AFRICANUS Vol 32 No 1 ISSN 0304-615X - University of South Africa

AFRICANUS
Vol 32 No 1 ISSN 0304-615X

AFRICANUS is an annual journal published for the Department of Development Studies by the University
of South Africa (Unisa). It seeks to publish articles, research reports, book reviews and bibliographies on
subjects relating to developmental problems and strategies in the Third World.
The attention of contributors is drawn to the Note to contributors printed at the back of the journal.
Copies of AFRICANUS can be ordered from the Business Section, Unisa Press, Unisa, P O Box 392,
Unisa, 0003, at R17,50 each (VAT inclusive) or (US$5,00) each. Cheques or postal orders should be
made out in favour of the University of South Africa.
The findings, interpretations and conclusions expressed in any article, book review or research note are
those of the authors and do not necessarily represent the views and policies of Unisa or the Department of
Development Studies. Neither the university nor the department guarantees the accuracy of the data
included in AFRICANUS or accepts any responsibility whatsoever for any consequences of its use.
Research notes present preliminary and unpublished results of the author's research and are published
to afford the opportunity of gaining information and feedback from fellow researchers; citation from these
should take account of their provisional character.
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Set, printed and published by the University of South Africa, 2002.
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ISSN 0304-615X
STATEMENT BY THE DEPARTMENT OF DEVELOPMENT
STUDIES
The values underlying our teaching of
our subject are as follows:
. We are dedicated to upholding human
rights, an open society and
social justice.
. We want to move our subject to a
relevant position abreast of the contemporary
sociopolitical situation in
South Africa and the rest of the Third
World.
. We affirm a pragmatic and human
view of development administration
and we reject a technicist approach
to development.
. We want to direct attention to the
sociopolitical climate for change and
the rules of the game within which
development at the local level takes
place.
. We affirm that development occurs
when social forces are generated at
the bottom of society.
. We see development as a popular
process not under the control of
external structures.
. We want to engage with the popular
development process in the larger
society and, within that framework,
with administration-related topics.
With the above values, we wish to
approach our subject of development
administration primarily through the
study of the dynamics of society in its
sociopolitical context.

Journal of Development Studies
Vol 32 No 1 2002
EDITOR
Linda Cornwell
ASSISTANT EDITOR
Sthephan Treurnicht
EDITORIAL COMMITTEE
Frik de Beer
Moipone Rakolojane
Peter Stewart
EDITORIAL ADVISORY BOARD
Jan K Coetzee Ð Rhodes University
Richard Cornwell Ð Institute for Security Studies
Cristo de Coning Ð University of the Witwatersrand (P & DM)
O P Dwivedi Ð University of Guelph
Des Gasper Ð Institute of Social Studies (The Hague)
Pieter le Roux Ð University of the Western Cape
Tom Lodge Ð University of the Witwatersrand
Johnny Matshabaphala Ð University of the North
Tsitso Monaheng Ð University of North-West
Aubrey Redlinghuis Ð Rand Afrikaans University
Michael Stocking Ð University of East Anglia
Francois Theron Ð University of Stellenbosch
Kees van der Waal Ð Rand Afrikaans University
Malcolm Wallis Ð University of Durban-Westville

Contents
Editorial
Linda Cornwell 4
Nationalism in the Third World Ð a gender perspective
Yudith Oppenheimer 6
Rotating credit associations: their formation and use by poverty-stricken
African women in Rhini, Grahamstown, Eastern Cape
Gina Buijs 27
The New Partnership for African's Development: last chance for Africa?
Richard Cornwell 43
Economic globalisation, industrial restructuring and development in the
Eastern Cape Province: an examination of selected issues
Richard J Haines and Peter Cunningham 56
Truth, reconciliation and resolution in South Africa
Gavin Bradshaw 77
3

Editorial
After more than 30 years of existence, it is appropriate to take stock of where
the journal comes from and where it is going. Africanus was first published 31
years ago as an initiative of lecturers in the Development Administration, Development
Studies, Development Management, African Politics, and African
Government and Law at South African universities. There was a distinct need
for a journal that would publish articles, research reports, book reviews and
bibliographies on subjects relating to development problems and strategies in
the Third World. Unisa's Department of Development Administration offered to
house the journal.
Over the years a number of changes took place ± most importantly, the names
of departments and subjects changed as the study of development and its
manifestations searched for its true niche among the many older and established
academic disciplines. In some instances the study of development found
partners in disciplines such as Public Administration, where it started focusing
on development management. In other instances, Anthropology was seen to be
the most suitable partner, a relationship which led to a focus on the position of
humanity in developing contexts. Another popular linkage was between development
and politics, and yet another was where development and geography
teamed up. Some academics regarded the ideal partner to come from
the ranks of the interface between the many disciplines which each, on its own,
addresses a single sphere of society. For these academics, development studies
became the ideal worth striving for. In 2002 Unisa's Department of Development
Administration achieved this ideal when the name of the subject was
changed to Development Studies.
How does this impact on Africanus, its focus and the content of the contributions
published? Initially, Africanus was regarded as a mouthpiece for research
done within, or on, southern Africa by African scholars. However, as the journal
grew in stature, unsolicited articles were received from scholars in develop-
Africanus 32(1)2002 4

ment-related disciplines across the world. Apart from deliberately recruiting
contributions from emerging researchers and practitioners, the journal has attracted
contributions from renowned scholars in the development field.
Over the years, the articles published consistently reflected the journal's concern
with issues relating to development and its opposite, poverty. It has always
been a product of its time ± in the heyday of modernisation and dependency,
articles were published in support of, or even in defence of, these two macrotheories
that have dominated the development discourse for so many years. At
the same time, the journal has always been critical of the times in which we live
and the dominant discourses. In our search for broader understanding of the
complexities of development, and in our search for solutions to the underlying
causes of mass poverty, we have also published numerous articles critical of
popular orthodoxies.
This issue of Africanus is no different. Contributors come from the ranks of
emerging scholars, established academics, commentators and researchers. As
always, the contributions reflect the wide range of concerns so characteristic of
people concerned with ``development''. The mix of articles also reflects the
scope of research ± from the theoretical analysis of constructs of gender and
nationalism, to the grassroots-based survival strategies of female heads of
households, to a comment on the New Partnership for Africa's Development
(NEPAD).
Future issues of Africanus will continue to explore the multi-faceted nature of
development, and will draw on the expertise and skills of scholars, researchers
and academics representing a growing number of disciplines engaging in reflection,
action and praxis with poverty as the point of departure.
Long live Development Studies!
5

