What middle class? The shifting and dynamic nature of class position

Abstract

Class categorisation should not only be informed by academic pursuits but by the lived experiences of those being categorised. A human or community-centred definition of class will illustrate the complexities of class experience and will thus present a dynamic conceptualisation. Through two life-history interviews of two black women from South Africa, this article illustrates that middle-classness for blacks during apartheid was marred with constant shifts related to the socio-economic and political impermanence of class position. Continuous negotiation driven by the need to be included in one's own community and the effects of being racially othered in interaction with whites and white spaces influences these shifts. In conclusion, the article argues that being middle class and black is heterogeneously experienced and thus complex.

Keywords:

• class
• black middle class
• life history

1. Introduction

Most recently, South Africa (SA) has seen a growth in studies trying to understand the black middle class. These have been varied in their approaches and intentions. There have been those that are more retail oriented, populist and reductionist in their approach and conclusions. These have reduced the experience of the black middle class to an undifferentiated mass of conspicuous consumers, foregrounding the tradition of conceptualising class and general life experiences of black people as homogeneous and fixed. Other studies have been more theoretically grounded and progressive in their contribution to knowledge production and societal illuminations of experiences of class, meanings of class and the complexities of the language used to denote individual social class positioning (Phadi & Ceruti, 2011; Phadi & Manda, 2010; Krige, 2011b).

Since the end of apartheid there has been a move to understand the black middle class. This is so especially after the enactment of legislations to address past inequalities like affirmative action and the Black Economic Empowerment imperatives. With these changes SA saw an exponential growth in the black middle class. Given the various conceptions of what constitutes a black middle class it is difficult to reconcile studies on its size and constitution (Visagie, 2011). However, research evidence indicates a growth post 1994 (Krige, 2011a; Visagie, 2011). Although this change has been recorded as positive by many it has nevertheless been accompanied by growing inequalities, with SA's Gini coefficient ‘increasing from 0.64 in 1995 to 0.72 in 2005’ (Bhorat, Van Der Westhuizen and Jacobs 2009:12). These increasing levels of inequality have been more intra-racial and illustrate a shift from the historical inter-racial inequalities known for apartheid SA (Seekings & Nattrass, 2002; Leibbrant et al., 2010). This should not, however, be read to mean that racial inequality has been eroded (Keswell, 2010; Gumede, 2011; Leibbrandt, Wegner and Arden, 2011), but that growing numbers of black people are in the middle class with a few more in the upper class (Seekings & Nattrass, 2002; Leibbrant et al., 2010).

This article is based on life-history interviews of two women who reluctantly self-identify as middle class. Given the relatively high educational attainment of both participants,¹ their understanding of class was an invocation of theoretical understandings of the concept lived experiences of racial segregation and renegotiation of social positioning. Thus their general conception of their social position as middle class was critically derived from their shifting experiences based on where they were and who was present (Lacy 2007). Being black in apartheid SA meant their being middle class came with constant complex negotiations of boundaries with community members that were not middle class and spaces that were middle class but white, thus raising racial dynamics not experienced at home. Although they experienced some changes in their class position in contemporary SA that are not discussed in this article, their experiences were marred by constant shifts and everyday negotiations. These complexities were a result of the socio-economic and political impermanence of their middle-class position, competing social inclusion needs and also the constantly shifting membership to this class.

This article provides a discussion of how these two women experienced class and how the flux nature of the position provides significant pointers for a critical re-examining of how the black middle class is lived and experienced from a subjective point of view. The next section provides the theoretical discussion of the concept class and middle class. The discussion that follows then presents a brief explanation of the methodology, which is followed by a detailed discussion of the findings from the two life histories. Finally, a brief conclusion and summary is provided.

2. Class: Some theoretical discussions

The notion of conspicuous consumption that is linked to the black middle class erroneously suggests that blacks as members of this class consume for the sake of consumption. Conspicuous consumption has been defined as purchasing a product not for its utility but for displaying wealth and purchasing power, where the ‘price becomes the only factor of any significance to him or her’ (Mason, 2007:26). On the contrary, Krige's (2012) reading of Soweto suggests that on ‘a closer look at the longer histories of social mobility, social distinction and consumption provides us with a more complex and nuanced reading of the possible meanings of consumption’. Krige (2012) then suggests that consumption linked to house building and renovation in Soweto is more a practice to signify the residences presence as habitants of the city and their different class positioning in relation to their broader community. He accurately concludes that the one-dimensional emphasis of the conspicuous element of consumption among the black middle class is a result of racialisation of the meaning of middle-classness (Krige, 2012).

