Game fences in the Karoo: reconfiguring spatial and social relations

In this article, we discuss how farm conversions to wildlife habitats result in the reconfiguration of spatial and social relations on white-owned commercial farms in the Karoo region of the Eastern Cape in South Africa. Farmers and landowners justify such conversions stressing economic and ecological rationales. We illustrate how conversions are (also) a reaction to post-apartheid land reform and labour legislation policies, which white farmers and landowners perceive as a serious threat. They seek to legitimate their position in society and reassert their place on the land by claiming a new role as nature conservationists. We argue that game farms should be interpreted as economically and politically contested spaces for three reasons: (1) whereas landowners present the farm workers' displacement from game farms as the unintended by-product of a changing rural economy, the creation of ‘pristine’ wilderness seems designed to empty the land of farm dwellers who may lay claim to the land; (2) game farms further disconnect the historically developed links between farm dwellers and farms, denying them a place of residence and a base for multiple livelihood strategies; (3) this way the conversion process deepens farm dwellers' experiences of dispossession and challenges their sense of belonging. Game fences effectively define farm workers and dwellers as people out of place. These dynamics contrast government reform policies aimed at addressing historical injustices and protecting farm dwellers' tenure security.     

Private game farming and its social consequences in post-apartheid South Africa: contestations over wildlife,property and agrarian futures

Spaces of privatised wildlife production, in the form of game farms, private nature reserves and other forms of wildlife-oriented land use, are an increasingly prominent feature of the South African countryside. Whilst there is a well-developed literature on the social impacts of state-run protected areas, the outcomes of privatised wildlife production have thus far received little attention. It is argued here that the socio-spatial dynamics of the wildlife industry, driven by capitalist imperatives related to the commodified production of nature and ‘wilderness’, warrant both in-depth investigation in their own right, and contextualisation in terms of broader processes of agrarian change locally as well as globally. The growing influence of trophy hunting and the wildlife industry on private land can be seen as a significant contributing factor to processes of deagrarianisation that are mirrored in other parts of the African continent and elsewhere. In South Africa, these developments and their impacts on the livelihoods of farm dwellers take on an added dimension in the context of the country's efforts to implement a programme of post-apartheid land reform. Two decades after the formal end of apartheid, contestations over land rights and property ownership remain live and often unresolved. This theme issue explores these dynamics on private land partly or wholly dedicated to wildlife production, with special emphasis on two South African provinces: KwaZulu-Natal and the Eastern Cape.     

Game farm conversions and the land question: unpacking present contradictions and historical continuities in farm dwellers' tenure insecurity in Cradock

This article addresses farm workers and farm dwellers' tenure insecurity and its relationship with farm conversions in the agricultural district of Cradock, located in the Eastern Cape Karoo. It argues that consequences of farm conversions for farm workers/dwellers' tenure security must be understood within the context of regional land and labour histories. Its main contention with existing positions that ‘blame’ farm conversions for increased evictions and an efflux of workers/dwellers from farms is that there is a correlative rather than causative relationship between farm conversions and farm worker/dweller displacements in the semi-arid areas. It argues that the extreme nature of the historical land question and the continued dominance of a historically white land-owning class in the semi-arid areas render farm workers/dwellers structurally vulnerable to having their residential arrangements on farms terminated at any given moment. Drawing on fieldwork conducted in Cradock between 2009 and 2011, the article shows that game farm conversions tend to perpetuate existing land and power relations on farms as they have prevailed over time. However, it also argues that the distinctiveness of game farm conversions lies in their near ‘irreversibility’ as a land use form which creates more permanently securitised and sealed-off pockets of consolidated land in the countryside. These transformations increase the erosion of farm workers/dwellers' embedded social histories and cultural imprint as a labouring class on the landscape.     

South African–Swaziland relations: A constructivist reading

There are several accounts of the past relations between Swaziland and South Africa. Some are set in the realist school of international relations scholarship. These studies portray Swaziland's policy behaviour as ‘submissive’ because of ‘immutable structural forces’. The neo-Marxian analyses locate the relations exclusively in class/ideological setting. Other accounts depict the ‘kaleidoscopic’ nature of the relations. The post-apartheid understanding of this relationship is largely gleaned from regional studies – the dominant view of which is that South Africa is reluctant to exercise hegemony in its relations with regional states. This article critiques the one-directional thrust of the realist and Marxian accounts. While endorsing multidirectional and multidimensional accounts of policy behaviour, the article shows that they lack an over-arching theoretical framework. A similar charge is directed at the post-apartheid literature. The position of this article is that constructivism offers analytical tools needed to understand the relations between the two states and how South Africa can reorder them.     

