Citizenship and land in South Africa: From rights to responsibilities

Citizenship and the restoring of land

Citizenship, as anthropologists have emphasised, is processual, contextual, contingent and changing (Cornwell et al., 2011), and is often experienced through, or mediated by, other forms of identification. Proto-citizens may find themselves linked to the nation/state, but indirectly so; for example through allegiance to tribal leaders, religious affiliation or kinship loyalties (Longva, 2000; Joseph, 2000).

In South Africa, emerging citizenship discourses made use of existing models as precedent. As in other settings of transition where people strive to overcome oppressive regimes, the struggle movement here served to extend ideas of citizenship to those previously excluded, by uniting the populace (for a comparative case see Lomnitz, 1999). ¹ Citizenship was bound to be inclusionary, liberatory and egalitarian in character, precisely because of the nature of the exclusionary and repressive regime against which the struggle had been fought. If the fight for freedom set the terms of reference, land provided an obvious model for national belonging. The intention to restore land to its former occupiers would reinstate basic civil liberties which had been removed, or denied, in the past (Ramutsindela, 1998). The unequal distribution of land had signaled earlier injustice as well as being a material result of it, and its restoring stood for the kinds of rights which South African blacks felt they ought to have enjoyed by virtue of their connection to the state (Bozzoli, 2004). ²

Such unity later fragmented when it became clear that the liberation elite would be the primary beneficiary of citizenship benefits, leading in turn to challenges and contestations by the excluded majority who resented their reliance on patronage for their access to what ought to have been theirs by right (Adam et al., 1998; see Lomnitz, 1999 for the case of Mexico). What had appeared as a solidaristic vision of restored rights at the moment of the first democratic elections, turned out to be constituted out of distinct pathways towards land-based citizenship. In other words, it was not a homogenous, or uniformly deprived, population to which citizenship would be restored by the state programme of land reform, but rather a stratified and differentiated one. Some of the intended beneficiaries of the land reform programme were former title-holding property owners while others belonged to the category of landless people, mostly living on state- or white-owned land, that had previously derisively referred to as ‘squatters’. (The title-holder/squatter division has tended to be represented more in ethnic than in class terms, as the case below demonstrates.) Both were left landless in the apartheid era, but the latter had never enjoyed property rights even before it. Although seen by some as more ‘truly landless’, and hence more deserving of the benefits of land reform (Lahiff, 2000), members of this squatter group have been typified by others, especially policy makers, as less likely to use the land productively and thus as being unworthy beneficiaries of the programme – or at least as requiring, themselves, to be ‘reformed’.

In the emerging narrative of South African citizenship, it was thus not only the elements of the struggle, and the land struggled-for, that set the terms of reference. A further important aspect concerned the fate of ethnic or race-based differentiation. Political leaders in the liberation struggle had proposed its total eradication. The aim was to do away with it in all its forms: with the enforced boundaries between language/cultural groups which had formed part of South Africa’s infamous policy of ‘homelands’, the division that had split urban-dwellers enjoying modern rights from those subject to the power of chiefs (Mamdani, 1996), and – most important – racially based inequality itself (Marks, 1994). What was little anticipated was the extent to which contestations over land might see the reassertion rather than the elimination of such differences.

The differentiated forms of land occupancy were certainly recognised in land reform policy. Several branches of the land reform program – restitution, redistribution and tenure reform – were designed in recognition of these differences. Restitution would concentrate on returning land to titled landowners who had forcibly lost their property during the apartheid era as a result of forced removals. Controversially, the Restitution Act of 1994 was phrased so as to render more far-reaching claims, dating from before 1913, illegitimate. Redistribution would allow for those Africans with no previous formal claims on landed property to group together and purchase farms with the aid of a government grant. Tenure reform would protect the rights of those residing on land but depending on others – chiefs (in the homelands) or white farmers (outside of them) – for their occupation of it.