This idea of a racialization of black middle classness is critically examined in how Krige (2012) analyses the works of Brandel-Syrier, who writes about social class in Reeftown. Krige (2012:32) illustrates that Brandel-Syrier narrowly argues that ‘the term African middle class can have no meaning in terms of association and social interaction with the European middle class'. Krige takes Brandel-Syrier to task by critically illustrating that the flaws in her argument are homogenising and fixing the experiences or being of the people of Reeftown to their rural past and not to their varied and complex experiences of residing in Reeftown. Krige's critique here is seminal as it is in line with a broader challenge of narrow scholarship that tends to fix the identity and experience of blacks. A similar critique was levelled at Bozzoli's conceptualisation of African societies as being inherently patriarchal compared with white societies (Tshoaedi, 2008). Brandel Syrier's refusal to see the Reef-town middle class as heterogeneous is problematic. Alternatively, in an examination of the American black middle class, Lacy (2007) maintains that to have an unbiased understanding of this group there is a need to make a distinction among the black middle class by looking at their income, wealth, housing, level of education and lifestyle. This will reduce unfounded generalisations and the potential perpetuation of historically racial stereotypes (Lacy, 2007:3). This also allows for an understanding of the complex ways in which the middle class manage their lives when they live among different classes of blacks and in middle class spaces that are racialised.

3. Methodology

This article is a result of a collaborative project on the black middle class.² In an attempt to make sense of the concept of the black middle class, this particular part of the study employed the qualitative approach. The article moves from the understanding that the black middle class had been in existence in SA before 1994 (Southall, 2004; Crankshaw, 2005; Mabandla, 2013), although in varied and shifting forms. This consideration is further attested to by the data gathered from the two life histories of women interviewed for this study.

To comprehend the unfolding histories (Hubbard, 2000) of the women, I employed in-depth life-history interviews. The life-history approach was useful in eliciting the patterns of the participants' social relations and processes that shaped them (Bertaux & Kohli, 1984:215). The data can thus be looked at from two perspectives; the lived life that presents the time line that the women shared as they narrated their factual life histories; these factual data are accompanied by the subjective accounts of their lives. These accounts are understood to be located in time and space, thus weaving the storytellers' experiences to the broader socio-economic and political context (Hubbard, 2000).

I was particularly interested in experiences of women who grew up in a middle-class family and were currently positioned in the same class. As a result, the selection of these two participants was purposive and convenient. This choice of sampling was influenced by the fact that there are multiple studies on experiences of class mobility but a dearth of research on a historical analysis of experiences of those born from the black middle class and who continued to be positioned in a similar class. The intention of the study was to get a sense of life experiences from women's perspectives; thus, the findings are not representative of any larger population group but are a personal representation from the women's perspective and my synthesis to the larger social, historical and economic processes that impact the black middle class. This is made possible because ‘life histories may focus on individual experiences, but that focus does not preclude an examination of social structure’ (Hubbard, 2000:4). The synthesis with previous research in the analysis and discussion section of this article attests to this broader examination.

The point of departure for the interviews were to get a sense of how these women got to be middle class by looking back and through sharing their contemporary experiences. The aim was to get accurate descriptions of the women's life trajectories so as to uncover the patterns of social relations, meaning-making and the varied processes that influenced them. Such an understanding provides a deeper explanation of the complexities involved in meaning-making around their being black and middle class.

The interviews were conducted between Johannesburg and Pretoria respectively depending on the availability of the two participants. They were conducted between February and April 2012. Three interviews were conducted with each participant and each interview lasted for one hour to one hour and 30 minutes. All interviews were tape recorded and permission³ to do so was requested and given prior to the interviews. The life-history interviews provided Aganang and Mosa⁴ with an opportunity to share their stories. Regarding who are these women, Aganang answered this question thus:

I am the fourth child, second daughter in a family of six children; I was born in a small village in the North West Province outside Rustenburg. When I say small village I really mean a small village, because everybody knew everybody else. (Interview, March 2012)

