Entanglement. Sarah Nuttall
‘Afrikaners’ so allegiance to Afrikaner nationalism had constantly to be created (see also Van Onselen 1982).
One of the most distinctive features of Johannesburg’s built environment in the inter-war years was the existence of a large belt of slums that spread from the western suburbs across the city centre to the suburbs in the east. Eddie Koch’s work (1983) shows how resistance to the clearance of the slums gave rise to a series of conflicts and tensions which delayed the implementation of segregation and allowed the culture of the slum yards to grow and thrive.
The extent of the permeability of racial boundaries at this time again reveals the amount of work it took to put and keep apartheid in place. The degree to which rural paternalism contained egalitarian elements has been debated in relation to Van Onselen’s The Seed is Mine (1996). Interesting, too, in this context is the existence of hybrid border communities: John Dunn’s people, and Coenraad de Buys and his descendants, the Griquas, in particular, symbolise what Mostert (1993, p 237) calls ‘a lost route of Afrikaner history’. Of De Buys Mostert writes: ‘on the one hand he represented the interracial intimacy and familiarity, on the other the ruthless self-interest, peremptory will and desire and brutality, of relations between those forerunning Boers and the indigenous inhabitants’ (p 238).
George Frederickson, in his book White Supremacy (1981), suggests that the Cape really was different. He shows that the main external source of attitudes to race mixture in the early Cape Colony was the precedents deriving from the Dutch experience in Indonesia, where the trend was to encourage intermarriage in an effort to superimpose on the native social order a new caste of Dutch Christians. The Dutch, not particularly committed to racial purity, preferred to legalise Dutch-speaking Christianised ‘mixed-race’ people, though the British would later try to impose a clearer basis of stratification on what they saw as this racial chaos. Frederickson argues in his comparative study that it is, in fact, the United States, not South Africa, in which historically-white supremacists enjoyed the luxury of a racial exclusiveness that is unparalleled in the annals of racial inequality (p 135).
The work of Vivian Bickford-Smith et al (1999) on Cape Town’s history has tended to de-romanticise the city’s story but still contains much material suggesting that Cape Town was much less racially bounded than other areas of South Africa. But the point I am pursuing here has less to do with the porousness or otherwise of racial boundaries than with the idea that the more such boundaries are erected and legislated the more the observer has to look for the petty transgressions without which everyday life for both the ‘master’ and the ‘slave’ would be impossible. Racial segregation, that is, can only work if, somewhere else, the entanglements, denied precisely to safeguard the official fiction, are also taking place.
The larger question is, therefore, how to find a method of reading the social which is about mutual entanglements, some of them conscious but most of them unconscious, which occur between people who most of the time try to define themselves as different. The more they try to do this the more the critic must be suspicious of their talk of uniqueness and difference. Such claims, we might well suggest, repress, at least at times, precisely what draws together, what links, the oppressor and the oppressed, black, white and coloured. In respect of all the above, then, it would not make sense to confine our understanding of creolité to the Cape past.4
Race and class
Once we take on board a way of reading which is based on mutual entanglements we are obliged to think of race, class and power differently. In particular, we have to confront what it is that older paradigms are not able to show us. Beginning with race we might first note that the South African academy and beyond has produced many examples of carefully argued work on race and power in this country. Moreover, there is a self-awareness, from within these very traditions, of the limits of dominant approaches (see Hamilton 1997 and Hyslop 2002a&b).
In asking how to locate the ‘now’, the contemporary, in South Africa, we have to ask the question when and how race matters. Here we might reflect on the fact that race appears to be hardening in the public political realm precisely as legalised racism has been abolished. One early example of this was the public correspondence between South African President Thabo Mbeki and the leader of the Opposition, Tony Leon, in 2000. Mbeki accused Leon of publishing ‘hysterical estimates’ of HIV/Aids sufferers in South Africa and of ‘making wild and insulting claims’, along with the international community, about the African origins of HIV. Leon averred that it was ‘a fundamental mistake and profoundly misguided to associate matters of race with the Aids crisis’ and accused Mbeki of using ‘tactics of moral blackmail or demonisation’.5 Since 1994, moreover, what used to be called ‘non-racialism’ is seldom heard in political discourse. This silence is closely related to the fact that while under apartheid racial discrimination was crucial to the twin issues of work and wealth, in the post-apartheid period the politics of black empowerment plays an important role in shifting institutional power politics.
This hardening is taking place at the same time as more choices are becoming available in terms of racial identification, especially in the sphere of culture. The pragmatics of a ‘cross-over culture’ are now expressed through other vehicles, in particular through powerful new media cultures and the market (see Nuttall 2004). There is, as yet, only the beginning of new work and theorisation of these ‘post-racist’ configurations which reinvigorate the political utopias of these terms. Extraordinary ethnographies are emerging from scholars such as Nadine Dolby (2001), Tanya Farber (2002) and Mpolokeng Bogatsu (2003).
In relation to studies of class in South Africa emphasis has been oriented towards the working class, while fewer studies have focused on peasant or rural culture or, one might add, on middle-class migrant and city cultures.6 How can we re-imagine its usages? Where is class located? If popular culture increasingly replaces neighbourhood and family as dominant sites for the making of identity, how class-bound is it? As I show in my work on Y or loxion culture (2004) remarkably similar processes of identity-making, especially in the realm of popular culture, emerge between ‘working’ and ‘lower middle-class’ school children in Durban and ‘middle-class’ teenagers in Johannesburg. What kinds of imperfect meshings occur between the micro and the macro, the complexity of people’s lives and the sometimes abstract and general categories we use to describe them? How do technological change, new forms of power, demographic upheavals, urban growth, challenge to stable identities, bureaucratic expansion and deepening market relations affect the making of social lives and the construction and deployment of class identities?
Tim Burke’s (1996) work suggests that class – perhaps not class formations exactly, but relations of economic and social power – needs to be thought about far less mechanistically than it has been to date. In his study of commodity culture in Zimbabwe Burke shows the complexity of ‘proletarianisation’ in a colonial context, and even of the day-to-day living out of poverty and privilege. Questions of class will need to be posed in a context in which not only has South Africa changed, so has capitalism.
Jean and John Comaroff’s (2001) work on ‘millennial capitalism’ suggests that the new South African nation state is not only new in itself but operates in a new world: it must achieve modernity in a post-modern world and a world of ‘casino capitalism’. This is an historically new situation, both internally and internationally. Production as it was known before is increasingly being replaced by provision of services and the capacity to control space, time and the flow of money through speculation. Speculation is not only practised by the middle classes: poor people, too, frequently participate in high-risk investments such as the lottery. In higher echelons, dealing in stocks and bonds whose rise and fall is governed by chance results in new cultures of circulation – the culturally inflected paths along which objects, people and ideas move
All this points to new temporalities or velocities of the social. James Campbell (2002) has written how, given South Africa’s elaborate tradition of labour repression, scholars have focused their attention on production, leaving consumption as something of an ‘historical orphan’.
South African theorists have yet to give an adequate account of these new configurations of the political economy of culture. For this reason it is more important than ever to pay attention to those archives still at times undervalued and,