Gary Minkley

Going Nowhere Slowly? Land, Livelihoods and Rural Development in the Eastern Cape

Colonial dichotomies continue to operate quite freely in the present … Of these dichotomies, that between “modernity” and “tradition” has proved to be the most enduring. The first axis – modernity – is associated with progress, development, “the West”, science and technology, high standards of living, rationality and order; the other axis – tradition – is associated with stasis or even stagnation, underdevelopment, conventional tools and technologies, poverty, superstition and disorder. (Gupta. 1998:48) Knowledge is like light. Weightless and intangible, it can easily travel the world, enlightening the lives of people everywhere. Yet billions of people still live in the darkness of poverty – unnecessarily. (World Bank, 1999:1)

In search of a developmental university: community engagement in theory and practice

Partly as a response to government mandates, pressures from civil society and the business sector, and the socio-economic realities in their immediate neighbourhoods, universities are increasingly venturing into activities that reach beyond their traditional function. Subsumed under concepts such as ‘community engagement’, ‘community service’, ‘university–community partnership’, ‘social responsiveness’, ‘academic citizenship’, ‘service learning’ and a number of other aliases, these activities aim not only to bring universities closer to the vortex of today’s socio-economic developmental challenges, but also – arguably – to enhance the relevance of universities in the 21st century. One of the clearest statements of this new mandate is contained in the South African Department of Education White Paper 3 (A Programme for Higher Education Transformation). According to the White Paper, universities must ‘promote and develop social responsibility and awareness amongst students of the role of higher education in social and economic development through community service programmes’. Universities were traditionally known for their devotion to teaching and research; now the argument seems to be that a ‘triple mandate’ of teaching–learning, research and

The Application of Rural Restitution to Betterment Cases in the Eastern Cape

Abstract There is little doubt that the Restitution of Land Rights Act had its origins in the rural struggle of the 1980s and early 1990s. However, when one looks back now at the first ten years of restitution, one easily thinks of urban celebrations, less of rural successes. One thinks of District Six in Cape Town, Sophiatown in Johannesburg, Cato Manor in Durban, East Bank and West Bank Locations in East London. But what about rural restitution? It has largely been disappointing. Even more worryingly, in some affect areas, it has been entirely absent. This paper looks at the exclusion of betterment dispossession in the Eastern Cape from the restitution programme, as well as the way in which various organisations (principally the Border Rural Committee have gone about reversing this exclusion. In this regard, we are particularly interested in the potentials to improve household livelihoods that have been thrown up by the precedent-setting Cata claim. The resolution of this claim involved a strong developmental element, which has seen strong emphases on community empowerment and integrated planning and implementation. Finally, we outline the current phase of the advocacy work relating to betterment and restitution and consider both its prospects of success and some of the potential implications of a successful outcome.

The Speaking Crow or ‘On a clear day you can see the class struggle from here’? (Career Girls, 1997)

By the late 1980s, the class struggle in South Africa had taken on a decidedly national character with the Congress of South African Trade Unions (COSATU, formed in 1985) and the National Union of Metalworkers of South Africa (NUMSA) becoming increasingly politically and nationally significant. As the opening ten minutes of Simon Gush and James Cairns’ video Red shows, through the narration of Thembaletu Fikizolo (a NUMSA shop steward), Mercedes Benz (SA) (hereafter Mercedes), located in the small port city of East London had been the target of repeated industrial action. But such action at the plant in East London had also been marked by tensions between NUMSA and the South African Allied Workers Union (SAAWU), reflecting a core working class political debate between what was known as ‘shop floor’ and ‘community’ unionism. By the middle of August 1990, both industrial action and the tensions between the unions had almost brought ‘the company to its knees’ (Ian Russell, Red). At this critical moment, arguably both at Mercedes and in Red – an hour into the film component of the installation – the film cuts to Fikizolo and, in a move typical of Simon Gush, shifts from the physical and political concern with work to the space and time when people are not working ... leisure time.

