As it turned out, Joseph made was later to become the minister of Lands, and he was responsible f... more As it turned out, Joseph made was later to become the minister of Lands, and he was responsible for leading the charge of Robert mugabe's 'fast track' resettlement programme that began in 2000. During the years from 1990 to 1992 I lived in Sengezane village in Gwaranyemba Communal Area in Zimbabwe's Gwanda District in matabeleland. At the time I was busy doing my doctoral fieldwork on village-level politics of land resettlement and rural development. Quite early on during my fieldwork I visited Zimbabwe's capital city Harare with the intention of conveying to Dr Joseph made, then a senior manager in the Agricultural Rural Development Authority (ARDA), some of the seething problems I had encountered at ARDA's 'model D' resettlement scheme in Sengezane village. In good faith, and in retrospect rather naively, I thought that I could convince the ARDA manager to change the top-down, technicist implementation of extremely disruptive land-use planning interventions in Sengezane village. I had seen first hand how these land-use plans had caused havoc with villagers' daily lives and livelihood practices. I had hardly begun to outline the kinds of village-level complications and hardships these plans had unleashed, when Dr made launched into a tirade against foreign researchers who criticised his government without providing solutions. 1 By the time I left this volatile meeting I had reconciled myself to the reality that my research findings would have no impact, and that Robert mugabe's ZANU-PF government was not interested in criticism. I was relieved to know that, once I finished my fieldwork, I could return to South Africa to make a contribution to my country's new democracy. The release of Nelson mandela in February 1990, and the unbanning of the anti-apartheid liberation movements shortly thereafter, ushered in expectations of democratisation and transformation that had once seemed unimaginable. It was this optimism that I witnessed following the 1994 election of mandela as the first President of the new South Africa. These heady times were also reflected in the extraordinary vibrancy of civic organisations, NGOs, and new social movements that emerged in a post-apartheid political landscape framed by one of the most progressive constitutions in the world. The proliferation of new political movevii viii Foreword & Acknowledgements ments included those concerned with the environment, indigenous rights, land, biotechnologies, low-income housing, gay and lesbian issues, housing and HIV/ AIDS. It was within this dynamic political moment that the seeds for this book found fertile ground. During the early 1990s, I became increasingly interested in the role of popular land struggles in catalysing new forms of identity politics amongst people in the Northern Cape Province who were previously classified as 'Coloured' but were increasingly identifying themselves as San, Grique and Nama (Chapters 2 and 3). This period also witnessed the emergence of new forms of transnational activism initiated by community-based organisations such as the South African Homeless Peoples' Federation (SAHPF) (see Chapter 4). Following President Thabo mbeki's controversial embrace of AIDS dissident views in 1999, my research began to focus on the ways in which AIDS activism was producing new political subjectivities, identities and practices (see Chapters 5 and 6). AIDS activism quickly became much more than a scholarly interest. Like the Treatment Action Campaign (TAC) activists, I too was outraged that President mbeki embraced AIDS dissident theories and seemed to be in a state of AIDS denial at a time when five to six million South Africans were living with HIV. I soon found myself confronted with new ethical and intellectual dilemmas and challenges as a South African political anthropologist doing research in the midst of a devastating pandemic. This interest in political anthropology, and my particular focus on social movements and activism, was not accidental; it reflected my growing political awareness as a white South African of the historical burdens of the twin legacies of colonialism and apartheid. These concerns had emerged in the course of my studies at the University of Cape Town (UCT) in the early 1980s. Although I had developed a gut sense of the systemic injustices of apartheid growing up as the son of a German Jewish refugee in the conservative, middle-class white suburbs of Port Elizabeth, it was my voracious reading of the works of South African sociologists, anthropologists and historians such as martin Legassick, Harold Wolpe, Jean and John Comaroff, and Shula marks that provided me with a historically and culturally informed understanding of the emergence of what marxist theorists referred to as South Africa's particular version of 'racial capitalism' and 'colonialism of a special type'. my training in political anthropology, and my political education more broadly, had begun in earnest in 1979 in the Department of Social Anthropology at the University of Cape