Ashwin Desai (2023). Geographies of racial capitalism.pdf

Ethnic and Racial Studies ISSN: (Print) (Online) Journal homepage: www.tandfonline.com/journals/rers20 Geographies of racial capitalism: the 2021 July riots in South Africa Ashwin Desai To cite this article: Ashwin Desai (2023) Geographies of racial capitalism: the 2021 July riots in South Africa, Ethnic and Racial Studies, 46:16, 3542-3561, DOI: 10.1080/01419870.2022.2131452 To link to this article: https://doi.org/10.1080/01419870.2022.2131452 Published online: 21 Oct 2022. Submit your article to this journal Article views: 634 View related articles View Crossmark data Citing articles: 2 View citing articles Full Terms & Conditions of access and use can be found at https://www.tandfonline.com/action/journalInformation?journalCode=rers20 ETHNIC AND RACIAL STUDIES 2023, VOL. 46, NO. 16, 3542–3561 https://doi.org/10.1080/01419870.2022.2131452 Geographies of racial capitalism: the 2021 July riots in South Africa Ashwin Desai Department of Sociology, University of Johannesburg, Auckland Park, South Africa ABSTRACT In July 2021, riots involving large-scale looting of businesses enveloped parts of South Africa. The “spark” for the violence was the incarceration of the country’s former President, Jacob Zuma. While referring to the broader dynamics of the riots, this article focusses on one township of Durban, Phoenix. Here, the violence was headlined as taking a racial turn, setting African against Indian. By situating the analysis against the African National Congress (ANC) led government’s failure to confront inherited apartheid geographies and racialised forms of capital accumulation, the article foregrounds the explanatory power of racial capitalism, with the understanding that, while “dynamic and changing”, its “temporality … is one of ongoingness … a process not a moment … ”. (12) (Jenkins, D., and J. Leroy. 2021. “Introduction: The Old History of Capitalism.” In Histories of Racial Capitalism, edited by D. Jenkins, and J. Leroy, 1–26. New York: Columbia University Press.). ARTICLE HISTORY Received 9 May 2022; Accepted 22 August 2022 KEYWORDS Riots; Phoenix; African National Congress; instigators; KwaZulu-Natal; capital accumulation Introduction In July 2021, widescale rioting and looting erupted in two of South Africa’s largest provinces by population, KwaZulu-Natal (KZN) and Gauteng. The immediate context was the imprisonment of former President Jacob Zuma for contempt of court, on the direct instruction of South Africa’s highest judi- cial body, the Constitutional Court. The riots had a decided ethnic character. The epicentre lay in areas where mainly Zulu-speaking South Africans lived; Zuma being Zulu himself. However, the socio-economic tinder was danger- ously dry with unemployment levels running beyond 40 per cent. Delivery on government promises of development for poor black communities through conservative economic policies has all but ground to a halt. This was exacerbated by endemic theft of public monies by cadres of Nelson Man- dela’s once proud liberation movement, the African National Congress (ANC) CONTACT Ashwin Desai [email protected] © 2022 Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group ETHNIC AND RACIAL STUDIES 3543 (Basson and du Toit 2017; Bhorat et al. 2017). Inequality in South Africa is, almost literally, a powder-keg. Having said that, as destructive as the riots were, the near insurrection observed one very speciﬁc rule of engagement. South Africans of diﬀerent races and classes did not set upon each other. Looters did not invade personal property and suburbanites did not venture beyond their neighbourhoods to attempt to quell the lawlessness in factories, shopping centres and on highways. One of the exceptions was the township of Phoenix; townships being dormitory-style districts servicing white cities and towns, set aside under apartheid for Black workers to live in. In line with apartheid’s strict and perverse social-engineering, Black people were themselves divided into groups; Africans, being the majority, coloureds (or people of mixed race) and Indians (mainly the descendants of British inden- ture in the second half of the nineteenth century). When Phoenix was created in the 1960s, it was to receive Indians forcibly removed from their footholds in the port city of Durban under South Africa’s infamous Group Areas Act. Marxists writing on South Africa argued that racial domination and capital accumulation were inextricably linked and that the ﬁght to defeat apartheid was also a struggle to end capitalism. Racial capitalism was the term used to show this interconnection. (Alexander 1985, 1986; Legassick and Hemson 1976). History was to show that this script was not followed and capitalism was given a new lease of life with the coming of the ANC to power. As Clarno puts it: The South African transition has reproduced racial capitalism while transform- ing the dynamics of exploitation and exclusion. Deindustrialization and casua- lization have weakened the labour movement, intensiﬁed the exploitation and precariousness of the Black working class, and produced a growing racialised surplus population ….Coupled with their increasingly precarious economic situation, the Black poor confront a severe shortage of decent housing. The crises of unemployment and homelessness are compounded by landlessness. Accepting constitutional protections for private property, the new government rejected the use of state-centred mechanisms to redistribute colonised land. Instead, South Africa adopted a market-based program through which the state helps subsidize the purchase of white-owned land by Black clients. This “willing-seller, willing-buyer” program depends not only on the ability of Black clients to access capital but also on the willingness of white landowners to negotiate a price and sell their land. The program has facilitated the emer- gence of a small class of wealthy Black landowners but has only led to the redis- tribution of 7.5 per cent of South African land. (Clarno 2017, 34) What is argued in this article is that, given the continuing power of racial geo- graphies and inherited forms of capital accumulation, racial capitalism still has great explanatory value in contemporary South Africa, and it provides ways of understanding the events that unfolded in Phoenix. In this context, Bhattacharyya’s recent work on racial capitalism has resonance, urging that attention be given to “new and unpredictable modes of dispossession to 3544 A. DESAI be understood alongside the centuries-old carnage that moistens the earth beneath our feet” (Bhattacharyya 2018, 9). Bhattacharyya acknowledges “the sedimented histories of racialised dispossession that shape economic life in our time” and upon which much scholarship still rests a languid eye. After all, history lies heavy on the neck of Black people, of all places in South Africa, the country which spawned the starkest exemplar of racial capit- alism; apartheid. However, Bhattacharyya opens the way to understanding “the place of racialisation in particular instances of capitalist formation, most of all when those instances are now” (2018, 9). This “permission” to seek explanatory force in contemporary events for phenomena in which race and capital appear to intertwine is theoretically useful and liberating. Yes, the historical framework is important but new questions may be enter- tained. How does the logic of capital, seeking ever higher proﬁt, tending towards monopoly when it can, and often dispossessing the already poor, resolve around racial lines in the here and now? In the story of Phoenix township and the fatal violence that took place there in July 2021, this article proposes that newer social forces played a sig- niﬁcant role. In particular, it suggests that a particular strata of post-apartheid Black capitalists have found it useful to operate within an ethnically charged market and society. This is the market for tenders that the local and provincial state awards for goods and services to private companies; a lucrative market with high rates of proﬁt. Although in a limited sector of the economy, some Black entrepreneurs have in recent years discovered the value of capitalizing on race in their dealings with an African nationalist state. This is no moral accusation. They would probably not be good businesspeople if they did not. Yet, this racialization can have consequences in the way social conﬂict is handled. Racial categories to be ticked in boxes on supply chain manage- ment forms do not always stay on those forms. They assume political substance. Where I take issue with Bhattacharyya is the dismissal of intentionality, when she argues that “racial capitalism does not emerge as a plan” (2018, 9). While taking the point that one must be wary of the idea of a puppeteer pulling the strings according to some preordained script, one has to take cog- nisance that in South Africa, capital accumulation and racist exploitation have been handy bedfellows. These histories and methodologies of proﬁting from racial division continue to impact on contemporary social relations. As Jenkins and Leroy put it, “violent dispossessions inherent to capital accumu- lation operate by leveraging, intensifying, and creating social distinctions” (2021, 3). Notwithstanding this, Bhattacharyya’s intervention is relevant to my own enquiries: this is to better understand events in South Africa that took place a quarter of a century after apartheid ended. As Bhattacharyya tells us: ETHNIC AND RACIAL STUDIES 3545 Racial capitalism helps us to understand how people become divided from each other in the name of economic survival or in the name of economic well-being. One aspect of its techniques encompass the processes that appear to grant diﬀerential privileges … and the social relations that ﬂow from these diﬀeren- tiations. (2018, 10–11) Bhattacharyya’s willingness to consider whether “new and unpredictable modes of dispossession” have proximate causes and are not simply a distant sine qua non, is worth emulating. Also stimulating is Bhattacharyya’s concession that racial capitalism operates both through the exercise of coercive power and through the mobil- isation of desire. People are not only ‘forced’ to participate in economic arrange- ments that cast them to the social margins; they also rush to be included in this way and to become edge-subjects of capitalism. (2018, 9–10) Except for casting local elites as sell-outs, dupes or pawns of imperialism, a fair portion of left analyses gives little attention to the desires of victims, the sometime “edge subjects of capitalism”. This is a regrettable oversight. Both racialization and commodiﬁcation can be processes that people or groups come to actively desire. Ignoring this underestimates the true scope of the problem. As Bhattacharyya put it, we need to understand “the seductive character of capitalist living, even for those who are most damaged by the workings of capitalism” (2018, 18). When we ascribe to racial-capitalism yet another outrage or dehumanizing loss, we might have to ask, how did its victims go along with it for so long and why do they apply its sharp edges to their own veins? Phoenix In July 2021, our television, telephone and computer screens ignited with scenes of looting in KZN and parts of Gauteng. The violence and destruction were so widespread that it resembled a war. For ten days, shops, warehouses, factories, a harbour, highways, and entire neighbourhoods had acrid palls of smoke hanging above them, as if these structures had been hit by airstrikes. Instead of a sneak attack by a foreign adversary, however, hundreds of civi- lians poured onto the streets to do damage with their bare hands and rudi- mentary tools; crowbars, jerry-cans and matchsticks. They grabbed what they could, set ﬁre to what they could not, and then receded back into the suburbs, shacks and townships. It is hard to imagine that any single participant’s lot improved, no matter how many TVs or groceries they managed to snag. Indeed, for most, it demonstrably worsened. Local shops never reopened, thousands of jobs were lost, the local state, already bankrupted by corruption and skewed development priorities, had little patronage to dispense. 3546 A. DESAI The riots were destructive in both human and ﬁnancial cost. Over 500 people died. Tragically, many were trampled or burned alive inside shops and factories when rioters further back-torched buildings. Billions of rands worth of damage was done to infrastructure, not to mention markets, supply chains, tax receipts, investment, and morale. No pro-poor gains were made on the economic policy front. No-one owned the uprising, which remains mired in negative and derogatory ethnic (it was a Zulu thing) and criminal (it was a Zuma thing) loops of association. Among those in the crowd, we are told by a subsequent Expert Panel, a few hardened and organized instigators directed the violence (Africa, Sokape, and Gumbi 2021). They pulled the strings on Twitter, on secretive WhatsApp groups and even in connivance with seditious elements in the state. Their presumed purpose was an old tactic employed against the apart- heid state by liberation movements: to make South Africa ungovernable. Judging by the hashtags on social media, the spectre of violence in 2021 was to some extent leveraged (not caused) to pressure the government into releasing from jail former President of the country and Kwa-Zulu-Natal native, Jacob Zuma. This most brazen politician is widely and notoriously implicated in corruption during his term of oﬃce, involving eye-watering amounts. He currently stands accused on several fronts of bartering access to state power for kick-backs that foreigners could give his substantial familial and political cohort. My focus is not on the general cause of the July 2021 violence, however. I hone in on the course the violence took in Phoenix, twenty-ﬁve kilometres north of Durban. Designated during apartheid as an Indian township, Phoenix houses around 300,000 people, many poor or of working-class social origin. Phoenix stands out as the reputed site of a massacre by Indian South Africans against African compatriots. Labelled as looters, some Africans moving around in Phoenix were set upon by vigilante groups and assaulted or killed. Reports of these