A new class for a new South Africa? The discursive construction of the ‘Black middle class’ in post-Apartheid media

A ‘newborn’ class: Narratives of hope and condescension

The term ‘new middle class’ was first coined by C.W. Mills (2002) in his study of the post-war white-collar working class in America, in order to theorize the shift from production to more service and management-oriented jobs, and the consequent social changes (Walkowitz, 2012). These ‘white-collar workers’ were seen in contrast to business owners and ‘free’ professionals (Mills, 1946, 2002), and their agency was contingent, ‘without a will of their own, siding with the prevailing forces in society’ (Burawoy et al., 2012: 158). In post-Apartheid South Africa, middle class newness was racialized. Against the history of an affluent White middle class produced by the Apartheid government, the dawn of democracy was framed as a birthing point for Black prosperity.

In 1991, Lewis Nkosi, a South African journalist, claimed that ‘with the demise of apartheid will come the rise of the Black middle class’ (The Daily News, 12 December 1991, p. 24). Media narratives described the Black middle class as brand new, a freshly birthed and coherent group that was most recognizable by its rapid growth. Action-packed adjectives painted a picture of an ‘emerging’, ‘rising’, ‘growing’, ‘burgeoning’ and ‘swelling’ class. Ben Turok, writing in the Mail & Guardian (3–9 October 1997, p. 24) argued that African ‘mobility’ took off ‘at an amazing speed’ since 1994, while Ferial Haffajee, writing in the same newspaper 2 years later, claimed that the rise of the Black middle class was ‘meteoric’ (Mail & Guardian, 1–8 April 1999, p. 10). This rapid rise was discursively linked to the end of apartheid – 1994 being the year of the first democratic elections, and Haffajee noting in 1999 that it took place ‘in the past four years’. The reasons were noted as, according to Turok, Black personnel moving ‘into the highest positions of the economy, including that of the government, monopoly capital, the public service, the security forces and the professions. Others have built medium-sized businesses on the basis of preferential state contracts’ (Ben Turok, Mail & Guardian 3–9 October 1997, p. 24). Haffajee argues that the Black middle class was simply ‘riding on the coat-tails’ of the flurry of corporate Black Economic Empowerment deals (Mail & Guardian, 1–8 April 1999, p. 10). Although, like Mill’s new middle class these groups are white-collar, they are racialized as Black.

Attached to the birth of the Black middle class were hopes that it would help forge a stable and prosperous national economy, featuring less race-defined inequality and driving South Africa forward as an advanced member of the global economy. Commentators claimed that the new Black middle class was an ‘important group of consumers’ (Financial Mail, 9 July 1999, p. 33) and ‘the great black hope’ (Sunday Tribune, 11 Jan 1998, p. 1). While the White middle class was increasingly framed as ‘debt-laden [and] battered on many fronts’ (Sunday Tribune, 11 Jan 1998, p. 1), the Black middle class was enjoying ‘the fruits of modest affluence’ (Financial Mail, 9 July 1999, p. 33). A significant economic optimism was thus attached to the new Black middle class, which was ‘contrasted with the general gloom […] seen in the white middle-class market’ (Saturday Star, 18 September 1999, p. 15). This can be linked to other contexts in the non-Western world. In India, a ‘new’ middle class was said to be the product of ‘a state-led project of development rather than an expanding consumer group that has naturally been produced by economic growth’ (Fernandes, 2009: 219). India’s new middle class signalled more free trade and an opening up to the consumption of international brands and commodities (Mazzarella, 2003). One outcome has been that ‘discourses about consumption, more than consumption itself, […] have become constitutive of middle class identity’ (Upadhya, 2008: 56).