Town (UCT). In the late 1980s, social anthropologists at UCT-Emile Boonzaier, mamphela Ramphele, Peter Skalnik, John Sharp, Andrew Spiegel, Robert Thornton and martin West-published a pathbreaking critique of apartheid state discourse in an edited volume called South African Keywords (1988). This text provided students like myself with the intellectual tools to unpack and deconstruct the apartheid state's discourses on race, ethnicity, tribe and so on. my understanding of the political situation in South Africa was further deepened by my 1982 Honours research on forced removals in Qwaqwa, an impoverished and overcrowded rural homeland of the South Sotho. It was here that I witnessed first hand the devastating consequences of apartheid social engineering, ix Foreword & Acknowledgements whereby hundreds of thousands of black South Africans were forcibly removed from 'white South Africa' and dumped in underdeveloped labour reserves. This was my real political and intellectual awakening. After completing my Honours degree, I was fortunate to study at Columbia University (1986-1994) in New york with two pre-eminent political anthropologists, George Bond and Joan Vincent. This training exposed me to broader theoretical questions raised by political anthropology in Africa. This book is a culmination of ethnographic investigations done over the period of more than a decade. The essays were written during a period of dramatic political transformations in terms of which nothing seemed stable and certain. In recent years this political landscape has become even more uncertain. In December 2007, South Africans, including political pundits, journalists and commentators, were taken by surprise by the dramatic electoral victory of former Deputy President Jacob Zuma's 'camp' at the ANC's Conference at Polokwane in Limpopo Province. Although the polls had indicated that Zuma had considerable support at the ANC branch level, not many pollsters predicted that his 'faction' would take a clean sweep of the top six positions of the ANC party leadership. This constituted a 'palace coup' and a dramatic routing of President mbeki and his support base. Zuma became President of the ANC, thereby thwarting President mbeki's attempt to win a third term as president of the ruling party. The book does not, however, deal with ANC party politics and struggles for political power of the sort that surfaced during the build-up to the December 2007 ANC Conference. Neither does it focus on the role of the trade unions and the SACP in national political life. Instead, it focuses on NGO and social movement activism and popular politics during the post-apartheid period. The case studies on land, housing and AIDS activism and mobilisation were researched and written during a period characterised by the global emergence of new social movements and new forms of identity politics. Although class-based mobilisation in the trade union movement has persisted, the book does not delve into the rich and well-researched field of labour movements. The book has also deliberately avoided analysing the twists and turns of political parties, ballots and procedural democracy, an area of study that has tended to be the domain of political science. Hopefully by focusing quite narrowly on NGOs and social movements, it will contribute towards expanding our understandings of new political discourses, organisations, citizenships and identities. There are numerous individuals I wish to acknowledge. These include my teach
This working paper is part of the Government of Chronic Poverty series Seeing like a 'PWA': a stu... more This working paper is part of the Government of Chronic Poverty series Seeing like a 'PWA': a study of therapeutic citizens and welfare subjects in Cape Town, South Africa 2 The Government of Chronic Poverty: from the politics of exclusion to the politics of citizenship? The papers in this series have been undertaken as part of the 'Government of Chronic Poverty' project within the 'Adverse Incorporation and Social Exclusion' theme within the Chronic Poverty Research Centre. Amongst other things, this theme is concerned with the politics of efforts to tackle structural forms of chronic poverty. 1 Although each of the papers in this series engages with a different country context and policy issue, they all frame contemporary efforts to reduce chronic poverty as essentially political efforts to (re)govern the relationships between the trustees of development and poor citizens caught within processes of adverse incorporation and social exclusion. From this perspective they ask whether contemporary development interventions and actors, within what critics have termed the era of 'inclusive liberalism', necessarily depoliticise the task of reducing structural forms of poverty, or whether they are capable of empowering chronically poor people as rightsbearing citizens. While each paper makes clear that the answers to this question are highly contextualised, the synthesis paper seeks to draw out the comparative and broader implications of these studies for efforts to understand and challenge chronic poverty.