In communities where people intimately know each other, the need to belong is signified; as later narrated by Aganang, this idea of belonging becomes central in how she experiences black middle-classness as shifting and marred with constant complexities. She also reiterated that:

Although my father was a teacher he also did some farming a little bit of cultivation and little bit of stock farming, so much so that when we went to school he would sell some of his life stock to pay our school fees. (Interview, March 2012)

This information is important in how Aganang thinks about what it was to be middle class and black and her later critique of the Black Diamonds label, discussed later in the article. Mosa answered the same question thus:

Mosa: I would define myself as born and breed in Johannesburg in the township all my life, that's what I would say am a city kid … I was born at Bridge man but now it's a private hospital and it is in Mayfair, via Brixton – Garden City.

Grace: So it used to be a public hospital? And when was that?

Mosa: 1958! So am not sure if it is because my parents were both black say middle class.? They were public servants my father was trained as a teacher but never worked as a teacher. He worked for the city council of Johannesburg, he was a senior municipal officer and my mother was a nurse at a clinic in Soweto, they both worked in the township, my mother walked to work in Mofolo South clinic my father could walk, but he used to drive to work, he had a car. (Interview, February 2012)

In Mosa's response to who she is there is already a tension seen in her hesitance to define her parents as middle class: ‘my parents were both say middle class or what?’. This not fully identifying as middle class is a constant theme throughout the life histories of both women. The rest of the interviews focused on the following themes:

• The beginning (where they grew up, their parents, siblings).

• Their neighbourhoods.

• The socio-economic position of their family in relation to the broader community.

• School years (primary, secondary and university).

• Work experiences.

On further exploration of these general themes opportunities emerged for probing that provided insight into the particular experiences of class at particular life stages. The interviews were illuminating; they revealed an especially interesting history of being black and middle class in apartheid SA. The three themes discussed in this article emerged through the narrating of the women's life histories and were subsequently foregrounded as significant during analysis.

4. Discussion of the two life histories

Most research undertaken on the black middle class is either quantitative or general in that it does not use the life-history approach to understand the phenomenon from the point of view of women. The only work that interrogates women's experiences and negotiations of class positions is the 2009 documentary emanating from the Classifying Soweto Study by Phadi (2010) and her follow-up 2011 article. This limitation as I indicate earlier further influenced my decision to examine women's experiences of being black and middle class.

Both Mosa and Aganang came from middle-class families. Although their self-identification as middle class was critically defined for Aganang because of its impermanence, it was a defining factor in how she experienced her early life. The same is true for Mosa; she suggested that even though being middle class did not openly define how she interacted with her community, the social positioning of her parents facilitated how her life experiences penned out.

4.1 Am I middle class? A critical engagement with the conception of one as middle class

Research on class usually takes it for granted that academic conceptions of the term are similar to those held by the broader society. Again, the characteristics used to denote membership into a particular class are also usually assumed to be uncomplicated, and unquestioningly accepted by those who are theorised about. Recent studies into the middle class, however, have began to illustrate the intricacies involved in self-identifying as middle class, the language used to refer to class and other factors that impact on belonging to and being able to identify with that class (Phadi, 2010; Phadi & Ceruti, 2011 Krige, 2011b). These complexities were clearly visible in how Aganang responded to my request for her to participate in the study. Her response revealed a deep questioning of the usually blind characterisation of particular people as belonging to this class because they share similar features with other members of the class.

When she wrote back questioning whether she was middle class and how I came to that conclusion, I initially thought she was not interested in participating; however, on close attention it became clear that this questioning was embedded in her history and the history of the social, economic and political context of her upbringing and again on her level of education – she had a PhD. She therefore unsurprisingly responded with the following question to my request: ‘Am I middle class? What constitutes middle class?’. Her questioning was based on how contemporary discourses on the black middle class tend to emphasise black middle-classness as a post-1994 phenomenon, as linked specifically to conspicuous consumption and thus positioning the black middle-class experience as different to other racial group class experiences. Aganang's critique of narrow conceptions of black middle-classness is a constant thread in her life history. Her narrative rejects an idea of heterogeneous experiences of class by blacks and re-asserts the notion of the existence of a black middle class in pre-1994 SA. These assertions are visible in how her narrative emphasises the shifting and constant negotiation of her class position. In her questioning of her social class position she also said:

Do we (blacks) belong to a different middle class from other racial groups? If the class division is highly determined by finances, where does social way of life fit into all this? What drives the classification of people as middle class? Is it resources, way of life, occupation? What about all the other kinds of wealth that is not classifiable in the western sense. Simply put where does the western and non-Western approach meet here? (Email communication, February)

Although this quote might initially suggests a view of middle-class experience that is racially homogeneous, at the end Aganang's narration of her life history is told from a restorative stance. Aganang's standpoint here intends to illustrate that apartheid engineering and its thinking of the black experience as homogeneous was not true of her experiences then and now. Her narration was thus both reflective and constitutive as she tries to foreground differential racial and cultural experiences of class from the factual position and from a reflective perspective. Her narration is in line with what Crankshaw (2005) and Krige (2011a) refer to when talking to undifferentiated black experience during apartheid and the conceptualisation of the black middle class as engaged in conspicuous consumption. For example, according to Henderson's (1999) research based in America, racial homogenising is as a result of how, because of the history of racial oppression, low-status and high-status blacks are usually lumped together as an undifferentiated mass. Although this essentialising of the black experience was especially true during apartheid, in contemporary SA race is still signified given how different racial groups experience access as determined by how they were positioned during apartheid (Southall, 2004:522). So the social way of life according to Aganang is still determined by racial disadvantage for the black middle class.

Aganang's response above also raises questions about the assumptions we make as academics when we classify those we study. A similar discussion in Phadi & Ceruti (2011) is used to illustrate the significance of theorising from below and the importance of the historical development of concepts signifying their specific contexts. To illustrate the importance of theorising from below, Phadi & Ceruti (2011: 84) contend that the segregation between academic-conceptual meanings of class from its popular usage-based meanings is not viable in the case of class, because social experiences and the self-conscious articulation of this experience form an important and indispensable aspect of the theoretical concept of class. Thus the conceptualisation of class ‘demands the inclusion of popular conceptions'.

At the heart of Aganang's contention to her identification as middle class was her outrage at the public discourse that links the black middle class to conspicuous consumption and the limitation of the Black Diamonds label. Black Diamonds is a concept emerging from market research with a focus on ‘individual consumption patterns as an indicator of class (or consumer market segment) rather than on household income or ownership patterns' (Krige, 2011a:297). This narrow conception and its increased use in public discourse on the black middle class is why, to a large extent, Aganang is critical of the black middle-class label in contemporary SA. The label was equally criticised in more progressive analyses of class (Krige, 2011a).

While arguments of conspicuous consumption and the black middle class were present as early as the 1950s in the United States (Frazier, 1957), they are not representative and thus cannot be assumed to represent the middle-class experience of all blacks. Notions that blindly assume that the black middle class engages blindly in conspicuous consumption are a result of stereotyping analysis that fails to critically engage the deep impacts of the homogenising policies of high apartheid, where the class characteristics of blacks were ignored (Crankshaw, 2005), and theorising without an investigation into social meanings of particular practices (Krige, 2011a). Thus Krige (2011a:277) calls for ‘more contextual and multi-level interpretations of economic and financial practices and processes such as consumption’.

The Black Diamonds conception was equally questioned in 2005 when it was first put into circulation. This label was not acceptable for Aganang as it seemed too homogeneous and suggested that the emergence of a black middle class was a wholly post-apartheid phenomenon; this is similarly argued by Mabandla (2013). Aganang's reference to the Semes and Motsepes and the question of whether, for our understanding of social position, it counts which social position your parents occupy is important in indicating the historically racialised way class is defined in SA. Again this historicisation is important in how she tells the story of who she is, and how she identified as middle class at times and not at other times. Aganang's response also illustrates her sharp reading of the flaws in contemporary public discourses on the black middle class and its unspoken assumptions that the history of the black middle class is non-existent, insignificant and not to be engaged with. Her contention demands that we broaden our view of black society and thus the different ways of being that racialised access meant for the black middle class, especially during apartheid and still in contemporary SA.