Nationalism in the Third World Ð a
gender perspective
Yudith Oppenheimer
Director, Kol Ha'lsha, Jerusalem 1
1 INTRODUCTION: NATIONALISM AS A MODERNIST CONSTRUCT
Nationalism has been the primary force that shaped and mobilised conflicts in
the Third World during the late nineteenth and the twentieth century. Nationalism
became, in the history of these societies, a major impetus in which the
battle for independence from colonial rule was envisioned and performed. At
the same time, nationalism as a political discourse appeared to be paradoxically
rooted within the same divisions between West and East, modernisation and
tradition, and progress and backwardness ± as was colonialism. This paradox
impacted on the dissemination of nationalism as a liberating discourse in the
history of the Third World in general and on women in particular.
In this article nationalism is studied as a discursive construct. 2 Following Anderson
(1991) and Gellner (1983), nations are viewed as ``imagined communities''
(Anderson 1991) whereby people come to ``invent'' a shared experience
of identification with an extended community. Nationalism as an imaginary
project seeks legitimacy by asserting its own narrative perspective as ``natural'',
homogeneous and historically genuine. It strives to suppress differences and
alternative narratives that are in conflict with the unitary vision of the nation.
However, social difference is constantly invented and performed in the discourse
of nationalism. It will emerge clearly from the following discussion that
nations are invested in radical definitions of self/other which are crucially depicted
in gender, class and ethnic terms.
While Anderson and Gellner ignore gender and other domains of difference,
Africanus 32(1)2002 6

their theories are by no means gender neutral. Nationalism is reflected by both
Gellner and Anderson as an intrinsic masculine ideology. Gellner describes
nations as made of men recognising themselves as being from the same nation
(McClintock 1993:62). Similarly, Anderson views nationalism as a ``deep horizontal
comradeship'' (Mosse 1985:91). Anderson explains that nationalism is
imagined within the vocabulary of kinship and affinity (1991:131). Nations speak
of themselves as ``motherland'' and ``fatherland'', as ``homelands'' and ``native''
lands. The assertion of the nation as a family serves to ``naturalise'' and ``essentialise''
the hegemony of its members over the symbolic and material assets
of their society, and entails, as will be elaborated later, a clear division of gender
roles.
Anderson and Gellner differ in their perception of the concept of invention. 3
However, they share the view that nationalism represents an attempt to realise
in political terms a modernised and homogenised vision of the nation. In this
view, nationalism appears as a rational and progressive frame which is affiliated
with a certain degree of development. This perception places nationalism
clearly within the discourse of modernism. It associates nationalism with the
development of a certain level of capitalism and technology which marks a shift
from a vertical, religious-orientated society to a rational, horizontal and marketbased
one. In line with the modernist thought, both Anderson and Gellner assume
that all societies evolve along the same path and will eventually take the
form of modernisation and nationalism.
As a modernist construct, nationalism suffers from inherent ambivalence. On
the one hand, it aims to transform traditional structures in favour of a rational,
progressive political order. On the other hand, it is assumed to embody a new
form of ``cultural artifacts of a particular kind'' (Anderson 1991:4). In other
words, while nationalism speaks in the name of universalism it is, in fact,
constructed on specific definitions of distinctiveness and difference. It is imagined
through extensive symbols of genealogy, territory and cultural continuity
which are far removed from its rational pretension. Nairn describes this duality
as the ``pathology'' or ``neurosis'' of nationalism (in Anderson 1991:3±5). Nairn
argues that capitalism is inscribed by ``uneven development'' which implies
``both progression and regression, political rationality and irrationality in the very
genetic code of the nation'' (in Bhabha 1990a:2). Bhabha describes this ambivalence
as the ``Janus-face'' of nationalism (1990a:2±3). The ``pathology'' of
nationalism, as will be discussed in the following sections, has posed a crucial
7

dilemma for the Third World in general and for women of the Third World in
particular.
Anderson's first version of Imagined communities was published in 1983, in the
same year as Gellner's work, Nations and nationalism. Neither of the works
deals with the Third World as a separate phenomenon. They are bound to their
general theory and to the postulations of modernity. It is striking that only during
the 1990s did both Anderson (1991) and Gellner (1997) start to account for the
peculiar development of nationalism in the Third World. Their approach to the
subject remained highly Eurocentric and superficial. 4
The modernist approach takes an extreme form in Gellner's theory. ``Nationalism
is, essentially, the general imposition of a high culture on society, where
previously low cultures had taken up the lives of the majority, and in some
cases the totality, of the population'' (1983:57). The concept of a ``high culture''
becomes the key to Gellner's theory of nationalism. The ``high'' of modern
society is contrasted with the ``low'' of agro-literate societies. A high culture is
literate, sophisticated and specialised. A low culture is, by contrast, wild,
spontaneous and undirected (Smith 1996:379). In a low society, there is neither
need nor room for nations and nationalism since many ``low'' cultures are local
and ``almost invisible'' (Gellner 1983:16±17). As Smith puts it ``for Ernest
[Gellner], all these `low' cultures are doomed. They are cut off, like so many
umbilical cords, because they are simply irrelevant in an impersonal, mobile
modern society. Nationalism, Ernest claims, is basically a product of modernity''
(1996:379).
For Third World societies, Gellner's distinction between ``high'' and ``low'' cultures
was equal to the distinction between local and Westernised culture. It
implies that Third World countries imagined their national liberation in terms that
were embedded in, and privileged, the colonial culture. Within this dichotomy
their culture was always perceived as inherently inferior. The nationalist dilemma
resulted in a highly contradictory situation.
`It [nationalism] is both imitative and hostile to the models it imitates.' It is
imitative in that it accepts the values of the standards set by the alien culture.
But it also involves a rejection, `in fact, two rejections, both of them ambivalent:
rejection of the alien intruder and dominator who is nevertheless to
be imitated and surpassed by his own standards, and rejection of ancestral
ways which are seen as obstacles to progress and yet also cherished as
8

