Judith Hayem

From May 2008 to 2011: Xenophobic Violence and National Subjectivity in South Africa

This article examines the recurrence of xenophobic attacks in 2011 in the light of the events of May 2008. Using archives and secondary data, examining slogans and discourses heard at the time and reflecting on the authors own involvement as an activist alongside foreign residents displaced by the 2008 attacks, it is argued that the xenophobic attacks demonstrated a shift in the national subjectivity or conception of citizenship, from an inclusive notion implying participation in the future South African society to a dialectical representation of nationals against foreigners. It is further argued that, in its mismanagement of the 2008 crisis, the South African government contributed to the emergence of such attitudes and did nothing to stop the violence; hence its repetition. The notion of human rights that has emerged in South Africa is one of the keys to an understanding of the representations at stake: whereas human rights used to be a universal and founding notion in post-apartheid South Africa, they are now seen as a national privilege regarding access to basic needs. The article shows that the humanitarian management of the May 2008 crisis by the South African Government contributed considerably to obscuring the notion of ‘human rights’. In order to oppose such a dangerous policy, there is an urgent need to revive the political debate in South Africa.

The ‘Voucher Strike’: Workers’ Political Subjectivities in Post-Apartheid South Africa

The article presents an anthropological case study of workers’ forms of thinking and subjectivity as they appeared at Autofirst, during a strike which took place in December 1998, in South Africa. After conceptualizing my approach as a ‘post-classist’ analysis following the work of the French political anthropologist Sylvain Lazarus and presenting my methodology, I focus on the problematic word ‘happy’ and its meaning in the specific subjective sequence. I show how the interviewees’ prescriptions that ‘a happy worker is a quality worker’ and that ‘the worker should be happy’ as much as management, are indications of the workers’ own logic and vision on what is possible in the factory in terms of relationships between management and workforce, during the early post-apartheid period. I contend that a ‘classist’ vision of capital and labour would not allow us to comprehend the issues at stake in the strike and in South African industry as a whole at that particular moment in time. Finally, I demonstrate the sequential existence of the factory as a place of engagement and of communication between 1995 and 1998, in contrast to the ‘apartheid of speech’ which, from the workers’ point of view, had previously characterized it.

Marikana: Analysing Miners' Subjectivity and the Crisis of Representation

This article analyses some of the reasons for the violent repression of the miners’ strike in Marikana, South Africa, in which 34 people died on 16 August 2012. It explores the economic and productive context which led the Rock Drill Operators to demand a wage increase outside the usual wage-bargaining structures. It goes on to examine the strikers’ subjectivity and the principles of their strike. Because the strike was organised independently of the main union, the National Union of Mineworkers, by miners demanding direct talks with their employer, as a sign of recognition, it illustrated a crisis of representation and embodied an alternative politics. The author argues that the African National Congress government was faced with a challenge to its instituted forms of political representation and, as a result, ordered the police to fire on the demonstrators.