The birth of the ‘new’ Black middle class signalled a shift from apartheid-era marketing, in which Black consumers were considered only a ‘mass’ market in need of cheap goods: ‘Viewed in terms of consumer living standards, there are now almost as many blacks as whites in the top living standards category in South Africa’ (The Sunday Independent, 18 May 1997, p. 2). It was considered newsworthy that market research statistics were being generated that showed that Black middle class consumers were starting to overtake their White counterparts in key Living Standards Measures (LSM) categories (Financial Mail, 13 June 1997 p. 22). Like well-off Whites, Black people now owned houses and cars, consumed pay-TV and spent ‘money on home improvements such as swimming pools, security services and garden walling. […] They also use a wide range of financial products and own a significant number of home appliances’ (Financial Mail, 13 June 1997, p. 22). As such, if this group continued to grow as ‘rapidly’ as it had, then there would be a huge boom in consumer spending and economic growth:

More than four times as many blacks as whites entered the LSM A market in the past 2–3 years. At the current rate of change, there should be more blacks than whites in South Africa’s first-world consumer segment within the next two years. (The Sunday Independent, 18 May 1997, p. 2)

The hopeful vision of economic growth attached to the ‘new Black middle class’ can be linked to the rainbow nation optimism of the 1990s, in which a ‘new’ South Africa was forged in which it was possible to dream of a better future (Habib, 1997).

The new Black middle class was also lauded as South Africa’s main chance to shake off a legacy of racism. Its ‘rapid class formation’ was credited for changing ‘the social landscape’ (Mail & Guardian, 1–8 April 1999, p. 10). The ‘emerging African middle class’ was also credited for ‘blurring race boundaries and encouraging stability’ (The Star, 28 April 1999, p. 4). Second democratic president, Thabo Mbeki, stated,

As part of our continuing struggle to wipe out the legacy of racism, we must work to ensure that there emerges a black bourgeoisie ⁴ whose presence within our society will be part of the process of the deracialisation of the economy and society. (Sunday World, 21 November 1999, p. 2)

The vision of a non-racial society was based on hopes for a class-based society, where income and consumption would produce social cohesion and erase racial discord. Sensible middle class values were the foundation for a stable future society: ‘thoroughly urbanized, reliable citizens who reject change for the sake of change’ and were devoted to church and family, building careers through their work ethic, and who rejected hedonism were the key to reconciliation and development (Weekend Argus, 8–9 July 1995, p. 6). These values were reiterated by a self-described Black middle class person in a letter to the editor: ‘through self-discipline and sacrifice’ they had cultivated and educated themselves, and ‘the principles and values of the middle class’ were imperative to ‘set a firm and sustainable foundation for our political, social and economic development’ (Cape Times, 8 September 1997, p. 14). The best counterpoint for this argument that the middle class produces social and racial harmony is the United States. There, the growth of a ‘new’ Black middle class was hailed as one of the triumphs of the civil rights movement (Pattillo-McCoy, 2000: 2). Despite having white-collar employment college degrees (Pattillo-McCoy, 2000: 15), the ‘new’ Black middle class in the United States still faces many challenges: racial integration, ghettoization, generally lower quality of life than middle class Whites and the ignominious critique that they imitated the White upper classes were frivolous, materialistic and disloyal to their race (Pattillo-McCoy, 2000: 18).

A photograph accompanying an article titled ‘The case of the black bourgeoisie’ (Mail & Guardian, 3–9 October 1997, p. 24) features two Black men in suits and ties. They are not named. They are photographed from a low angle, behind them looms an impressive glass atrium, suggesting the lobby or conference room of a powerful corporation. They are smiling, natural light from the outside streams in through the glass skylight. The caption reads, ‘African mobility: Actions will in time identify social roles’. This caption hints at some reservation, which does not come across in the breathless excitement about the non-racial, socially stable, economically prosperous future depicted in other accounts of the new Black middle class as the nation’s hope. ‘The new middle classes are seen as the principle drivers of hope in the developing countries. They are considered to be those who, above all other groups of the population, represent innovation and management potential’ (Lange and Meier, 2009: 2). However, like the American Black middle class, the ‘new’ South African version also had its critics.