marks of identity' (Chatterjee, 1986:2; internal quote by Plamenatz in Chatterjee
1986:2).
Historically, nationalism evolved in the history of the West after national identities
had been established and a certain process of modernisation had taken
place. This was not the case in the Third World where nationalism emerged as
a reaction to colonialism and as a way of inventing collective identity in order to
resist imperial domination. Consequently, the struggle for national liberation in
the Third World had to be followed by social and cultural transformation. ``The
search therefore was for a regeneration [reimagining] of the national culture,
adapted to the requirements of progress, but retaining at the same time its
distinctiveness'' (Chatterjee 1986:2). In reality, this process was full of contradictions
and distortions.
Nationalism did not live up to its promise to mobilise lower classes socially and
politically. Modernisation did not penetrate evenly into the Third World before
and after liberation. Instead, modernisation and capitalism remained the reality
of a narrow e lite which created a bilingual section, able to mediate between the
metropolitan nation and the masses. ``Bilingualism meant access, through the
European language of state, to modern Western culture in the broadest sense
and, in particular, to the models of nationalism, nationness, and nation-state
produced elsewhere in the course of the nineteenth century'' (Chatterjee
1986:20±1). Inequalities in access to socio-economic and political resources
continued to shape the social and political realms in nearly all postcolonial
societies even after national independence had been established. Nationalism
remained largely a discourse of a minority of Westernised, male e lite. This e lite
enjoyed the privileges of nationalism but did not escape the ambivalence in
which it was embedded.
At the very moment when the native intellectual is anxiously trying to create a
cultural work, he fails to realise that he is utilising techniques and language
which are borrowed from the stranger in his country. He contents himself with
stamping these instruments with a hallmark which he wishes to be national,
but which is strangely reminiscent of exoticism (Fanon 1963:177±80).
In these semi-autobiographical remarks, Fanon articulates the identity crisis
from which the colonised intellectual suffers. For Fanon this is largely perceived
as a crisis of ``manhood''. A central theme in his writing is the effemination of the
native man/nation by colonial powers. Fanon portrays the emancipation of the
colonised nations as a process in which the black man reclaims his manhood
9

(Fanon 1963, Yuval-Davis 1997:60). His effemination results from the process
by which he (for Fanon it is always ``he'') is made to perceive himself in the way
he is reflected by a dominant foreign culture. In this reflection he is always
mirrored as an ``exotic'' other.
The distortion of nationalism in the history of the Third World posed a critical
dilemma to the modernist school of thought. It had to give explanations as to
why nationalism as an emancipatory discourse often resulted in regimes of
tyranny, exploitation and organised violence. The ``liberal dilemma'' (Chatterjee
1986:2±4) took different forms according to specific social and historical contexts.
However, in all of its manifestations, it had crucial gender, class and
ethnic implications which will be discussed further on in this article.
2 THIRD WORLD CRITIQUES OF ``IMAGINED COMMUNITIES''
Third World critiques discussed in this article undermine and problematise the
totality and the homogeneity of ``imagined community''. They question the assumption
that nationalism is the most authorised and authentic form of collectivity
identification. Furthermore, they question the entire conception of
modern knowledge and its claims to universal truth. They argue that knowledge,
culture and power are interrelated and shape discourses of domination and
subordination.
Bhabha attempts to define the symbolic process in which the social imaginary
becomes a subject of discourse. Drawing on the school of cultural studies,
Bhabha applies the concept of ``nation as narration'' in a crucially different way
than Anderson. Bhabha challenges the cohesiveness and linearity of ``imagined
communities''. What Anderson views as a rational space becomes in Bhabha's
terminology a ``space of liminality'' which signifies the ``unbearable ordeal of the
collapse of certainty''. The nation is no longer the sign of modernity under which
cultural, differences are homogenised in the horizontal view of society. The
nation reveals in its ambivalent and vacillating representation, the ethnography
of its own historicity and opens up the possibility for other narratives of the
people and their difference to emerge (1990b:300).
Bhabha addresses the ambivalence of nationalism, discussed above, in a fairly
radical manner. He describes it as a ``split'' in the national narrative between the
pedagogical and the performative, two narrative movements in time. This ``split''
becomes the site of ``writing the nation'' (1990b:297). The performative coincides
with the nation's grand narrative. It is characterised by a linear, pro-
10

