proletarians. Their field of manoeuvre may be narrow and hemmed in. Nevertheless they have something to defend’ (Cell 1982: 111). Casting them in the role of a completely proletarianized working class like that of Europe therefore raises considerable difficulties.

Secondly, the coincidence between class and race is complicated by the efforts of blacks to attain a respectable class status within colonial and apartheid society (see Ross 1999). Those efforts have persisted despite all attempts to ‘level down’ black communities. Indeed, in some cases they were assisted by the white state’s need for collaborators, or at least for compliance, among certain black groups. The complexities of social status for these ‘interstitial’ or ‘in-between’ groups are explored further in chapters 3 and 4.

Finally, the identification of class with race has been complicated by the failure, despite state assistance, of many whites to attain unambiguous class dominance, and by the tendency of large numbers of whites to slip through the net of material privilege during periods of economic difficulty. While there has been a broad coincidence between class and race in modern South Africa then, it has never been a straightforward one. And when even that broad coincidence was threatened, for instance by the material difficulties of poor whites, it had to be maintained through conscious political action by white governments (chapters 4 and 5).

In recent decades, a new black middle class has emerged in South Africa. It first developed out of those ‘interstitial’ groups which helped the state to administer black areas, but it became increasingly broad-based as the education system incorporated more blacks and as employers demanded more skilled labour of them, creating a black ‘labour aristocracy’ during the 1970s and 1980s (chapter 5). Since 1994 and the demise of apartheid, it has swollen and achieved new levels of aggregate wealth as bureaucratic and commercial opportunities have been opened under a black-led government (chapters 6 and 7). Because of these developments, the boundaries of race and class are commonly seen to have been reconfigured quite dramatically in recent years. To what extent is a question that we will be asking in the latter chapters of this book.

Ethnicity

Conscious political action to protect class and ‘race’ privilege has been intimately associated with another kind of socially constructed boundary - that of ethnicity. Afrikaner nationalism, based on a vision of ‘ethnic power mobilised’ (Adam and Giliomee 1979), as we shall see in chapters 4 and5, became a powerful influence in the creation of modern systems of segregation and apartheid. It can be explained, at least partially, as an attempt to protect the class position of poor, Afrikaans-speaking whites, threatened within a context of imperial conquest and capitalist ‘development’. In this case, the ideological construct of ethnicity was deployed ‘in the battle to cut the cake of gross domestic product’ in a particular way’ (Lonsdale 1998: 295).

Despite their longer genealogy, the boundaries of ethnicity between Africans, which are alluded to throughout the text, are also historical phenomena which need to be explained rather than taken for granted (Vail 1989). Immediately before the early nineteenth-century colonization of the South African high veld, African ‘tribal’ identities were in the process of being dramatically reconstructed through the process conventionally known as the ‘Mfecane’, discussed in chapter 3. In general, however, ‘Politicized ethnicity … is widely accepted in African studies [as being] a modern phenomenon’ (Lonsdale 1998: 295). Very different, politicized ethnicities such as the ‘Zulu-ness’ propagated by the Inkatha Freedom Party (IFP) in recent years, and the ‘Coloured-ness’ of the Western Cape, which is now resurgent, have been re-imagined and re-inscribed in response to the particular political circumstances of the twentieth century.

African ethnic boundaries have complicated patterns of resistance to racial structures of dominance in South Africa. Before relatively widespread and overt resistance to segregation and apartheid could be co-ordinated across the country, a black South African identity had to be constructed, even if incompletely, by transcending longer-established and more divisive ethnic and regional distinctions. The persistence of these prior tribal and ethnic affinities meant that Africanist movements were long frustrated in their efforts to mobilize mass opposition to white colonial rule (Cooper 1994). The ANC, which sought to mobilize a united black front against the apartheid government during the late twentieth century, for instance, found itself in conflict with the more particularist notion of Zulu identity propagated by the Inkatha movement in KwaZulu and Natal. South African historians have only recently realized the continuing potential for African ethnic boundaries to be politicized in modern South Africa, as they have been in many postcolonial states to its north (Beinart and Bundy 1987a; Maré 1993; chapter 8).

Gender

A more recent historiographical and developmental concern than that with either race, class or ethnicity is with the most remarkably persistent and universal boundary of all - that of gender. As Mager has recently demonstrated in a case study of the mid-twentieth-century Ciskei, and as this book all too cursorily indicates, ‘historical processes look different when relations between the sexes are seen as integral to them’ (Mager 1999: 1). In both African and colonial societies, women have been excluded in varying ways from material and social privilege relative to men. The compromises reached between African and colonial powers in the nineteenth century acted, if anything, to reinforce those gendered boundaries which were common to both cultures. They created ‘a patchwork quilt of patriarchies’, in which ‘everywhere women were subordinate to men’ (Bozzoli 1983/1995: 126; Walker 1990a: 1).

These gender systems in turn were modified with the progressive industrialization and urbanization of twentieth-century South African society. As both the colonial authorities and African men attempted to narrow the spaces for African women’s manoeuvre in the cities, gendered boundaries were continually redrawn. In the case of black women, the particular form of exclusion which these gendered boundar...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title
• Copyright
• CONTENTS
• List of figures
• List of plates
• List of tables
• Preface
• Acknowledgements
• 1 Introduction
• 2 Setting the scene
• 3 Pre-industrial South Africa, 1652–c.1900
• 4 Industrializing South Africa, 1900–48
• 5 Apartheid South Africa, 1948–94
• 6 Inequality and ‘development’: a snapshot at the birth of democracy
• 7 Post-apartheid ‘development’: redistribution with growth?
• 8 Beyond the Limpopo: South Africa in Africa and the wider world
• 9. South Africa’s current transition in temporal and spatial context
• Glossary
• Bibliography
• Index