One media commentator made the argument that the Black middle class was too immature and naïve to be able to fulfil the South African dream. In an article titled ‘Wanted: Adequate black middle class’ (Eastern Province Herald, 27 August 1992, p. 10), Wallace Neil-Boss, a self-described ‘retired Port Elizabeth businessman and a long-standing student of South African and international politics’ argued that readers needed to ‘face up to South African realities’: the new Black middle class did not have what it took to save the nation. Why? Because it was ‘neglected, stunted, and inert’ and had ‘lain fallow for far too long’, it did not have ‘any material assets to speak of’, did ‘not own real estate’ and ‘had no experience in commerce or industry or mining’. Far from having been successfully birthed, ‘the Black middle class is still an embryo’. Consistently comparing the Black middle class with ‘its Western prototype’, Neil-Boss argued that it was too inexperienced and childlike to deliver on its social and economic potential. He cautioned against ‘unduly accelerating’ the process of economic reform, claiming that ‘economic power can only be acquired the hard way’ and inviting Black South Africans to ‘exercise a temporary restraint’ in their ambitions towards middle class status. The tone is at once patronizing and imperialist, and it echoes Eurocentric perspectives on economic development in the non-Western world. The South African Black middle class, Neil-Boss infers, will never be able to adequately imitate the Western model, although it should try. Even Franz Fanon, the iconic post-colonial theorist, showed contempt for ‘blacks who try to enter white society by trying to make themselves less black’ and implied that the Black middle class was merely ‘imitative’ (Burawoy et al., 2012: 90).

This condescending attitude is the underbelly of the selfsame discourses that claimed great things were attached to the newborn middle class. The newcomer is accused of inexperience and under-qualification. Although a blank canvas onto which the hopes and dreams of a nation can be projected, it was just as easily framed as naïve, inexperienced, childlike and imitative. Because ‘the rise of the new middle classes is seen as a symbol of a comprehensive shift in economic and national power relations’ (Lange and Meier, 2009: 2), the label new can be read as a way of signalling the externality to old centres of power and undermining their legitimacy. Cynical voices implied a lack of hope in the project of nationhood also, linking its predicted failure to the ‘inherent’ weaknesses of the Black middle class. During the recession in the 1990s in Brazil, a common media discourse in relation to middle class lifestyles was that the ‘dream was over’ and ‘paradise was lost’ (O’Dougherty, 2002). It is interesting to contrast this notion of a dream broken with the ways in which the middle class dream was born in post-Apartheid South Africa. The South African middle class dream had existed throughout apartheid but was racialized in that only Whites could access it. The accession of Black South Africans to this dream was at once celebrated and contested. These two attitudes are different aspects of the same discursive move, which named the Black middle class ‘new’ and thus pinned on it both excessive, hopeful responsibility for a ‘new South Africa’ and a bitter lack of faith in its ability to pull it off.

(Re-)historicizing Black middle class histories: Popular counter-discourses to ‘newness’

Despite, or perhaps because of, the rash of attention on the newness of the Black middle class, some media voices attempted to introduce evidence against its ‘meteoric rise’. Sipho S. Maseko (2000) (who went on to write a PhD in the subject) explains in painstaking detail how commentators celebrating the appearance of the Black middle class have neglected ‘to take into account the history of the development of the black capitalist class in South Africa’ (Mail & Guardian, 21–27 May 1999, p. 46). A similar piece penned 9 years earlier (The Natal Witness, 10 June 1990, p. 15) describes in detail the history of South Africa’s Black middle class, which ‘began life in the mid 19th century’ in missionary schools, and points out that the liberation movement comprised middle class Black people who faced consistent obstacles from White power to their development (e.g. in attempts to buy land, start businesses and sell their professional services). The article also reminds readers that the Black middle class is explicitly rooted in the Apartheid government’s establishment of ‘bantustans’, which ‘provided opportunities for many more Black people to climb their way on to the middle class ladder’. Ironically, the piece is headlined ‘The rising middle class: The black middle class is burgeoning under democratic rule in South Africa’, although it outlines in great detail the historical roots of the class and tries to show that it is not new at all (The Natal Witness, 10 June 1990, p. 15). In comparison, consider that the American Black middle class did not simply appear out of nowhere as a result of the victories of the civil rights campaign; its historical roots stretch back to slavery and the divisions between house-slaves and field-slaves imposed by the slave masters, in which lighter-skinned Blacks and mulattoes had preferential treatment, worked in houses and could often learn trades or skills (Lacy, 2007: 24) – thus setting the scene for their easier transition into middle class status.

