Paper short abstract:

South Africa's overstretched inheritance system is founded on old laws. Officials expertly suture together workable arrangements for a post-apartheid era. Yet they share the majority's view that the system is marked by its repudiated past - a form of complicity against apartheid's legal legacies.

Paper long abstract:

South Africa's official inheritance system is based on old laws, and it is overstretched. These two features shape the work of Johannesburg officials as they try to make arrangements function for a post-apartheid public. Change came in the form of massive expansion, as the inheritance bureaucracy accommodated the previously excluded black majority. Yet connections to apartheid remain, as a new generation of bureaucrats find themselves enforcing rules crafted by and largely for a white minority. Overloaded and under-resourced, public servants literally make the system by suturing it together. Their work consists of occupying multiple roles in relation to the public - they tack between enforcing the law, using it to facilitate mediation, explaining its oddities, and advising on how to navigate it. But they do all of this while confronting a legal edifice that they acknowledge bears damaging traces of another era. This paper explores the particular practical expertise mobilised by officials in holding together a bureaucratic system, even as they negotiate principles that they see as carried over from a repudiated past. The result is a form of bureaucratic complicity with the historically marginalised in the face of the law's legacies.