Tourism strategies and local responses in Southern Africa, 2009
This chapter discusses the possibilities for communities in and close to the Great Limpopo Transf... more This chapter discusses the possibilities for communities in and close to the Great Limpopo Transfrontier Park to benefit from tourism development.
Ferguson's (1990) The Anti-Politics Machine: 'Development,' Depoliticization and Bure... more Ferguson's (1990) The Anti-Politics Machine: 'Development,' Depoliticization and Bureaucratic State Power in Lesotho has come to represent a defining moment in recent anthropological critiques of development. Ferguson's sophis ticated discourse analysis draws attention to the tightly structured 'conceptual apparatuses' that constitute the object of 'development,' for example the 'Less Developed Country' (LDC), 'the female headed household,' 'the illiterate,' 'the poor,' 'the subsistence farmer,' and so on. His analysis of World Bank reports on Lesotho lead him to suggest that there is a vast chasm between 'academic' and 'development' genres. He concludes that there is very little room for maneuver within the conceptual black box of development discourse. As a result, the development consultant has to operate within a prepackaged repertoire of ideas and practices, a discursively constructed 'c...
The paper examines the history and politics of sanitation and urban belonging and citizenship in ... more The paper examines the history and politics of sanitation and urban belonging and citizenship in Cape Town. It traces the cultural histories of waste and odour in order to reveal the embedding of liberal citizenship, as well as technology, in the body. We do this to make sense of why and how toilets and waste have become recent objects and instruments of struggle in Cape Town, and elsewhere. The paper shows that these political struggles did not arise from nowhere; their emergence is the outcome of historically and materially sustained contradictions that are fundamental to liberal governance. Over the course of human history, the olfactory sense has been completely redefined and gains its historical momentum with the onset of the powerful State. Smell becomes the unnamable. Beautiful smell becomes an absence …. (Laporte [1968] 2002, 66). 2011 was a municipal election year for Cape Town, South Africa, and the African National Congress Youth League (ANCYL) decided to challenge the opposition, the Democratic Alliance, by destroying portable toilets and flimsy enclosures to communal flush toilets in several townships outside Cape Town. Their demand was for "proper" toilets and rights of privacy, or dignity. This quickly became part of a larger demand for human rights. The ANCYL activists brought the matter to the South African Human Rights Commission (SAHRC), which took up the charge, and utilising municipal codes that dictate proper ratios of toilets to space and population, filed a lawsuit against the City. On April 29 2011 High Court Judge Nathan Erasmus delivered a ruling in favour of the SAHRC, which accused the City of Cape Town of violating the rights of citizens by not providing a sufficient number of toilets per household and by not properly enclosing those they did provide. The ANCYL, the SAHRC and the Erasmus court brought the full weight of citizenship and human rights to bear on toilets. But this was only the beginning of what became "the toilet war. " In May 2013, workers from a sanitation services company hired by the city to clean and collect waste from portable toilets in townships, entered into a labour dispute with the City that culminated in the blocking of traffic on the N2, a major highway, because of burning tires and faeces dumped on the road. In June of that year, a group of protesters led by then African National Congress City Councillor Andile Lili covered the steps of
This article focuses on two cases of elusive and hyper-transient expressions of ‘communitas’ that... more This article focuses on two cases of elusive and hyper-transient expressions of ‘communitas’ that seem to have been structured by specific conditions of liminality. These are the FIFA World Cup 2010 and the experiences of young Zimbabwean refugees living in Cape Town. In the course of the analysis we draw attention to the limits and possibilities of Turner's analysis of the ritual process for understanding contemporary forms of sociality. In each case we illustrate how a liminal period establishes an experience of ecstatic solidarity and high connectivity as reactions to, as well as products of, the neoliberal capitalist system which dominates African sociality today. We discuss how the 2010 World Cup created the conditions for South Africans to experience a hyper-transient form of communitas that, unfortunately, seemed seamlessly to morph into the scapegoating of African foreigners just as the sporting event drew to a close. In contrast, we illustrate how a group of Zimbabweans depend upon communitas in order to survive and develop a sense of structure in their liminal positions as foreigners in xenophobic South Africa, especially facing threats of violence at the end of the World Cup. We hope that doing this allows us to illustrate the productivity of Turner's concept of communitas for understanding a wide variety of contemporary social and political phenomena, including that which can be seen as the ‘underbelly’ of communitas.