Despite this differentiated framework, restitution formed the moral cornerstone of land reform in the public mind. It enabled a loosely defined and inclusive vision whereby land (and citizenship) rights previously alienated would be restored. It initially embraced the whole terrain of landlessness, only later coming to be pitted against the redistributive approaches when these started to be viewed, by land and human rights activists, as the best way of transferring significant amounts of formerly white-owned land to the ‘historically oppressed’ (Lahiff, 2001). From early on, however, these different aspects blurred. Loopholes became evident, as aspirant farmers with no former basis on the land attempted to prove spurious connections to it through restitution, while others with a genuine sense of entitlement recognised the difficulties of verifying their claims, and attempted to benefit from redistribution instead.

This blurring of policy-created boundaries was not the only modification of the land reform program as it came to be tested in practice. There was also a gradual but inexorable shift from a language of rights, commensurate with the welfarist-oriented vision of citizenship, to one of private ownership, market-oriented economic viability and the need to fulfil responsibilities (Kymlikca and Norman, 1994). The former emphasis had owed much to the presence of human rights lawyers and NGO activists who played a key role in the program’s design. The latter reflected an increasingly predominant line of argument, adopted by the government after the second democratic elections in 1999, which foregrounded the economic benefits to be gained from secure ownership, and the economically viable use, of property. While the two approaches were linked in the early years of the land reform program, the government’s subsequent shift towards more explicitly neoliberal economic policies decoupled the rights-based approach from the market-based/economic one, favouring the latter. Attempts to foster a land-owning, middle-class black farming constituency became paramount, eclipsing the previous emphasis on safeguarding the basic residence rights and welfare of the rural poor through land redistribution or tenure reform (Cousins, 2000; Hall and Williams, 2003). With this altered direction and the substitution of personnel which accompanied it, many former NGO activists and human rights lawyers, having worked in state employment, rejoined the NGO sector, attempting to contest the government’s new insistence on the private property model, and to reinstate the more egalitarian vision of land reform. Their efforts have been matched by those of the rank-and-file landless, as will be demonstrated below.

Land and citizenship in South Africa are thus integrally linked, but the connection between them developed over time, and was contingent and changing. It was shaped in the course of intensive negotiations over several decades between those dispossessed of their land, the activists and lawyers aiming to reclaim it on their behalf, exiled members of the ANC (African National Congress), and – after 1994 – the new government which those exiles formed. Land continues to symbolise citizenship as well as being seen as a material outcome, intended if not yet achieved, of citizens’ exercise of their democratic rights: getting land back was one of the things ‘we voted for’. But the exact mechanism of land access, and hence the precise way in which property is held, has been a matter of dispute. If one model of citizenship – increasingly favoured by the government – has come to foreground the private ownership of property, another – highlighted by activists and by members of the rank-and-file landless – has idealised land as an inalienable possession which ought not to be privately owned or sold.

The first section of the paper illustrates these conflicting views about ownership, showing how these crystallise disputes over the nature of citizens’ entitlements: narrow, restricted and based on ‘property’, or broad, inclusive and based on universal access.

‘All people have the right to stay’: Titleholders and tenants

Restitution was at the outset the ideological and moral cornerstone of the land reform program overall. The drafters of the new constitution saw land as central in defining the rights that had formerly been denied, and its restoration as a means to restore those rights and with them the sovereignty, nationhood and full citizenship of the African population. Seen against the broader backdrop of the reform process, however, restitution has an ambiguous status. It restores property to those black titleholders whose original ownership of it – in the early years of the 20th century – had assured them a better life, even after its confiscation (Murray, 1992), and thus is alleged by some to have been driven less by a desire for social justice and equality than by an urge to re-establish the status quo ante. Land purchase, as a strategy adopted by those who strove to better themselves despite the racially based land alienation enshrined in the 1913 Land Act, had formed the basis of the emergence of a black middle class. The communities who have struggled for decades to get ‘their land back’ have particular interests not shared by those demanding land on other grounds. The narrow remit of restitution as it came to be practiced gave the lie to its symbolic potency. Given that it was primarily the claims of former black titleholders that were foregrounded by the government’s policy of restitution, the privileging of former ownership looked set to strengthen a longstanding social division in South African society by returning such properties to their former owners.