In 1995, an exhibition took place in the South African National Gallery, called ‘The Black Photo Album’ curated by celebrated South African photographer Santu Mofokeng. It showed a series of photographs of middle class Black South Africans taken between 1890 and 1950, featuring several families from Soweto. These people ‘owned property’ or had ‘acquired a Christian mission education, and they considered themselves to be “civilized”’; they ‘took their model from colonial officials and settlers, especially the English, lived life in a manner and dress very similar to those European immigrants’. Photographs show them posing in family portraits dressed in their Sunday best (Vuka SA, 31 May 1995, p. 16). One article points out, ‘The emergence of the black middle class is not new. Colonial mission schools shaped the intellectual lives of many of the African National Congress’s leadership’ Sowetan (10 April 1996, p. 11). Another reminisces on the ‘amazemtiti’, the class which during the pre-National Party era were considered the ‘civilized, educated elite’ and were exempted from carrying pass books. The writer argues, ‘These “exempted” or zemtitis […] were a precursor to the class that the poet Mafika Gwala refers to in his poem A Mirth to Middle Class Bantus’ (The Natal Witness, 23 January 1995, p. 8).

These attempts to historicize the Black middle class link it to colonialism and the White supremacist regime:

The [apartheid] government under PW Botha was engaging in its total strategy to win the hearts and minds of a disgruntled black population. Part of this strategy was to create a black middle-class, which of its own inclinations would be a block against the spread of communism. (The Daily News, 30 November 1994, p. 10)

Apartheid power attempted to influence or control indigenous elites and granted selective permission to some Black business people to carry on with their affairs and flourish while most Black South Africans were structurally excluded from meaningful economic activity. In the global literature about new middle classes, the theme of the colonial legacy is prominent. Although the rise of ‘new’ middle class lifestyles in post-colonial nations is noted, the fact that there were always ‘old’ middle classes in such contexts requires acknowledgement. In China, a middle class was originally formed in urban centres such as Shanghai in the 1910s and 1920s through an increase in jobs in the retail and banking sectors (Jaffrelot and Van der Veer, 2008: 20), although an ‘ongoing process is resulting in the crumbling of the old class system based on the Party elite and workers, and a new class system is emerging that is largely based on individual wealth’ (Elfick, 2008: 210). There is considerable debate about when this ‘new’ class in China emerged, with some arguing that there is not an ‘old’ middle class in China, only a ‘new’ one – because industrialization is a relatively recent phenomenon (Xiahong Zhou, 2008: 116–7) and others claiming that the Chinese middle class is a mere media fabrication (Xun Zhou, 2008: 171). In Brazil, the ‘new’ middle class is commonly known as the ‘modern’ middle class, in opposition to the ‘traditional’ middle class who comprised landowners and self-employed professionals (Owensby, 2001). Legacies of colonialism come into play, to the extent that the ‘new’ middle classes are vestiges of the ‘service classes’ initially encouraged by colonial powers (Lange and Meier, 2009: 8).