gressive movement in time and history which shapes and authorises people's
identity as homogeneous and solid. The performative is diverse, scattered and
multifaceted. It is described by a circular, repetitive and contemporary movement
focusing on the ``scraps, patches and rags of daily life'' (1990b:297). The
split in the nationalist sign occurs ``between the continuist, accumulative temporality
of the pedagogical, and the repetitious, recursive strategy of the performative''
(1990b:297). This duality marks the crisis of representation in the
nationalist discourse, which provides the appropriate time-frame for alternative
meaning and practices to emerge from the margins of society. The performative
intervenes in the sovereignty of the nation ``in between'' through the ``gap'' or
``emptiness'' of the symbolic order, and challenges the authoritative narrative of
the pedagogical. It ``interrupts the self-generating time of national production
with a space of representation that threatens binary division with its difference''
(1990b:299). The nation becomes a space of a liminal form, marked by cultural
difference and heterogeneous histories.
Bhabha supports his theory with examples taken from other scholars, such as
Fanon, Kristeva, and Derrida, showing similar dualistic conception. For instance,
in Women's time, Kristeva, identifies a double historical time in a
``concurrent circulation of linear, cursive and monumental time'' (Bhabha
1990b:303±6) which constitutes a new historical temporality which allows women
and other marginal groups to emerge in the narrative ambivalence of
disjunctive times and meanings. In Derrida's example Bhabha locates the
concept of the supplementarity ± a heterogeneous movement that confronts the
totality of the nation and provides a space for alternative discourses to emerge
(1990b:305). Bhabha does not treat these concepts as the same. Rather, he is
trying to show a similar ambivalence in their point of departure which subverts
the homogeneous, transparent time of the horizontal society and allows a space
for a minority discourse.
The ``dual writing'' of the nation reveals the people who are located within the
liminal space of the symbolic order: ``Those people ± colonial, postcolonial
migrants, and minorities ± wandering people who will not be contained within
the national culture and its unisonant discourse, but are themselves the marks
of a shifting boundary that alienates the frontiers of the modern nation''
(1990b:293). Two particular groups, the colonised and women, are found by
Bhabha, to be the most hindered in the antinomies of the modern political
rationality. They are placed within a hierarchical, binary structure of social antagonism
and become the symbols of national otherness (1990b:292±4).
11

Bhabha stresses that it is precisely from this place of liminality that the ambivalent
structures of the equivocal trend of historical time are uncovered and
subversive forms of cultural identity and political solidarity emerge.
Bhabha applies Derrida's concept of the ``supplementary'' as a strategy
whereby the performative becomes a supplement to the pedagogical and intervenes
in the sovereignty of the nation through the logic of ``adding to''.
Bhabha stresses that `` `adding to' need not `add up' but may disturb the calculation''
(1990b:305). The logic of ``adding to'' is contained within the notion of
``hybridity'' which is never an harmonious addition of contents but rather a
discourse through which all forms of cultural meaning are re-translated and reinterpreted
(1990b:314±19).
The postcolonial space is now supplementary to the metropolitan centre; it
stands in a subaltern, adjunct relation that doesn't aggrandise the presence
of the West but redraws its frontiers in the menacing, agonistic boundary of
cultural difference that never quite adds up, always less than one nation and
double (1990b:319).
In his comprehensive work (1986) Nationalist thought and the colonial world: a
derivative discourse, Chatterjee illustrates an Eastern (as opposed to Western)
theory of nationalism.
The crucial question for Chatterjee is not whether the East can be involved in
the task of modernisation, but rather ``why is it that non-European colonial
countries have no historical alternative but to try to approximate the given attributes
of modernity when that very process of approximation means their
continued subjection under a world order which only sets their tasks for them
and over which they have no control?'' (1986:10). In line with Said 5 and
Bhabha, Chatterjee seeks to undermine the frame of knowledge produced by
the modernist school of thought and its claim for universal truth. He argues that
this knowledge has never been neutral to the receiving cultures in the colonised
world. It has been directly associated with relations of dominance and subordination,
and with specific cultural codes. Chatterjee stresses that the possibility
of substituting one cultural code in the place of another is highly
problematic. Knowledge can never be acquired with the same meaning when
projected on different socio-cultural contexts. The problem with nationalism lies
in its attempt to become modern. It simultaneously rejects and accepts the
dominance, both epistemological and moral, of an alien frame of knowledge.
12

This state of affairs has largely determined the distortion of nationalism in the
history of the Third World.
Chatterjee argues that the Third World has to develop a critical and deconstructive
knowledge of the power relations which dictate the discourse of nationalism
on both the epistemological and political levels. ``It is only on the basis
of such knowledge that postcolonial subjects can produce a genuinely subaltern
history about themselves and not merely replicate, in one way or another, the
liberal-elitist narrative of the West'' (Radhakrishnan 1992:86). This knowledge
is based on a distinction between the ``problematic'' and the ``thematic'' ±
Chatterjee's version of the ``dual writing'' of nationalism.
The thematic ``refers to an epistemological as well as ethical system which
provides a framework of elements and rules for establishing relations between
elements; the problematic, on the other hand, consists of concrete statements
about possibilities justified by reference to the thematic'' (Chatterjee 1986:38).
By applying this distinction, Chatterjee argues that the problematic in nationalist
thought is the reverse of that of Orientalism. The passive ``objects'' of colonialism
are now active ``subjects'' of nationalism, and perceive themselves as
autonomous and sovereign. However, their relationships to themselves and to
others remain within the frame of progress and reason. Those relations are no
longer acted out by foreigners. Rather, the nationalist subjects now believe that
their subjectivity is active, autonomous and sovereign (Chatterjee 1986:38).
The level of the ``thematic'' is concerned with the relations between nationalism
and modern Western thought. It reveals that the postcolonial nationalist subjects
accept the same essentialist conception based on the distinction between
``the East'' and ``the West'' and hence the same ``objectifying'' procedures of
knowledge constructed in the post-Enlightenment age of Western science
(Chatterjee 1986:38).
It follows that postcolonial nationalism has sustained and continued the pitfalls
of Orientalism and colonialism. It has internalised rather than questioned
Western conceptions of progress and universalism. In reality the discourse of
the power of knowledge has not been reversed and the problems of political and
cultural domination persist. The assumption that the conditions for social and
political transformation are universally present has been proven wrong. The
challenge of breaking away from colonial and postcolonial domination is both
political and epistemological. The nationalist subject has to break away from the
colonial past in order achieve full and inclusive representation. Chatterjee
13