Such a group were the SePedi-speaking Lutheran converts who in the early 20th century had pooled their resources to buy the farm Doornkop, near Middelburg in Mpumalanga (B on map in Figure 1). When, some time in mid-century, the most successful members of this titleholder group abandoned full-time farming, moved to urban areas such as Soweto, and took up professional positions as nurses, teachers and librarians, their land came to serve primarily as a residential and livelihood base for tenants from a landless ethnic group (SiNdebele-speakers), mostly people evicted from white-owned farms where they had worked and lived as labour tenants. Moving to farms such as Doornkop, they now became the rent-paying tenants of its – largely absentee – Pedi owners. Both those few Pedi owner/landlords remaining on the farm, and their Ndebele tenants, were later evicted under the apartheid regime’s infamous ‘black spot’ removals of the 1970s, in a bid to expunge all black residents from so-called ‘white’ South Africa and resettle them in ethnically distinct reserves or ‘homelands’. When, with the advent of democracy, the farm was restituted in 1994, many Pedi owners showed little interest in returning to take up their ownership rights. It was, instead, their former Ndebele tenants and their descendents, alongside a burgeoning population of landless people newly evicted off white farms and thus more recently rendered ‘landless’, who began vociferously to demand the right to access land on farms such as Doornkop. Several hundred tenant/squatter families moved to the farm, building shacks there and starting to cultivate crops and vegetables. In doing so, they claim merely to have filled a vacuum, given that so few of the farm’s bona fide owners had shown willing to leave Soweto or their other places of domicile to return to the newly restored farm. But this did not make the owners, absentee or otherwise, any happier about the invasion.

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Figure 1.

Map of Mpumalanga.

Their anti-tenant sentiments were of long standing. Owners re-invoked the community’s original constitution, drawn up by some of their forefathers in 1933, which states that no-one ‘who is not a legal purchaser of the farm’ or a descendant of one may ‘dwell or settle’ there. The exclusivity in this injunction was linked to the sense of religious difference which had led Doornkop’s owners, like many similar mission/Christian communities, to buy their own land in the first place. What made this sense of exclusivity more stark in the case of Doornkop was that it echoed an ethnic cleavage, pitting SePedi-speaking Christians with a modernising tendency against SiNdebele tenants generally thought of as traditionalists who favoured the veneration of ancestors (Delius, 1989). Restored Pedi owners, in the 1990s, were, however, uneasily aware that their opposition to tenancy echoed the ethnic/racial exclusivities of South Africa's past. On one occasion well before the large-scale tenant invasion of 1999, several truckloads of Ndebeles arrived and were refused permission to settle on the farm. They retaliated by accusing the Doornkop community of ‘practising apartheid’. It was also rumoured that the Mpumalanga housing director had refused to provide services to Doornkop until it abandoned its elitist stance as a Volkstaat (lit. ‘people’s state’, an ironic reference to the separate homelands for Afrikaners once proposed by the far-right Conservative Party). But despite these anxieties, most titleholders remained steadfast in their opposition to accepting tenants. For them, restored citizenship went along with private ownership, rather than with free access to land.

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Figure 2.

Leader of Doornkop's squatter/tenants, Jan Masina.

Not all Pedi owners agreed, however. Very few restored titleholders were resident on the farm: most were living in Soweto and other urban areas, had middle-class/urban sources of livelihood, and viewed the restored farm as a rural retreat for weekends. But some had fewer options for making a living outside the rural context, and had been actively involved in letting out – or ‘selling’ – plots to the Ndebele outsiders. In the respective condemnations and justifications of this practice (and the renewal of tenancy which it enabled), the moral positions adopted have been closely linked to perceived material interests and have not always coincided with the owner/tenant division. The expressed views of the minority of rent-receiving owners echoed those of tenants: that land should be available to all rather than being privately owned, and hence that the basis for owner exclusivity was invalid, since this went against the promises of all-encompassing political belonging which had been made at the 1994 election.

One owner in particular had been assaulted and (unsuccessfully) charged for ‘selling’ several hundred plots on the farm. He, and his client/tenants, justified the practice by stressing the need to use of land for the common good and de-emphasising its ‘private’ or exclusionary aspects. ‘All people have the right to stay’, said the land-seller, claiming to be motivated by charitable impulses as well as by egalitarian and anti-racist sentiments. ‘As a black person I can’t allow a fellow black to suffer, so I help them to come here’, he maintained. ‘The national government doesn’t believe in keeping people separate, so why should we keep them separate here?’

