Socio-economic conditions, young men and violence in Cape Town

People in violent neighbourhoods attribute violence in public spaces to, especially, poverty and unemployment, but agree that social disintegration, disrespect, drinking and drugs and the weaknesses of the criminal justice system also contribute substantially. However, data from a panel of young men in Cape Town provide little support for the hypothesis that unemployment and poverty are direct causes of violence against strangers. Growing up in a home where someone drank heavily or took drugs is, however, a strong predictor of violence against strangers in early adulthood. A history of drinking (or taking drugs) correlates with perpetration of violence, and might also serve as a mechanism through which conditions during childhood have indirect effects. Living in a bad neighbourhood and immediate poverty are associated with violence against strangers, but being unemployed is not. Overall, heavy drinking – whether by adults in the childhood home or by young men themselves – seems to be a more important predictor of violence than economic circumstances in childhood or the recent past. Heavy drinking seems to play an important part in explaining why some young men have been more violent than others in circumstances that seem to have been generally conducive to rising violence, for reasons that remain unclear. It seems likely that few young people in South Africa in the early 2000s come from backgrounds that strongly predispose them against the use of violence.

The Colour of Desert: Race, Class and Distributive Justice in Post-Apartheid South Africa

This paper examines how racial differences affect perceptions of distributive justice in post-apartheid South Africa. In ‘divided’ societies, citizens might be expected to discriminate on the basis of race or culture in assessing the justice of other citizens’ claims. South Africa is a prime example of a ‘divided’ society whereby, in the past, legislation and racial elite culture combined in pervasive discrimination. Given the continued importance of race in daily life in South Africa, we might expect that attitudes about distributive justice would continue to be racialised, with people considering members of the same ‘racial group’ as themselves as being more deserving than members of other groups. But evidence from both national data-sets and a new data-set for Cape Town in particular suggests that race has complex and often counter-intuitive effects on perceptions of distributive justice. By some criteria, and some analytic techniques, people do not discriminate on the basis of race when assessing desert; by other criteria, and other analytic techniques, desert appears still to be somewhat coloured in post-apartheid South Africa. Overall, however, the evidence suggests that the effects of race are either weak or work in counterintuitive directions. Rich, white Capetonians are certainly more generous in their views on redistribution than is generally assumed

Do South Africa's unemployed constitute an underclass?

High rates of long-term unemployment pose difficulties for the mapping of the class structure. In South Africa, the high rate of long-term unemployment raises the question of whether or not the unemployed constitute a separate class or underclass. An underclass should only be distinguished if it has some theoretical foundation (i.e. the members of this class share some systematic disadvantage) and empirical consequence (i.e. that membership of this class is associated with experiences or attitudes that differ from those associated with membership of other classes). In South Africa, evidence from the mid-1990s suggests that, at the end of the apartheid era, one section of the unemployed suffered systematic disadvantage in terms of access to employment. Given that people get jobs in South Africa primarily through friends and family, people without such social capital are relegated to an especially disadvantaged position in the labour market and society in general. Some but not all of the unemployed can be located within an underclass defined in terms of acute disadvantage. The limited evidence available suggests that these unemployed people and their dependants constitute an 'underclass', experiencing more acute poverty, worse living conditions and less satisfaction with their lives than the members of other classes (including other unemployed people who do not fall into the underclass)

Race, class and inequality in the South African city

The 'apartheid city' in South Africa stands out as an extreme example of urban social engineering. Urban segregation was pervasive across the colonial world, some other cities in colonial and even post-colonial Africa were subject to massive forced removals or restrictions on urbanization that compared to South Africa under apartheid (Freund, 2001; Burton, 2005), and ghettos are certainly not uniquely South African. Nonetheless, the apartheid city was distinctive in several important respects

Partisan realignment in Cape Town, 1994-2004

The Western Cape is the one part of South Africa that has experienced strong competition in democratic elections and a dramatic shift in power between political parties. Between 1994 and 2004 the initially dominant National Party lost almost all of its support, whilst support rose steadily for the African National Congress. Neither voting patterns nor shifts in the Western Cape fit neatly with a simple racial explanation of voting behaviour, because of both the heterogeneity and supposed fluidity of the ‘coloured vote’. First, coloured voters have voted for opposing parties. Secondly, it has been asserted widely that there was a swing among coloured voters from the National Party to the African National Congress. This paper explores ward-level election results and survey data on Cape Town to show that coloured voters continue to be heterogeneous in their voting behaviour but that there is little evidence that former National Party supporters have become ANC supporters. The major cause of shifting partisan power in Cape Town is not voter realignment, but rather demographic change, with differential turnout playing a role in specific elections. It is the overall electorate, rather than the individual voter, that has changed

The discourse of dependency and the agrarian roots of welfare doctrines in Africa: The case of Botswana

Political elites across much of Africa have criticized welfare programmes and the idea of a welfare state for fostering dependency. Anxiety over dependency is not unique to East or Southern Africa, but the discourse of dependency in countries such as Botswana differs in important respects to the discourses of dependency articulated in some industrialised societies (notably the USA). This paper examines African discourses of dependency through a case-study of Botswana. The paper races the genealogy of dependency through programmatic responses to drought between the 1960s and 1990s, and a reaction in the 2000s. The growth of a discourse of dependency reflected both social and economic concerns: Socially, it was rooted in pre-existing understandings of the reciprocal responsibilities associated with kinship and community; economically, the emergence of a discourse of dependency reflected the rise of an approach to development rooted in nostalgic conceptions of hard-working small farmers. The discourse of dependency appealed to both conservatives (offended by anti-social individualism) and economic modernisers (eager for an explanation for the failures of the developmental project to eliminate poverty)