Driving through Lusikisiki one is struck by the green rolling hills, the healthy looking cattle g... more Driving through Lusikisiki one is struck by the green rolling hills, the healthy looking cattle grazing in village pastures and the endless fields of maize. For those in the know, the extraordinary biodiversity of the area-with its over 1700 indigenous plants-is as impressive as the rolling hills and the maize fields. This high rainfall and fertile part of the picturesque Wild Coast is very different from so many other communal areas in South Africa that regularly experience drought. But the statistics show that not all is well in Pondoland. The district, like so many parts of South Africa, has an extremely high HIV infection rate of 24%high for rural areas in the Eastern Cape. It also has an under-resourced provincial health department. As we drove past Lusikisiki's provincial hospital, St Elizabeth's, Herman Themba (Hope) Reuter, the MSF (Medecins Sans Frontieres) doctor responsible for Lusikisiki's HIV/AIDS programme, pointed out the shacks that served as the accommodation for the hospital's nursing staff. Further on we passed old shipping containers that comprised the main Lusikisiki Village Clinic. Dr Reuter spoke about the enormous capacity and resource problems facing the Eastern Cape health system and the difficulties of attracting and retaining nursing staff in such contexts. More than 50% of the hospital posts were not filled because of these problems. Only dedicated health professionals were prepared to remain in this deep rural part of the Eastern Cape Province.
Hargreaves (2002) suggested that vigorous social movements have the potential to improve the qual... more Hargreaves (2002) suggested that vigorous social movements have the potential to improve the quality of (and increase the equity in) public education. This paper explores the role of Equal Education, an education social movement in South Africa led by university students and secondary school learners, in the process 1. Interview evidence presented in this paper was also used in Brahm Fleisch and Steven Robins, Mediating active citizenship and social mobility in working-class schools: The case of Equal Education in Khayelitsha, Cape Town. In Citizenship as mediation: The role of intermediaries in relations between states and poor & marginalised groups in the Global South, edited by Laurence Piper and Bettina Von Lieres, (Palgrave 2014).
Jy is nou of aan die een kant of die ander leant. Jy is dus of 'n Raadsman of 'n Gemeentskapkommi... more Jy is nou of aan die een kant of die ander leant. Jy is dus of 'n Raadsman of 'n Gemeentskapkommittee se man ("Hannes Smil", Leliefor.tein, February, 1994) ... Within these [Nnmaqunlnnd] communities there is what you could call n class struggle. The people in the communities don't understand the thing as class struggle, but they know that our teachers and business people practice apartheid here ("Manie KJoete", Springbok, February, 1994). ... My personal feeling is that we have spent lots of energy in the campaign to get these economic units' set aside. But since then nothing has improved. People got the land back but they still continue in the same way. Just hiiving 20 sheep or so. They're not market-orientated. But its no use if the mining company retrenches you and gives you a few thousand rand to buy a few hundred sheep or so, but you're not market-orientated ("Manie Kloete", Springbok, February, 1994). ' "Economic unils" were individuallyallocaled plols that were sold Namaqualand farmers who qualified to buy cm in terms of specific criteria, i.e., 250 head of slock or R 3,000 in assets. The introduction of these units in the JSO's involved the subdivision of common grazing land into individual grazing "camps". Although these camps ere sold to a small number of residents in the various "Coloured Reserves" of Namaqualand, in 1988 a Supreme ourl case ruling set aside the economic unils initiative and the land reverted to the commons.