Asked to elaborate on the kind of land ownership which they saw as legitimate, both tenant/squatters (Figure 2) and their new landlord advocated a continuation of the model which – ironically – had formerly operated during the apartheid era, in the communally held homeland areas.

This ‘communal/trusteeship’ model of ownership had been established only during the 1930s and 1940s (Murray, 1992: 132), but had become firmly entrenched as a ‘customary African’ practice by the time of writing.

In disputes about who had the greatest entitlement to live on the farm – its absentee owners or the squatters with their immediate material needs – ideas of citizen entitlement interlocked with those of custom and culture. Invoking Lockean-style concepts about the necessity of using land rather than letting it go to waste, tenants saw it as unfair to allow one group of privileged people to own land of which they clearly had no need, while another group was being denied land despite being much better placed to use it for grazing and cultivation.

It can be seen from this case how sectors of society beyond the official reach of restitution have latched onto the discourse which links citizenship to the restoration of land. Many of the landless poor, with no basis for ‘restitution’ since they never before owned property in any legally enforceable sense, were nonetheless invoking its broader spirit by demanding the right to settle on black-owned farms. By connecting restitution to the rights of the citizen, they were challenging what they saw as the attempted reinstatement, by the official restitution programme, of pre-existing owner/tenant divisions. Members of the two constituencies – the title-holding Pedi newly restored to ownership of their farm and the tenant Ndebele who have flocked to live there – draw on repertoires envisioning contrasting views of citizenship. One highlights the restored ownership and exclusivity of private property while another foregrounds the equal rights of all. While both ideas are enshrined in the discourse of the South African post-apartheid state (informed by the struggle agenda of the liberation elite who struggled to establish that state), they here coexisted uneasily with the ideas about cultural/ethnic exclusivity that had been the bedrock of state ideology in its earlier, apartheid guise.

Ethnicity, race and citizenship

Forms of citizenship that are differentiated along ethnic lines are well known in the anthropological literature. In studies of the US, what has been of particular interest are the ethnic or racial differences distinguishing legal citizens from immigrants, which may mask – or parallel – socio-economic stratification. Membership of a single nation, according to Ong, is achievable for immigrants only along lines mediated by race: there are ‘black’ or ‘white’ routes to US citizenship respectively (1996). ³ In a later work, Ong demonstrates that, instead of seeing everyone as striving to belong to a single nationality, there is now greater stress on the preservation and protection of minority rights. But liberal ideas on multiculturalism deny the ‘darker side’, in which the fruits of citizenship fully granted to some are effectively denied to others. Some are truly excluded, others simply given second class status while allowed into the body politic only in a restricted sense (Ong, 2003). In similar vein, Rudrappa shows how NGOs help Indian immigrants to make their difference an advantage in their bid for inclusion in the body politic of the USA, by offering ‘ethnic routes to becoming American’ (2004). Privileging multiculturalism and respect for difference, these organisations turn race-based resistance into ethnic assimilation. Here, an initial uniformity of citizens’ rights and fulfilment of their needs by the state has given way to a new emphasis, in which the market is foremost and the demands of flexible accumulation allow for people to have particularities as groups and ‘rights to be recognised as different’ (2004). In both cases, multiculturalism, coupled with market discourse, can present a positive image that masks inequality and exclusion.

But it is not only between those recognised as jural insiders and those seen as immigrants or outsiders that such differentiation occurs. ⁴ The case of South African land reform – like that of Europe (Kymlicka and Norman, 1994) and Mexico (Lomnitz, 1999) – shows how insider/outsider divisions occur internally as well. Contested aspirations for full restored citizenship, expressed on one level in terms of divergent views about property, were here mediated through ethnic stereotypes, in terms of which the (mostly unwilling) Pedi landlords expressed their fundamental difference from their property-less Ndebele tenants. The ideological nation-building project has attempted to transcend such divisions and to downplay the socio-economic faultlines in society, informed by the ruling ANC’s need – increasing exponentially as social differentiation grows (Adam et al., 1998; James et al., 2005; Marais, 2001) – to garner political support from poorer sectors of the electorate. The rift between the black middle class and the poor, albeit never as great as the more notorious racial divide between ‘whites’ and ‘non-whites’, has endured in one form or another. Expressing itself in ethnic forms, this rift harks back to the cultural differentiations which were emphasised by the apartheid state.

