From biographies of African prophets and ordinary Christians to archipelagos of water access and mosaics of land use, and from the analysis of Satanic panics to the ‘naked story-telling’ of Khoi orature, this issue of JSAS contains the usual wide range of topics readers expect from the Journal. It is unusual, however, in its concentration of in-depth scholarship in two particular areas: religious studies and new research on HIV/AIDS. The religious studies theme is represented here in a Part Special Issue on Religious Biography containing three articles, separately introduced by Achim von Oppen and Silke Strickrodt, which explore the ways in which religious actors have engaged with the various kinds of boundaries imposed on them by colonialism and apartheid. The second cluster, on HIV/AIDS, is led by a case study that puts neoliberalism on trial for its role in the epidemic in Swaziland. This is followed by three articles that cast new light on recurrent themes of the AIDS literature – lives and livelihoods, activism and governance, truck drivers and transmission of the virus.
After the opening biography cluster, we continue the theme of religion in the first article in our general issue, which describes the role of religion in the progress of colonial Malawians on their path to new jobs and homes in Zimbabwe. Zoë Groves's ‘Urban Migrants and Religious Networks: Malawians in Colonial Salisbury, 1920–1970’ is unique in giving equal attention to three very different religious expressions popular among ‘Nyasa’ migrants – the Church of Central Africa, Presbyterian (CCAP); Yao Muslim associations; and the Nyau secret society. While studies of African Christianity have often explored the role of churches in migrant communities, Islam has been relatively neglected and Nyau has been seen as the territory of rurally based anthropologists more often than urban historians. Groves sensitively describes how these religious expressions featured in the strategies of migrants as they adapted to urban life in a country that did not always welcome them. The vital role that Malawian migrants played in the making of Salisbury, now Harare, must not be forgotten, for their history calls into question Robert Mugabe's denigration of urban minorities as ‘people without totems’, also exemplified in the exclusionary nationalism of ZANU(PF). Dancing the ‘Great Dance’, Gule Wamkulu, Nyasa migrants indelibly shaped the character of the city, their Nyau societies contributing to its rich popular performance culture, while in church and mosque they helped knit together migrant and local communities into the religious fabric of the city.
Few other events in Africa's history have rivalled the tragedy of HIV/AIDS. After nearly three decades, the study of its effects is now ripe for long-term perspectives and new agendas for action. Although the often implicitly racist medical and popular assumptions that caused many Western observers to initially place the blame for AIDS on African sexuality and culture have been thoroughly critiqued in the scholarly literature, few writers have questioned the West's deeply held economic assumptions for the role they play in the epidemic. In ‘Neoliberal Plague: The Political Economy of HIV Transmission in Swaziland’, Jason Hickel makes a convincing case that the structural violence of economic forces and, in particular, structural adjustment programmes and free trade agreements, have exacerbated the AIDS epidemic, making futile the educational programmes intended to raise awareness and change the individual behaviours that put people at risk of the disease. Using Swaziland as a case study, he argues that the high transmission rates suffered by the poor result from structural factors often beyond their control: ‘In Swaziland, economic decline and increasing rates of unemployment force men to resort to labour migration and women to resort to transactional and commercial sex, two trends that significantly increase HIV risk’. Meanwhile local and international NGOs focus on individual behaviour change as the solution to the problem. The solution lies not in making ever greater efforts to change the behaviour of those who have the least power, Hickel argues, but to directly challenge the powerful agents of market economics – ‘building alliances with the global justice movement’ to confront the World Bank, the IMF, the World Trade Organisation, transnational pharmaceutical companies and wealthy nations, as well as the priorities of the Swazi government. This is a task that most state agencies and NGOs that focus on HIV prevention have so far failed to accept as part of their role.
