Midterms are over!

Well, almost. The light at the end of the tunnel is getting brighter. I have one more paper to pound out today and then I am done. Today, after a 2 hour panel on expanding women's roles in Afghan society through civil society organizations, my schedule is to get said paper finished and, depending on what time is left over, catch up on a million other things I need to get done. But, to be truthful, things like calling the insurance company and checking retirement accounts will probably wait until next week when I am *on break.* Except I still have to work. But, whatever, it's still break because I'll only be getting home past 9 if I want to :)

I know I'm getting to the end of my rope when the podcast listening increases and the long-forgotten pile of knitting starts looking really appealing. There was a NYT article recently on taking a digital day off each week. No blackberry, no blogging, just taking downtime. Wow, it's been a while since I managed that. But in the spirit of trying to calm down, I have planned a digital day off for tomorrow. No emails, no blackberry buzzing, no work. No one said it would be easy. I'm going to take a long run in the morning, work on my plants outside, read something non-academic, get a massage, and hopefully end the day with dinner and a movie out (not Netflix! It's great and all, but a girl has to get treated to going out once in a while). True, that paper may not be done, but I can make notes on paper and finish Sunday if need be. I think my addled brain needs the time off more than the paper needs to get done right now.

Off to start my busy day today...

State-building in South Africa

Reconstructing the Veld: Challenges of state-building in post-apartheid South Africa

“South Africa belongs to all who live in it, united in our diversity”
--Preamble to the Constitution of the Republic of South Africa, 1996

South Africa's past and present is one of state building and reconstruction. The new South Africa would not be a state forged by modern wars, but by hundreds of years of accumulated conflicts. Post-apartheid, South Africa needed to change more than just hearts and minds to become a new nation. Apartheid rule had tried to carve out South Africa as a country reserved for whites only. The “rainbow nation” would strive to be different. Black, white, or colored, the qualification to be South African was now to have shared in South Africa's success and its suffering. South Africa, the new Constitution stated, “belongs to all who live in it.”1

Post-1994 South Africa's goal and challenge was to build “a new inclusive identity based on citizenship and national territorial integrity.”2 Territorial integrity and representation would prove to be key. Apartheid had yoked citizenship with elaborately gerrymandered borders and boundaries. Years of forced relocation of blacks to government-designed “homelands” outside the major urban areas and economies had created majority black areas plagued by under-development, lack of basic social services, and malnutrition and rates of child mortality common in sub-Saharan Africa. Black South Africa, though the vast majority of the country's population, was squeezed onto a mere 13% of its land.3 Most of South Africa's rural land still remains under state ownership, with those living on it for generations having little to no say in the fate of its use or redistribution.4

Debates of land reform and redistribution raised questions of claims to the land and who should oversee its administration: the state, local authorities, or individuals? As Lungisile Ntsebeza writes: “One of the key problems contributing to the constitutional obligation to establish law guaranteeing tenure security for all South Africans...is the unresolved issue of the roles, powers and functions of traditional authorities in land matters and, indeed, in the new democracy.”5

Bantustans and borders
Even before the term “apartheid” was coined in 1948, the white leadership of South Africa was creating a legal structure that would fundamentally challenge the notion of what it meant to be South African living in South Africa. A series of laws, starting in 1913, began removing blacks' claim to land as well as their physical presence on it. Over subsequent decades, dozens of laws and acts were passed with the goal of creating a white South Africa. The Native Affairs Act of 1923, the Slum Act of 1934, the 1951 Bantu Authorities Act, and finally from 1976-1980 the “independence” of a series of “homelands,” also known as bantulands, removed black South Africans, often forcefully, from their places of residence to distant sections of South Africa that had been decreed by the government to be their “true” homelands. Resettlement to the homelands was the final stage in the campaign to redefine South African citizenship as the exclusive domain of whites.6 Each homeland was “legally” outside the boundaries of South Africa as a state. Initially blacks resettled to the homelands were granted “dual citizenship” in their homeland and South Africa, but as homelands were “granted” their “independence,” those residing in them found they were no longer South African citizens. It is illustrative of the white perception of the homelands that some apartheid-era academics went so far as to classify them as “less developed countries” and used the language of development studies to explain the challenges and reforms needed to improve social conditions in these overcrowded, poverty-ridden areas.7

The homeland areas did not reflect traditional landholdings of different tribes but were instead drawn to remove black populations from important white landholdings, gold or coal rich areas, and urban areas of economic importance.8 Homeland economies were largely dependent upon “migrant” labor to South Africa's cities and suburbs.9 Despite claims of homeland independence and self-governance, the Bantustan Administrations were dependent upon the South African government for financing two-thirds to three-quarters of their meager budgets.10

Too Many Institutions
Ironically, post-apartheid South Africa suffered from a surplus of institutions, but few of them functioning. In an effort to build legitimacy for the homelands, the apartheid government had invested in the establishment of homeland bureaucracies. Homelands such as QwaQwa, an arid land surrounded by mountains, by the late 1980's had not only their own self-administered police force, jails, president, cabinets, parliament and civil service but also their own rigged elections, patronage networks, and repression.11 The ANC's official position on bantustan structures was favoring their eradication.12 When the party was banned, the UDF picked up the struggle, and in standing for a united South Africa advocated for not only the abolition of homelands but also homeland governments and the role of chiefs.13