Customizing post-apartheid Johannesburg: the dialectic of errancy in Ralph Ziman’s Jerusalema

ABSTRACT

In post-apartheid inner-Johannesburg, the built environment reflects a city no longer wrenched apart by race, but by socio-economic stratification. Even as the city is refurbished for global appeal through gentrification, the rich-poor tussle among black urban dwellers motivates peculiar spatial practices which, while illustrating embedded urban pressures, produce new urban rationalities. Among these practices is hijacking of white-owned buildings in Hillbrow, a practice that impacts theorization of the ways in which black urban dwellers have customized Johannesburg post-1994. Through close reading of Ralph Ziman’s Gangster’s Paradise: Jerusalema, this article theorizes building hijacking as a curious case of sprouting city-making practices. Terming this aggressive do-it-yourself approach to urbanism as errancy, the article argues that such customization of the city usefully illustrates not only the annexation of post-apartheid Johannesburg, but the peculiarity of changing perceptions of freedom among black urban residents..     

Safe-guarding the colonial present: game farms on the frontier in KwaZulu-Natal's ‘Battlefields Route’

Drawing on Alistair Fraser's concept of the ‘colonial present’, I show how private game farms are both conceptualised and deployed to maintain ideas of boundaries and belonging that sustain colonial ideals and identities. This article is located on the banks of the Mzinyathi River in KwaZulu-Natal, a river that has functioned as a boundary between various groups for almost two hundred years. The game farms located in this area conserve the idea of the river as a frontier space for ‘white’ South Africa and a boundary with ‘black’ South Africa, as well as entrenching their own boundaries through the imagination and realisation of an idealised space. I argue that the game farms safeguard and perpetuate a colonial present whilst obscuring opportunities for other ways of interpreting and using the space of the farm. Ultimately, how the game farms are now imagined and the way they operate is counterproductive to social transformation in the rural landscape.     

In Search of Strategies to Face the Economic Crisis: Evidence from Greek Farms

This study examines the strategies – defensive or aggressive, individual or collective – undertaken by sheep farms in a Greek rural area in order to face the repercussions of the economic crisis and their effects on the productivity and economic performance of these farms. The article presents the results of a farm management survey conducted in 2010 and repeated in 2014 in northern Evros, Greece. The mix of strategies – mainly passive – adopted by farmers shows their confusion in the face of crisis conditions, which has resulted in reduced productivity, more use of family labour and a rise in collective actions.     

Identities: Engaging self and other in Modern Sudanese Narrative Discourse

Contrary to the prevalent tendencies of ‘state-centrism' and legal formalism in the literature, this article studies the Ottoman Land Code of 1858 not as an initiator of trends but as a product of social change. The Code recognized private property on land, enlarged liberties of landholders, and pushed inheritance rules further towards gender equality. Deeply influenced by the uneven development of the capitalist relations of production, agrarian conflict, and the complex matrix of the interests of ruling groups, Ottoman land law in the nineteenth century unmistakably evolved in the direction of modern law based on the abstract individual and full commodification of land.     

Space Invaders: border crossing in Dan Halter’s Heartland

Using springstone sculpture and woven paper photographs, the Zimbabwean-born artist Daniel Halter draws from African craft traditions to expose the precariousness of migrant experiences in South Africa. Halter, who lives in Cape Town, exposes the ironic tensions between hostility towards migrants and metaphors of inclusiveness in the post-apartheid nation. This essay reads metaphors of belonging, border crossing, and nationalism evoked by Halter’s materials and modes of production. Building from Ranjana Khanna’s work on demetaphorization – an undoing of discourses of community – and Edward Casey and Mary Watkin’s analysis of the border as always already undone by its lived functions, the essay argues Halter addresses the immigrant’s position uncovering the borderland as both a porous zone and a metaphor of exclusion. By weaving, Halter addresses this condition through an interdependency that, following Derrida’s work on hospitality, offers a framework to reconsider discourses of citizenship and nationalism in southern Africa.     

Zulu: a transnational history of a New Orleans Mardi Gras krewe

This article examines the transnational ties, both real and imagined, between New Orleans and South Africa through the lens of the Zulu Social Aid and Pleasure Club, an African American Mardi Gras krewe founded in 1909 and based on the popular conception of the South African Zulu of the era. While the organization’s performance of Zulu remained largely fixed, the world around it altered significantly, leading to changing outsider perceptions – and criticism – of the club. I examine how this relationship evolved over time, starting with the genesis of the organization, and how the Zulu krewe interacted with or was disconnected from the links between the two locations. As such, this work explores two parallel strands: the increasing, tangible ties between the Crescent City and South Africa – particularly economic trade – and the performance of Zulu.     