Nevertheless, the history of AIDS activism shows that a challenge to market dogma and corporate interests can sometimes succeed – for example, South Africa's Treatment Action Campaign (TAC) and its global support network contributed to pressure for the Doha Declaration in 2001 and the General Decision of 2003, which allowed poorer nations to import or manufacture affordable generic versions of antiretroviral drugs (Hickel points out, however, that in Swaziland these will be under threat in future trade negotiations between the US and the Swazi government). In response to the effectiveness of such groups as the TAC, scholars have generated a huge literature that examines their inner workings, their transnational support and their relations to the state (for example, see S. Robins, ‘“Long Live Zackie, Long Live”: AIDS, Activism, Science and Citizenship after Apartheid’, JSAS, 30, 3 (September 2003); and E. Grebe, ‘The Treatment Action Campaign's Struggle for AIDS Treatment in South Africa: Coalition-building through Networks’, JSAS 37, 4 (December 2011). The links these AIDS activist groups have forged with transnational NGOs often figure in claims about the erosion of the state's authority in Africa, and the TAC's challenge to former President Thabo Mbeki's denial of HIV's role in AIDS is often cited as the prime example.
In our next article, Theodore Powers examines NGOs in South Africa and their role in governance at a time when ‘increasing opportunities for international funding produced autonomous social movements that challenged the ANC's intransigence on implementing orthodox AIDS treatment in the public sector’. In ‘Institutionalising Dissent: HIV/AIDS, the Post-Apartheid State and the Limits of Transnational Governance in South Africa’, Powers argues that despite the money and power of transnational NGOs the state has been resourceful in its response. Notwithstanding its success on the international stage of the ‘AIDS denialism’ controversy, the TAC did not so easily engage with urban communities for its educational and organisational activities – its efforts were often halted or moderated by local institutions. As Powers argues, activists encounter the state's policies through a number of ‘nodes’ consisting of ‘the national, provincial, district and municipal AIDS councils, and the sub-municipal social institutions of South Africa's townships: street committees and social development forums’. One such sub-municipal institution in Khayelitsha, for example, is the South African National Civics Organisation (SANCO), a non-political umbrella organisation for groups involved in township development. Almost synonymous with ‘the community’ itself, SANCO's long history of relations with the ANC during the anti-apartheid struggle led many SANCO members to perceive AIDS activism and, especially, the TAC's stance against Mbeki's AIDS policies, as a threat to the ANC-led government.
In contrast to their mediating influence on activist groups that openly challenge government, however, subnational institutions can also help to rapidly disseminate new government AIDS policies. The change in South Africa's political leadership from Mbeki's administration to Jacob Zuma's rapidly brought about major changes in AIDS policy at community level, which Powers argues is an illustration of the state's continuing relevance.
Powers's critique of globalisation theory has emerged from his fine-meshed ethnography of AIDS activism in a township community, and our next article similarly uses intensive fieldwork, this time in a rural community, to understand the impact of AIDS on ordinary lives. Many predictions about the consequences of HIV/AIDS for lives and livelihoods across the region have until recently been assumed because we lack the data necessary to evaluate them in a meaningful way. The best kind of study – longitudinal, involving comparisons made across a long time period with a strong baseline – is difficult to achieve given the epidemic's historically recent emergence and the rarity of older studies that cover the factors of interest to scholars today. In ‘Dimensions of Vulnerability: The Impact of HIV/AIDS on Livelihoods in Southern Zimbabwe, 1986–2007’, Josphat Mushongah builds on a baseline consisting of the detailed 1986–1987 co-studies of Ian Scoones and Ken Wilson on rural households in Mazvihwa, a communal area in Zvishavane. (Scoones's recent book is discussed in the reviews section of this issue.) These studies covered an unusually full spectrum of factors – household economy, livestock and crop production, environment, health and nutrition – making it possible for Mushongah's study in 2006–2007 to support a compelling argument for household resilience, rather than inevitable decline, in the face of the epidemic.
The impact of AIDS-related morbidity and mortality in Mazvihwa has been demographically and emotionally deep. Mushongah's article combines statistical thoroughness with the insights that emerge from the personal stories of grief and struggle told to him by his informants. For example, the age-group which attained sexual maturity during the worst years of the epidemic achieved a mere 60 per cent survival rate. Given the severity of the epidemic on people of productive age, Mushongah asks if ‘the predictions of progressive and massive decline in agricultural production and food security’ have been fulfilled. He answers with an unexpectedly complex picture. While many Mazvihwa households declined and even dissolved under combined pressures from HIV/AIDS, loss of employment, orphanhood, drought and other environmental challenges – all against a backdrop of Zimbabwe's larger political and economic crises – other households survived. Moreover a few households employed innovative agricultural methods, with the help of relatively small inputs of cash or assistance, to improve their position. Mushongah concludes by suggesting a number of policy changes that could enhance household survival through careful targeting of assistance.
