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- Convenors:
-
Olaf Zenker
(Martin Luther University Halle-Wittenberg)
Steffen Jensen (Aalborg University)
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- Discussant:
-
Hylton White
(University of the Witwatersrand)
- Formats:
- Workshops
- Location:
- S203
- Sessions:
- Thursday 12 July, -, -, Friday 13 July, -
Time zone: Europe/Paris
Short Abstract:
This panel explores current ways of being in and belonging to former South African homelands. Focusing on the political economy and sociality of "home" and "lands", the panel probes the potentials and limitations for managing uncertainty and disquiet under conditions of multiple marginalisations.
Long Abstract:
Epitomising the ideology of Grand Apartheid, the homelands in South Africa evolved as places forcefully made "the home" of millions of ethnicised Africans and comprising overcrowded lands of poor quality and deliberately marginal industrialisation. Increasingly constituting territories of uncertainty and unrest, these areas have persisted as spaces of neglect and abject poverty into the post-colonial present. Addressing this continuing neglect, this panel seeks to explore the multiple imageries and social realities of being within and belonging to former homelands: have people made these relocation spots their "home"? Do they wish to return to earlier homes (e.g. through land restitution) or rather long for leaving elsewhere? What is the place of former homelands in the wider political economy, of South Africa and beyond, of labour migration, consumption and desired biographical futures? And what is the state of homelands' actual "lands" in their multiple dimensions: as economic resources for agriculture, mining, forestry, tourism, residence and investment; as conflicting realms of political and legal pluralism, in which local government uneasily coexists with increasingly resurrected neo-traditional authorities; as social spaces, in which gender and intergenerational relations are renegotiated and identities remade in light of equally contested "traditions" and "modernities". While former homelands in Post-Apartheid South Africa surely constitute agentic spaces for actors' skillful management of both "home" and "lands", this panel also probes the limits to such mastering of uncertainty and disquiet - limits that are set by the fact that, for many, being and belonging to former homelands still means existing in dire straits.
Accepted papers:
Session 1 Thursday 12 July, 2012, -Paper short abstract:
Focussing on contested white land restitution claims related to former KwaNdebele, this paper analyses this homeland as a fateful frontier zone of contestation, in which the terms of a new South African moral community are negotiated.
Paper long abstract:
South African land restitution, in which the post-apartheid state compensates victims of "racial" land dispossession, has been intimately linked to former homelands: prototypical rural claims consist of communities that lost their rights in land when being forcibly relocated to reserves and now aspire to return to home and lands from their despised "homelands". However, white farmers, who were also dispossessed (although usually compensated) by the apartheid state in the latter's endeavour to consolidate existing homelands, have lodged restitution claims as well. While the Land Claims Court has principally admitted such restitution claims and ordered upon the merits of individual cases, state bureaucrats, legal activists as well as other members of the public have categorically questioned and challenged such claiming of land rights by whites. Focussing on a number of white land claims related to the built-up of former KwaNdebele, this paper investigates the contested field of moral entitlements as emergent from divergent discourses about true victims and beneficiaries of apartheid. It pays particular attention to land claims pertaining to the western frontier of KwaNdebele - the wider Rust-de-Winter area, which used to be white farmland expropriated in the mid-1980s for consolidation (that never occurred) and currently vegetates as largely neglected no-man's-(state-)land under multiple land claims. Being the point of reference for state officials, former white farmers, Ndebele traditionalists, local residents and other citizens and subjects, this homeland frontier is hence analysed as a fateful zone of contestation, in which the terms of a new South African moral community are negotiated.
Paper short abstract:
Land in the former Transkei homeland is commonly viewed as a site of rural retirement for migrant laborers. In contrast, this paper examines the agency of those left behind in rural areas, taking a novel approach to the social meaning and politics of "communal" land, and showing how "keeping land for their children" aims to keep migrants from absconding.
Paper long abstract:
Land in the rural areas of the Eastern Cape comprising the Transkei homeland has been conventionally seen as a site of rural retirement for migrant laborers. In contrast, this paper examines land and notions of "home" through a focus on the agency of those left behind by migrants in rural areas, and the ways in which they press claims to land as a way to persuade migrants to maintain rural ties. Retired migrants' interests in land are less as a site of production or reproduction, but of attraction: "keeping land for their children" emerges as a strategy to encourage their migrant children to return, in a context of increasing scarcity of rural agricultural and residential land.