In the South African context, historicizing the Black middle class in popular discourse meant explicitly connecting it with Apartheid. In a long opinion piece published in the City Press, The Citizen, Sunday World and Sowetan, Azanian People’s Organization (AZAPO) member Jabu Makwena argued that the Black middle class ‘is a creation of white capital and cannot boast any independence from white middle class interests’. It ‘cannot succeed in giving capitalism a humane face’ (City Press, 5 December 1999, p. 7). This argument is reflected in a cartoon by Zapiro published in the Sowetan (9 December 1999), which depicts the Black middle class as a puppet on a string being controlled by a hand labelled ‘white capital’. These attempts to expose the ‘truth’ of the long history of the Black middle classes and its often-uncomfortable closeness with White power operated as a counter-discourse to the optimistic/cynical narrative of its newness. After all, if this was the class that was always ‘in bed’ with White power, how could they be relied upon to act in the interest of the entire nation, including the Black poor? This undertone to the re-historicization of the Black middle class finds its full expression in the third theme evident in media discourse during the 1990s – claims that the class was subject to a ‘new’ set of ethics: materialism, greed and rapacious consumption.

New money, new ethics: The avaricious class?

One concern aired about post-apartheid’s ‘new’ Black middle class was whether it would ‘remain loyal to the liberation movement’ (Mail & Guardian, 3–9 October 1997, p. 24). Some media commentators emphasized that not only was this middle class new, but that ‘old’ values were at risk of being abandoned in a ‘wave of material aspirations’ and in favour of a ‘new ethos [that] prizes wealth’ (Business Day, 4 August 1997, p. 11). Others asked rhetorically, ‘Will their new values of luxury consumptionism and profit-making lead us to the national democratic revolution?’ (Mail & Guardian, 3–9 October 1997). When values are labelled new, they are set up against ‘old’ values, which are implied to be more ethical. The irony is that South African White society was no stranger to the ‘values of luxury consumptionism’, and indeed neither were Black South Africans who had been excluded from partaking in them but surely took note of their availability for Whites. Yet when the values of materialism become acquainted with Black individuals, they suddenly were called ‘new’.

A considerable amount of focus is placed on their Western lifestyles of new middle classes in post-colonial contexts. ‘These lifestyles, however, are not really spectacular. They represent the standard in many parts of the world both in normative and practical respects. Why then, do they merit such attention?’ (Lange and Meier, 2009: 1). When the lifestyles of non-Western middle classes are critiqued, the implication is that such lifestyles are not acceptable or normal in contexts outside of the west, where they are taken for granted (Lange and Meier, 2009: 3). Some extremely vicious attacks on the ‘new values’ of the Black middle class came from Black commentators, who rooted their critiques in a charge of having ‘sold out’ on the liberation struggle. AZAPO member, Jabu Makwena quoted earlier, claimed that the Black middle class ‘are greedy and are three months away from bankruptcy’ (City Press, 5 December 1999, p. 7). Sandile Dikeni wrote graphically: ‘The black middle class is disgusting. It also smells’, and went on to claim that they ‘maintain their fat consumerism on the backs of the poor’ and pretend that they were involved in the struggle when in fact they ‘stuffed themselves with the selected fruit […] of apartheid’ (The Cape Times, 25 August 1997, p. 8). Sandile Memela (Mail & Guardian, 8–14 October 1993, p. 16) argued that the ‘new Black middle class’ is ‘overpraised’: They were out of the country during the revolution, they ‘consumed Western imperialist education in America and Europe’, they returned only to move in to White areas. These ‘achievers’, he argues, enjoyed privileges reserved for Whites yet were not ‘involved in the communities that sacrificed to give them the opportunities’ and that the new middle class is nothing but ‘an extension of apartheid capitalism, exploitation and oppression’.

Two weeks later, a reply to Memela’s article appears: a self-identified ‘middle class’ Black man, Loyiso Madikane ‘from Northlands’ writes in to ask, sarcastically, whether he should go and live in a shack in order to prove that he ‘identifies with the people’. If he did, he says, ‘the very people I would be trying to identify with in that manner would view my education as a complete failure if it cannot afford me any material improvements in my life’. This speaker is arguably one of the ‘coterie of blacks who are well-off and whose existence and behaviour would, at a superficial level, suggest the overriding goals of the liberation struggle was easier assimilation of the relatively advantaged blacks into the middle class’ (City Press, 28 November 1999, p. 18). The liberation struggle was spearheaded by middle class leaders like Mandela, Tambo and Sisulu who fought for the rights of Black South Africans to freely own land, pursue education, open businesses – basically, to be middle class. These goals were considered a ‘sell-out’ from the perspective of the radical left-wing element in the liberation struggle, which was grounded in working class politics and pro-poor socialism. Class conflicts took place within the liberation movement itself, and these came to ahead as the revolution was concluded: Concern from the left about ‘new’ materialism is linked to a longer ideological history.