From the beginning of HIV's spread throughout subSaharan Africa, truck drivers have held an unenviable place in the demonology of the AIDS epidemic. Although mobile male workers have indeed played a role in the transmission of the disease, the focus of blame on African male sexuality has distracted from more important issues, such as the low wages that have forced migrant workers in the region historically to depend on multiple relationships with women, at home and away, to bear the costs of production (see Hickel, above). Truck drivers are the most mobile of workers and thus the most likely to infect or be infected by sex workers or girlfriends who supply drivers with food and accommodation as well as sex. This model is turned on its head in our next article, ‘Women in the Driver's Seat: An Exploratory Study of Perceptions and Experiences of Female Truck Drivers and their Employers in South Africa’. Scott Naysmith and Clara Rubincam interviewed transport company employers and some of the growing number of female truck drivers in South Africa, producing results that go against the grain of previous research on women in male-dominated blue collar jobs. The number of men with the necessary qualifications for truck driving jobs has been thinned by mortality from HIV/AIDS among other factors, leading some employers to consider hiring women. Employers who have never hired women as drivers give a familiar range of objections (lack of facilities for women, pregnancy, women's sexuality distracting the men, vulnerability during night shifts etc.), but employers who have hired women give a surprisingly positive account and often aim to hire more. Women are ‘softer on the trucks’, as well as more reliable, safer drivers. Employers' impressions also match gendered stereotypes, depicting women as cleaner and better dressed than male drivers and less likely to engage in risky sexual behaviour while on the road. Women drivers also assess driving jobs positively and appear to have the support of their families. Naysmith and Rubincam stress that their findings are preliminary, noting that employers' impressions notwithstanding, women in South Africa within the age range from which female truck drivers are drawn have a higher rate of HIV infection than men in the same age range.
Moving on from the politics and economics of HIV/AIDS to the politics of the democratic transition in South Africa, another kind of demonology is examined in our next article, ‘“No less a foe than Satan himself”: The Devil, Transition and Moral Panic in White South Africa, 1989–1993'. Danielle Dunbar and Sandra Swart note how a pantheon of ‘drugs, Satanism and communism’ exercised the minds of many members of the white public during the period of social anxiety just prior to the end of apartheid. Although the South African panic did not focus as strongly on allegations of ritual Satanic abuse of children as did the widespread satanic panics in the US and Britain in the 1980s, white South African children and youth were perceived as both ‘vulnerable and threatening’, with rumours and news stories sensationalising their supposed conversion to satanic covens through the usual combination of drugs, sex and rock music. ‘While the moral panic over satanism in the 1989–1993 period fed off a wider transnational satanism scare, and shared the concern over the vulnerability of children, these global concerns assumed a vernacular cast and were shaped by the specific cultural and political changes in white South Africa’. The South African white moral panic, Dunbar and Swart claim, ‘articulated a myriad of concerns regarding the current and future health of white society and broadly reflected changes in the arena of political rhetoric’. Many of these concerns reflected a sense of political betrayal felt by some members of white society during the years of negotiation between the National Party-led apartheid government and the ANC in the run-up to the elections of 1994. ‘Echoing the rhetoric around the alleged “Third Force”, a secret force of right-wing whites attempting to sabotage negotiations [between the ANC and government], [and] claims that the National Party had betrayed its people, the satanic menace had allegedly infiltrated positions of power in South Africa’.