What is as noteworthy as the ethnicised character of multicultural citizenship in the US studies cited above, is the fact that citizenship rights under neoliberal conditions appear to be characteristic of a more atomised and individualised society, where market relationships predominate, inequality is on the increase, and attempts are made to inculcate responsible behaviour even among those sections of the population that may not, in the end, enjoy many of the fruits of that citizenship. While the Doornkop case illustrates how citizenship in post-apartheid South Africa initially seemed set to intensify the ethnic differentiations that the apartheid state had once enshrined in law, contesting statist discourses of egalitarian liberation, the case of a nearby farm demonstrates how the welfarist vision of citizenship as fulfilling needs and providing entitlements has been quickly superseded by market-oriented notions which posit the individual citizen as responsible for her own wellbeing and sustainable reproduction. In the process, new faultlines have become evident, sometimes partly replacing or at least cross-cutting the older ones. Racial discourses of whiteness/blackness have re-emerged as the means through which ideas of the responsible citizen are expressed.

The reluctant farmers: Cultural citizenship and contestation

Delivering on the promises of land reform was initially seen as one way of transcending ethnic/class divisions of the kind discussed above. But delivery has been slow and has privileged particular sectors while neglecting others, thus deepening rifts and exacerbating conflicts rather than damping them down. Given these delays and inequities, other nation-building tactics have been substituted. On restituted lands such as that of Doornkop, state officials have responded to owner/tenant ethnic conflicts by trying to appease the tenants, while simultaneously shifting them off to neighbouring areas where they might enjoy their ‘own rights’ of ownership and citizenship. Faced with contestations over restitution, they turned instead to the redistribution wing of the programme to solve conflicts over land and citizenship. In the case of Doornkop’s squatters, it was proposed to settle them on a nearby farm purchased for the purpose (I on map). New, technical and intricately planned models of ownership and managerial competence emphasise that the onus is on the ‘beneficiaries’ of redistributive land reform, once they have become the proprietors of jointly owned farms, to constitute themselves as members of Communal Property Associations (CPAs) ⁵ or trusts, and hence to take responsibility for their own economic and social well being (James, 2007: 154–176). The resettlement of the Doornkop tenants proposed for this ‘redistribution project’ had not been completed by the time of my fieldwork in 2003. But designers of this alternative strategy would have done well to take a lesson from an earlier-attempted programme of redistribution, situated nearby at Sizanani (II on map). This land reform initiative, with its communally owned farm, was not faring as well as had been hoped and planned-for. Among other things, this was because it was modeled on an image of the self-disciplined citizen, independent of the state and of employers, forging her own way in the world, but in a setting where the circumstances were far from conducive to the achievement of such aspirations.

The prevalence of neoliberal forces and market ideologies require that we go beyond the contextual aspect of citizenship, its modeling on prior forms of experience, and its ethnic differentiation, to explore the idea of ‘cultural citizenship’. Citizenship, shows Ong, can involve ‘the cultural inscription of state power’, through Foucauldian-style ‘self-making’. Cultural citizenship involves subtle pressures; such that people may feel themselves compelled to adjust to dominant modes of being (1996). This is a matter of citizenship rather than simply of belonging in a more general sense, in that much of this pressure concerns the earning of the right to be a participant in national life (Kymlicka and Norman, 1994). A diffuse cultural discourse, experienced as hegemonic by poorer immigrants in the US, proposes citizenship as involving the civic duty of individuals to reduce their burden on society; if necessary to pull themselves up by their own bootstraps, entrepreneur-style, and attain success through self-reliant struggle. Succeeding in doing so would amount, in Ong’s terms, to becoming ‘whitened’; becoming a citizen in a more mainstream and less ethnically marginal sense. Few of those in her account – Khmer refugees from Cambodia – manage to achieve this particular kind of assimilation, however. Exceptionally, some Khmer women joined the Mormon church and/or married Mormons. By doing so, they were in effect becoming the go-getting, hard-working Americans, not in receipt of welfare cheques, that neoliberal discourse favours. These few, then, managed to ‘whiten’ themselves whereas the majority remained crammed into a kind of pre-existing ‘black’ – almost second-class – citizenship mould.