events sowed immense social discord and, for a time, threatened to ignite a race-war in South Africa. It is worth pausing for a moment and going back a few decades before the 1990s to understand how Phoenix came to contain Indian people during apartheid. In the second half of the 1960s, with the apartheid state at the zenith of its’ powers, tens of thousands of Indians were forced out of their homes. This dispossession was part of the weaponry of “Grand Apartheid” where the government enacted even more zealous laws to separate black from white; in the labour market, sexually, and where they lived. Phoenix was designed to receive many of these families put on the move, evicted mainly from areas closer to the CBD of Durban. The barren township far outside of Durban was laid out in a swirling grid, encompassing some stand-alone houses, but also many two or three storey tenements, row after row of them. After the fall of apartheid, a large proportion of middle- ETHNIC AND RACIAL STUDIES 3547 class residents moved to formerly white suburbs. Many industries, such as the huge textile factories that employed Indian workers during the 1970s and 1980s collapsed, as tariﬀs were hastily decreased and imports ﬂowed. Pos- itions in the civil service also became harder to access. Under apartheid, Indians beneﬁtted from a certain level of job-reservation. Since 1999, aﬃrma- tive action targets in eﬀect reserved 85 per cent of jobs and promotions for African work-seekers and only around 2 per cent for Indians. While this quota accurately represents South Africa’s overall population demographics, it is out of kilter with Durban’s population statistics.1 In response to receding economic prospects in the state, many Indian breadwinners adopted trades, such as plumbing, tiling, and so on. Others opened stores or spaza shops, rented out backyard rooms or ran taxis. Others clung onto their existing jobs as teachers, clerks, salespeople, waiters, attorneys, accountants, hairdressers, caterers, and technicians. Phoe- nix’s economy also came to encompass (and bleed from) organized crimi- nality, mainly through a drug-trade conducted by rival gangs, but also the popular illegalities of knocking oﬀ name-brand goods and evading tax and import duties. The end of apartheid thankfully saw the end of Group Areas. For reasons irreducible simply to being better resourced, schools in Phoenix were widely regarded as having higher standards of education than those in African town- ships. Poorer parents in search of better opportunities for their children, who lived outside the area, thus eagerly sought placement in Phoenix schools. With the state, through legislation, gradually clawing back school admission authority from parent-run governing bodies, by the mid 2000s, the racial proﬁle of learners in Phoenix schools changed dramatically. This created its own tensions and conﬂicts. The same applied to hospitals and other social services. Anyone moving around Phoenix before (and after) the riots will see a mixture of African and Indian consumers, workers, public servants, small business-owners and pedestrians going about their business, the racial admixture of which one does not see in many former “group areas”. Geographically wedged between the aﬄuent Umhlanga, Gateway Mall, Mt. Edgecombe, Inanda and Kwa-Mashu, the latter two being African town- ships, Phoenix has absorbed far greater cultural and demographic change than either (white) Umhlanga or (African) Kwa-Mashu could dream of. Cru- cially, for Indians living in working class areas like Phoenix, this “opening up” of community resources, coupled with their own modest ﬁnancial stand- ing has provided them with no credit as to their legal identity. Legally, Indian and African South Africans are distinct groups and the state, through legis- lation, diﬀerentiates between them in assigning opportunities, giving prefer- ential treatment to Africans. This would perhaps not be a recipe for conﬂict in a growing economy or one where the government spends its tax revenues properly. However, 3548 A. DESAI since 1999, the ANC government’s economic policy has predominantly rested on redistributing existing resources, whilst neglecting infrastructure invest- ment that would serve people’s basic needs. This has led to a decade of pun- ishing electricity black-outs and water shortages. An ageing infrastructure, catering mainly for whites, has not been extended or even maintained. Houses built in Durban have been of laughable quality and shack settlements have sprung up everywhere. Arguments by the ANC government that this stems from the legacy of apartheid are specious twenty eight years after the ﬁrst democratic elections. Similarly specious are arguments that a neo- liberal economic policy imposed upon South Africa by the West is to blame. Even with the development inequalities of apartheid factored in, and even within the social spending brackets imposed by international lenders and investors, the ANC government had trillions of rands at its dispo- sal over the years to build and equip new schools, hospitals, power-plants, pipes and to build proper houses. Not only has this money been available, but it has been stolen by ANC cadres. For rich whites and Indians, the following fact is something they can absorb. While Group Areas have ended, group classiﬁcation has not. What this means is that the state can still pick winners and losers in the game of life based on the colour of their skin. In its very constitution, the new South Africa entrenches apartheid’s racial categories of African, coloured, Indian and white. The rationale is that diﬀerential treatment based on these categories is necessary to redress the stark social imbalances of the past. Thus, preferential treatment may be given to Africans in the workplace in hiring and promotion. Similarly, universities may adjust their admission requirements to permit a greater number of African students. Even in sport, it is not suﬃcient that provincial or national teams have a certain split between white players and players of colour. Cricket teams, for example, must have a certain proportion of Africans in them. And so, where does a place like Phoenix stand? Unlike either the suburbs or townships, it has transformed, on the North Coast of KZN, into arguably the most racially diverse location. Social divisions are the least stark in schools, hospitals and queues for social services. Because government policy is sensi- tive to brute race and not class, the formal inequality which an Indian learner from Phoenix faces when she does not make the cut for medical school with 93 per cent aggregate is appreciably higher when an African learner from a rich background in Umhlanga gets the place. These policies form part of the broad, everyday brooding lament of working-class Indians in places like Phoenix. While similar complaints of “losing out” may be muttered by weal- thier Indians, this is said with a hint of irony. There is always a way around that money or connections can buy. But for poor Indians, this sense of racial grie- vance ironically has not bubbled up. For many, it has helplessly seethed. ETHNIC AND RACIAL STUDIES 3549 