THE GRAVES OF DIMBAZA:: TEMPORAL REMAINS

This chapter takes as its starting point a formulation of liberation, read as inaugurating the non-racial as constitutive of the postapartheid social. Or perhaps, stated somewhat differently, liberation (as the ‘after’ of 1994) is understood as having seemingly prepared the ground for the capacity to move beyond the always already racial individuation of the social (see Van Bever Donker). Yet liberation also holds within it the folds of a particular materialism and framing discourses of both class and of socialism, as well as how these conceptualisations are sutured to those of race and nation. Materialism and concepts of class also of course function internal to the logic of capitalism, although they are there repressed even as capitalism imagines itself as antithetical to the politics of socialism and the Left. A central proposition to emerge from this is how race and class are stitched together in various formations of disciplinary (history, psychology) and instrumental reasonings (systems of governance), and in a politics of resistance, and are seen to define apartheid (and anticipate the postapartheid), ranging from the Native Republic Thesis and Colonialism of a Special Type (CST), to those of racial capitalism. In these formulations, often bracketed as the ‘race–class debate’, three central suppositions for defining the apartheid social can be discerned: (i) race is always already individuated by the imperatives of class; (ii) race is read as irrational and ‘false consciousness’, and its false irrationalities can be disclosed through class struggle and resistance; and (iii) class will enable the disappearance of race through the modern figure of the worker (and a non-racial modernity). Read from a different vantage point, what remains of the social of apartheid – of race – are fragments, legacies and inheritances that continue to refuse or withhold this non-racial modernity even as the promise of a socialist answer has dissipated. We wish to add another provocation to this assemblage through a recent engagement seeking to refigure the South African bantustan as constitutive of a South African ‘empire’, thought simultaneously as a dependent space in which the South African state commanded sovereignty, (despite its ‘independence’), and as a theoretical concept to re-examine the unexpected wider, global trajectories of race. This has two components.

Red Assembly: East London Calling

Wedding at Cana, completed in 1563, filled the entire rear wall of the Palladian Refectory of the Monastery of San Giorgio Maggiore in Venice, placing through its formal depiction the architectural space in which the monks and their guests dined en abîme. In 1797, after the occupation of Venice, Napoleon seized the painting as spoils of war. Because of its size, the work was dismantled, cut up and re-assembled for the Louvre, where it still hangs today.

The graves of dimbaza and the empire of liberation

This paper focuses on the ambiguous, contradictory and montaged space of Dimbaza in the former Ciskei bantustan of the Eastern Cape, figured simultaneously as homeland resettlement village, betterment rural township, decentralised industrialisation showcase, site of political banishment, international symbol of apartheid difference and as graveyard of the racially discarded, among others. Drawing on empire as the dependent space to command sovereignty, the paper considers Dimbaza in terms of South African empire. While it is suggested that as a means to re-figure the South African political, the bantustan may be read as a mark of a South African empire ‘project’, the paper is more concerned to ‘think with empire as a theoretical concept’. The paper draws on the elements of knowledge susceptible to being assembled by historical imagination – written documents, letters in the International Defence and Aid Fund (IDAF) Collection, contemporary testimonies, and visual sources (including the important film documentary Last Grave at Dimbaza) – and which constitute or resist the native/racial/ethnic/African subject (and thus are seen to exemplify the racial spatial command of the sovereign). We assemble these in relation to seemingly antagonistic historical formulations, particularly ‘colonialism of a special type’ and the politics of exile and liberation. We propose that, rather than returning us to South African ‘empire’ as a totality, the term offers us multiple singularities that allow us to consider the imaginative formulation of the ‘empire of liberation’ as a dependent space that continues to command sovereignty within the ‘native question’.

Across the Continents: Engaging and Questioning Community

Academics study the concept of community as a dynamic force and, increasingly, universities have become researchers, partners, and participants in community engagement. What is surprising is the lack of a definitional framework for the word “community”, and perhaps due to the use (one might say overuse) of the term in common parlance, no one questions what we mean by community.To engage a discussion without questioning what community means would be insufficient, if not presumptuous. Our goal is to explore. Equally presumptuous would be to define the dynamic, fluid, transforming concept of community. We aim to plumb the wisdom of our colleagues, community partners, students and mentors to bring meaning to the word community in all its richness and resilience.