wonders whether nationalism can realise these tasks (Chatterjee 1986:17±18,
Radhakrishnan 1992:87).
The theories examined in this section reveal that the crisis of modernity has
resulted in the history of the Third World in a double temporality in which the
majority of the people has been excluded from the authoritative linear narrative
of the nation. As opposed to the horizontal perspective suggested by Gellner
and Anderson, these theories view the nation as a ``zone of occult instability''
(Fanon in Bhabha 1990b:303). Feminist theories discussed in the following
section show that the ``dual writing'' of the nation has had specific inference for
women.
3 FEMINIST CRITIQUES OF NATIONALISM
Bhabha, Chatterjee and other scholars discussed above challenge the horizontal
homogenising view of ``imagined communities''. While some of them
acknowledge the position of women as a subaltern group, they do not explore
how nationalism is implicated and constituted in gender power. 6 Feminists differ
widely in their relation to nationalism. However, they share the recognition that
the integration of women into nationalism and ``nationhood'' follows a different
path to that of men. Their critiques attempt to undermine the perception of the
nation as a ``deep horizontal comradeship'' and to reveal the constructions of
gender in nationalism (Parker et al 1992:4±6).
Until recently, feminist analyses of nationalism have been few and far between.
White feminists in particular have been slow to recognise issues of ethnicity and
nationality (McClintock 1993:61±63). It is only since the mid-1980s that feminist
theory has become increasingly interested in the politics of collectivity identification.
This trend in feminist thought has been profoundly influenced by poststructuralist
theories of power such as Foucault's, and by the rising crosscultural
debate on social difference and multiculturalism. It stresses that gender
as a discourse of difference never operates alone but rather intersects with race
and class as well as other social differences in concrete social relations. The
following discussion attempts to set a basic frame of reference following the
issues and terminology raised by the preceding discussion following . . .:
Nations tend to administer difference on two crucial levels, the material and the
symbolic. Both levels are interdependent and both situate women differently to
men. On the material level, difference is administered through differentiating
access to resources and power as well as through acts of violence and coer-
14

cion. On the symbolic level, difference is manipulated through what Parker et al.
call ``representational labour'' (1992:5). The discussion attempts to explore both
levels in an integrative fashion. However, some issues will be discussed separately
because of the complexity and/or quantity of the literature examined.
Mosse (1985) was among the first to reveal the connection between nationalism
and sexuality. He shows that nationalism embodies the male search for
friendship and community as it is expressed in Anderson's view of a ``deep
horizontal comradeship'' (Mosse 1985:91). According to Mosse, Westernised
nationalism adopted middle-class, bourgeois ideas of respectability that penetrated
all classes of the European nineteenth-century society. Respectability
was linked to a romantic utopia of what was perceived as the ``natural'' family
life. Women became the symbolic embodiment of this view of respectability. It
assigned them strictly within their traditional role as wives and mothers, and as
the custodians of tradition. The nationalist demands for respectability entailed
strict heterosexuality. Sexual behaviours were classified according to normal
and abnormal categories conflated with notions of natural and unnatural. The
association between racism and sexuality was immediate and direct. Those
who stood outside of the respectable norms of bourgeois society, such as
homosexuals and blacks, were ruled out by a set of social norms that were fixed
by ``natural'' validation.
Feminist theory insists that that all nations are framed by powerful constructions
of gender. In all nations, women are situated differently to men in divisions of
power, violence, labour and resources. These divisions are naturalised and
essentialised, as shown by Mosse, in order to promote the idea of the nation as
a natural and organic construct. The association of women with the domestic
sphere comes as a result a ``natural'' implication of their role as the ``mother of
the nation''. It is often translated into specific cultural codes of the ``appropriate''
behaviour for women.
The naturalisation of gender serves to signify the boundaries of the collectivity
and to mark its distinction from alien others. It creates ``hierarchy within unity''
which places gender, ethnic and cultural difference within strict binary oppositions.
``First, the family offers a `natural' figure for sanctioning social hierarchy
within a putative organic unity of interests. Second, it offers a `natural' trope for
figuring historical time . . . into a single historical genesis narrative'' (McClintock
1993:63). Thus, the logic of the ``gender hierarchy within unity'' depends upon
hierarchies of masculinity and femininity that portray the nation as an organic
15

unity and is extended to naturalise race and other domains of social difference
(McClintock 1993:61).
The symbolic construction of motherhood in nationalist discourses ties the
entire arena of women's sexuality into the national cause. Women are envisioned
as signifying the wholeness of the nation constituting both its biological
and its cultural reproducers. The metaphoric representation of the ``motherland''
operates on various levels of the national imaginary. It tends to conflate the
political control of a territory with the control of female sexuality. Territoriality is
often marked by the ``combined pull of the primordial ties of kinship, community''
(Spivak 1988:217) which is formulated through the space of socio-sexual difference.
In times of national and inter-group conflicts, as the recent events in
Serbia and Bosnia have shown, a woman's body often becomes a site of
conflict liable for invasion and violation from alien males. The violation of a
woman's body is perceived, in these cases, as the contamination of the essence
of her nation (Spivak 1992, Nash 1993, Peterson 1994:79±80, Yuval-
Davis 1997:22±4, 109±110).
Historically, nationalism has often placed women in highly ambivalent positions.
As an emancipatory discourse it raised expectations for redefinition of gender
identities and for new possibilities of inclusion of women in public life. National
liberation movements often gave legitimacy to the ``women's question'' and
acted as a mobilising force of reforms concerning women's rights. They often
integrated women in national struggles and created an opportunity for them to
participate in public life. However, women were incorporated into nationalist
struggles on inherently unequal terms which reflected their ambivalent representation.
Most often, once independence had been won, women were returned
to domesticity and to subordinate roles.
Kumari Jayawardena (1986) shows that in the nineteenth and early twentieth
centuries nationalism and feminism were linked in several countries in Asia and
in the Middle East through the anti-colonialist and nationalist struggles. During
this period in countries such as India, Turkey, Greece and Egypt feminism and
nationalism coincided in their aim to assert the national identity of a modernised
civilised society. They found a common ground around the issue of social reforms
(Jayawardena 1986:258±9). Nationalism was perceived as a homogenising
agent which could mobilise progressive social changes (Kandiyoti
1991:429, Moghadam 1994:3). Feminism, then, was not imposed on the Third
World, but rather integrated with the historical circumstances which produced
16