In keeping the focus local and contemporary, we are bound to ask what kind of racial capitalism deﬁnes social relations in Phoenix? At a very abstract level, one could seek to implicate the Washington consensus. One could point a ﬁnger at red-lining banks scared to advance credit to the poor. One might even blame the continuing stranglehold of white monopoly capital on industries like mining or farming. It is a matter of record that, as the tran- sition unfolded, “infrastructural rights” initially won “(such as access to water, sanitation and energy)” were rolled back “by linking the scope of services pro- vided to buyer aﬀordability, rather than providing an acceptable level of ser- vices and charging an acceptable amount” (Bond 2000, 110). However, what is argued here, is that if one looks more closely at the manner in which capi- talist interests racialised the episode of looting in 2021, other players, not properly described before, may be discerned. It comes down to this: by the time the riots erupted, many working-class Indians in Phoenix arguably faced the brunt of a “fraction of capital” seeking hegemony in signiﬁcant sec- tions of the KZN economy. These were African chauvinists feeding oﬀ con- tracts with the local and provincial state, whose business model was to steal state resources and displace the resultant disaﬀection of the poor onto racial minorities. Between borders and business forums As the looting spread, many looters in the north of Durban walked along the highway between Kwa-Mashu and the warehouses, malls and businesses at Cornubia, where they wanted to be. Their journey took them past or through Phoenix. Although these lamentable events took place during a widespread episode of social unrest, this geo-spatial fact is crucial for what happened later. Oddly, Phoenix was also singled out quite early for attention in the “Twitter streets”. Social media was awash, ﬁrst with a threatened inva- sion of Phoenix by Africans, followed by news of vigilante violence by Indians, which triggered further threats. Similar fears of attack and isolation may have permeated other neighbourhoods. But in Phoenix, they had an obvious sub- stantive, geographic and psychological resonance that did not apply in other locales, as I argue below. My approach takes locale seriously, with the under- standing that broader economic and political factors “are refracted through the prism of locality into the conditions in which the individual functions. However mobile our society, the local spatial dimension is a necessary and major part of our experience” (Parry, Moyser, and Wagstaﬀ 1987, 213). While ﬁgures vary, it is estimated that some thirty six people were killed in Phoenix; thirty three were African. A total of ﬁfty six people have been arrested in connection with the murders. Most of those killed came from the African settlements adjoining Phoenix; Zwelisha, Bhambhayi and Umaoti. Here, RDP housing rests alongside shack settlements. For the ﬁrst 3550 A. DESAI 20–30 h, when the looting spread and threats of attack made the digital rounds, there was little if no police presence. When a group of nearby African residents made their way into Phoenix, stones rained down on some houses. Twitter and Facebook lit up with stories of attacks on Phoenix. On 11 July 2021, a WhatsApp message went viral: “Tomorrow we are coming in all your Indian people town to close every- thing. You will wake up and see ﬂames”. A siege mentality took over, as visuals of widespread looting were captured live on television, and stories abounded of Phoenix being invaded and shopping malls going up in smoke. One must also remember the historical backdrop of antagonism that turned to violence in 1949 and 1985. In Cato Manor in 1949, violent clashes took place between Indian and African. Probably more importantly, in 1985, Indians were driven out of Inanda. This conﬂict was caught up in the escalating resistance to apartheid that also saw the ANC aligned United Democratic Front (UDF) pitted against the Zulu nationalist Inkatha Freedom Party (IFP). The IFP were pushing for Inanda to be incorporated into the KwaZulu-Natal Bantustan, while the ANC/UDF opposed this. Indian presence was seen as holding this process up. Most of the Indians driven out found a home in Phoenix. These events remain fresh in the memory and one can discern how this fed into a siege mentality (Hughes 1985). Much is made of white mainstream antipathy to Indians which, under white minority rule, portrayed Indians as an unwanted community and a scourge on the economic prospects of white businesspeople. After 1994, some of these attitudes have been adopted, quite casually, in mainstream black majority rule. Famous anti-apartheid playwright, Mbongeni Ngema, released a popular song titled “AmaNdiya” in 2002, excoriating Indians as a group and, worryingly, calling on the “strong men” of the Zulu “nation” to resist. In Kwa-Zulu-Natal, an African grassroots movement, the Mazibuye African Forum sprang up purportedly to oppose against Indians’ “racism”. It portrayed Indians as foreigners. The Black nationalist political party, the Econ- omic Freedom Fighters (EFF), also articulates anti-Indian sentiment, most noticeably ahead of elections. Much of this delicate historical balance of Afro-Indian relations would have been known and experienced by Phoenix residents (Desai and Vahed 2019). In a bail application for nine people from Phoenix, accused of a variety of crimes including murder during the riots, a voice note was played in court by the lawyer of three of the accused. “In the voice note, an African man speaks of meetings allegedly held in KwaMashu, Umlazi and the Inanda Hostel where attacks on Phoenix residents were discussed. The speaker claims a special tra- ditional medicine would be used to kill people in Phoenix” (Post, October 27– 31 2021). It remains unclear why the focus was on Phoenix, but it created something of a siege mentality. The near total absence of police or army ETHNIC AND RACIAL STUDIES 3551 responses to widescale, serious and obvious illegality only added to the impulse of self-security among Indians. Around Phoenix, the Kwa-Mashu highway was barricaded by mobs who stoned passing cars, and on the R102 near Ottawa, on its eastern border, municipal refuse trucks commandeered by Zuma supporters dumped tons of refuse on the road. Within a day, columns of black smoke rose from the townships that girdle the area, as malls, shops and spazas were pillaged. Anxiety – the fear of what would come next, with the police patently over- whelmed – began to tighten its grip. The disquiet was inﬂamed by an array of WhatsApp messages and voice notes that spelled out plans to attack Indians in their own homes. Phoenix resident Aldino Padayachee recorded: Voice notes were all over saying the Zulus were coming, but it made people scared. We were hearing that and at the same time we could see hundreds of people coming toward us. (Hunter, Wicks, and Singh 2021, 192) Were these voice notes designed to create racial tension and as much mayhem as possible? Were they to ensure that those who attacked shops in Cornubia and later Nandi Drive would have “safe passage” through Phoenix? It is doubtful there was any strategic command centre. The threats were at best ad-hoc, in-group mobilization eﬀorts, the enunciation of a desire to constitute blocs of identity for their own sake, such as soccer teams from adjoining towns devising bloodcurdling chants. The eﬀect however was very diﬀerent. The chants were taken seriously. In Phoenix, roadblocks were set up by residents of the ﬂats. These were ﬁrst defensive barricades, intending to slow traﬃc. As the looters made their way through Phoenix though, this took on a more oﬀensive turn, with cars and bakkies stopped and searched, especially vehicles laden with goods, some still in boxes. And then the drug lords, gangsters and their runners moved in. They began looting the looters in the name of “defending the community”. When some of these “community defenders” were arrested, their own homes contained washing machines, fridges and other looted items. This re-looting was accompanied by gratuitous violence. Vehicles belonging to suspected looters were pummelled with cricket bats. African people walking in Phoenix were assaulted. Some were shot. None of this is to say that the victims were selected for mob “justice” based on any under- lying facts. Afterwards, African people reported being targeted simply for trying to ﬁll up at petrol stations in Phoenix, or walking home from work, being as innocently present on public thoroughfares as any South African has the right to be anywhere in the country. In understanding the violence, the enduring power of two phenomena seems dominant. The spatial logic of apartheid saw Phoenix placed between white suburbs and high-end shopping centres and African town- ships. To get from the latter to the desired former meant physically traversing 3552 A. DESAI Phoenix roads. The constitutional logic of democracy saw Africans and Indians in Phoenix still separated as economic and political subjects. Phoenix, housing the lower middle-class and poor, was thus a site where the sharing of state resources with African neighbourhoods was most visible, but for which residents were given no credit. Both of these factors made the settlement potentially explosive in times of trouble. Economic decisions, either to violently acquire or violently guard property, became cloaked in racial identities, African versus Indian. The looting, screened on tel- evision, the clear incapacity or lack of police will in protecting people, the heightened social media posts, led to apocalyptic thinking in a narrow strip of Phoenix, a sense of an ending, of betrayal. Debates surrounding the looting have taken two opposed forms: orches- tration or spontaneity (Africa, Sokape, and Gumbi 2021; Hunter, Wicks, and Singh 2021). In what has emerged so far, there is some evidence of local mobilization to protest Zuma’s imprisonment. However, the jailing of Zuma stands for something more profound: It was widely seen as the courts drawing a line in the sand against the impunity of a professional caste of looters embedded in and around the ANC, who in concert with foreigners and local businesspeople, had bankrupted state coﬀers while Zuma was pre- sident. Zuma, still on trial for corruption, and with more charges pending, had been jailed for a relatively minor infraction: contempt of court. The jailing of the ﬁgurehead of state capture sent shockwaves through the tender maﬁas of KZN. These shockwaves ﬁltered through to the livelihoods of community leaders at a very local level. How so? To beneﬁt from corruption around the procurement of state contracts in KZN, one had to be in favour with the politicians. For they held sway over the bureaucrats who evaluated bids and awarded contracts. Under Zuma, a vast network of rent-seekers had been installed in senior positions within the executive. Since the favour of senior ANC leaders was crucial to business- people seeking to win tenders in certain sectors of the KZN economy, this also meant the opposite. As an ANC member, unless one acquired a leadership position, you were not worth bribing. To acquire a leadership position in turn meant contesting, every two and half years, for ANC leadership positions in branch or provincial executive committees. This was – and still is – an expensive business. Rival factions of ANC members must pay branch members and delegates to vote them in, with the price of a mark on an ANC ballot reportedly running into tens of thousands of rands. Insidiously then, ANC leadership is monetized all the way down the ranks. Along with this monetization comes loyalty, or at the very least, mutual self-interest. The arrest of Zuma and the threatened dismantling of corrupt networks of patronage which he headed up, understandably agitated local Kwa-Mashu and Inanda leaders, as much ﬁnancially as ideologically. ETHNIC AND RACIAL STUDIES 3553 So, while my own view inclines towards the looting being a spontaneous response to the opportunities that such a moment aﬀorded, especially as law enforcement agencies were either over-run or seemed unwilling to inter- vene, one cannot completely ignore the political interests that would be served in encouraging racial discord. This is a key feature, as described above, of the business model of the fraction of capital operating in KZN alongside ANC elites. Steal, and then deﬂect blame for the resulting non- delivery of basic services. Indeed, the alleged racism of Indians increasingly garnered more public headlines than the actions of looters, the incitement by Zuma supporters, and the woeful inaction of the state. In some quarters, Indian racism became the sine qua non of the rioting and looting itself, as if attacks on Black people from Phoenix preceded the widescale looting. While the riots were still simmering down, some African politicians saw ﬁt to march on Phoenix to decry racism. Simultaneously, calls by Black nationalist poli- ticians for Indians to be shot attracted an insipid push-back from black pol- itical parties, whose key mobilising promise is to win for their constituents, through control of state purchasing, the biggest slice of the economy (Hunter, Wicks, and Singh 2021). It is one thing to criticize local business maﬁas. At a central level, the ANC’s economic model was, in practice, also bereft of coherence, realism and honesty. With no real plan to make good on the vision of past leaders in the ﬁrst half of the twentieth century, who were committed to self-help schemes and opportunities for the small trader to grow, they concentrated instead on the idea of creating a Black patriotic bourgeoise, through a legis- lative opening up of the upper echelons of the economy through Black Econ- omic Empowerment (BEE) rules and preferential procurement policies weighted in favour of Black business. BEE was supposed to, in the words of Mbeki, be the catapult for creating and strengthening a black capitalist class (Saul and Bond 2014, 223). Much was expected of this black bourgeoisie which the ANC held would be committed to redressing the inherited inequal- ities of apartheid (MacDonald 2004, 649). This expectation did not age well. Access to the commanding heights bred aloofness and entitlement (as well as airs and graces). By the time of Zuma’s presidency, it was clear that BEE had become the preserve of a few, that there were few genuine businesses created, and many of the deals were mired in debt. By 2014, the ANC’s once Premier of Limpopo Ngoako Ramatlhodi, held that the ANC was the foot-soldier of an economy that was still commanded by whites (Saul and Bond 2014, 223). In the face of this, we have those grouped around former president Zuma and his infamous cronies in the Gupta family, who used proximity to the pre- sident to allegedly steal billions of rands during Zuma’s nine years in oﬃce. They argued that they were seeking to tip the balance away from monopoly capital and Mbeki’s BEE beneﬁciaries in favour of tender-based black 3554 A. DESAI capitalists (Pauw 2017). This would deal the ﬁnal death-knell to white mon- opoly capital, old-money concentrated in sectors of the economy that white people were able to monopolize under apartheid such as agriculture, banking, insurance, engineering and mining. Tender-based capitalists in prac- tise, however, simply looked to use the state as a way to accumulate capital. They were not in the business of using this capital to invest in ways that would create jobs, develop national industry and expand internal markets. Jeremy Cronin, former deputy general secretary of the South African Commu- nist Party (SACP) and ANC Member of Parliament referred to “a process of primitive accumulation” in contemporary South Africa, in which would be capitalists “without capital … could only really emerge in any substantive way through taking on indebted shareholding from existing monopoly capital (with all the dangers of fronting and compradorism), or through the diversion of public resources into private pockets (parasitism)” (Daily Maver- ick, 14 August 2020). In Durban, ANC ward councillors are at the centre of not only primitive accumulation but also a network of patronage and backhanders. This was given free rein in the Zuma years, but once he was forced prematurely from oﬃce, has been stymied, with some of his closest allies in KZN being charged for alleged roles in patronage networks surrounding tenders. A form of primitive accumulation was further “legitimised” by so-called Business Forums which targeted large projects of private companies and, at the barrel of a gun and in the name of transformation, forced companies to pay over a percentage of contracts and employ workers on the books of the Business Forums. Ahead of Zuma’s arrest, these forums, while still operat- ing in KZN, were substantially pushed back by special law enforcement attention. While arguably still nascent and with their slice of the economy not measured, no social history of Durban in 2021 can ignore the existence of these tender barons. They exist, they cohere as a class or faction of a class and, given that the eﬀect of their business practices is to deepen poverty, they need a scapegoat for non-delivery in the next ﬁnancial year. This scape- goat may just as well be an Indian family terriﬁed by threats of violence, as it may be an African breadwinner assaulted by Indian thugs on a Phoenix side- walk. As long as there is someone else to blame for the mess of corruption, it does not really matter whose blood is spilt. Present futures Where are we now? The streets have returned to the kind of normalized vio- lence which has characterized the area for the last decade. This is true both in Phoenix and Kwa-Mashu. Drug-lords, some with registered security compa- nies and ﬁre-power, rule the streets. Many of the young are anchored ETHNIC AND RACIAL STUDIES 3555 within the limits of a few square kilometres. Sugars2 addicts wander the streets. Drug lords enforce their will with brutality. The areas contiguous to Inanda, Kwa-Mashu and Phoenix, Umhlanga and Mount Edgecombe saw incredible development post-1994 into what urban economists call an “edge city”. Writing in 2007, Bill Freund described the development: On the ridge overlooking the sea and the oceanside suburb of Umhlanga Rocks, one now ﬁnds hundreds of houses of the newly rich (no longer racially deﬁned, of course), the largest shopping complex in South Africa modelled on activity- based U.S. shopping malls and a growing array of corporate service oﬃces and headquarters. … Just inland, Mount Edgecombe sugar estate has been largely turned into a golf course and network of aﬄuent gated suburbia. (Freund 2007, 190) A few kilometres away, we have another world. The shacks of Inanda sit alongside rudimentary government-built houses. Many places have no elec- tricity and running water. In the government-built ﬂats in Phoenix, things are better, but here too, the Indian working class has taken a battering. Wealth and poverty bare their teeth at each other. In this area of the KZN North Coast, we witness an unfolding of what Neil Smith has referred to as “satanic geographies of uneven development” which “represent a striking spatialization of the class and race, gender and national relations that make global production a social process” (Smith 1997, 188). On an overcast September weekend in 2021, with the violence subsided, I was in Phoenix. The Ubuntu (Friendship) Committees and Social Cohesion workshops were in full swing, but the youth of Phoenix stayed away. At the bottom of a stairwell in the Phoenix ﬂatlands, in Lenham, I met an Indian man in his mid-20s. Let me call him Gupta. He used to work in the local taxi rank, but for two years has been unemployed. When asked about jobs, his persistent refrain is “they do not want Indians”. He was at the barri- cades during the unrest; “protecting his grandmother”. His life is spent “hanging”, as he put it. A mere road away lives a young man in the shack settlement of Umoati. Let me call him Zuma. During the looting spree, he had garnered a few goods from the Phoenix Mall. But the takkies and clothes had been sold. He worked for a while in the Umhlanga strip as a cleaner. It is a 15-minute ride away from his home but a world away. He too is “hanging”. He is ﬁercely anti-Phoenix Indians, but could laugh and crack a joke with me. As we speak, I gaze over the view from his shack. Distant car-dealerships, malls, the high-end apartments of Umhlanga in the distant haze, even a des- cending aeroplane. Wealth drips around him but just out of reach. Except during the riots. According to Zuma, it was so very easy. He walked across a bridge that covers a stream and the Mall was immediately in sight. He 3556 A. DESAI grabbed a few things and made his way back. More would have been poss- ible if the Indians hadn’t got in the way. One thinks of Achille Mbembe telling us of a society in which something is within eyesight but beyond reach: “an economy of desired goods that are known, that may sometimes be seen, that one wants to enjoy, but to which one will never have material access” except through “pillage and seizure” (2002, 271). Life is “assimilated to a game of chance, a lottery, in which the existential temporal horizon is colonized by the immediate present and by prosaic short-term calculations” (2002, 271). So close, yet so far apart. Both Zuma and Gupta feel powerful