Paper short abstract:

The purpose of this paper is to provide a comparative analysis of rural despotism on white commercial farms and Bantustans in South Africa.

Paper long abstract:

In his seminal work, Citizens and Subjects, Mahmood Mamdani (1996) discusses the existence of ongoing rural despotism in the former Bantustans of post-apartheid South Africa in the form of the chiefdom system, despite liberalisation and deracialisation more broadly since 1994. In examining the differences between political subjects and rights in urban and rural contemporary South Africa, he fails to appreciate the question of another form of rural despotism in South Africa, namely, the presence of what Blair Rutherford (2001) refers to as - borrowing from Foucault - domestic government (with specific reference to Zimbabwe) amongst white agrarian capital. For purposes of this paper, I refer to domestic government as a fiefdom, as it involves feudal-style elements of racism, coercion and paternalism in tightly-controlled places.

In the South African literature, both sets of rural despotism are discussed quite extensively, including in relation to both the pre-1994 period and the post-1994 period. However, and quite amazingly, the literature on these forms of despotism are almost totally disconnected from each other. Thus there is one set of literature on customary tenure and the chieftainship system in the former Bantustans, and another set on private property regimes and labour control regimes on white commercial farms.

The purpose of this paper is to provide a comparative analysis of these forms of despotism in both the pre- and post-1994 period, including (in both cases) continuities and changes in the post-apartheid period.