Given the racialised nature of apartheid SA, class was experienced as an uncomfortable and shifting identifier because of its impermanence and convoluted nature in SA, thus leading to a cautious identification with it as a categorisation. The flux of the concept came up in two particularly revealing ways in the two life histories; this impermanence and complexity of class position like in Phadi & Ceruti (2011) study of class in Soweto was identified in comparison with others and with their past. In his theorising on boundaries and class among the black middle class in America, Lacy (2007) found something similar to what Phadi refers to. He found that middle-class blacks had to not only negotiate their racial identity but had to manage how they interacted with members of lower classes in their own community; these interactions ‘shape middle class blacks conceptions of who they are’ (Lacy 2007:9). The following subsection captures the two discussions that illustrate how these two women's conception of who they are was influenced by the distinct spaces they occupied and principles they came into contact with in their everyday lives.

4.2 Managing difference and negotiating inclusion

It was confusing for Aganang when she was young to comprehend why her parents insisted that she was not any different from the other children, when she could clearly see that they were different. At the time of the confusion she did not link the differences to class, but it became apparent as she grew older that her father's education and wealth had a lot to do with the difference she felt when growing up. Aganang said:

the village where I grew up there was this thing were children grew up with their grandparents or sometimes they grew up without parents because their parents were in Johannesburg working but with us we had both parents, that was a source of difference even though my parents especially my father used to hammer the fact that we were not different from the other children but it was funny because whilst he was saying we are no different you see difference every day, you go home there is your mom you go home there is your dad the other kids don't have mom and dad, so how can we not be different. (Interview, March 2012)

The difference she is referring to had to do with the effects the migrant labour system had on families, where children were primarily raised by grandparents. Middle-classness in such communities allowed for the black nuclear family to remain intact, as indicated in the following quote. So for Aganang this meant she was not like everyone else around her and thus she had to constantly negotiate how to be in contradictory ways, as she explained:

You go home there is a car the other parents don't have cars and father says you are not different you go home come month end your father and mother possibly you too get into this car you go to town to buy groceries you do all these things that the other kids don't do but your father says you are not different, I think what he was instilling in us was humility – be humble don't think you are better off materially, don't think you are better off in any other way. (Interview, March 2012)

This lesson at being humble was an interesting way of negotiating their middle-class position in a community that was not middle class. This parental negotiation of class difference by instilling a certain kind of behaviour was similarly experienced by Mosa. Although like Aganang the difference was present, she did not realise how deep it went in terms of the everyday experiences of those around her. She shared a moment when this difference was made clearer. Mosa said:

At standard 2 the teacher asked us to talk about something that we did at home and I said in my bedroom I was saying something that I did in my bedroom and the whole class was wow you have your own bedroom it was strange that nobody had their own bedroom and I was like I thought this was what happens in other families. (Interview, February 2012)

With Mosa's experience, even though the difference was somewhat downplayed even when it was clearly visible in everyday experiences and observation of others around them, it influenced who they became. Again this difference was observed in the food they had access to as compared with the other children. According to Phadi & Ceruti (2011) community-wide comparisons are significant in how class is defined and how one positions themselves in relation to others. This is apparent in how Aganang understood the social position of her family when she was young. Although the food they had access to was supposedly more nutritious, it was different, thus leading to further negotiation of who she was in relation to others. Aganang shares an experience where she and her siblings questioned why their mother did not work in the kitchens so that they could also eat dikokola (dried bread), saying the following to illustrate this point:

 … we used to have this dikokola, dried bread. Parents who worked as domestic workers took bread that was left over from the table, and would put butter and jam; red jam dried it up (the bread) until the time that they wanted to send it home. There was these kombis or trucks that would take boxes, parcels back home so the mother or the father would send that big box which would have clothing and food. So we had this dried bread which was called dikokola and remember in our village we didn't have a shop, shops were a few kilometres away so we did not have the luxury of having fresh bread so what I remember was that because my mother was not working as a domestic worker my father was not working as a domestic worker we were envious we wanted dried bread we wanted dikokola. (Interview, March 2012)

Comparison and wanting to belong to those around you was experienced deeply by Aganang whose experience of wanting dikokola, which was basically leftover food from the madam's table instead of the fresh bread and dumplings her mother made, was an indication of how being differently positioned as middle class in a non-middle-class environment was somewhat uncomfortably experienced. This explains how the struggle against apartheid was successful in rendering class and gendered struggles insignificant (Ramphele, 2000).