within their areas but powerless outside it. Gupta circulates in the ﬂats, picks up a few “lucks”, as he terms it. His manning of the barricades has reinforced his repu- tation as a tough guy. Zuma also links into the power structures of the ward councillor. He will mobilize for him in the ANC branch and elections. He’ll get an odd-job here, a handout there. They eye each other with resentment from within spitting distance. As Bourdieu tells us: “Social identity lies in diﬀerence, and diﬀerence is asserted against what is closest, which represents the greatest threat” (Bourdieu 1984, 479). But there is something deeper as one probes, a kind of ressentiment from both sides, a willing adoption of racialised identities that are assumed to best advance the economic interests of individuals, under a local capitalist for- mation, who live but a road apart from each other. The ﬂats are slightly better but are in free-fall, as Gupta senses that all the resources go across the road; “the government gives us nothing”. Both have histories of evictions and dispossessions, but as Bhattacharyya states, these experiences are “com- plicated by other diﬀerentiating processes and the battle to retain access to increasingly scarce resources is mobilising diﬀerences, and commonalities, between groups” (2018, 21). Endings and beginnings Pockets of looting also popped up during the July 2021 riots in Gauteng. In Soweto, African residents mobilized to protect their property, using violence to ward looters oﬀ. These actions were framed as righteous, law-abiding civi- lians standing up to the incipient barbarism of the lumpen proletariat. In complete contrast, in Phoenix, the story is of the working classes of Inanda (African) and Phoenix (Indians) turning on each other. This says much about the enduring ability of apartheid lexography to shape political percep- tions of events decades after its fall. Rendered invisible in these narratives are the luxurious estates lying beyond the battleﬁelds. Near Phoenix, this is Mount Edgecombe, acres of green-roofed luxury homes set around golf courses and water-ways. After the riots, these and other gaudy private ETHNIC AND RACIAL STUDIES 3557 developments in Umlanga will continue, increasing populated by Indian and African families wishing to escape the township and suburbs by visibly cutting themselves oﬀ from it. As Freund put it: The logic of capital is one that the ANC government is very unwilling to counter; there is complete acceptance of the need to accommodate and attract business through “competitiveness” as the key dictate in urban policy. Countering unplanned development (or better put, development planned purely in the interests of the aﬄuent) is no longer considered a sensible way to conduct urban politics. And thus the continuing edge city development of north Durban can be considered a certainty for the future. (Freund 2007, 191) The challenge of organizing Zuma and Gupta into a radical subjectivity from below is that they are not part of the employed, working alongside each other. They are part of “the disposable poor” who “must constantly invent creative life strategies to survive. Yet, these spaces of abandonment are never external to the dynamics of racial capitalism”. They are there as a poten- tial “desperate workforce”, recruiting ground for drug lords and foot soldiers of local politicians and tender maﬁas (Clarno 2017, 2002). Their exploitation, their immiseration in poverty is in their demarcated “group areas”. The recent violence illustrates how the lines have been drawn; recruitment grounds for the entrepreneurs of Indian racism and African chauvinism. Do we all end up with the promise of nuance and complexity, but end in the same place of a re-racialization of society, a society of blood? Or is there something else? Can a politics emerge that can close the distance? How do we build the future in the present? At the moment, the social cohesion and ubuntu workshops are, uninspiringly, all we have. Even the churches mainly keep to their “own” ﬂock. The eﬀorts of out-reach are laudable, but at the same time simply a holding pattern. Standing in Phoenix, one can say that the dream of a non-racial inclusive democracy is rendered into ashes. Can it ever rise? Can we build an anti-racist movement of young people in the area? School assemblies are crucial. In most schools in Phoenix, between 30 per cent and 60 per cent of the students are African. It is the one shared social space where identities may be con- tested and reformed. The ﬂats and council houses of Phoenix have progress- ively deracialised and social relations are really good. Witness Lloyd Cele who found fame as a runner up in SA Idols, the main singing contest in the country. Born in Kwa-Mashu, he grew up in Phoenix. In the aftermath of the riots, he spoke about the impact on his family: From what they have expressed, it was nothing but fear. Fear in their own homes that had them in tears. I could only pray for their safety and hope that it would be over as soon as possible and that unity would be restored again. 3558 A. DESAI Talking about growing up in Phoenix, he remembers it as a special time: “the only people who had problems with us was the Aunty who didn’t want to give our tennis ball back” (IOL News, 21 August 2021). At the top echelons of society, Gupta and Zuma merged into the Zuptas. But at the bottom, they eye each other with fear and anger. Can we bring working-class youth together? What kind of language will appeal? How can we break this re-racialization of society? One of the ﬁrst challenges is to understand local dynamics. To situate oneself on the ground. To not shy away from the challenges that come with it. To take a step back. The violence in Phoenix has monopolized our political energies. Given us choices to make in either Black or brown. Some see the moment as fostering “One Indian, One Bullet” sentiments (Hunter, Wicks, and Singh 2021, 180). Others instead urge an attitude of “let’s all just get along”. Both duck the harder insight. It needs us to look near and far as well as the ground beneath our feet. Getting along depends on the categories of Indian and African dissolving into a practical neighbourliness between Phoenix and Inanda, as much as it is also a struggle to develop an orientation that prior- itizes the poor and marginalized, rather than simply ploughing resources into mega-projects and infrastructure for the speedier import and export of goods. Patently also obvious is that government restitutionary measures that only take race into account, and not class, hinder practical solidarity. Race is no longer a reliable placeholder concept for disadvantage. Social policies using this measure alone thus facilitate the sharp social divisions that ﬂow from a sense of injustice. Indeed, inequality within South Africa is now most deepened within the African income spread. Making legal distinctions between people of colour in South Africa (African, coloured and Indian) may have made sense a quarter of a century ago, but no longer. Meanwhile, the everyday violence of the area marches on. Drug lords hold sway and mete out instant retribution to those who