Dinah Rajak

‘Uplift and empower’: The market, morality and corporate responsibility on South Africa's platinum belt

In recent years, with the advent of the phenomenon known as corporate social responsibility (CSR), transnational corporations have moved away from traditional modes of philanthropic largesse, to a focus on ‘community engagement’, partnership, empowerment and ‘social investment’. This chapter draws on ethnographic research, tracing the practise of CSR in a transnational mining company, from its corporate headquarters in London, to its mining operations on South Africas platinum belt. It explores how the practices of corporate–community partnership – and the goal of ‘self-sustainability’ that the company propounds – project the company as a vehicle of empowerment as it strives to convert ‘beneficiaries’ to the values and virtues of the market with an injunction to ‘help yourself’ to a piece of ‘the market’ and share the opportunities that it offers. However, while the promise of CSR holds out this vision of mutual independence and self-sustainability, I argue that the practise of CSR reinscribes older relations of patronage and clientelism which recreate the coercive bonds of ‘the gift’, inspiring deference and dependence, on the part of the recipient, rather than autonomy and empowerment.

Remaking Africa’s Informal Economies: Youth, Entrepreneurship and the Promise of Inclusion at the Bottom of the Pyramid

Abstract In recent years, the quest for ‘inclusive markets’ that incorporate Africa’s youth has become a key focus of national and international development efforts, with so-called bottom of the pyramid (BoP) initiatives increasingly seen as a way to draw the continent’s poor into new networks of global capitalism. SSA has become a fertile frontier for such systems, as capital sets its sights on the continents’ vast ‘under-served’ informal economies, harnessing the entrepreneurial mettle of youth to create new markets for a range of products, from solar lanterns and shampoo to cook stoves and sanitary pads. Drawing on ethnographic research with youth entrepreneurs, we trace the processes of individual and collective ‘transformation’ that the mission of (self-) empowerment through entrepreneurship seeks to bring about. We argue that, while such systems are meant to bring those below the poverty line above it, the ‘line’ is reified and reinforced through a range of discursive and strategic practices that actively construct and embed distinctions between the past and the future, valuable and valueless, and the idle and productive in Africa’s informal economies.

The Anthropology of Extraction: Critical Perspectives on the Resource Curse

Abstract Attempts to address the resource curse remain focussed on revenue management, seeking technical solutions to political problems over examinations of relations of power. In this paper, we provide a review of the contribution anthropological research has made over the past decade to understanding the dynamic interplay of social relations, economic interests and struggles over power at stake in the political economy of extraction. In doing so, we show how the constellation of subaltern and elite agency at work within processes of resource extraction is vital in order to confront the complexities, incompatibilities, and inequities in the exploitation of mineral resources.

Speculative futures at the bottom of the pyramid: Speculative futures at the bottom of the pyramid

Celebrated as creative, flexible catalysts of inclusive capitalism, urban youth are central to bottom‐of‐the‐pyramid (BoP) models of development, which set out to repurpose the jobless as entrepreneurs in the making. We explore the multiple (at times conflicting) temporalities – the practices, technologies, and representations of time – which figure in a BoP initiative offering entrepreneurial opportunities to unemployed youth in Nairobis slums: from the invocation of clock‐time discipline to the professional time of entrepreneurial subjectivities and the enchantments of the not‐yet. But the appeal of BoP, we suggest, does not turn either on the here‐and‐now of survival or on an impossible pipe dream of prosperity, but rather resides firmly in the medium term: a foreseeable future of modest desires, which nonetheless remain tantalizingly just out of reach for most. By examining how these temporal conflicts play out in attempts to fashion a cadre of self‐willed, aspiring entrepreneurs, we reveal the limits to entrepreneurial agency, and the contradictions inherent in the mission of (self‐)empowerment through enterprise upon which the ideology of inclusive markets is built.

Hope and Betrayal on the Platinum Belt: Responsibility, Violence and Corporate Power in South Africa

This article considers the resurgence in state-backed violence against mineworkers in South Africa, which reached its apogee at the Marikana platinum mines in August 2012, in relation to the rise of corporate social responsibility (CSR) within the post-revolutionary political economy. I explore a paradox of CSR, which has emerged more strongly than ever in the wake of Marikana, whereby mining companies have been able to use CSR to dispense with (rather than fulfil) their social obligations and to externalise (rather than address) their social impact. Operating within an old-school logic of paternalism and benevolence, the practice of CSR is at odds with the discourse of empowerment, upward mobility and worker autonomy that modern mining companies claim to foster. Marikana shows us how CSR paradoxically serves as a resource that empowers companies (in response to their critics and claimants) rather than its intended beneficiaries.

Expectations of paternalism: welfare, corporate responsibility and HIV at South Africa’s mines

It is over a decade since South Africa’s leading mining companies first rolled out an HIV treatment and well-being program for their employees. With seroprevalence at South Africa’s mines estimated at over 20 percent, HIV management has become the object of the most intensive exercise of corporate social responsibility (CSR). This essay focuses on HIV/AIDS management at Anglo American—the world’s third-biggest mining company, the largest private-sector employer in South Africa and across the continent, and the first company to provide antiretroviral therapy (ART) “free of charge” to its workforce in a context of little or no access to state health care. Through the lens of HIV management, I consider what happens when fundamental human care and welfare is refracted through the prism of corporate managerialism, shareholder value, and, more immediately, the relationship between workers and capital. Relations between employer and employee are being transformed as a result of corporate health care programs, creating connections between the personal realm of sexual conduct and family life, and the political economy of global corporate capitalism. Recently, anthropologists have become increasingly interested in neoliberal South Atlantic Quarterly

Introduction: Labour, insecurity and violence in South Africa

The police killing of scores of striking mineworkers at the Marikana Mines in 2012 triggered, as Beresford puts it, ‘a period of national introspection’ in South Africa. This gave new urgency to persistent questions about state violence and the repression of workers – and more broadly about widening inequality (the highest in the world) within the workforce, increasing levels of insecurity and deepening disaffection among South Africa’s disenfranchised workers. The violence at Marikana was explicit and dramatic. But in the aftermath, as protest spread beyond platinum to other mines and other industries across the country, the more everyday forms of overt and structural violence that define conditions of work and life for South African workers came into view. Marikana became a watchword for a new wave of disaffection, defiance, and protest by South Africa’s working and jobless poor, still waiting for the promise of economic liberation and social mobility to be realised. Similarly, while Marikana was its catalyst, this special issue of JSAS aims to go beyond the causes and outcomes of the violence there to address those broader questions about the interrelation of labour, insecurity and violence in South Africa today. Many of these struggles are not unique to South Africa. Yet the centrality of violence to South Africa’s labour arrangements – both underpinning and feeding off them – is a striking feature of the country’s history. The ‘precarious liberation’ of post-apartheid South Africa has produced its own vulnerabilities and frustrations, giving way to a new era of protest and claim-making. At the same time, Marikana focuses attention not only on the forms of violence and insecurity that are contested, but also on those that are left unchallenged. Building on a stream of panels organised for the African Studies Association UK (ASAUK) conference of 2014, the collection explores the broader canvas of labour insecurity, economic disenfranchisement, coercion, and the everyday enforcement of working conditions in South Africa. Most of the articles have a particular focus on the recent past, but they demonstrate