The government of poverty and the arts of survival: mobile and recombinant strategies at the margins of the South African economy

Abstract

The paper is concerned with marginal populations affected by the ‘truncated agrarian transitions’ of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries: people displaced out of land-based employment without reasonable prospects for accumulation in the non-farm economy. It analyses the forms of economic agency of people living in the migrant routes and networks connecting the shantytowns of Cape Town and the rural Eastern Cape in South Africa. It describes the artful and hybrid nature of their livelihood strategies – strategies that involve the integration from ‘below’ of urban and rural spaces, formal and informal income, and which simultaneously take shape outside the regulatory spaces conferred by the state, and make use of the rights and opportunities created by law and formality. Far from being reduced to the ‘outcast’ condition of ‘bare life’, marginalized and poor people in South Africa pursue inventive strategies on uneven terrain, cutting across the dichotomies of official discourse and teleological analysis. This allows a more nuanced analysis of the nature and specificity of the agrarian transition in South Africa.

Keywords:

• migrancy
• poverty
• de-agrarianization
• unemployment
• biopolitics
• South Africa

Sections of this paper have appeared in substantially different form, but under similar title, elsewhere: (du Toit 2011, du Toit 2012a). The research on which this paper draws was conducted over a period of ten years within a number of donor funded projects. We in particularly wish to acknowledge the support of the Chronic Poverty Research Centre (CPRC), the UK Department for International Development (DFID), the South African Treasury, USAID, the FinMark Trust and the Programme for Pro-Poor Policy Development (PSPPD) within the South African Presidency. We gratefully acknowledge our many intellectual debts to friends and colleagues, in particular Franco Barchiesi, Henry Bernstein, Ben Cousins, Colleen Crawford-Cousins, James Ferguson, Ruth Hall, Sam Hickey, Francie Lund, Hein Marais, Nicoli Nattrass, Jeremy Seekings and Barbara Tapela.

Additional information

Andries du Toit is the Director of the Institute for Poverty, Land and Agrarian Studies (PLAAS). He has a PhD in Comparative Studies from the University of Essex. His work focuses on developing a critical understanding of the politics of knowledge production in the government of poverty and marginal livelihoods. University of the Western Cape, Institute for Poverty, Land and Agrarian Studies, Private Bag X 17, Bellville, 7535 South Africa.

David Neves joined PLAAS in 2006. His research is concerned with the strategies of people coping with the consequences of structural poverty and unemployment in urban and rural contexts. Email: [email protected]