Innocent violence: social exclusion, identity, and the press in an African democracy

Critical Arts, July, 2009 by David B. Coplan

Over and against the legitimacy of the raiding game has stood the indigenous bantu principle of social reciprocity, much beloved of today's black political elite, known as ubuntu (isiZulu: 'humanity'), rooted in the proverbial maxim, umuntu nge muntu nga bantu (isiZulu: 'a person is a person through [other] people'). Over the decades, however, the disintegrative effects of suppressive racial capitalism, which included the destruction of rural social economies and the creation of vast, anomic yet gossip-ridden peri-urban labour camps called townships, turned ubuntu into something either more honoured in the breach or abandoned in favour of a new maxim of social morality, 'nothing for mahala' ('[you receive] nothing for nothing'). More sympathetically, we might wish to recognise the bleak reality that it is difficult to engage in social reciprocity when hardly anyone has anything.

When someone black does have something, now more often the case in today's moderately successful neo-liberal economy, the inequality exacerbated by the implementation of the Black Economic Empowerment policy, which has enriched only a small new elite, ensures that there are so many claims upon it from the endless numbers of kith and kin still drowning in a sea of deprivation, that members of the new or aspiring black middle class distain to or dare not honour them. And so it is the few successful residents of a 'tightly knit' rural or 'disaffiliated' urban community, for example, who suffer (often self-imposed) social exclusion, as unless they can sustain patron-client relationships based on the opportunistic and exploitative manipulation of social power, they are almost certain to be the victims of grand or petty social predation. Indeed, the very concept of barui (Sesotho: self-made rich men) entails an onus to redistribute and so dissipate hard won capital amongst their neighbours (whether deserving, or not), for as the ancient Sesotho proverb puts it: 'The cattle bellow at the chief's place; /When they bellow at a commoner's it is unbecoming.'

The destructive and demoralising squabbling that accompanies social differentiation in small communities is the contemporary meaning that lies behind another old saying, Motse o tootle kantle (Sesotho: 'The village looks pretty from the outside).' Adam Ashforth, (2004: 209-219) recently observed that South African bantu kinship organisation has become far less inclusive over the past century. Redistributive kinship networks and exchanges once involved potentially not only the agnatic core of a clan chieftaincy, but affinal relatives and contractual clients granted fictive or putative kinship status as well. Today, however, kinship identities and effective networks are confined, in both urban and even rural areas, to families that rarely 'extend' beyond first-cousin-based households on the horizontal plane. So has the field of mutually supportive 'in-group' relations contracted, as that of negatively reciprocal 'out-group' relations has expanded. So too, in post-apartheid South Africa, the pieties of liberte, egalite, and especially African fraternite have been undermined, and the tendency toward social exclusion reinforced.