Trade unions and the redesign of South Africa’s minimum wage-setting institutions in the 1990s

South African trade unions’ criticisms in the 2010s of the institutional framework for minimum-wage-setting mark a dramatic departure from the central role they played in the design of these institutions in the 1990s. The four key features of the institutional framework – i.e. the emphasis on sectoral rather than national wage-setting, the primacy attached to collective bargaining, the role of technocrats in wage-setting in sectors where there was insufficient worker or employer organisation for effective collective bargaining, and the stipulation that employment effects be taken into account in setting minima in unorganised sectors – all reflected concerns raised by trade unions themselves. The trade unions’ approach in the 1990s reflected their own sectoral organisational form, their strong shopfloor organisation and distrust of the state, and anxieties about job destruction (especially in unions in labour-intensive sectors and among allied intellectuals)

The Social and Political Implications of Demographic Change in Post-Apartheid South Africa

The cohort of young people born between the early 1980s and early 1990s comprise a demographic bulge in the South African population. The sheer size of this cohort renders it especially important in terms of the changing political, economic and social life of the country. The cohort grew up for the most part after apartheid had ended, entered the labour market at a time of high unemployment, is having children as marriage in in decline, and reached voting age just as the ANC's moral stature began to decline. All of these might be expected to result in distinctive attitudes and behaviours. By diverse criteria, however, the cohort looks much like older (or immediately previous cohorts of) South Africans. This 'generation' does not appear to be particularly distinctive except in terms of its size. Where this cohort is likely to leave its mark is in entrenching some of the social, economic and political changes that, until recently, might have appeared transient

Racial and class discrimination in assessments of “just desert” in post-apartheid Cape Town

In multi-racial or otherwise multi-cultural societies, people may discriminate in the allocation of scarce resources against members of particular racial or cultural groups. This paper examines how people in post-apartheid Cape Town – a city characterized by both inequality and cultural diversity – assess the ‘desert’ of others in terms of access to social assistance from the state and employment opportunities. The paper uses attitudinal data from two sets of vignettes included in a 2005 survey of a representative sample of adults. The paper extends the findings of previous studies that a wide range of South Africans distinguish between deserving and undeserving poor on the basis, primarily, of their willingness or ability to work and their responsibility for dependents. The paper also confirms the preliminary findings of previous research that there is little racial discrimination in respondents’ assessment of how deserving the subjects were in a narrow range of vignettes, but that race and class are significant in that richer and especially rich, white respondents are more generous in their assessment of what deserving people should receive. There is stronger evidence that racial considerations are relevant with respect to popular assessments of the justice of employment decisions, although it is difficult to distinguish (using available data) between racial prejudice (on the part of the respondents) and a principled opposition to affirmative action (i.e. opposition to perceived unfair racial discrimination on the part of employers or the state)

Why was Soweto different?: Urban development, township politics, and the political economy of Soweto, 1978-84

African Studies Seminar series. Paper presented 2 May 1988Vorster described the events of 1976 as just ‘the whirlwind before the storm’, and events since 1984 have confirmed his judgement. But whereas the protests and conflicts of 1976-77 were focussed on Soweto (although they did spread widely across South Africa [1], the gales of the ‘storm’ in 1984-85 largely passed Soweto by. 'Soweto schools were relatively unaffected by the school protests and boycott which swept through the Eastern Cape, Pretoria, the East Rand and the Vaal Triangle in 1984. Soweto's residents were not drawn up into the protests over rent increases which convulsed the northern 'Orange Free State, Vaal Triangle, Pretoria and East Rand between June and September 1984. When the Eastern Cape erupted in February and March 1985, Soweto stayed generally quiet, as it continued to be when bloody conflict swept the East Rand again in May and June, and the Western Cape and Durban from August. Consumer boycotts in Soweto in the second half of 1985 lacked solid support, and there was only patchy participation in stayaways. In the first nine months of 1985, only 17 people were reported killed in ‘unrest’ in Soweto, compared to 110 on the East Rand, for example [2]. Soweto's councillors not only clung to office but also continued to live in the township itself, unlike many of their counterparts elsewhere who were herded into fortified compounds or put up in hotels outside of their townships. It was only in the last three months of 1985, and more especially in mid-1986, that protests ceased to be sporadic, transitory and disparate, and overt conflict in Soweto matched that elsewhere in the country. Why? This paper addresses this question through an examination of Soweto between 1978 and 1984. In so doing it is a very preliminary attempt to explore a broader issue, namely the nature of "quiescence". "Quiescence", or the apparent absence of overt struggle, is a more general phenomenon than overt protest or revolt, yet receives very little critical attention. In examining "quiescence" in Soweto I focus on a range of factors, including: (1) the social structure of Soweto; (2) the state's prioritisation of urban development in Soweto since 1979, its wariness of revolt, and its use of relatively sophisticated policing; (3) the chronic unimportance of the Soweto Council in township politics; and (4) the character o-f opposition politics and the experience of struggle during the period 1977-84. I hope that, this paper begins to illustrate how "quiescence" should not simply be understood in terms of a process (of transformation to protest or revolt) that did not, happen, but rather as the outcome of the interaction of a set of processes (including processes of struggle and limited overt protest) that did happen, and that did indeed transform township politics although in ways which led to continued "quiescence" rather than widespread overt revolt