Deborah James

Land for the Landless: Conflicting Images of Rural and Urban in South Africa's Land Reform Programme

South Africa’s land reform programme has been underpinned by ambivalence about land and what it signifies. One set of discourses and practices shows that ownership of or access to rural land is a key part of many African families’ well-being and livelihood. But it is only a part: small-scale agriculture in South – and southern – Africa has been shown over the past decades to have become impossible without inputs from labour migrant remittances. The corollary is that the desire to acquire or retain access to land exists alongside the (real or desired) capacity to earn money in the urban sector. Land represents a series of things – a sense of security, identity and history – rather than being an asset to be used for farming alone (or at all). But despite this, land has featured in the assumptions of some policy-makers (and some academic researchers, closely associated with them) as a key asset in its own right. Reforming its ownership, and redistributing it to poorer sectors of society is thought to provide the key to solving poverty and inequality, and is seen as the starting point in any real debate about redistributing wealth. Ignoring the interplay of rural and urban sources of income and identity, this set of assumptions is one which envisages the worlds of town and country as separate: it reconstitutes Africans either as rural ‘farmers’ or as urban ‘wage earners’. Ironically, there are striking continuities between this discourse and that of apartheid, with its attempts in the 1950s to promote successful African farmers and in the (linked) attempts to divide urban from rural people through such means as the infamous influx control regulations. This paper reviews published academic work, policy statements, and case studies of labour migrancy and land reform to illustrate some of the contradictory impulses behind, and outcomes or, the land reform programme in the new South Africa. It demonstrates that the idea of rural and urban as separate worlds has been strongly entrenched in South Africa’s ‘development discourse’ from long before apartheid’s demise.

“To take the information down to the people” : life skills and HIV/AIDS peer educators in the Durban area

Education in “life skills” has been a central pillar of state and NGO strategy in combating the threat of HIV/AIDS in South Africa. Based on research conducted in Durban in 1999, this paper examines how life skills education – thought of by some as a euphemism for “teaching about safe sex” but by others as an essential way of contextualising sex education in its broader context of empowerment and striving for equitable gender relations – is understood in contrasting ways by senior personnel and the largely unpaid volunteers who form the ranks of peer educators. Outlining the complicated institutional context of funding and educational practice in which this teaching has been taking place, the paper shows how conceptualisations of the role played by life skills peer educators, and their motivation for involvement in such programmes, diverge considerably. Senior personnel see educators as conveyors of accurate biological knowledge about reproduction and disease transmission to their peers and, subscribing to development discourse about “sustainability”, perceive them as driven primarily by an altruistic spirit of voluntarism. What is equally important for some peer educators, however, is the sense of identity provided by involvement in such programmes, and the prospects for future employment, and escape from the beleaguered world of township poverty, which they offer.

‘After years in the wilderness’: The discourse of land claims in the New South Africa

This article examines land restitution in the new South Africa, and the intersecting roles of land‐claiming communities, forcibly resettled from their land during the apartheid years, and the NGOs and — since 1994 — Government Commissioners who have helped them to reclaim the land. Ideas and practices concerning land, community and development that emerge from the interaction between these different players are mutually constitutive but sometimes also mutually incomprehensible. A populist rhetoric, evident both ir: discussions with former land owners, and in much of NGO publications such as Land Update, depicts land as something communally owned which must be communally defended. This sense of uniformly experienced injustice and shared resistance against outside intervention obscures the fact that claims on land derive from a series of sharply differentiated historical experiences and articulate widely divergent interests, such as those — in the case of the farm Doornkop for example — between former owners and their former tenants. The restitution of land to these former owners, while of great importance to them as a source of identity and as a redress of past injustices, is not necessarily the key to solving ‘poverty, injustice and misery’ as claimed for the process of land reform in South Africa as a whole.

Introduction: Popular Economies in South Africa

African economies have long been a matter of concern to anthropologists, not least in the pages of Africa. These economies are situated, somewhat contradictorily, between global settings of financialized capitalism on the one hand and impoverished local arenas where cash-based economic transfers predominate on the other. The more such economies appear to be tied to wider global arenas and operations that place them beyond the reach of ordinary people, the more necessary it is to explore the logics and decisions that tie them inexorably to specific everyday settings.