In South Africa, as in many settings in the global South, similar visions of citizen responsibility – labeled ‘responsibilisation talk’ – have become ubiquitous (Chipkin, 2003; Cornwall et al., 2011). Rather than simply being evident in some generalised ‘cultural’ sense as in Ong’s work, such talk has been explicitly adopted in state policy documents and White Papers. These stress that citizenship should go beyond providing services such as housing and water to fulfil ‘basic needs’: it should entail ‘furnishing the conditions for individuals and households to sustain themselves socially and economically’. There is an injunction for people to ‘roll up sleeves’ to act in a concerted and responsible manner, rather than being the ‘consumers of municipal services’ (Chipkin, 2003: 64–65). Analysing one such White Paper, Chipkin notes a switch from an emphasis on how many houses have been built, how many sites serviced (and, one might add, how much land redistributed), to one on sustainability, and on making people responsible for their own welfare.

The advent of such talk, closely tied to technical and elaborate ‘development plans’, has been traced to a moment two years after the first democratic election of 1994. In 1996 the government’s initial RDP (Reconstruction and Development) strategy, focused on development in a more welfarist sense, was replaced by GEAR (Growth, Employment and Redistribution), more explicitly neoliberal in focus and aimed primarily at producing growth and stimulating foreign investment. Where the RDP embodied a conviction that the market was unable ‘to do anything other than reproduce existing racial inequalities’ (Chipkin, 2003: 82), GEAR entailed the opposite. Combining the economic priority of growth with the political one of democracy, however, confronted the new government with sometimes irreconcilable objectives: to ensure a healthy economy attractive to private investors while retaining popular support from those with no assets who were increasingly sliding into unemployment and poverty (Adam et al., 1998: 190; Hart, 2002: 61). The task has been made still more challenging, in that the older fault-lines have been transcended to produce newer, more extreme ones. Starker than the cleavage which separates the impoverished landless from the black title-holder class, as in Doornkop, is that which now divides it from the privileged ‘liberation aristocracy’. This, although partly drawn from the existing black middle class, has novel and distinct features and advantages. It is a new cadre of black business-oriented elites, assisted by policies of Black Economic Empowerment (BEE), whose interests are closely entwined with those of the ruling ANC, upon which it is often dependent for the ubiquitous government ‘tenders’ out of which it makes its living (Adam et al., 1998: 190; Freund, 2010: 21; McNeill, 2012).

In my fieldwork setting, this type of cultural citizenship and the reciprocal interplay of rights and responsibilities came into focus most clearly at the point when restitutive models, focused on restoring that which had been lost in the past, had been found wanting, and when people were encouraged instead to take charge of their futures. Instead of having their rights of yore re-granted by the state, they were encouraged to become forward-looking, independently motivated self-starters. Planned models of ownership and managerial competence emphasise that the onus is on land reform’s ‘beneficiaries’, once they have become the proprietors of jointly owned pieces of land purchased by means of state grants, to become the ‘new farmers’. Although these plans owe much to broader government policy, the character of neoliberal government is such that they are usually implemented by non-state bodies: there has been a switch from the state to ‘alternative service providers’ (Chipkin, 2003: 67). In the case of the redistribution farm Sizanani, the training of the farm’s new owner-occupiers has been outsourced to the parastatal development agency Eskom, and in turn to black-owned companies of ‘service providers’ and/or private consultancies.

The following conversation from my field notes shows how Eskom Development Foundation officer George, and Department of Land Affairs (DLA) officer Rose, in a visit to the farm, were attempting to actualise a vision of self-reliance and disciplined action. The objects of their ‘remaking’, however, remained caught in a web of dependency upon the state and upon their white farmer employers: a fact of which they were all too aware.