This experience of being different taught Mosa and Aganang not to openly identify with the class position of their family. Given that blacks were restricted to townships and homelands whether they could afford to live elsewhere, they were forced to reside with their own race even though they might have been different with regards to social class. ‘Under apartheid, the class divisions within urban African society were “compressed” by a range of policies that ignored occupational class divisions among Africans' (Crankshaw, 2005:354). For example, the ‘Apartheid Group Areas Act forced the black middle class to live alongside workers' (Phadi & Ceruti, 2011:93). This is another reason why class was underplayed in black communities during those years and an inclusion that emphasised racial belonging was emphasised instead. This meant their experiences were unlike those of the black middle class in America, who Lacy (2007) suggests engaged in exclusionary boundary work – to illustrate they were different to poor blacks. In the case of Mosa and Aganang they were barred by racial laws that controlled their movement and integration to any other group, and thus they engaged in a more integrationist's negotiation of their class position with that of the various positions of members of their communities. This underplaying of differences of class and gender were undertaken to focus energies on racial oppression (Ramphele, 2000; Krige, 2012). The experiences presented by Mosa and Aganang therefore suggest that these supposedly homogeneous communities experienced class position in complex ways. Mayers (1977, quoted in Phadi & Ceruti, 2011:86) ‘illustrates that class stratification manifests in an oppressed environment’. This stratification remains true whether it is acknowledged as present or not.

4.3 Managing difference, negotiating racial exclusion, and being the other middle class

The positions of these two women also illustrate the broader racialisation of relations and social position of the time; they could not openly be middle class in their communities of origin. This was also true when they were in apartheid-engineered white spaces. Even though with regards to class positioning they were similar to most whites, they still could not self-identify with the middle-class position as occupied and lived by whites in similar ways. The privileging of white middle classes during apartheid meant for both Mosa and Aganang that in comparison the privilege and access they experienced in relation to their communities of origin was disadvantaged in comparison with the experiences of the white middle class, thus they were more similar to the black working classes than they could be to the white middle class. This meant they could not even begin to think of what Lacy (2007) refers to as inclusionary boundary work, which means that in America the ‘middle class blacks engage in inclusionary-work to establish social unity – to show that middle class blacks are much like the white middle class' (Lacy 2007:76).

This difference is illustrated when Aganang and Mosa went to study at Wits. For Mosa this happened at the height of the students' revolts of the 1970s, which denotes an era where racial difference was signified as compared with deracialised class unity. During high apartheid, this was facilitated by discriminatory state policies (Crankshaw, 2005). This further explains why at this time in their lives they identified more with those back home than their white middle-class counterparts. The difference they experienced when they came to Wits attested yet again to the impermanence and complex class position they were meant to occupy. For Aganang, who had undertaken her undergraduate degree at the then University of the North,⁵ coming up to Wits for a postgraduate degree opened her eyes to yet another shift in her ability to identify herself as middle class; she was not the same middle class as the white middle class. Her experience of coming to Wits started with an undervaluing of her degree; she was rejected entry into an honours programme because her third-year degree from Turfloop was viewed as equivalent to a second-year course at Wits. This different valuing was central to apartheid engineering. White and black education was driven by distinct policies, as was access and mobility. Aganang also shares how this was made possible through apartheid state policies:

The Bantu Education Act was passed in 1953, now the extension of Bantu education Act meant that the Bantu Education Act is extended to universities where I think people like Dr Motlana and his contemporaries studied at Wits but then that privilege or right was taken and therefore we couldn't just come. We needed a ministerial permit. (Interview, April 2012)

At the centre of apartheid engineering was a move to strip blacks of ideas of heterogeneity. Despite the fact that ethnic difference was used to denote difference among blacks, important analytical differences among ethnic groups like class and educational background were concealed by how blacks were defined as an undifferentiated group (Crankshaw, 2005; Grosfoguel, 2004). Again the project to distinguish blacks through different ethnic groups was mainly to further apartheid, ’determined to divide the non-white majority and secure white supremacy’ (Henrard, 2002:49). This attempt at heterogenising blacks was nothing but a continuation of racialising blacks. Therefore the government, as Aganang explains, did away with state acknowledgement of African class difference through ‘a range of policies that ignored occupational class divisions among Africans' (Crankshaw, 2005:354). The absurdity of apartheid policies were also experienced by Aganang in how blacks from outside SA were provided more privileges as compared with her who was a SA. The following quote from Aganang indicates how this was experienced:

now the fascinating thing about the ministerial permit was I am in Rustenburg but I need to go to the South African embassy in Mafikeng to go and get a permit to allow me as a person from an ‘independent’ country to (laughs) to study, well it's funny now, actually there was a policy confusion because if you were from an ‘independent’ country you were supposed to have honorary access. For example the three women who were lecturing at the University of Bophuthatswana came here on that ticket, so they were guests of the South African Government. They lived in one of the residences, they were allowed privileges that your regular black Soweto person wouldn't be allowed because look this is a white country but I was treated like your regular black because I needed a ministerial consent and a ministerial consent would have to state that the course that I wanted to do is not on offer in our university. (Interview, April 2012)

This quote illustrates the limits of class position when you are not permitted to be in similar ways as others occupying the same social position; in Aganang's case this was in reference to the white middle class and middle-class blacks from outside SA who were given a more privileged position from the one given to her. Phadi & Ceruti (2011:102) indicate that middle-class identity reflects ‘the material reach that social location confers, but also the width of the social view that different social locations permit’. On another note, Mosa's experiences illuminated the disparities between the races much earlier than it did for Aganang. She did her first degree at Wits, and although her encounter with Wits earlier illuminated her differences to the white middle class, it meant she was somewhat better able to deal with these differences when she became a student of the University. Mosa said:

I applied at Wits, I was send the forms and requested a ministerial consent, permission from the minister of Education and training or City Bantu education – you couldn't come to Wits because of group areas Act and because it's a white university you had to get the permission from the minister so I put in this application and I sent it to Pretoria and in the front they asked why I wanted to come to this university because this degree is not offered in any black universities that was my reason and the minister would consider it. You were never certain that you will get it and then I mean Wits was 99% white there was no black person I think. In my application one of the things they wanted was a testimonial – I needed to get it from my then father in the Anglican Church and he gave me hassles. He said, ‘why do you want to go to Wits that is a white university they will never accept you?’ I struggled I would go to his office everyday he wouldn't do my letter, he said I don't remember how he said it but he implied that I was not that class that goes to Wits, indicating that people who are from the rich, the well-known people can get there, that is, the Motlana‘s, we were in the same church with Dr Motlana's family … (Interview, February 2012)

Mosa's encounter with Mathabatha, one of the individuals active in sensitising black youth during the 1970s in Soweto, meant that her application to Wits was a radical questioning of exclusion, but not necessarily that of inclusionary work as referred to by Lacy. The refusal and questioning by her minister, although a reassertion of class difference within her community, was also an assertion of the precarious nature of her standing in the middle-class position – she and her family were not similar to other ‘top’ families in her community, thus she could not secure a testimonial from her pastor. The work of challenging exclusion engaged in by the youth of 1976 was based on the idea of a unification of blacks as espoused in the black power movement, and Mosa's participation as a young person at the time influenced her ideas of who she was as a black person rather than as a middle-class black person.

For both Mosa and Aganang their various experiences linked to public encounters with white spaces brought about a re-evaluation of membership to the middle-class position, and somewhat suggested that the idea of difference experienced earlier was not necessarily true or necessary, thus foregrounding their blackness more so than their middle-classness.

Conclusion

Through a detailed discussion of two life histories this article has illustrated that the social position of class, and middle-classness in particular, for the two black women was not experienced homogeneously throughout their lives. The apartheid racial politics and ideas about who you should be among your community and in white apartheid-engineered spaces impacted how they experienced and identified with the label. These findings are significant for our general thinking of class position and the experiences of the black middle class during apartheid and in post-apartheid SA.

In conclusion, this article maintains that being middle class and black during apartheid was filled with complexities. Therefore we need to take into consideration that being middle class and black is heterogeneously experienced and thus should be understood as such.

Notes

¹One had completed a PhD in the social sciences and another was writing a PhD at the time of the interviews.

²The broader project was entitled ‘Towards a More Inclusive, Cohesive and Dynamic Society: Understanding the Significance of the Emerging Black Middle Class'.

³The participants signed a consent form indicating their formal agreement to participate in the study.

⁴To protect the anonymity of the participants pseudonyms are used.

⁵The University of the North was popularly known as Turfloop, which was the name of the farm where the university was established. It was renamed Limpopo when it merged with Medunsa in 2005.