As jy arm is, is jy fokol! – poverty, personalism, and development: farmworkers’ experiences of neoliberal South Africa

ABSTRACT

Contemporary commercial agricultural production in the Western Cape bears the legacies of longstanding racialised paternalism. Attending to interpersonal interactions and expectations in this milieu, this paper interrogates the changing conceptions and experiences of poverty, personalism, and development among farmworkers in the neoliberal 2010s. Central to the analysis are two vignettes. The first captures interaction between an employer and an employee of a relatively progressive farming business, and the second presents the experiences of a woman farmworker with an empowerment project run by a non-governmental organisation. Both vignettes show how claims to develop or empower inadvertently affirm the disempowerment of those being developed or empowered, while the privileged status of those doing development remains unchallenged. The Afrikaans idiom of ‘as jy arm is, is jy fokol! [if you’re poor, you’re nothing]’ brings out the rawness of emotions, expressing a breach in promises of development, as a way out of poverty and powerlessness. Despite the nominal moral consensus over poverty reduction objectives and policies, the neoliberal economy of development in post-apartheid South Africa produces its own social and material inequalities. The burdens and humiliations resulting from changing character of inequalities manifest in interpersonal interactions, perpetuating feelings of worthlessness among the working poor.

KEYWORDS:

• Farmworker
• poverty
• development
• cape winelands
• neoliberalism
• personalism

Acknowledgements

A version of this paper was presented at the College of Arts and Sciences’ Wealth and Poverty Theme, at Ohio University in 2018, the African Studies Association’s Annual Meeting in Boston, USA in 2019, and at the online Anthropology Colloquium of the Social and Cultural Anthropology Department at the University of Konstanz in 2020. Feedback from these platforms was extremely helpful. I thank Yeong-Hyun Kim, Papa Kwabena Owusu-Kwarteng, Lindsay Frederick Braun, Thomas Kirsch, Judith Beyer, Katherina Bodirsky, Jeannine-Madeleine Fischer, Maria Lidola, Eva Riedke, Benedict Mette-Starke, Femke Brandt, guest editors, Jörg Wiegratz, Joost Fontein and the two anonymous reviewers, for their generous reading and insightful suggestions. I also thank the editorial team of Third World Thematics, Madeleine Hatfield and Siri Nylund, for their kind support in the process.

Disclosure statement

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

Correction Statement

This article has been corrected with minor changes. These changes do not impact the academic content of the article.

Notes

1. Although I record this sentiment in a particular time (ca. 2012–13) and context, Helta (2017) also reflects on similar sentiments from his interactions with white farm-owners.

2. Fokol literally means ‘fuck all’, an epithet. However, it was translated as ‘nothing’ to me, probably out of politeness.

3. Dop-system was a practice whereby farmworkers were given alcohol as partial payment for their labour (see Williams 2010 for details).

4. ‘KWV originally stood for the Ko-operatieve Wijnbouwers Vereniging van Zuid Afrika Beperkt (Co-operative Wine Growers Association of South Africa Ltd). It changed its Dutch name to the Afrikaans: Koöperatiewe Wynbouersvereniging van Suid Afrika Beperk in September 1993ʹ (Williams 2005, n1).

_5. A statement by the Chairperson of SAWIT, Sharron Marco-Thyse, on their official website, (see http://www.sawit.co.za/chairperson.html) [Accessed on 5 December 2014].

6. As projected on WOSA’s website, see: http://www.wosa.co.za/Sustainability/Socially-Sustainable/BEE/Introduction/ [Accessed: 30 August 2015].

7. See: http://www.wosa.co.za, for details.

8. See: http://vinpro.co.za/services/transformation-development#sthash.4DF9sMUU.dpuf [Accessed: 30 August 2015].

9. See: http://www.wida.co.za/Content/strategic-focus.html [Accessed: 30 August 2015] .

10. See: http://www.elsenburg.com/ruraldev/ruraldev.html [Accessed: 27 November 2014] .

11. Since I did not record a formal interview with Auntie Marie at the time, this extract is constructed from the information recorded as field notes over multiple meetings we had on: 9 December 2012, 20^th, 24^th and 26 January 2013.

12. According to Auntie Marie, none of the women (including herself) expected the amount bank would deduct as fees for their business account. Moreover, the bank account attached to the project itself was set up in a hurried manner and none of the women had an opportunity to ask questions or have the terms and conditions attached to the account explained to them (Field notes: 24 January 2013).

13. Auntie Marie pointed out how the number of cars that the NGO owns had increased significantly, the state of their offices, and the staff’s personal material status had visibly improved.

14. This is an extract from one of many conversations, which I wrote down and reconfirmed with Auntie Marie for its accuracy (Field Notes: 24 January 2014).

15. Black Economic Empowerment.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Tarminder Kaur

Tarminder Kaur is Post-Doctoral Research Fellow at the Department of Anthropology and Development Studies, University of Johannesburg. Her research focuses on sports and development among the working-class people of South Africa. She wrote an ethnography of sporting lives of farmworkers in the Western Cape for her doctoral dissertation. By contrasting the sporting practices in the everyday lives of farmworkers with the development discourses and initiatives directed at them, her research illuminates the problematic in the lauded claims of sports-for-development.