‘Anthropologists Are Talking’: About Anthropology and Post-Apartheid South Africa

Abstract

In 2010, South Africa hosted the first World Cup in soccer ever to take place on the African continent. Twenty years after the fall of Apartheid, South Africa presents a series of fractured and contradictory images to the outside world. It is, on the one hand, an economic powerhouse in sub-Saharan Africa, but on the other hand a society in which socio-economic inequalities have continued to flourish and increase. What can anthropology tell us about contemporary South Africa? As part of an ongoing series in public anthropology, Professor Thomas Hylland Eriksen and Postdoctoral Fellow Sindre Bangstad sat down for a public conversation with Professors John L. and Jean Comaroff in The House of Literature in Oslo, Norway, on 28 September 2010.

Keywords:

• South Africa
• apartheid
• post-apartheid
• ethnicity
• nationalism
• xenophobia

Acknowledgements

The authors thank Cato Fossum for transcribing this conversation, Rune Flikke for introducing the Comaroffs at the House of Literature, and the editors at Ethnos for their useful comments and suggestions. Financial support for the Comaroffs' visit from the Fritt Ord Foundation, the Department of Social Anthropology at the University of Oslo and the Norwegian Institute for International Affairs (NUPI) is gratefully acknowledged.

Notes

See Bourdieu (1977: 167)

See Bourdieu (1984: 232)

The rabbi in question was Dr André Ungar (1930–), the Hungarian-born head of the Jewish Reform Congregation in Port Elizabeth, a Holocaust survivor who had arrived in Port Elizabeth from London as a 25-year-old in 1955. He spoke out against the iniquities of apartheid. Having faced a subsequent ‘barrage of telephone calls, personal visits, emergency meetings, threats, reproofs [and] anonymous letters’, he was ordered by the regime to leave the country in December 1956. The South African Jewish Board of Deputies publicly distanced itself from Unger, and did not protest his expulsion order. See Mendelsohn and Shain (2008:142–143). Ungar eventually settled in New Jersey, USA, where he has reformed and served as a reformist rabbi untill the present day, and took part in the civil rights struggle of the 1950s and 60s. Ungar revisited South Africa and Port Elizabeth for the first time in 54 years in early 2010.

See for instance Nadime Gordimer's short story, A Chip of Glass Ruby (1965).

David Webster (1945-1989) was a South African anthropologist and anti-apartheid activist who taught at the University of the Witwatersrand in Johannesburg. Webster was assasinated by a hit squad from the covert apartheid government agency the Civil Cooperation Bureau (CCB), led by Ferdi Bernard, outside his home in 1989. Barnard was sentenced in 1998 to two life counts plus 63 years for numerous crimes, including the assasination of Webster. Webster taught at the University of Manchester in the UK for two years from 1976 to 1978. For Webster's biography, cf. Frederikse (1998).

This features as a central argument in Imperialism: The Highest Stage of Capitalism: A Popular Outline (Lenin 1985), originally dating from 1914 to 1917.

The former British protectorate of Bechuanaland became the independent state of Botswana in 1966. It provided a safe haven for South African anti-apartheid activists after independence.

Under apartheid policy and legislation, such as the Group Areas Act (1950), the Bantu Authorities Act (1951), and the Promotion of Bantu Self-Government Act (1959), it became an official aim in South Africa to minimize all kinds of social intercourse between South Africans of various ‘racial’ and/or ‘ethnic’ backgrounds.

The South African Broadcasting Corporation (SABC) started regular television transmissions only in 1976, after prolonged debates over the moral and ethical implications such broadcasts would have on the conservative Afrikaaner Christian populations. The SABC remained a loyal mouthpiece for the apartheid government untill the 1990s.

The classical academic formulation of South African un-exceptionality in relation to colonialism in Africa is that of Mamdani (1996).

For Tutu's biography, see Allen (2006).

The post-apartheid Constitution of South Africa of 1996, itself the result of prolonged political negotiations starting in 1990, was modelled on the US, the French and the Indian Constitutions, as well as on international human rights legislation. It includes controversial and contested provisions for so-called ‘third-generation rights’, i.e. socio-economic rights, in addition to classical liberal rights. See Ebrahim (1999).

See Barth (1969).

The paradox to which Prof. Hylland Eriksen alludes here is that the Barthian instrumentalist paradigm of analysing ethnicity in South Africa was appropriated precisely by Marxist-orientated anthropologists, such as Emile Boonzaier and John Sharp, with whom the Comaroffs were loosely aligned, since it provided a useful analytical instrument with which to debunk apartheid mythologies concerning cultural identity. Barth himself was of course anything but a Marxist, as the history of his reception in Norwegian anthropological circles attests. See Boonzaier and Sharp (1988) for the classical formulation of this in the context of late apartheid.

The South African term ‘kwerekwere’ (plural: ‘makwerekwere’ in Sotho-Tswana and ‘amakwerekwere’ in Nguni languages) refers to ‘unwanted’ immigrants from elsewhere on the African continent. While there is debate about its derivation in linguistic circles, the term is usually taken to be an onomatopoeic reference to the ‘incomprehensible babble’ of ‘foreigner's speech.’

See Benjamin (1978).

See Bond (2000) and Marais (1998).

See Gevisser (2007).

Keynesian, after the British economist John Maynard Keynes (1883–1946), the founder of modern macroeconomics, who in The General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money (Keynes 1936) argued that full employment is determined by effective demand and requires government spending on public works in order to stimulate this. Keynesian thinking was central to the public works programmes under Franklin D. Roosevelt in the post-depression USA as well as in Europe in the 1930s. It was also a cornerstone of the social democratic reconstruction and expansion of the European welfare state post World War II (1939–1945).

Directed by Pete Travis and released in 2009, the movie stars William Hurt and Chiwetel Ejiofor.

The former trade union leader Lula da Silva (1945– ), of the Brazilian Workers Party [Partido dos Trabalhadores, PT], stepped down in 2010 after two consecutive periods as the most popular president in Brazilian history. In the elections of October 2010, da Silva's Chief of Staff since 2005, Mrs Dilma Rouseff (1947– ), was elected as the first female president of Brazil.