Land must be seen in the context of relations between generations, in which the loyalties, aspirations, and capabilities of young migrants are increasingly uncertain. Claims to land are about displaying--and evoking--the idea that one's children belong in and to their rural homes, as much as they are about any intentions to cultivate or occupy a plot. Despite longstanding ethnographic evidence of the ritual and material work that is done to convince migrants to maintain ties to their rural homesteads, these issues have scarcely been explored directly in the literature on communal land tenure.
Drawing upon more than 25 months of fieldwork around Dwesa-Cwebe, conducted between 1998 and 2011, the paper develops its argument through an examination of changes and continuities in land tenure, settlement patterns, and domestic architecture.
Paper short abstract:
The paper explores the meanings of house and homestead in the former Transkei homeland in a context of dramatic social change in South Africa. The paper refletcs on the ways in which anthropologists have understood the homestead and the house in this area and how relevant these understandings remain today in a context rapid out-migration,HIV and Aids and welfare dependence in rural areas. Why do rural homesteads still matter?
Paper long abstract:
The paper explores the meanings of house and homestead in the former Transkei homeland in a context of dramatic social change in South Africa. The paper refletcs on the ways in which anthropologists have understood the homestead and the house in this area and how relevant these understandings remain today in a context rapid out-migration,HIV and Aids and welfare dependence in rural areas. Why do rural homesteads still matter?
Paper short abstract:
Through an ethnographic and historical analysis, this paper traces how contemporary everyday life in a rural village is animated by history. It provides a corrective to the widespread idea that tradition is central to understanding life in the homelands.
Paper long abstract:
This paper seeks to understand the role of history in contemporary everyday life in a village in Nkomazi, part of the former KaNgwane homeland near the borders of Mozambique and Swaziland. It challenges the idea that tradition is central to understanding life in the homelands, an idea that, with Mbembe, we might say renders African life resemble a historical flatland of primordialism. Taking its point of departure in one man's historical narrative about the relationship between war (mfecane and colonial struggle), misfortune and transformation, it seeks to unveil an alternative history of African life. Although the tale includes all the usual suspects of the traditional - chiefs, witchcraft and evil, it is organized in quite linear form. In this way, the paper contributes to the scholarship of oral history against the grain of colonial and apartheid archives. Furthermore, the paper suggests that this history is a living history that animates life in contemporary Nkomazi. Empirically it draws on fieldwork in Nkomazi between 2002 and 2006.
Paper short abstract:
The paper examines the life stories of senior residents from a cluster of villages in the former borderlands of the Gazankulu and Lebowa homelands. The focus is on strategies of coherence creation across fundamentally changing frameworks of political authority and economic opportunity.
Paper long abstract:
This paper explores strategies of coherence creation in a context characterized by repeated, fundamental shifts in political authority and economic opportunity. It does so by engaging with a series of life story interviews with senior residents from a number of villages that form part of the extended townships southeast of the tropical farming town Tzaneen in Limpopo Province, South Africa. Due to their long history of linguistic and cultural diversity, the cluster of villages under discussion became a site of ongoing struggle for political authority over natural and institutional resources from the mid-1950s onwards: First between two newly emerging "Tribal Authorities" under the chiefs Maake and Mohlaba, then between the homelands of Gazankulu and Lebowa into which these two "Tribal Authorities" were later incorporated.
The paper examines coherence creation on two levels: In a first step, the paper will discuss the strategies interviewees remember to have employed to create and sustain a meaningful life and livelihood for themselves and their families across a series of life-changing governmental interventions related to the politics of betterment and separate development. The paper will then turn to analyse coherence creation as a narrative strategy, thus shifting its focus from memories of the past to the act of rembering itself. It will seek to identify narrative strategies by means of which interviewees manage to create coherence between past choices and present-day realities; narrative strategies to render past coping strategies narratable and to some degree compatible with the interviewees' present-day political and social environment.