Another angle to this public debate, echoing Fanon, was the accusation that the avaricious Black middle class was selfishly pursuing the good life in imitation of Whites. Trevor Manuel, the then Finance Minister, warned in a high-profile newspaper interview: ‘unless the new black middle class begin to add substantial value to the economy, South Africa can run the risk of creating a nation of people who strive to become shallow materialists’. He went on to suggest that the Black middle class was ‘often as greedy and opulent as the white middle class’ (Sunday Tribune, 9 January 2000, p. 1). ANC Member of Parliament, Ben Turok, took a more teacherly tone: ‘black power should not ape white privilege’ (Mail & Guardian, 2–8 May 1997, p. 19). He continues,

What is a matter of concern now is not that blacks are becoming entrepreneurs and rich, but that their yardstick is the colonial levels of wealth and lifestyle, including the whole panoply of perks that white colonial South Africans gave themselves in addition to their incomes. These include servants, company cars, five star hotels, business class travel, holidays, and all the rest of the consumption-ism associated with an exceptionally privileged group.

Turok’s hypocrisy was shown up in a letter to the editor responding to his piece, which questioned his ‘assumption that the emerging black middle class should be less avaricious and display a discipline which is not required from the white middle class’ (Mail & Guardian, 9–15 May 1997, p. 25). How could a White commentator argue that a Black middle class should show more concern for all members of a society? No matter how substantial a role they played in the struggle or their political allegiances, Whites never had to suffer the indignities of the Group Areas Act, Bantu education and pass laws which were designed to ensure they stood only the slimmest chance of ever becoming middle class.

The innuendo that the Black middle class was a breed of ‘fat cats’ comes up quite literally in an article that claims that they, after enjoying too much of the ‘good life’, now have to struggle with ‘the battle of the bulge’ (obesity): ‘As men in the emerging black bourgeoisie try to rein in their bellies, or hide them inside well-tailored suits, black women are joining bored white housewives at aerobics classes’ (Eastern Province Herald, 26 June 1998, p. 11). Such accounts depict the new Black middle class not only as imitative but also as deficient in restraint, ‘taste and style as a means of social distinction beyond mere wealth’ (Lange and Meier, 2009: 5). This links with stereotypes of nouveau riches lacking refined tastes and responsibility when it comes to personal care (as evidenced in the narratives of the new ‘bourgeoisie’ letting themselves get fat). This individual negligence is mirrored in a lack of responsibility for societal needs, another common trope in discourses around new middle classes (Lange and Meier, 2009: 4). The new Black middle class is thus framed as suffering from a moral hollowness: They are materialistic, selfish, greedy, have betrayed the struggle and cannot be trusted with a social democracy. They are consumers, not citizens.

Although there are many features of ‘new’ post-colonial middle classes that are not commensurable, some are shared. ‘One of the most striking and most cited is the four-stepladder of consumer goods that people aspire to possess. It starts with cheap gadgets and moves to cars, houses and tourism as core features of the uppermost level’ (Lange and Meier, 2009: 16). New middle classes in South Africa, India, China, Brazil and beyond are united by westernized lifestyles, which in turn implies an integration into a global economy. In the west, these qualities are so taken for granted as a foundation of society that they are hardly made explicit and certainly would not be newsworthy enough to be labelled ‘new’. It is no surprise, therefore, that anxieties about the moral compass of consumerism are bound up in discourses about the rise of ‘new’ middle classes beyond the west.