With its rumours of a shadowy ‘third force’ and fears of government betrayal, the moral panic described by Dunbar and Swart shares its troubled context with our next article, ‘Boipatong: The Politics of a Massacre and the South African Transition’. On the night of 17 June 1992, men from the KwaMadala Hostel, a local stronghold for the Zulu-based Inkatha Freedom Party, attacked the township of Boipatong, home to a large population of ANC supporters, killing 38 men, women and children. Allegations of collusion in the massacre between Inkatha and the state caused public outrage, hastening the demise of the government and any hopes the National Party had entertained of carving out for itself a powerful minority position in a post-apartheid government. Interested in how the Boipatong massacre became the ‘founding myth’ for South Africa's transition from apartheid, James G. R. Simpson argues that ‘“Boipatong”…was successfully broadcast as an event that epitomised unending state-sponsored violence’. Although the state's involvement in the massacre was never definitively proved, the massacre ‘is broadly viewed as evidence of a third force, comprising elements within state security working covertly and illegally to undermine the ANC and its allies’. In careful detail, Simpson dissects the press coverage and political rhetoric following the massacre, as well as the testimony about the massacre given at the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, to understand the process through which Boipatong became iconic of state-sponsored violence in a way that distracted observers from the lack of forensic evidence for the state's involvement. While uncovering a broader landscape of violence in which KwaMadala hostel residents were often victims, too, Simpson convincingly shows how the massacre and its interpretation opened space so that ‘a new order could be brought much closer to realisation’ – though historical truth may have suffered in the process.
Our next two articles deal with colonial science – philology in the 1860s and social anthropology in the 1930s and 1940s – each of which enjoyed a long afterlife in controversies over the nature and potential of African societies. Prior to founding the Manchester School of social anthropology in Great Britain, the South African-born social anthropologist Max Gluckman worked at the Rhodes-Livingstone Institute in Northern Rhodesia. In the seminal study based on his early South African fieldwork, ‘Analysis of a Social Situation in Modern Zululand’ (1940), he had deftly dissected South Africa's racial and social cleavages while analysing the economic forces that held South African society together. In ‘Applied Anthropology or the Anthropology of Modernity? Max Gluckman's Vision of Southern African Society, 1930–1947’, Paul Cocks argues against the claims of previous scholars that Gluckman's subsequent work in Northern Rhodesia was a somewhat naive attempt to use applied anthropology to change the approach of colonial development policy. On the contrary, Gluckman's proposals for the reform of the Barotseland native authority and of Tonga land tenure and agriculture represented a continuation of his overall project to understand how African societies were becoming integrated into the world economy. This vision also informed his plans, as director of the Rhodes-Livingstone Institute, to understand the ways that Africans pursued and created new forms of modernity in south central Africa despite the constraints of colonial labour exploitation and social segregation.
The next article describes a very different science, philology, and its very different colonial agenda in 1860s South Africa. In ‘Wilhelm Bleek and the Khoisan Imagination: A Study of Censorship, Genocide and Colonial Science’, Hermann Wittenberg considers Bleek's translation of Khoisan folk tales, Reynard the Fox in South Africa, or Hottentot Fables and Tales, as a foundational moment in South African literary history. Bleek's decision to censor the ‘Rabelaisian’ content of these tales reflected a high Victorian mission to civilise, while his rendering of them into fables, or moral tales for children, reflected his theories of language, race and the ranking of cultures. ‘…Bleek's editorial handling of the “naked” elements of Khoi orature was shaped by a certain Victorian prurience, as well as a desire to promote the aesthetic affinity of the “Hottentot fables” to European folk literature’. Bleek's positing of Khoi cultural affinity with Europe (compared to the cultural distance he saw between ‘the Bantu’ and ‘the European’) parallelled his romanticisation of the Khoisan as innocent and child-like. The ‘naked story-telling’ that Bleek left out can be reconstructed using a neglected collection of Khoi stories, which the German ethnographer Leonhard Schultze gathered in the early twentieth century. Wittenberg makes his case for Bleek's destructive censorship of the wit and intelligence of Khoisan storytellers through a comparison with ‘the abundance of sexual, bawdy and other risqué content’ faithfully recorded by Schultze.
