Laurence Piper

Xenophobia, criminality and violent entrepreneurship: violence against Somali shopkeepers in Delft South, Cape Town, South Africa

ABSTRACT Violence against Somali shopkeepers is often cited as evidence of xenophobic attitudes and violence in South Africa. However, as argued in this article, it is not necessarily the case that such violence is driven by anti-foreigner sentiment. Instead, as illustrated in the case of Delft, a poor, mixed-race area in the City of Cape Town, violence against spaza shopkeepers may also be explained in terms of criminal activities and economic competition in the form of ‘violent entrepreneurship’. This argument is made drawing on a survey of over 100 spaza shopkeepers, a household survey, police statistics, and interviews and focus groups with key stakeholders living in Delft. The key insight is that despite a recent history of intense economic competition in the spaza market in which foreign skopkeepers have come to dominate, levels of violent crime against foreign shopkeepers, 80 per cent of whom are Somali, are not significantly higher than against South African shopkeepers. In addition, while South African shopkeepers openly resent the Somali advent, most consumers remain indifferent to their presence and certainly prefer the lower prices. While our findings cannot be generalised beyond this case, they do alert us to the importance of locating arguments about xenophobia in the wider context of crime and violence in South Africa, as well as paying close attention to the local particularities that can turn general sentiment into xenophobic action.

Too Dependent to Participate: Ward Committees and Local Democratisation in South Africa

Abstract Will participatory local government structures help deepen democracy in South Africa? That is the proclaimed purpose of the ward committee system, the centre-piece of post-apartheid local government reform, intended to facilitate deliberative democratic decision making. Drawing on a case study of the Msunduzi municipality, it is argued here that ward committees, as yet barely functional seven years since first being established, have from the outset been caught up in relations of dependency with ward councillors, political parties and the municipality itself, and that these relations threaten to undermine the democratic dividends that the committees are expected to yield.

Small Area Census Approach to Measure the Township Informal Economy in South Africa

In this article, we describe a research approach to undertaking a small area census to identify informal economy activity, using a mixture of quantitative and qualitative tools. The method focuses on enterprise activity. The approach enables the researcher to record a broader spectrum of informal micro-enterprises through identifying businesses in situ within an area of sufficient scale to broadly reflect area-level market conditions and business dynamics. The approach comprises an enterprise census, a survey of all identified micro-enterprises in key sectors, in-depth interviews, and participatory research techniques. The article reports on the application of this method in eight case sites, located in township settlements within five major cities in South Africa. The research identified 9,400 individual enterprises, entailing 10,220 primary and secondary activities, distributed within a population of 325,000 and comprising 97,000 households. The approach permits significant advances to our understanding of the spatial dynamics of the informal sector. The research data has enabled the researcher to make original contributions to understanding informal enterprise activities in grocery retailing, liquor trade, and traditional medicine sectors.

Enforced informalisation: The case of liquor retailers in South Africa

After a decade of unsuccessful efforts to migrate informal businesses to South Africas formal economy there remains little understanding of the dynamics in this sector, especially as regards micro-enterprises. International literature discusses ‘exit’ and ‘exclusion’, holding that poor law enforcement is the reason for the persistence and growth of the informal economy. Through examining the informal liquor retail (shebeen) sector, we demonstrate that enforcement actually produces informality in this sector. Illustrated with examples from one of our sites in Delft South, Cape Town, the article describes key aspects of shebeen business practice, including the responses to greater law enforcement. Notably, instead of closing shop or facing the hurdles of compliance, the great majority of shebeens continue to evade the law by downscaling their activities. This finding has implications not just for liquor policy in South Africa, but for understanding both theories of formalisation and theories of the informal economy.

Deconstructing ‘the foreign’: The limits of citizenship for explaining price competition in the Spaza sector in South Africa

ABSTRACT An important component of the informal economy in South Africa, the Spaza sector is portrayed as dominated by foreign nationals who outcompete South African shopkeepers on price. Indeed, this business competition from foreign nationals is a key reason given to explain xenophobia in South Africa. This article sets out to interrogate this widely held assumption. Drawing on evidence from over 1000 Spaza shops from South Africa’s three main cities, the article makes the case that business competitiveness does not correspond with ‘foreign’ or South African identities in a simple way. Firstly, while citizenship or nationality is a factor, it is not captured by the labels of ‘foreign’ versus South African, as there are significant differences by nationality within the ‘foreign’. Secondly, not all foreign nationalities out-compete South Africans on price. Thirdly, place matters too, not only because we find different nationalities in different cities, but also because there are different patterns of price competition by nationality in each place. Lastly, there are product-specific dynamics that impact on price more profoundly than nationality. For example, regardless of nationality, milk is cheaper in Cape Town and bread is cheaper in Johannesburg.