In the semi-humorous final statement by this male CPA member, it is evident that the intended beneficiaries – newly construed as ‘efficient small farmers’, almost ‘like whites’ in their self-sufficiency, by government and consultants alike – contest the ‘self-reliant’ vision of their future. This example shows the state – and its agents in the Eskom Development Foundation – attempting to foist the responsibilities of ownership onto beneficiaries. But this vision is frankly unrealistic, given the general lack of state support and state subsidies for farmers, big or small, from the early 1990s onwards (James, 2007:10, 231: 2012: 20), and given the lack of experience of the people in question. The only literate person in the group is Driver Ntuli, the treasurer of the CPA, who is still a scholar (Figure 3).

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Figure 3.

Sizanani CPA treasurer Driver Ntuli.

While parastatal development agencies or ‘service providers’ try to reshape reality by portraying Sizanani’s members as independent owners responsible for their own future prosperity, the members themselves recognise that their poverty will continue to render them reliant on white farm employment and on state welfare. Overall, then, these members of the regional tenantry reject private ownership, harking back instead to models of landholding established before 1994 in which access to land was guaranteed either by the state, or by other, more powerful, patrons or intermediaries: usually combined with other wage-based forms of livelihood. In Ong’s terms (1996), they are mocking of, and resistant to, any attempt to ‘whiten’ them – or turn them into boers (Afrikaans farmers). Instead, they resolutely reaffirm the fact that whatever citizenship they have is mediated through their ‘blackness’: their existing identity as poor blacks working as wage labourers on neighbouring white farms – and still, to all intents and purposes, landless. This outsourced citizenship is thus evident more in its ‘deficit’ than its presence (Cornwall et al., 2011: 14). ⁶

Conclusion

The anthropology of citizenship illuminates how the actions and experiences of people carry the imprint of presently existing and earlier understandings, discourses and expectations. People are both influenced by and resist these. The aspirations to restored citizenship enunciated in the ANC’s election campaign of 1994 were centred on a unifying idea about restitution. The squatter leader’s statement that the government ought to own the land reflects one interpretation of this, harking back to forms of state ownership that prevailed from the 1950s to the 1990s in the former homelands: a model in which enjoyment of the benefits of citizenship were premised on state and chiefly patronage. The restored titleholders of Doornkop held, in the main, to an opposing view, one which privileged a return to the status quo ante and would bring them back, they hoped, to their earlier positions as property owners. Conflicts of this kind, mediated through the ethnic frameworks that the apartheid state had long legitimised, were transcended when newer divisions emerged. Members of the BEE elite to whom aspects of government and development were outsourced became the bearers of a new discourse, in which citizenship would need to be earned, not granted, and in which the image of the ‘white farmer’ as opposed to the ‘black employee’ became the intended blueprint. It is unclear how far this new wave of black consultants actively espoused such ideas about the self-motivated farmer or, conversely, whether they simply subscribed to these because their own new forms of livelihood – and middle-class citizenship – depended on its legitimacy and on securing compliance from the rank-and-file landless at whom their speeches were aimed.

Such a switch from entitlements and rights to the responsibilisation of neoliberal citizenship echoes the themes outlined by Kymlicka and Norman (1994). It also dovetails with Ong’s analysis of cultural citizenship – ‘the cultural inscription of state power’ – which is underpinned by Foucauldian ideas of self-making (1996). Here, cultural, often barely perceptible, sub-currents become part of people’s internalised self-government. Taking a similar view of outsourced, capillary-like, non-state arrangements, but focusing more on institutional than on socio-cultural frameworks, is Ferguson and Gupta’s paper on ‘neoliberal governmentality’ (2002). But are such analyses, with their strongly Western-centred character, appropriate in an African setting?