The historical evolution of settlement patterns and trends in South Africa: Unlocking the log-jam of the unsustainable settlements impasse

Abstract

This article ascertains the underlying causes of the persistence of unsustainable settlement patterns and trends in post-apartheid South Africa. Despite positive development planning policy intentions in the post-apartheid South Africa, glaring deprivation and spatial inequality has persisted. The article is grounded in a chronological analysis of demographic, functional and regional economic dynamics at the different epochs of South Africa's history as well as the settlement policy and planning intentions. Its main finding is that the persistence of unsustainable settlement patterns and trends in post-apartheid South Africa is largely a result of misplaced settlement policies and strategies. They give knee-jerk responses to global, regional, national and local dynamics shaping settlement patterns and trends. The recommendation is that development planning initiatives should be informed by the dialectics of settlement facets at local, regional, national and global levels for them to deal decisively with the historical problem of unsustainable patterns and trends.     

South African foreign policy and China: converging visions,competing interests,contested identities

South Africa's burgeoning relationship with China exposes the increasing complexities of its post-apartheid international relations. On one hand bilateral relations have deepened since 1998, due to the increasing complementarities with South Africa's foreign policy priorities that emphasise developmental pragmatism and a Southward orientation within the broader African context. On the other hand this relationship emphasises the deeper schisms within South African society itself, where divergent and multi-layered perspectives on South Africa's post-apartheid identity and relationship with China, the country's largest trading partner, remains unresolved. This article maps out the nature of China–South Africa relations through a thematic approach. This allows for nuanced consideration of South Africa's contemporary foreign policy, one that remains compressed between a combination of external and domestic factors.     

Breaking with tradition? South Africa–UK relations

Just over twenty years into its new era of democracy, South African foreign policy appears to be undergoing important changes in orientation and global positioning. Indeed, post-apartheid South African foreign policy has been steadily shifting away from a preoccupation with more traditional partnerships to developing alliances and coalitions with emerging economies and actors seeking to reform the global governance order. The paper seeks to understand the implications of this shift for South Africa's relationship with its most pivotal and enduring traditional ‘partner' – the United Kingdom. Thus, the paper proposes that this relationship can be best understood by considering it on different and at least partially contradictory levels, reflecting South Africa's own ambiguous identity as an emerging middle power.     

The ‘ballot and the brick’: protest,voting and non-voting in post-apartheid South Africa

Over the last decade, protest has become an enduring feature of the post-apartheid political landscape. Despite this wave of protest, the African National Congress (ANC) has largely retained its dominant status. The endurance of the ANC’s electoral support in spite of the high levels of protest has led Susan Booysen to conclude that protests in South Africa form part of a ‘dual repertoire’ of political contestation. She argues that protests are used to signal grievances to the ANC between elections but that, ultimately, people remain loyal to the party of liberation. This article interrogates Booysen’s claim through advancing an analysis of voting district and ward-level data in protest hotspots. The article highlights weaknesses in the methodological base of Booysen’s thesis. By analysing the support for the ANC amongst the estimated eligible voting-age population, this article suggests a different relationship between voting and protesting in post-apartheid South Africa.     

Ideological and pedagogical tensions in an environmental sustainability education project: A review of adult education practices around Lake Fundudzi,South Africa

ABSTRACT

Research in poor communities in South Africa faces intellectual challenges and tensions which offer lessons for evaluating environmental education (EE). This article illuminates five such tensions that emerged during the course of an adult environmental education programme, implemented from 1999 to 2002, in communities surrounding the catchment of Lake Fundudzi in South Africa: tensions arose between traditional and modern concepts of community; between traditional and post-apartheid structures of local governance; between liberal empowerment and traditional conservationist ideologies; and also within and between environmental ideologies and research paradigms. Paramount among the lessons learned is the need to develop multi-, inter- and transdisciplinary (MIT) practices that are sensitive to local community and environmental needs, and to solutions expressed through local residents, community workers and academics – in other words, the recognition and affirmation of local indigenous knowledge systems (IKSs).     

An ‘All of Commonwealth’ Journey: From Marlborough House to Malakal

In this article, the author, who played an instrumental role in the post-apartheid development of South Africa, argues that there is a clear need for some ‘All of Commonwealth’ initiatives for the reconstruction of South Sudan. In particular, he advocates the creation of an Eminent Persons Group along the lines of its 1985 South African predecessor, and notes that the strategy suggested may lead to Canadian re-engagement with the Commonwealth.     