cross them. Police are either invisible or in on it. Political murders are commonplace. In African communities, in language reminiscent of the Phoenix uprisings, a determination to defend the community against “foreigners” (mainly African migrants) has gained traction. Operation Dudula, a loose movement of vigilantes popular in many African areas, object most stridently to African migrants walking their streets, seen to be criminals up to no good. It is useful to keep in mind Jenkins and Leroy’s argument that Racial capitalism is a highly malleable structure. It has at times relied on open methods of exploitation and expropriation that wrench racialized populations into capitalist modes of production and accumulation, such as slavery, coloni- alism, and enclosure. But racial capitalism also relies on exclusion from those same modes of production and accumulation in the form of containment, ETHNIC AND RACIAL STUDIES 3559 incarceration, abandonment, and underdevelopment for a racial surplus popu- lation. The maintenance of racial capitalism can even rely on the limited inclusion and participation of racially marked populations; by extending credit and political rights to these populations, the pervasive “racial” of racial capitalism recedes, entrenching itself through obfuscation. (Jenkins and Leroy 2021, 3–4) Returning to the racialization of tender-based capitalism, it seems safe to say that the motive to limit competition to ensure higher proﬁts has found expression in legal and political discourses, which propose that African and Indian citizens should be treated diﬀerently. This division of people based on race however rests on a fundamental obfuscation. Only a small percentage of people deploying this ideology truly beneﬁt from it. The rest scrabble around to make ends meet under an economic system that excludes them all. Unfortunately, this is not clear when racial identities are mobilized, in the midst of a riot or vigilante action. To the extent that many of the foot sol- diers would, if you surveyed them, likely swear by the racial identity that they have been assigned, they too are the edge subjects of capitalism. There is possibly also a material basis to this assumption of identity. South Africa, like almost every society in the world, is undergoing profound socio- economic stresses. These are brought about by forces as profound as pan- demics, tanking economies, movement of people, inﬂation, unemployment, loss of trust in traditional institutions, and the shocks of war. In this situation, groups of people contending for dwindling resources may ﬁnd it useful to form identities that place them ﬁrst in line to receive state largesse. These identities would also serve to excuse any illegal taking they may do. Phoenix/Inanda has heralded what “new and unpredictable modes of dispos- session” may be essayed under conditions of socio-economic stress, especially where people of visibly diﬀerent races live cheek by jowl in places as “edge-subjects of capitalism” (Bhattacharyya 2018, 10). Edge subjects like Gupta and Zuma come with histories of racialised diﬀer- ential incorporation. Zuma sees historic privilege across the road, Gupta sees the new political arrangements as discriminating against him. Bhattachar- yya’s argument that “Racial capitalism is a way of understanding why we seem so divided and yet so intimately intertwined with each other” is haunt- ingly apposite (2018, 11). So it will go. On. What will break the cycle in a context where the spatiality and “temporality of racial capitalism is one of ongoingness, even if its precise nature is dynamic and changing … a process not a moment … ”? (Jenkins and Leroy 2021, 12). It would be easy to shake one’s head and bemoan our broken dreams. Returning to the streets of Phoenix one year after the riots, there are tensions and recrimination, but also a determination to build something beautiful, as once more a key shibboleth of anti-apartheid struggle, non- 3560 A. DESAI racialism, amidst the ruins of racial capitalism, is raised as something possible and worthy to ﬁght for. Notes 1. Indians make up 2 per cent of South Africa’s overall population but could easily be 15–20 per cent of Durban’s. 2. Cheap, addictive drug swhich has burgeoned in these areas. Disclosure statement No potential conﬂict of interest was reported by the author(s). References Africa, S., S. Sokape, and M. Gumbi. 2021. “Report of the Expert Panel into the July 2021 Civil Unrest, 29 November 2021.” Pretoria: The Presidency. Alexander, N. 1985. Sow the Wind. Johannesburg: Skotaville. Alexander, N. 1986. “Approaches to the National Question in South Africa.” Transformation 1: 63–95. Basson, A., and P. du Toit. 2017. Enemy of the People: How Jacob Zuma Stole South Africa and How the People Fought Back. Jeppestown/Johannesburg: Jonathan Ball Publishers. Bhattacharyya, G. 2018. Rethinking Racial Capitalism: Questions of Reproduction and Survival. London: Rowman and Littleﬁeld. Bhorat, H., M. Buthelezi, I. Chipkin, S. Duma, L. Mondi, C. Peter, M. Qobo, M. Swilling, and H. Friedenstein. 2017. Betrayal of the Promise: How South Africa is Being Stolen. Stellenbosch: State Capacity Research Project. Bond, P. 2000. Elite Transition: From Apartheid to Neoliberalism in South Africa. Pietermaritzburg: University of Natal Press. Bourdieu, P. 1984. Distinction. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul. Clarno, A. 2017. Neoliberal Apartheid: Palestine/Israel And South Africa After 1994. Chicago: University of Chicago. Desai, A., and G. Vahed. 2019. A History of the Present: A Biography of Indian South Africans, 1990-2019. New Delhi: Oxford University Press. Freund, B. 2007. The African City: A History. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Hughes, H. 1985. “Violence in Inanda, August 1985.” Journal of Southern African Studies 13 (3): 331–354. Hunter, Q., J. Wicks, and K. Singh. 2021. Eight Days in July: Inside the Zuma Unrest That set South Africa Alight. Cape Town: Tafelberg. Jenkins, D., and J. Leroy. 2021. “Introduction: The Old History of Capitalism.” In Histories of Racial Capitalism, edited by D. Jenkins, and J. Leroy, 1–26. New York: Columbia University Press. Legassick, M., and D. Hemson. 1976. Foreign Investment and the Reproduction of Racial Capitalism in South Africa. London: Anti-Apartheid Movement. MacDonald, M. 2004. “The Political Economy of Identity Politics.” The South Atlantic Quarterly 103 (4): 629–656. Mbembe, A. 2002. “African Modes of Self-Writing.” Public Culture 14 (1): 239–273. ETHNIC AND RACIAL STUDIES 3561 Pauw, J. 2017. The President’s Keepers: Those Keeping Zuma in Power and out of Prison. Cape Town: Tafelberg. Parry, G., G. Moyser, and M. Wagstaﬀ. 1987. “The Crowd and Community. Context, Content and Aftermath.” In The Crowd in Contemporary Britain, edited by G. Gaskell and R. Benewick, 212–254. London: Sage Publications. Saul, J., and P. Bond. 2014. South Africa – The Present as History: From Mrs Ples to Mandela and Marikana. Johannesburg: Jacana. 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Ashwin Desai (2023). Geographies of racial capitalism.pdf

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