Defiant citizenship: marginality, race, and the struggle for place in Hangberg, South Africa

ABSTRACT

This article examines the rise of ‘defiant citizenship’ in Hangberg, a historic fishing village set on the lower slopes of the Sentinel Mountain in Cape Town, South Africa. Defiant citizenship affirms membership of the state, but on terms that assert the primacy of residents’ right of belonging in, and sovereignty over, the place of Hangberg, even against the will of the state. This form of citizenship is rooted in long-standing experience of racial, economic and cultural marginality, deep disappointment with the post-apartheid order, and a strong attachment to local place.The defiant citizenship of Hangberg is explained by national and local, as well as international, dynamics. International dynamics centre on the precarity of tenure linked to the neo-liberalisation of property relations. National dynamics centre on perceptions of enduring and systemic racial exclusion from the post-apartheid order, and local dynamics refer to a history of local place-making associated with the environment of the sea and the mountain. We show how residents of Hangberg have constructed a new form of political subjectivity from a marginal and racialised position that disrupts citizen/foreigner notions of inclusion and exclusion, and reclaims marginality through implicit and explicit appeals to belonging and local sovereignty of place.

KEYWORDS:

• Defiant citizenship
• fishing rights
• marginality
• race
• place
• participation
• sovereignty

Disclosure of potential conflicts of interest

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1. ‘Coloured’ is one of the four racial categories established under apartheid rule and perpetuated in the post-apartheid institutional order. The others are White, Indian and Black African. Defined in the 1950 Population Registration Act as people who were not ‘European’ or ‘African’ or ‘Indian’, the ‘Coloured race’ was constructed as a residual category for descendants of the indigenous Khoi and San peoples, former Cape slaves from Malaysia and elsewhere, and miscegenation among the various groups. Most Coloured people live in the Western and Northern Cape provinces in South Africa, the historic lands of the Khoi and San people. They comprise just less than half the population of Cape Town, and 9% of the national population (StatsSA 2019).

2. The Khoisan is the name given to a range of distinct groups of people first living in what later became South Africa. The San were hunter-gatherers and the Khoi or KhoiKhoi were pastoral people. They lived in the Southern African region from the late Stone Age, before the southern migration of the Bantu peoples (Diamond 1999, 384–397; Smith 1990).

3. https://www.cnu.org/publicsquare/four-types-placemaking

4. Abalone, also known as perlemoen, is a pale coloured form of large sea snail, housed in a flat, shiny shell. It is traded live, frozen, tinned, canned or dried.

5. Thanks to an anonymous reviewer for drawing our attention to this point.

6. The Freedom Front Plus is a conservative, white-led party.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Laurence Piper

Dr. Laurence Piper is a Political Scientist at the University of the Western Cape, South Africa, and University West, Sweden, interested in urban governance and democracy. His latest book is 'Democracy Disconnected: Participation and Governance in a City of the South' , Routledge, 2019, with Prof. Fiona Anciano. He is the previous President of the South African Association of Political Studies (SAAPS) 2016-8.

Fiona Anciano

Dr. Fiona Anciano is Associate Professor in the Department of Political Studies at the University of the Western Cape, South Africa. Her research areas include civil society, democracy, and urban politics. She is the editor, with Joanna Wheeler, of 'Political Values and Narratives of Resistance: Social Justice and the Fractured Promises of Post-colonial States', published by Routledge in 2021.

Bettina von Lieres

Dr. Bettina von Lieres is Assistant Professor, Teaching Stream, in the Centre for Critical Development Studies at the University of Toronto Scarbrough, Canada. Her publications include Mediated Citizenship: The Informal Politics of Speaking for Citizens in the Global South (co-edited with Laurence Piper, Palgrave, 2014) and Domains of Freedom: Justice, Citizenship and Social Change in South Africa (co-edited with Thembela Kepe and Melissa Levin, UCT Press, 2016). She is the Co-chair of Teaching and Learning in the SSHRC-funded Participedia Network (participedia.net).