Paper short abstract:
The social landscape of South Africa is scarred by the division of the population into ethnic categories, and the designation of these to territorial spaces. It is pertinent to the discussion of the state of homelands in post-apartheid South Africa that the only presently existing homeland, privately funded and voluntarily joined, is for Afrikaners.
Paper long abstract:
In light of the legacy of government developed homelands, it is interesting that the only homeland existing at present in South Africa is one for Afrikaners. This paper will provide an ethnographic example not normally considered in discussion of South African homelands but which is similar in many ways. Orania is a privately owned and developed property, intended as the point from which a volkstaat should grow. It was founded by people closely associated with the apartheid system, but who apparently argued as early as the 1960s that there should be a separate homeland for Afrikaners, not just for other ethnic groups. Thus, the present white homeland has the same theoretical origins as the Bantustans, but the outcome is similar in many respects and different in others. Reasons for the difference includes that residence in Orania is voluntary rather than forced, structurally it is not a top-down government policy but an initiative of the people who live there, and economically it is private land with no government input in its development.
Some who are affiliated with Orania believe that Afrikaner culture is under threat from government policies. For them, Orania is the means for the survival of Afrikaner culture, and thus symbolic of the main hope for the survival of Afrikanerdom itself. Thus, ironically, it exemplifies a homeland as a means for managing uncertainty.
Paper short abstract:
Drawing upon an ethnographic study conducted in Nkomazi district in the old Bantustan of Kangwane, I examine how the application of customary law in the erstwhile “Homelands” informs women’s everyday relations to male kin within households and in local authorities and ; whether and how these relations differentially infringe upon or enable their rights to material resources, such as access to property, their mobility and freedom from gender based violence across the lifecycle. I ask whether and how women interpret or give meaning to local customary practices in relation to their legal and substantive rights, in a context where the population is overwhelmingly feminised, but where their access to secular legal institutions is uneven or non-existent.
Paper long abstract:
Drawing upon an ethnographic study conducted in Nkomazi district in the old Bantustan of Kangwane, I examine how the application of customary law in the erstwhile "Homelands" informs women's everyday relations to male kin within households and in local authorities and ; whether and how these relations differentially infringe upon or enable their rights to material resources, such as access to property, their mobility and freedom from gender based violence across the lifecycle. I ask whether and how women interpret or give meaning to local customary practices in relation to their legal and substantive rights, in a context where the population is overwhelmingly feminised, but where their access to secular legal institutions is uneven or non-existent. I reflect on how the women negotiate their way through the effects of customary law by drawing upon non-governmental institutions as well as everyday forms of generational agency. In doing so, I argue that the living customary law is being given diverse new meanings and instantiates finer forms of gendered and generational power that we need to take into account.
Paper short abstract:
The paper discusses listenership to the SABC's Ikwekwezi FM (Radio Ndebele under apartheid) which still resonates widely with the Ndebele-speaking South Africans today. The station gives a sense of cultural belonging and allows the people on the margins of power in former KwaNdebele homeland and in townships to engage directly in political discourse.
Paper long abstract:
Between 1960 and 1983 the South African Broadcasting Corporation (SABC) launched nine separate African language radio stations through which it sought to propagate the apartheid government's policy of ethnic separatism, or homelands. The last was Radio Ndebele, which was established primarily to foster a distinctive Ndebele ethnic consciousness and to encourage Ndebele-speaking South Africans to perceive of KwaNdebele (the least economically viable of the ten Bantustans) as their ethnic 'home'. In this paper I use both archival sources - written texts and especially the rich but hugely untapped SABC Sound Archive - as well as oral interviews conducted with Ndebele radio presenters and listeners to discuss African language radio broadcasting and listenership in post-apartheid South Africa. I argue that Ndebele radio - now called Ikwekwezi FM - continues to resonate with large numbers of Ndebele-speaking audiences in urban townships and rural villages, particularly the elderly and the illiterate who are still living in the former homeland of KwaNdebele, mainly because it is seen as a medium through which Ndebele language and culture could be mediated and further developed. Many tune into the station to derive a sense of cultural belonging. But most importantly, in post-apartheid South Africa where English has become even more dominant than before, African language radio is proving to be an indispensable medium for deepening democracy and enabling the poor people on the margins of power to engage in political discourse through live talk shows and other forms of cultural programming.