As it turned out, Joseph made was later to become the minister of Lands, and he was responsible f... more As it turned out, Joseph made was later to become the minister of Lands, and he was responsible for leading the charge of Robert mugabe's 'fast track' resettlement programme that began in 2000. During the years from 1990 to 1992 I lived in Sengezane village in Gwaranyemba Communal Area in Zimbabwe's Gwanda District in matabeleland. At the time I was busy doing my doctoral fieldwork on village-level politics of land resettlement and rural development. Quite early on during my fieldwork I visited Zimbabwe's capital city Harare with the intention of conveying to Dr Joseph made, then a senior manager in the Agricultural Rural Development Authority (ARDA), some of the seething problems I had encountered at ARDA's 'model D' resettlement scheme in Sengezane village. In good faith, and in retrospect rather naively, I thought that I could convince the ARDA manager to change the top-down, technicist implementation of extremely disruptive land-use planning interventions in Sengezane village. I had seen first hand how these land-use plans had caused havoc with villagers' daily lives and livelihood practices. I had hardly begun to outline the kinds of village-level complications and hardships these plans had unleashed, when Dr made launched into a tirade against foreign researchers who criticised his government without providing solutions. 1 By the time I left this volatile meeting I had reconciled myself to the reality that my research findings would have no impact, and that Robert mugabe's ZANU-PF government was not interested in criticism. I was relieved to know that, once I finished my fieldwork, I could return to South Africa to make a contribution to my country's new democracy. The release of Nelson mandela in February 1990, and the unbanning of the anti-apartheid liberation movements shortly thereafter, ushered in expectations of democratisation and transformation that had once seemed unimaginable. It was this optimism that I witnessed following the 1994 election of mandela as the first President of the new South Africa. These heady times were also reflected in the extraordinary vibrancy of civic organisations, NGOs, and new social movements that emerged in a post-apartheid political landscape framed by one of the most progressive constitutions in the world. The proliferation of new political movevii viii Foreword & Acknowledgements ments included those concerned with the environment, indigenous rights, land, biotechnologies, low-income housing, gay and lesbian issues, housing and HIV/ AIDS. It was within this dynamic political moment that the seeds for this book found fertile ground. During the early 1990s, I became increasingly interested in the role of popular land struggles in catalysing new forms of identity politics amongst people in the Northern Cape Province who were previously classified as 'Coloured' but were increasingly identifying themselves as San, Grique and Nama (Chapters 2 and 3). This period also witnessed the emergence of new forms of transnational activism initiated by community-based organisations such as the South African Homeless Peoples' Federation (SAHPF) (see Chapter 4). Following President Thabo mbeki's controversial embrace of AIDS dissident views in 1999, my research began to focus on the ways in which AIDS activism was producing new political subjectivities, identities and practices (see Chapters 5 and 6). AIDS activism quickly became much more than a scholarly interest. Like the Treatment Action Campaign (TAC) activists, I too was outraged that President mbeki embraced AIDS dissident theories and seemed to be in a state of AIDS denial at a time when five to six million South Africans were living with HIV. I soon found myself confronted with new ethical and intellectual dilemmas and challenges as a South African political anthropologist doing research in the midst of a devastating pandemic. This interest in political anthropology, and my particular focus on social movements and activism, was not accidental; it reflected my growing political awareness as a white South African of the historical burdens of the twin legacies of colonialism and apartheid. These concerns had emerged in the course of my studies at the University of Cape Town (UCT) in the early 1980s. Although I had developed a gut sense of the systemic injustices of apartheid growing up as the son of a German Jewish refugee in the conservative, middle-class white suburbs of Port Elizabeth, it was my voracious reading of the works of South African sociologists, anthropologists and historians such as martin Legassick, Harold Wolpe, Jean and John Comaroff, and Shula marks that provided me with a historically and culturally informed understanding of the emergence of what marxist theorists referred to as South Africa's particular version of 'racial capitalism' and 'colonialism of a special type'. my training in political anthropology, and my political education more broadly, had begun in earnest in 1979 in the Department of Social Anthropology at the University of Cape