Punto de equilibrio

As mentioned in my Introduction, this thesis focuses upon the often-overlooked experiences of rural youth. My research took place in Intaba township in the Ehlanzeni district of Mpumalanga province.

Mpumalanga, ‘the place where the sun rises,’⁵ is approximately 200 km from Johannesburg, and shares its borders with Swaziland and Mozambique. Probably best known for containing the Kruger National Park nature reserve, the economy of the province relies upon its tourism, mining and agricultural industry.

According to Statistics obtained in 2013, Mpumalanga’s percentage share of the national population of 51.77 million was 7.8 per cent. The poverty rate of the province was declared as 36.9%, with 1.52 million of its citizens living in households below the poverty income (StatsSA, 2013). As is the case across South Africa, Mpumalanga is marred by unequal incomes across races and unemployment. While the Department of Education of Mpumalanga annually receives a budget allowance of approximately 44% of the total provincial budget (StatsSA, 2013), the latest community survey I was able to access recorded that only 6.7% of Ehlanzeni’s population has received post-school education, and only 29.5% has received secondary schooling (StatsSA Community Survey, 2007). In 2012, the matric pass rate, at 70.0 % was the third lowest in the country. There are several vocational colleges in the province and in 2014 the University of Mpumalanga was established, although to date only offers few degree programmes.

While these statistics situate Mpumalanga within the present, they do not offer insight into its historical formations. In order to understand this better, it is necessary to refer back to apartheid’s

5 In siSw ati, Ndebele, Zulu and Xhosa.

policies of separate development and its construction of ‘Homelands’ or ‘Bantustans.’ The development of these areas demonstrates the government’s ruthless racial segregation through the deliberate organisation of space and political economy to benefit the minority white population.

Presented as a means of enabling non-white population groups to govern themselves, the Bantu Authorities Act of 1951 established tribal, regional and territorial authorities within black areas (Malan and Hattingh, 1976:8). The Promotion of Bantu Self-Government Act of 1959 identified eight 'black national units' and articulated the national desire to move these units towards self-governing status (Malan and Hattingh, 1976). In total, ten homelands were created by the apartheid regime.

Bantustans were splintered so that powerful resources – land and minerals – were secured in white hands with networks of transport and communication largely bypassing Bantustans (Christie, 2013).

Since the demise of apartheid, these homelands were integrated within the land previously allocated to whites only and nine new provinces were formed. The former homeland of KaNgwane is now within Mpumalanga. In 1993, KaNgwane became part of the South African province of the Eastern Transvaal, which changed to Mpumalanga in 1995. I have provided a map of the former homelands and current provinces in Appendix 1.1 and 1.2. The second smallest homeland in the country, KaNgwane was often identified as the Swazi homeland. The border between Swaziland and South Africa (then the Zuid-Afrikaansche Republiek) was settled in the Pretorius and Alleyne Commissions of 1866 and 1879 and later ratified by the Pretoria Convention of 1881 and the London Convention of 1884 (Van Jaarsveld, 2007). This meant that all Swazi chieftains in South Africa fell under the authority of the Union of South Africa after 1910 and under the Republic of South Africa after 1961. With the establishment of the Swazi Territorial Authority in April 1976, the Swazis of South Africa became a self-governing people with their own central authority in KaNgwane (Van Jaarsveld, 2007:32).

While the boundaries of the homelands were erased through their political reincorporation, apartheid spatial planning continues to influence the material realities of rural residents. A number of factors have reduced opportunities within the region, such as its poor soil quality, scarcity of water for irrigation and limited access to markets for the sale of goods. For these reasons rural households have been forced to diversify into a host of formal and informal activities, including the selling of fruits and vegetables from neighbouring farms, selling of livestock, car repair, shoe repair, security work, domestic work, and manufacturing (King, 2007). As with many other rural communities in South Africa, the local tribal authorities provide access to a variety of assets, including land title and certain environmental resources. The authority of the chieftaincy is

questionable, revered by some and disregarded by others. The complex connections that young people in Intaba have in relation to a ‘rural’ past and imaginings of an ‘urban’ future is a central concern within this thesis, and will be explored further in Chapter Six.

Research concerning residential areas has shown that even though many South Africans of different racial origins may now potentially live among one another, most continue to live in racially segregated spaces. One reason for this is that choice is largely constrained by socio -economic factors, as the majority of South Africans cannot afford to live in the more affluent, historically whites-only suburbs (Seekings, 2008). Although residential areas, school and leisure spaces have officially become desegregated, many of these spaces remain racially exclusive. In environments where different racial and ethnic groups have ended up living side by side, research indicates that interaction between different groups is limited. Instead, people continue to frequent particular shops or particular leisure spaces where their racial group is perceived to be the majority (Lemanski, 2006).

This leads to what Valentine (2008) describes as ‘parallel lives’, whereby diverse peoples co-exist, but this does not necessarily result in contact. Durrheim et al. (2011) further point out that while a vast number of black South Africans have little to no interactions with white people, the majority of the white population have casual and close contact with black South Africans. This is partly because inter-racial contact in urban areas is higher than in rural areas, and while most white people are urbanised, a large number of black South Africans reside in rural areas where interactions with white people are less frequent (Seekings, 2008).

While statistics indicate that black South Africans are more likely to be the victims of crime than whites (Durrheim et al., 2011), discourses of crime, particularly those circulating within the media, routinely portray white people as prime targets. Of even greater discursive significance than crime itself is the fear of crime which is a ‘coded form of racial discourse’ (Dawson, 2006:132). As argued by Dawson, with the demise of the official racist lexicon of apartheid, ‘the discourses of crime and security have become the primary conceptual frame through which the economically hegemonic white minority represents national culture’ (Dawson, 2006:132).

Although my participants had limited exposure to South Africans deemed as belonging to different races, they were exposed to black people with different ethnic and linguistic back grounds. While Intaba was predominantly siSwati speaking and made up of people who consider themselves, in the words of one matric student, ‘Swazi but not from Swaziland’ (Phil), it was home to people of Shangaan, Shona and Zulu backgrounds, to name a few. Students and teachers often identified

with different ethnic backgrounds and spoke different languages in their homes. Given that many of South Africa’s official eleven languages share the same linguistic bases, students from non-siSwati speaking backgrounds told me that they were still able to communicate with one another confidently and engage with the siSwati syllabus. Within South Africa, the idea of ‘ethnicity’ has been historically tainted through its use as a political tool. This is because part of the NP’s divide-and-rule strategy was to exploit ethnic differences, differences that have subsequently been exposed as being ‘partially invented, reinforced and entrenched by apartheid’ (Adam, 1994:25). In Intaba, teachers and students rarely referred to one another’s ethnicity. This might have been different if my study had taken place in an urban environment with more diverse ethnicities present or in part of the country to have experienced some of the recent xenophobic attacks (Crush, 2008).