important material and ideological changes that affected women (Jayawardena
1986:2).
However, the symmetry between nationalism, feminism and social reforms was
operating in very narrow terms. The growth of capitalism created new social
classes with clear roles for women. In most cases reforms had limited and
selected scope with little effect on the daily lives of the masses of working-class
women. Those women were drawn into wage labour to become the largest and
cheapest labour force. Middle-class women, for whom reforms were actually
meant, were trained to accept new social roles in conformity with the emerging
bourgeois ideology of the period. The notion of the ``new women'' reflected the
ambivalence inherent in the concept of modernity and implied a moderate
version of ``civilised housewives''. The women's movement in several countries
in Asia and the Middle East achieved political and legal equity at the juridical
level, but failed to make a significant impact on women's subordination within
the wider patriarchal structures of family and society. In most of these countries,
women of all classes participated actively and publicly in nationalist and anticolonial
struggles. However, feminist consciousness did not develop, irrespective
of the few exceptions, to the level of radically questioning traditional
patriarchal structures (Jayawardena 1986:24±6).
After national liberation had been won, the relations between nationalism and
feminism seemed less and less compatible (Moghadam 1994). Disillusions with
the postcolonial state have raised questions with regard to the capacity of
national governments to deliver the benefits of socio-economic and political
development. The lack of these achievements had an important bearing on
family, class and ethnic relations. Integration into capitalist markets brought
dramatic changes in definitions of the private and the public, as women joined
the waged labour force in increasing numbers. These changes have often
raised the level of tension and conflict between women and men, and between
different ethnic and cultural groups. Women have often found themselves
bound to constraints within the domestic sphere while having to face growing
demands from the public sphere which granted them less and less social security.
These tensions have contributed to the growing influence of fundamentalist
ideologies which place further suspicion on the progressive appeal of
nationalism. At the same time, the feminist movement in the Third World had
become more independent and far more critical of the social order. Women's
rights activists, particularly middle-class and professional, can be seen and
17

heard in many countries nowadays, including Muslim countries (Moghadam
1994:3; 8, Kandiyoti 1991:439).
The representation of women in nationalism appears to be intimately connected
to the ``temporal paradox of modernity'' discussed earlier. The tension in the
double inscription of the nation seems to find a natural focus around the personal
status of women (Kandiyoti 1991:432).
[It] is typically resolved by figuring this contradiction as a `natural' division of
gender. Women are represented as the atavistic and authentic `body' of
national tradition (inert, backward-looking and natural), embodying nationalism's
conservative principle of continuity. Men by contrast, represent the
progressive agent of national modernity (forward-thrusting, potent and historic),
embodying nationalism's progressive, or revolutionary principle of
discontinuity. Nationalism's anomalous relation to time is thus managed as a
natural relation to gender (McClintock, 1993:66).
Thus, the ambivalence in the ``Janus-face'' of nationalism is resolved through a
natural division of gender between the home and the world. The idea of the
nation entails retaining cultural distinctiveness, on the one hand, while adapting
to the requirements of a modern material world on the other. Thus, the home is
the domain where the spiritual distinctiveness of the national culture is kept and
nourished in contrast to world as the realm of modernity and progress. It necessitates
that women, as custodian of cultural sanctity, are excluded from the
modern world of the nation. This division has set up a series of connected
binary oppositions between private and public, nature and reason, body and
mind, productive and reproductive in which women are constantly restricted to
the domestic sphere and to notions of backwardness and otherness. In many
colonial and postcolonial societies this created a predominantly masculine,
middle-class, secular and modernised sector, and a traditional and deprived
one to which most women have been confined. In the postcolonial era these
relations become even more complicated as the institution of the family itself
has become a site of a fundamental crisis.
Kabeer (1994), Peterson (1996) and Spivak (1992) situate the family/household
in relation to the nation-state and global capitalism, and expose the interactive
power of gender divisions. Global economy enforces hegemonic masculine
hierarchies over reproductive and productive activities which incorporate the
household into state-centric policies. As a result, masculinist dichotomies of
public/private, productive/reproductive and formal/informal create apparent
18

