Paper short abstract:

Formal property inheritance in Johannesburg relies on a human infrastructure of legal officials and professionals committed to post-apartheid access. Yet understanding the divergent commitments underlying such an infrastructure reveals how formalisation and its promised legal protections founder.

Paper long abstract:

During apartheid’s demise, who owned property in urban South Africa changed rapidly, as township houses were transferred to long-term black tenants who previously could not own. Soon, attention turned to the inheritance of these homes across generations. Under apartheid, property inheritance was one among many aspects of governance that excluded the black majority. As administration was deracialised, the system expanded rapidly to serve a new public. This paper explores the resulting field of legal administration as a public human infrastructure. Today, formal inheritance in Johannesburg relies on a city-wide public infrastructure of legal officials and professionals understood precisely as offering coordinated post-apartheid access. A distributed network of institutions extends beyond state officialdom to civic and for-profit services, with the aim of bringing the system ‘to the people’. Its public character implies shared values, shared availability and benefit, and a shared public experience of encounter and collective engagement. These features capture the aspirations of officials and many providers of non-state assistance, promising a coherent human infrastructure of legal procedure and assistance. But in practice, their realisation is far from straightforward. Increased public access occurs at normative interfaces – between the law and popular norms, and between civic and corporate notions of service – and it requires brokering and bridging work. A shared project of post-apartheid access coexists with different institutional agendas, and variable understandings and degrees of public obligation. Understanding the divergent and contradictory commitments underlying this human infrastructure of property inheritance reveals how formalisation and its promised legal protections founder.