Institutions alone would not have been enough to keep up the appearance of homeland self-governance. The apartheid government “made extensive use of headmen and traditional authorities as a way to extend the rule of the state into the rural areas of the country, and the appointment of tribal authorities and headmen generally reflected the power dynamics of the apartheid state.”14 During apartheid, chiefs were instrumental in implementing and maintaining homeland rule. Widely derided as puppets of the state, chiefs were either appointed from existing traditional structures or simply created by the state to fill a governance position in the homelands. The 1951 Bantu Authorities Act gave power to a hierarchy of chiefs, but compliance with the ruling government was essential. Uncooperative chiefs would find themselves displaced by a government-sanctioned successor.15

When the opportunity of a reunified South Africa arose, not all homeland governments welcomed the idea. Despite the early approval by the prominent homelands of Transkei and Ciskei, other homeland chiefs balked at the prospect of losing the rights and power they had accumulated under homeland rule.16 After all, some of the chiefdoms were creations of apartheid, with no historical claim to their positions.17 Part of the challenge in rethinking South Africa's local administrations is that both those who promote the retention of chieftaincies and those who call for their end can point to South Africa's history to bolster their argument. The country does not have a good track record of the central state looking out for the best interests of the majority of its population. In contemporary South Africa, the ruling ANC has also neglected the needs of many South Africans through a strong urban bias in its early reconstruction plans.

There were fundamental problems with adopting chieftaincy into the new South African government structure. For a country striving to base its laws on human rights and inclusion, how could an institution based on heredity—and one that often relegated women to second-class status—have any legitimacy? While chieftaincy did allow some measure of popular concern to be voiced during apartheid, it remained a largely apartheid power construction.18 Linked to the trouble with local chiefs is the challenge of reconstructing South Africa's civil service for provincial and local governments. Provinces were rebuilt from fragments of the old provincial and homeland systems. New local-government structures will also have to be “built up from an inheritance of racially segregated and duplicative institutions.”19 In a nation with limited resources, homelands created redundant institutions that sapped funding that could be spent on other programs:

“One major headache for the government of the Northern Province was the incorporation of three former bantustans: Venda, Ganzankulu (destined for the South African TsongaIShangaan; the majority of the Shangaan live on the other side of the border in Mozambique) and Lebowa (Northern BaSotho). The government inherited the costly legacy of Grand Apartheid. The bureaucracies of the former bantustans, reputed to be inefficient and corrupt, had to be absorbed in the new provincial administration. Traditional leaders, until recently maligned as the faithful servants of the apartheid government and the bantustan despots, had to be incorporated in provincial and local government and in the ANC's ambitious five-year development plan, the Reconstruction and Development Programme (RDP).”20

Conclusions
South Africa's inequality is still quite heavily drawn along racial lines, but perpetuation of apartheid-era governance structures further divides the population, this time splitting black South Africans into those who “have” and those who “have-not.” As Pickles and Woods foresaw in the late 1980's:

“...the artificiality of homeland governments and their corrupt bureaucracies threaten
those not part of the patronage system...and second, that the ongoing restructuring of social relations in the homelands is creating concrete social structures and ideologies, and entrenching the mythology of ethnic difference within the political discourse of South African society.”21
South Africa today is increasingly accepting and proud of its multi-racial identity. The latest edition of the Economist reported on a survey showing that most South Africans belief race relations are improving, while “an emerging black middle class is slowly blurring racial and social lines.”22

Overcoming the social class divide will not be accomplished by retaining institutions like chieftaincies that perpetuate class divisions. The ANC states its commitment not to “perpetuate the separation of our society into a First World and a Third World—another disguised way of preserving apartheid,” but rather to “meet the basic needs of people,” particularly in the rural areas.23 Along with promoting rural people's land tenure should be a commitment to fostering community organizations and boards where ordinary citizens, for a fixed term of service, have a direct role in land reform and local administration. This is a challenge in any society with high levels of illiteracy, such as South Africa, but it would be a step towards incorporating historically marginalized people directly into the governance process, making them key stakeholders in the new rainbow nation in more than just rhetoric.

1Sally Peberdy. (2001) Imagining Immigration: Inclusive Identities and Exclusive Policies in Post-1994 South Africa. Africa Today, 48(3), pp.16
2Ibid.
3Lungisile Ntsebeza (2003) Land Rights and Democratisation: rural tenure reform in South Africa's former bantustans. Transformation: Critical Perspectives on Southern Africa (52). pp.77
4Ibid, pp.71
5Ibid, pp.78
6Joseph Lelyveld. (1985) Move Your Shadow: South Africa, Black and White. New York: Penguin Books. pp.124
7Ibid, pp. 79
8Nial MacDermot. (1984) Self-Determination and the “Independent Bantustans.” United Nations Centre Against Apartheid. pp.9
9Ibid.
10Ibid, pp.13
11John Pickles; Jeff Woods (1992) South Africa's Homelands in the Age of Reform: the case of QwaQwa. Annals of the Association of American Geographers, Volume 82, No. 4. pp.637
12Ineke van Kessel; Barbara Oomen (1997) “One Chief, One Vote”: The revival of traditional authorities in post-apartheid South Africa. African Affairs, Volume 96, No. 385. pp.567
13Ibid, pp.568
14Noah Zerbe (2006) Democracy Compromised: Chiefs and the politics of the land in South Africa. African Studies Review, Volume 49, No.3. pp.144
15Kessel; Oomen. pp.581
16Pickle; Woods. pp. 647.
17Kessel; Oomen. pp.581
18Ibid, pp.585
19Charles Simkins. (1996) Problems of Reconstruction. Journal of Democracy.7.1 pp.85
20Kessel; Oomen. pp. 578-579
21Pickle; Woods. pp. 658
22The Economist. “South Africa: Skin Deep.” March 8-14, 2008. pp.55
23Fred Judson (2006) The Dynamics of Transition Governance in South Africa: Voices from Mpumalanga Province. Africa Today. 60. pp.7