separation of spheres of activities which shape stereotypes, identities, visibility,
and external and internal forms of violence. While decision making and resources
are concentrated in a small, privileged and male-dominated class, the
majority of the world's people ± men and women ± are drawn into the ``black
hole'' (Kabeer 1994:77) of the informal, part-time, non-organised economic
sector. Peterson (1996:11) describes this state of affairs as the ``housewifisation''
of the poor world. Consequently, massive groups of Third World
people, of whom the majority are poor women, are not only excluded from
formal economic activities, but are rendered invisible in the entire range of state
and national affairs. Peterson goes on to argue that state autonomy and accountability
are further eroding in the dynamics of global economics. Hence,
``nationalism's progressive claims, which are already suspect in regard to reproducing
gender inequalities, are additionally suspect in regard to securing
and safeguarding the welfare of the group'' (Peterson 1996:13).
Spivak seeks to undermine the logic of the evolutionary narrative of nationalism
which lies in the metaphor of familial relations. This very logic fails to realise,
according to Spivak, that within the context of the postcolonial state and global
capitalism the family itself has been broken. The crisis in the family as a nationalist
unit results in a further collapse in the representation of the subaltern
woman. ``[She] moves us to a space where the family, the machine for the
socialisation of the female body through affecting coding, has itself been broken
and deflected to see that, even in the displaced imaginings'' (Spivak 1992:101).
Thus, women's invisibility in the economic realm is followed by their symbolic
invisibility in the entire national realm and this, in turn, displaces the logic of the
evolutionary narrative of the nation. For Spivak, nationalism is always in complete
negation with the female subaltern (Spivak 1992, Nash 1993:39±40). This
totality of view is not necessarily shared by all Third World feminist perspectives.
Since the 1980s, women activists and writers from the Third World have
questioned the right of feminists, particularly Westernised feminists, to speak
for the experience of all women. One of the major issues in contest has been
the issue of identity politics. The attempt to place nationalism in antagonism to
feminism falls under this debate. This approach was condemned as it does not
consider the externally imposed identities on women of colour and other oppressed
minorities, by racist and sexist cultures (Yuval-Davis 1997:117±120).
For many Third World women, subjectivity is both individual and collective. The
construction of their self is conducted through multiple oppressed identities
19

which cannot be politically separated. Many women of the Third World, as well
as women of cultural minorities, cannot assume an individual or separatist
identity, as they are at always reminded of their multiple levels of difference.
Their condition as women, as people of colour, as working-class members and
so on, has led them to seek an identity which can make connections between all
the forces of domination which affect their lives (Torres 1991:274±5). Women
have often affiliated their destiny with the liberation struggle of their nations.
They did so both because they identified with the national aspirations of their
communities, but also because their national oppression has had severe and
immediate effect on their life choices and the welfare of their families. At the
same time, their integration into the national liberation struggle was bound to
discriminating constructions of gender divisions described above. This complexity
is very powerfully articulated in the poem, `I ain't the right kind of feminist',
by Cheryl L West (in Mohanty et al. 1991).
First off I'm too confused
Secondly you know my blackness envelops me
Thirdly my articulateness fails me
When the marching feminists come by
I walk with them for awhile
And then I trip over pebbles I didn't see
My sexist heels are probably too high
I'm stuck in the sidewalk cracks
Oh where Oh where has my feminism gone . . .
Don't you know it's chasing after my
Blackness
Somewhere in the white sea
I'm in the movement
No chile
I'm not talking about dancing
I'm in the liberation movement
Yeah I'm talking about the PLO
Yeah I'm talking about South Africa and
Apartheid
No I didn't say you were fit to be tied . . .
Girl what are you talking about
I can have kids
20

My people have always had kids
No it's about oppression of all oppressees
But they never come in peace
They just got some different labels
Tell me
Is sisterhood the same as the 60s
Brotherhood
...
The construction of women in nationalism presents a series of contradictions.
Women are located on the borders of national/ethnic, class and gender discourses
and their very consciousness is most often constructed on fragmentation
(Torres 1991:280±4). Therefore, a narrow politics based exclusively on a
single domain that shapes women's experience will always result in further split
and marginalisation of women's psychic and physical condition. The realisation
that a non-contradictory, unified self is impossible within the current debate on
nationalism may open up the opportunity for a movement which will strive to
transform differences and to acknowledge the multi-level of oppression that
affects people of colour in general and women in particular.
4 CONCLUSION
It emerges from this discussion that people of the Third World ± men and
women ± have experienced nationalism in a rather different, most often distorted
way. In contrast to the homogenising view of nationalism, gender, class
and ethnicity as well as other social differences have crucially affected people's
positioning within their nationalist discourse. Nationalism is revealed through
this discussion as an ambivalent construct which both rejects and internalises
relations of power and domination embedded in the colonial and postcolonial
world order. This ambivalence was often depicted in the dual writing of the
nation and experienced as a split between a linear, authoritative and homogenising
national narrative, and a diverse, scattered and heterogeneous one.
The latter intervenes in the sovereignty of the nation from its margins, and from
there it is assumed to create its counter-narratives. At the same time, the place
from which subaltern groups produce knowledge about themselves remains
highly ambivalent and distorted.
It follows that the formation of a hegemonic national culture has been built upon
systems of exclusions. Femininst critiques reveal that these systems are de-
21

pendent upon divisions of masculinity and femininity that crucially exclude the
vast masses of people ± among them the majority of Third World women ± from
the unitary discourse of the nation. Women appear to be particularly vulnerable
to the binary language of nationalism as they are most hindered by the essentialist
antinomies of home/world, productive/reproductive, mind/body and so
on. Gender appears to play a crucial role in defining national difference. It has
often become the site of the crisis of modernity, as the ambivalence in nationalism
finds a ``natural'' resolution in its articulation as a gender division. As a
result, women have often become the markers of shifting boundaries that draw
the margins of the modern nation and have been denied political agency of their
own.
Feminist writing explored in this article expresses a profound alienation from the
language of identity that constitutes the nationalist discourse. Feminist writers
strive to reject embodied metaphors, which have historically excluded women
and ethnic minorities from full participation in politics, without falling into the trap
of reinscribing universalist liberal values on the one hand or exclusionary cultural
ones on the other. In particular, they undermine the boundaries between
the public and the private, which separate issues of nation and state from those
of family, community, identity and citizenship. Also central to these critiques is a
rejection of homogeneous notions such as citizenship, community, women and
so forth. Feminist writers, thus, seek a new imagining of the nation, which
``allows for difference and diversity without making women its hostages''
(Kandiyoti 1991:441). They demand a new concept of citizenship that is exercised
in both the private and the public realms, and embraces a range of
gender, ethnic, cultural, class and other differences (Eisenstein 1997:140±3,
Yuval-Davis 1997:56±9; 129±131).
There is no ready-made formula to address this debate. One should be cautious
about taking simplistic shortcuts ± especially reactionary anti-modernism and
cultural relativism. Some features of the modern nation-state, such as welfare
accountability and citizen rights cannot be easily brushed aside (Dallmayr
1998:208±212). These aspects have become requisites for democratic politics
around the globe. Also, state institutions nowadays have a major role to play in
protecting underprivileged people and cultures from globalising changes. These
changes are taking place within the context of a one-dimensional world without
alternatives or diversity (Dallmayr 1998:208±12). Rather, feminist and subaltern
politics demand a new kind of democracy which emphasises government
participation in delivering sexual, economic and political rights to women, girls
22