The term ‘neoliberal’ has been recently subjected to critical analysis, with attempts made to untangle its confusingly multiple meanings (Ferguson, 2011; Kipnis 2007; Sanders 2008). First, says Ferguson, there is neoliberalism as ideology, viewed by Harvey as a disguise for self-interest (Ferguson, 2011:170). In South Africa, while neoliberalism as ideological doctrine became widespread, the actual extent and influence of market models was limited. A particularly strong version of state planning during the apartheid era – with state subsidies to farmers, marketing boards and the like – has left its imprint. The sudden withdrawal of these endowed the post-apartheid economy with a situation unconducive to the emergence of small-scale semi-formal entrepreneurs in general, and to that of small farmers in particular. Even if current state policy does attempt to adopt free-market ideology, this does not mean that market forces in fact predominate. The attempted privileging of the market as a harbinger of change was, indeed, made possible only through state-initiated planning and regulatory frameworks. It was these initiatives, in the form of ‘black economic empowerment’ (BEE), that made it possible for consultants, like the ones now attempting to train Sizanani’s farmers, to take up employment and to operate at least their businesses – if not those of the putative farmers they were encouraging – with some success.

A second aspect demonstrates that it is insufficient to characterise neoliberalism simply as the self-interested ideological project of a capitalist elite, as Harvey might have it. In South Africa, for political as well as historical reasons, and to mitigate increasingly intense inequalities, pensions, welfare and other state grants (such as those with which land for both restitution and redistribution was purchased) play a key role. These, and to a lesser extent wages, have blunted what might otherwise have been the sharp instrument of market-oriented targeting through which the ‘reluctant farmers’ of my story were being newly encouraged to ‘self-make’. Overall, the existence of considerable – if not always effective – state spending means that South Africa does not, in fact, represent a classic case in which market models have free reign; the country, rather, is best characterised as possessing a ‘distributional’ rather than a ‘neo-liberal regime’ (Seekings and Nattrass, 2006: 314). Or, as I have written elsewhere, ‘neoliberal means serve to ensure the ever wider spread of redistribution’ (James, 2012: 37).

Beyond neoliberalism as ideology, Ferguson’s interest in the concept is, above all, for its use to characterise ‘specific governmental devices’ (Ferguson, 2011: 182) and, by implication, citizenship. In this guise, he maintains that the term is least useful when applied in African settings, where attempts at instigating techniques of self-control, encouraging people to become self-motivated, and the like, have been ‘very limited’ (Ferguson, 2011: 173). Other authors have similar misgivings about applying such models in African and other postcolonial settings, but imply that Foucauldian approaches might be retained provided they are combined with those focusing on other forms of citizenship regime. A tendency to comply, in part, with self-imposed disciplinary arrangements, while also resisting these, has been noted by Ecks, in India. In the face of attempts at what might be considered the ultimate neoliberal regime – that of the ‘corporate citizenship’ which multinational drug companies attempt to impose – he shows how GPs in India attempt to apply its tenets, yet readily switch to ‘near’ rather than ‘neo-liberalism’ (Ecks, 2010) when these attempts fail.

In similar vein, Comaroff points to how attempts at ‘capillary power’ in (post) colonial states ‘amounts to the exact opposite of what a Foucauldian narrative … might lead us to expect. That narrative does not … account for the essential paradox of colonial governance: its capacity to … elicit compliance and contestation, discipline and defiance, subjection and insurrection … in ways that blurred the boundaries between these, apparently antithetical, species of action.’ (1998: 340). ⁷

What such accounts suggest is that governmental arrangements in whatever period are not a matter of either rights or responsibilities; either enforced compliance or subtly insidious self-discipline. Instead, they are a matter of both/and: ‘at the very same time as they spoke of transforming colonised peoples into civilized … free, right-bearing citizens’, [they] … dealt in heterogeneity by naturalizing ethnic difference and essentialising racial inequality’. (Comaroff, 1998: 329).

In sum, broad, over-arching political/economic projects of citizenship – whether in Western or postcolonial settings – should not be assumed to be hegemonic or determined. In considering how different regimes of citizenship interact, we must bear in mind how earlier social orders have left their imprint upon newer ones. We need a view of citizenship which merges elements – state and market – that might at first sight seem contradictory. We need a view which both acknowledges the power of wider frameworks and recognises the ability of ordinary actors on the ground to respond to and sometimes resist these.