Party over outsiders, centre over branch: how ANC dominance works at the community level in South Africa

Common to most accounts of South African electoral politics is some version of voter loyalty or party identification. In contrast to arguments that focus on voter behaviour, although less common, are views that point to the reinforcement of voter choice through the relationship of the African National Congress (ANC) and party-state to key civil society and business allies. This article explores this party capture of political organisation at the crucial, and yet understudied, level of the local community or settlement. Drawing on case-study work in Cape Town and Johannesburg, it is demonstrated how the attempted dominance of political society over civil society at national level is reproduced at the most local of levels through a combination of ideological and instrumental factors. Key to the former is the idea of the ANC’s entitlement to rule implied by liberation nationalism. Key to the latter are the forms of patronage politics enabled by the ‘party-state’, where it exists. The result is the representational privileging of political actors over civil society actors, and the party ‘centre’ over branches. Notably, the attempt to construct the local ‘party-society’ is always partial and often weak, not least due to governance failures of various kinds. This leads to periodic crises and popular protest, but the party dominance of representational choice means that new leaders often emerge in the name of the ANC and its allies rather than against it.

Mediating between state and citizens: the significance of the informal politics of third-party representation in the global south

This article argues that we should take more seriously the role of intermediaries in relationships between states and citizens in the global south. More specifically it holds that the practice of mediation, the third party representation of citizens to states and vice versa, is a widespread and important political practice in this context. Largely distinct from the contentious politics and popular mobilisation of social movements, mediation is more a politics of negotiation and bargaining by representatives. Developed as an emergent analysis from multiple case studies, mediation is a broad concept that includes practices that at other times might be described as lobbying, clientelism and coercion, but that we conceptualise in terms of claiming legitimacy to speak for the poor and marginalised, and theorise in terms of a democratic deficit between formal political institutions and these groups. In addition to identifying different kinds of mediators, the article categorises mediation in terms of the orientation and nature of various mediatory practices. Lastly, the article identifies at least three explanations for mediation including the endurance of pre-democratic political relations and practices, new forms of social exclusion in post-colonial democracies and the erosion of state authority brought about by neo-liberal policies and globalisation.

DEMOCRACY BY ACCIDENT: THE RISE OF ZUMA AND THE RENAISSANCE OF THE TRIPARTITE ALLIANCE

In party organisational terms, the rise of Jacob Zuma to the Presidency of the African National Congress (ANC) is a victory for the alliance partners and the struggle‐era vision of the ANC as a popular front, or the ‘ANC as alliance’, as against Mbeki’s centralised and exclusionary practice. Accidentally, this renaissance of the ANC as alliance is good for democracy in South Africa understood in both liberal and participatory terms. On the one hand, the factionalism in the party provided for an alternation of leadership not possible through formal elections; and perhaps not desirable at this time. Further, the emergence of Congress of the People (COPE) promises a more meaningful party pluralism, taking the pressure for democratic competition off ANC internal processes into the future. On the other hand, the renaissance of the ANC as alliance provides better access to government by organisations, especially the Congress of South African Trade Unions (COSATU), who have a proven record in mobilising working and poor people around key social issues from land to HIV‐AIDS and Zimbabwe. In this way the chances of greater inclusion in national decision‐making are heightened, at least for some marginalised groups.

Introduction: The Crucial Role of Mediators in Relations between States and Citizens

This book sets out to answer a deceptively simple question: how do citizens and state engage in the global south? The answer is not simple; it is indeed complex and multifaceted, but we argue that much of the time this engagement involves a practice of intermediation. From local to international level, citizens are almost always represented to the state through third parties that are distinguished by the intermediary role that they play. These intermediaries include political parties, non-governmental organisations (NGOs), community-based organisations, social movements, armed non-state actors, networks and individuals. For its part, the state often engages citizens through intermediaries from private service providers to civil society activists and even local militia. Intermediation is thus both widely practised and multi-directional in relations between states and citizens in the global south. Indeed, so significant is the role of intermediaries in the engagement between states and citizens that it may well be useful to unpack the commonplace conception of ‘state-society relations’ in terms of the term ‘state-intermediary-citizen’ relations.

Mediation and the Contradictions of Representing the Urban Poor in South Africa: the case of SANCO leaders in Imizamo Yethu in Cape Town, South Africa

The formal system of local governance in South Africa has the ‘ward’ as its lowest and smallest electoral level — a spatial unit consisting of between 5,000 and 15,000 voters. The ward is equivalent to the ‘constituency’ in much of the rest of the world. Notably, the history of South Africa means that the vast majority of people live in ‘communities’ or neighbourhoods that are far smaller in scale than the ward, and most of these are the site of multiple claims of informal leadership by a variety of local organisations and their leaders. For example, the Cape Town ward, in which our case study is located, includes at least five different communities, distinguished in racial and class terms.