OF FIRE AND REJUVENATION: IN SEARCH OF THE ‘POST-’ IN ‘POST- APARTHEID’

ABSTRACT

In the novels, Scatter the ashes and go (Ravan 2002) and Rumours (Jacana Media 2013), Mongane Wally Serote depicts post-apartheid through a leitmotif central to which the soldier of the African National Congress military wing, ‘Umkhonto We Sizwe’ (MK), is ostensibly caught in an interrupted odyssey. In Scatter the Ashes and go, this soldier has returned from exile in various Southern African countries to a South Africa that is on the threshold of the post-apartheid era. By contrast, in Rumours, the soldier, having arrived from exile in 1990, then goes away to Mali in search of a solution for his post-traumatic stress disorder. The article imputes these disruptions on to the failure to ‘properly’ mourn the victims of apartheid's extra-judicial killing squads, and goes on to note that, as a result of Serote's attention to the subsequent angst, post-apartheid appears as a continuum of trauma. The discussion then proceeds to posit that the resolutions to these diversions are hinted at in these novels’ elaborate motifs of fire, and proposes that the depictions of this pattern recall how Batswana suture the spiritual, psychological and social fractures consequent upon death – especially the death that occurs unnaturally, and upon the breadwinner's return home from a long absence. The bulk of the exploration pays attention to the nuances of this symbol of fire, recognising it as an integral component of a social rite populated by a dynamic interplay between poetry and music.     

Mining with a ‘Vuvuzela’: reconfiguring artisanal mining in Southern Zimbabwe and its implications to rural livelihoods

The rural landscape of Zimbabwe has dramatically changed in the last decade. Zimbabwe inherited a racially biased land ownership pattern at independence in 1980 and 20 years on efforts by the state to address the colonial land imbalances have been largely unsuccessful. In 2000 the Zimbabwe government embarked on a controversial rapid land redistribution exercise that saw vast tracts of land previously owned by white commercial farmers taken over and distributed to mostly black Zimbabweans. Some authors have argued that there is no single story of the Fast Track Land Reform and Resettlement programme because of the myths and realities spread by the media. It is important to note that what happened in one province might not be similar to the other. Rural dwellers in the countryside had for years depended on agrarian livelihoods and the fact that more land had been availed by the state meant better livelihoods. However, this article argues that in spite of a widened horizon to pursue agrarian activities many people have actually drifted away from on-farm to off-farm livelihoods. This is true in the case of southern Zimbabwe where a large number of rural dwellers have chosen artisanal gold mining as a pathway in realising a livelihood. This article therefore focuses on the expansion of artisanal gold mining in southern Zimbabwe; particularly in southern Matabeleland. Using fieldwork as a method of data gathering, the article unravels the development of artisanal mining in this region and how it has been reconfigured after the hosting of the Soccer World Cup in South Africa 2010. In particular it shows how the metal detector technology (the Vuvuzela) availed by the hosting of the Soccer World Cup has found its way to the region and changed the gold panning process. Conclusions drawn from a detailed PhD study revealed that a significant number of southern Zimbabwe gold panners have adopted the metal detector technology as a way of expanding their trade.     

Non-parametric approach to the study of farm efficiency in agriculture

This article examines the extent of resource-use efficiency under different types of tenure and different farm sizes in two types of villages — one having high incidence of irrigation facilities and High Yielding Varieties (HYV) technology in an area usually cropped twice the same plot of land every year and the other having no irrigational facilities except rain-water and non-HYV technology in a mono-cropping area because the estimates on the extent of inefficiencies could help to decide whether to improve or to develop new technology to raise productivity. On the basis of a field survey and applying the method of Data Envelopment Analysis (DEA) the authors observe that all farms score high efficiency irrespective of the types of tenure and of farm sizes, in both the types of villages. This seems to suggest that the diffusion of new agricultural technology is not so important in improving the efficiency level of the farm.     

Writing Roots in Post-Apartheid South Africa

What are the benefits and drawbacks of the popular practice of writing Alex Haley-style Roots narratives—and making roots claims more broadly—in post-apartheid South Africa? This article explores this question through special attention to two South African neo-slave narratives. The first, Botlhale Tema’s The People of Welgeval (2005), is a contemporary version of Haley’s classic that reveals the benefits of genealogical narration particularly in repairing individual trauma and addressing the vexing problem of land redistribution. The second, Yvette Christiansë’s Unconfessed (2006), can be read as text that challenges both the literary model and the psychological and social projects I associate with Haley and Tema, as it foregrounds the gaps or cracks present in such acts of recuperation and focuses on a kind of pain than cannot be assuaged or made up for. I argue that, taken together, these novels concerned both with historical slavery in South Africa and its legacy in the democratic present help us to move beyond a longstanding “roots”/ “routes” dichotomy to understand what roles each term plays for individuals grappling with racial oppression and where, how, and why the terms fold into each other.