Land shortage and Inheritance in a Lebowa Village

While ethnographers document rules of inheritance as favouring the oldest son in both Pedi and Ndebele tradition, the inhabitants of this Trust village ‐ of both language groups ‐claim to practise last‐born inheritance. The paper explains this change as resulting from the extreme shortage of land in the village, due to the areas rapid population by ex‐labour tenants from the white farms of the southeastern Transvaal. The “rule” of ultimogeniture is, however, flexibly interpreted. A married son may be favoured above the youngest, since the role of women in tending the inherited plot, and in caring for aged in‐laws, is crucial. A couple wishing to transfer land to an unmarried daughter, in the absence of a married son, is hamstrung by the rule ‐ “traditional” but enshrined in Homeland bureaucracy ‐ that only men may inherit land. Another divergence from the norm can be seen in the case of many Ndebele families, whose extended and solidary structure prompts an indefinite deferment of the transfer of land to...

“Deeper into a hole?” : borrowing and lending in South Africa

In South Africa, with upward mobility much aspired to but seldom attained, householders must spend money they have not yet earned. Borrowing both from formal institutions and smaller moneylenders (legal and illegal) positions them uneasily: in order to fulfill social requirements in one register, they acquire intensified obligations in another. Moneylending and money borrowing, owing much to the legacies of “credit apartheid,” involve an uneven mix. Embeddedness and community connection enable flexibility, juggling, and temporary escape from repayment obligations on the one hand, but systems of repayment and ever-newer technologies enable creditors to pursue debtors with inexorable swiftness on the other. Given that credit postapartheid has an increasingly formal, uniform, and financialized character, the second of these—which makes debtors get “deeper into a hole”—is becoming a predominant way of experiencing and representing the situation. The phrase, with its suggestion of entrapment, captures an important aspect of the deeply ambivalent feelings that borrowers experience in the face of debt.

A question of ethnicity: Ndzundza Ndebele in a Lebowa village

The insights of such authors as Mitchell, Barth and Cohen can be usefully applied to understanding the occurrence of ethnicity in small‐scale communities within the context of the South African system of ethnic homelands. In this paper, deep‐seated divisions between Pedi and Ndebele in a village in the Pedi Homeland of Lebowa are examined. While it is undoubtedly true that these can be understood only in the light of the constraints on resources and political power imposed from above through state policy, account must also be taken of local‐level processes. Recent historical events, and the contemporary setting, have led the people concerned — particularly the Ndebele — to constitute themselves as ethnic groups in order to try to secure their hold over crucial economic and political resources.

‘Music of origin’: class, social category and the performers and audience of kiba , a South African migrant genre

This article uses a case study of the kiba migrant performance genre from the Northern Province of South Africa to illuminate recent theoretical ideas on the role of performers and audiences, and in so doing to offer a critical perspective on the way in which the concept of class has been conceptualised in some southern African studies. While the homogenising and Western-derived concept of class may well be unsuitable in some African and other southern contexts, as certain writers have claimed, migrant northern Sotho communities have developed indigenous notions of social category which combine modern work-related sources of identity with apparently backward-looking celebrations of traditional behaviour. The article examines the contention of performance theory that cultural expression does not merely reflect the predilections of established groupings of people but may provide a focus for the consolidation and identity of new ones.

Hill of Thorns: Custom, Knowledge and the Reclaiming of a Lost Land in the New South Africa

This article provides a detailed ethnographic exploration of a case of land restitution in South Africa. It shows how the development discourse invoked during the process of reclaiming land, rather than being imposed in an entirely top-down manner, has been the result of negotiations between those claiming and those — in government and NGOs — who have helped them claim. The resulting knowledge about the ownership and appropriate governance of land reveals a complex and often contradictory understanding of concepts like ‘custom’, ‘community’ and ‘power’.

Not marrying in South Africa: consumption, aspiration and the new middle class

This article explores how marriage, or its absence, features in relation to the aspirations and obligations of members of South Africa’s new black middle class. In a context where the state and credit have played key roles in the newly financialised arrangements of neoliberalism, it considers how ties that are both conflictual and intimate — bonds that simultaneously distance people from, while creating increasingly intimate connections to, both kinsmen and (prospective) affines — operate within this novel space. “Middle classers” are set apart from their less fortunate relatives, even as they continue to have to support and remain intimate with them; divided from partners who expect them to conform to conservative female roles, while they continue to hold positive views about marital exchanges (and payments) more generally.