Town (UCT). In the late 1980s, social anthropologists at UCT-Emile Boonzaier, mamphela Ramphele, Peter Skalnik, John Sharp, Andrew Spiegel, Robert Thornton and martin West-published a pathbreaking critique of apartheid state discourse in an edited volume called South African Keywords (1988). This text provided students like myself with the intellectual tools to unpack and deconstruct the apartheid state's discourses on race, ethnicity, tribe and so on. my understanding of the political situation in South Africa was further deepened by my 1982 Honours research on forced removals in Qwaqwa, an impoverished and overcrowded rural homeland of the South Sotho. It was here that I witnessed first hand the devastating consequences of apartheid social engineering, ix Foreword & Acknowledgements whereby hundreds of thousands of black South Africans were forcibly removed from 'white South Africa' and dumped in underdeveloped labour reserves. This was my real political and intellectual awakening. After completing my Honours degree, I was fortunate to study at Columbia University (1986-1994) in New york with two pre-eminent political anthropologists, George Bond and Joan Vincent. This training exposed me to broader theoretical questions raised by political anthropology in Africa. This book is a culmination of ethnographic investigations done over the period of more than a decade. The essays were written during a period of dramatic political transformations in terms of which nothing seemed stable and certain. In recent years this political landscape has become even more uncertain. In December 2007, South Africans, including political pundits, journalists and commentators, were taken by surprise by the dramatic electoral victory of former Deputy President Jacob Zuma's 'camp' at the ANC's Conference at Polokwane in Limpopo Province. Although the polls had indicated that Zuma had considerable support at the ANC branch level, not many pollsters predicted that his 'faction' would take a clean sweep of the top six positions of the ANC party leadership. This constituted a 'palace coup' and a dramatic routing of President mbeki and his support base. Zuma became President of the ANC, thereby thwarting President mbeki's attempt to win a third term as president of the ruling party. The book does not, however, deal with ANC party politics and struggles for political power of the sort that surfaced during the build-up to the December 2007 ANC Conference. Neither does it focus on the role of the trade unions and the SACP in national political life. Instead, it focuses on NGO and social movement activism and popular politics during the post-apartheid period. The case studies on land, housing and AIDS activism and mobilisation were researched and written during a period characterised by the global emergence of new social movements and new forms of identity politics. Although class-based mobilisation in the trade union movement has persisted, the book does not delve into the rich and well-researched field of labour movements. The book has also deliberately avoided analysing the twists and turns of political parties, ballots and procedural democracy, an area of study that has tended to be the domain of political science. Hopefully by focusing quite narrowly on NGOs and social movements, it will contribute towards expanding our understandings of new political discourses, organisations, citizenships and identities. There are numerous individuals I wish to acknowledge. These include my teach
This working paper is part of the Government of Chronic Poverty series Seeing like a 'PWA': a stu... more This working paper is part of the Government of Chronic Poverty series Seeing like a 'PWA': a study of therapeutic citizens and welfare subjects in Cape Town, South Africa 2 The Government of Chronic Poverty: from the politics of exclusion to the politics of citizenship? The papers in this series have been undertaken as part of the 'Government of Chronic Poverty' project within the 'Adverse Incorporation and Social Exclusion' theme within the Chronic Poverty Research Centre. Amongst other things, this theme is concerned with the politics of efforts to tackle structural forms of chronic poverty. 1 Although each of the papers in this series engages with a different country context and policy issue, they all frame contemporary efforts to reduce chronic poverty as essentially political efforts to (re)govern the relationships between the trustees of development and poor citizens caught within processes of adverse incorporation and social exclusion. From this perspective they ask whether contemporary development interventions and actors, within what critics have termed the era of 'inclusive liberalism', necessarily depoliticise the task of reducing structural forms of poverty, or whether they are capable of empowering chronically poor people as rightsbearing citizens. While each paper makes clear that the answers to this question are highly contextualised, the synthesis paper seeks to draw out the comparative and broader implications of these studies for efforts to understand and challenge chronic poverty.