In the next two articles we travel north to Malawi and Mozambique to consider access to water and land, increasingly under threat in both rural and urban settings. While Theodore Powers in his article, above, argued for the continuing power of the state relative to international NGOs in the politics of AIDS in South Africa, Maria Rusca and Klaas Schwartz discover a different balance of power in the services sector where, since the 1980s, international NGOs have increasingly taken over control of development activities from government institutions. Using case studies of water services in Maputo, Mozambique, and Lilongwe, Malawi, they use ‘hollow state’ theory to make sense of how governments subcontract taxpayer-funded services to non-governmental organisations in the charitable and private sectors. Unlike governments, however, NGOs do not automatically enjoy legitimacy in the eyes of the populations they attempt to serve. Rusca and Schwartz define two types of legitimacy: ‘output legitimacy’ which is based on achieving successful projects and ‘normative legitimacy’ which is based on fulfilling their mission statements. They describe African cities such as Lilongwe and Maputo as ‘archipelago-like’, with small islands of water provision scattered across an urban sea of largely inadequate or nonexistent access to water. In this context NGOs select communities for their projects based on the criterion of likely success – ‘…on the expected ability-to-pay for water services of the residents’, rather than on the level of actual need. The resulting ‘success’ of the project contributes to output legitimacy which in turn is required for legitimacy in the eyes of those who fund the NGOs, as well as the governments that contract public services to them.
While Schwartz and Rusca evoke islands and archipelagos to describe water scarcity, the author of our next article employs a different set of metaphors to evoke land scarcity and the importance of history in the resulting contestations. In ‘A Spatio-Temporal Mosaic of Land Use and Access in Central Mozambique’, Michael Madison Walker provides a richly historical picture of the land in Sussundenga district of central Mozambique, using the term ‘mosaic’ to capture the overlap of its material capacities with the layers of authority that determine who gains access to which pieces of land and why. ‘Although all land in Mozambique is legally defined as state property, the state does not exert absolute sovereignty over the allocation of land, nor do Mozambicans solely articulate their claims to land through appeals to the state or the land law’. As Walker argues, ‘Sussundenga's spatio-temporal mosaic connects a patchwork of settlement patterns, land use rights, authority over land, and land use strategies constituted by the various historical moments when individuals or groups migrated and received land, the forms of authority they draw on to substantiate their claims, and the location of their fields in relation to other fields, homes, farms, water resources, and forests’. Although some Sussundenga residents enjoy legitimacy as pre-colonial ‘owners of the soil’, others lay claims based on completely different histories. These can involve displacement and migration, including experiences of colonial expropriation, post-colonial collectivisation and the ‘villagisation’ that took place during the conflict between the Frelimo government and Renamo insurgents – the latter a time when people ‘cultivated in fear’ of being caught by soldiers. Today, access to land reflects a postwar period in which government seeks to attract foreign and domestic investors – the context in which the Mozambican parliament devised a new land law in 1997 which, because it recognises a huge variety of local rights and practices requires claimants to draw on multiple forms of authority in contests with others for access to land.
Our final article returns to the critique of neoliberalism. In ‘The 2010 World Cup in South Africa: A Millennial Capitalist Moment’, Shaheed Tayob argues that for South Africa as a new majority-led nation emerging from years of apartheid, the 2010 World Cup appeared as an opportunity to affirm a new national identity and promote the new country to an international audience. As President Nelson Mandela remarked: ‘The World Cup will help unify people – if there is one thing in this planet that has the power to bind people, it is soccer’. This aim was diligently pursued in ostentatious ‘sacrificial’ consumptive activities leading up to the event, including the ‘Fly the Flag for Football campaign’, which aimed to hand out 47-million South African flags in a country with a population of only around 50-million people. Meanwhile the millennial promise of the event was expressed in the ‘grandiose rhetoric’ of Danny Jordaan, CEO of the organising committee: ‘Clearly football represents hope, football represents joy, football represents achievement, football represents progress for many people on this continent’. It also represented a vast diversion of resources and, after the event ‘…a realisation that large amounts of public resources had been invested in exchange for the private gain of a select few’. The international football association (FIFA) earned record profits, and a few South African beneficiaries also profited. The majority of South Africans, however, saw no change in their conditions of life, while ‘the feeling of unity and nationhood proved to be fleeting as real life concerns re-surfaced in a landscape now dotted with stadiums too large for domestic requirements’. Tayob skilfully employs ideas from John and Jean Comaroff's work on millennial capitalism and Bataille's notions of excessive expenditure and ‘sacrifice’, comparing South Africa's spending on the 2010 World Cup to the nineteenth-century Xhosa cattle-killing, which ended in starvation rather than fulfilment of its millennial promise of salvation.