Tourism strategies and local responses in Southern Africa, 2009
This chapter discusses the possibilities for communities in and close to the Great Limpopo Transf... more This chapter discusses the possibilities for communities in and close to the Great Limpopo Transfrontier Park to benefit from tourism development.
Ferguson's (1990) The Anti-Politics Machine: 'Development,' Depoliticization and Bure... more Ferguson's (1990) The Anti-Politics Machine: 'Development,' Depoliticization and Bureaucratic State Power in Lesotho has come to represent a defining moment in recent anthropological critiques of development. Ferguson's sophis ticated discourse analysis draws attention to the tightly structured 'conceptual apparatuses' that constitute the object of 'development,' for example the 'Less Developed Country' (LDC), 'the female headed household,' 'the illiterate,' 'the poor,' 'the subsistence farmer,' and so on. His analysis of World Bank reports on Lesotho lead him to suggest that there is a vast chasm between 'academic' and 'development' genres. He concludes that there is very little room for maneuver within the conceptual black box of development discourse. As a result, the development consultant has to operate within a prepackaged repertoire of ideas and practices, a discursively constructed 'c...
The paper examines the history and politics of sanitation and urban belonging and citizenship in ... more The paper examines the history and politics of sanitation and urban belonging and citizenship in Cape Town. It traces the cultural histories of waste and odour in order to reveal the embedding of liberal citizenship, as well as technology, in the body. We do this to make sense of why and how toilets and waste have become recent objects and instruments of struggle in Cape Town, and elsewhere. The paper shows that these political struggles did not arise from nowhere; their emergence is the outcome of historically and materially sustained contradictions that are fundamental to liberal governance. Over the course of human history, the olfactory sense has been completely redefined and gains its historical momentum with the onset of the powerful State. Smell becomes the unnamable. Beautiful smell becomes an absence …. (Laporte [1968] 2002, 66). 2011 was a municipal election year for Cape Town, South Africa, and the African National Congress Youth League (ANCYL) decided to challenge the opposition, the Democratic Alliance, by destroying portable toilets and flimsy enclosures to communal flush toilets in several townships outside Cape Town. Their demand was for "proper" toilets and rights of privacy, or dignity. This quickly became part of a larger demand for human rights. The ANCYL activists brought the matter to the South African Human Rights Commission (SAHRC), which took up the charge, and utilising municipal codes that dictate proper ratios of toilets to space and population, filed a lawsuit against the City. On April 29 2011 High Court Judge Nathan Erasmus delivered a ruling in favour of the SAHRC, which accused the City of Cape Town of violating the rights of citizens by not providing a sufficient number of toilets per household and by not properly enclosing those they did provide. The ANCYL, the SAHRC and the Erasmus court brought the full weight of citizenship and human rights to bear on toilets. But this was only the beginning of what became "the toilet war. " In May 2013, workers from a sanitation services company hired by the city to clean and collect waste from portable toilets in townships, entered into a labour dispute with the City that culminated in the blocking of traffic on the N2, a major highway, because of burning tires and faeces dumped on the road. In June of that year, a group of protesters led by then African National Congress City Councillor Andile Lili covered the steps of
This article focuses on two cases of elusive and hyper-transient expressions of ‘communitas’ that... more This article focuses on two cases of elusive and hyper-transient expressions of ‘communitas’ that seem to have been structured by specific conditions of liminality. These are the FIFA World Cup 2010 and the experiences of young Zimbabwean refugees living in Cape Town. In the course of the analysis we draw attention to the limits and possibilities of Turner's analysis of the ritual process for understanding contemporary forms of sociality. In each case we illustrate how a liminal period establishes an experience of ecstatic solidarity and high connectivity as reactions to, as well as products of, the neoliberal capitalist system which dominates African sociality today. We discuss how the 2010 World Cup created the conditions for South Africans to experience a hyper-transient form of communitas that, unfortunately, seemed seamlessly to morph into the scapegoating of African foreigners just as the sporting event drew to a close. In contrast, we illustrate how a group of Zimbabweans depend upon communitas in order to survive and develop a sense of structure in their liminal positions as foreigners in xenophobic South Africa, especially facing threats of violence at the end of the World Cup. We hope that doing this allows us to illustrate the productivity of Turner's concept of communitas for understanding a wide variety of contemporary social and political phenomena, including that which can be seen as the ‘underbelly’ of communitas.
Driving through Lusikisiki one is struck by the green rolling hills, the healthy looking cattle g... more Driving through Lusikisiki one is struck by the green rolling hills, the healthy looking cattle grazing in village pastures and the endless fields of maize. For those in the know, the extraordinary biodiversity of the area-with its over 1700 indigenous plants-is as impressive as the rolling hills and the maize fields. This high rainfall and fertile part of the picturesque Wild Coast is very different from so many other communal areas in South Africa that regularly experience drought. But the statistics show that not all is well in Pondoland. The district, like so many parts of South Africa, has an extremely high HIV infection rate of 24%high for rural areas in the Eastern Cape. It also has an under-resourced provincial health department. As we drove past Lusikisiki's provincial hospital, St Elizabeth's, Herman Themba (Hope) Reuter, the MSF (Medecins Sans Frontieres) doctor responsible for Lusikisiki's HIV/AIDS programme, pointed out the shacks that served as the accommodation for the hospital's nursing staff. Further on we passed old shipping containers that comprised the main Lusikisiki Village Clinic. Dr Reuter spoke about the enormous capacity and resource problems facing the Eastern Cape health system and the difficulties of attracting and retaining nursing staff in such contexts. More than 50% of the hospital posts were not filled because of these problems. Only dedicated health professionals were prepared to remain in this deep rural part of the Eastern Cape Province.
Hargreaves (2002) suggested that vigorous social movements have the potential to improve the qual... more Hargreaves (2002) suggested that vigorous social movements have the potential to improve the quality of (and increase the equity in) public education. This paper explores the role of Equal Education, an education social movement in South Africa led by university students and secondary school learners, in the process 1. Interview evidence presented in this paper was also used in Brahm Fleisch and Steven Robins, Mediating active citizenship and social mobility in working-class schools: The case of Equal Education in Khayelitsha, Cape Town. In Citizenship as mediation: The role of intermediaries in relations between states and poor & marginalised groups in the Global South, edited by Laurence Piper and Bettina Von Lieres, (Palgrave 2014).
Jy is nou of aan die een kant of die ander leant. Jy is dus of 'n Raadsman of 'n Gemeentskapkommi... more Jy is nou of aan die een kant of die ander leant. Jy is dus of 'n Raadsman of 'n Gemeentskapkommittee se man ("Hannes Smil", Leliefor.tein, February, 1994) ... Within these [Nnmaqunlnnd] communities there is what you could call n class struggle. The people in the communities don't understand the thing as class struggle, but they know that our teachers and business people practice apartheid here ("Manie KJoete", Springbok, February, 1994). ... My personal feeling is that we have spent lots of energy in the campaign to get these economic units' set aside. But since then nothing has improved. People got the land back but they still continue in the same way. Just hiiving 20 sheep or so. They're not market-orientated. But its no use if the mining company retrenches you and gives you a few thousand rand to buy a few hundred sheep or so, but you're not market-orientated ("Manie Kloete", Springbok, February, 1994). ' "Economic unils" were individuallyallocaled plols that were sold Namaqualand farmers who qualified to buy cm in terms of specific criteria, i.e., 250 head of slock or R 3,000 in assets. The introduction of these units in the JSO's involved the subdivision of common grazing land into individual grazing "camps". Although these camps ere sold to a small number of residents in the various "Coloured Reserves" of Namaqualand, in 1988 a Supreme ourl case ruling set aside the economic unils initiative and the land reverted to the commons.
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Papers by Steven Robins