and other underprivilged people. It insists that governments should take responsibility
for freeing women as well as other marginalised groups from the
constraints of poverty, illiteracy, violence and discrimination. Thus, politics must
include both the personal and collective, and build on the strength of difference
so as to disentangle the contradictions inherent in women's multiple identities.
A feminist imaginary of the nation is still inadequate and scattered. In many
cases, women's struggles remain local, temporal, and bound by physical and
domestic constraints. However, in various Third World societies, women are
increasingly making demands on the political sphere. They have come to view
themselves as political actors and as advocates of social and political change.
Women's organisations form coalitions and take collective action that aims to
define both citizenship and the political in broader terms than the established
understanding of ``the common good''. A great deal of these efforts takes place
in community-based organisations and informal politics. Further research
should aim at shedding greater light on, and enhancing the value of, activities
that take place outside formal politics, thereby enabling these activities to help
renegotiate meanings of citizenship and collectivity.
NOTES
1 Kol Ha'lsha is a feminist centre in Jerusalem and a member of Machsom Watch, a women's
human rights organisation which opposes the occupation in Israel.
2 This article is based on a chapter from a dissertation of limited scope submitted in partial fulfilment
of the MA in Development Administration at the University of South Africa. The title of the
dissertation is Nationalism in the Third World ± a gender perspective. The degree was awarded
with distinction in the author's full name, Yehudith Atara Oppenheimer-Luria.
3 Gellner equates ``invention'' with ``fabrication'' and ``falsity'' (1983:56). Anderson, in turn, stresses
that the symbolic is no less important than reality. Nations as imagined constructs are real and
concrete. They differ from each other ``not by their falsity/genuineness, but by the style in which
they are imagined'' (1991:6). While Gellner relies exclusively on structural explanations,
Anderson emphasises the role of culture, ideology, symbols and collective memory in the
construction of nations. In this sense, his approach is highly unorthodox (Smith 1996:383,
Chatterjee 1986:19).
4 In his work from 1997, Nationalism, Gellner discusses the relations between culture, religion and
nationalism in which he allocates a chapter to the Arab World. Gellner remains consistent in his
distinction between ``high'' and ``low'' cultures. He argues that the problem with the Muslim world
is that ``high'' culture takes the form of fundamentalism instead of nationalism. Gellner falls short
in realising the complex and often contradictory trends within the Muslim world which cannot all
be explained by a single, universal theory (Smith 1996:386).
Anderson, in his revised version of Imagined communities (1991), added a chapter on the Third
World. In this chapter he admitted that ``My short-sighted assumption then was that official
nationalism in the colonised worlds of Asia and Africa was modeled directly on that of the dynastic
23

states of nineteenth-century Europe'' (1991:163). Anderson explains that the establishment of
nationalism in the colonised countries ``owed much to the colonial state's peculiar imagining of
history and power'' (1991:185). While Anderson acknowledges the Third World as a ``special
case'' he does not question how these conditions have affected and distorted its encounter with
nationalism. Particularly, he does not consider problematic the fact that the colonised nations
were imagined by categories which were imposed on them by foreign invaders who aimed at
turning them into serial numbers, fitted to be effectively controlled and exploited.
5 Said, in his classic work Orientalism (1978), questions the entire premises of the westernised
knowledge of the Orient. He represents orientalism as a false imaginary, which constitutes certain
practices and institutions that constructs the Orient as a homogenised object of study, charged
with otherness. Said, thus, facilitates a much wider discussion on the representation of difference
in westernised culture.
6 Chatterjee addresses this issue in his work, The nationalist resolution of the women's question
(1990).
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26

Rotating credit associations: their
formation and use by povertystricken
African women in Rhini,
Grahamstown, Eastern Cape
Gina Buijs
Department of Development Studies and
Anthropology
University of Zululand
1 INTRODUCTION
The project on which this article is based 1 is aimed at investigating the role of
rotating credit associations (RCAs) (popularly known as a stokvel, or umgalelo
in the Eastern Cape) and other forms of voluntary savings schemes in assisting
African people (mostly women) in poverty-stricken circumstances to provide for
themselves and their families.
The Eastern Cape, in which the project areas of Rhini, Grahamstown, and
Zwelitsha, King William's Town, are situated, is among the poorest provinces in
South Africa, with current estimates of unemployment running at over 65 per
cent. Such work as there is for African people in Grahamstown, mostly domestic
work in the schools, hospitals and private homes, is often only available
to, or preferred by, women. In many cases the unemployed turn to self-employment
and in these circumstances RCAs and other forms of savings
schemes help poor women to make the most of what little resources they have.
Ardener (1964:201) defined an RCA as ``an association formed on a core of
participants who agree to make regular contributions to a fund which is given in
27 Africanus 32(1)2002

whole or in part of each member in rotation''. Ardener places special emphasis
on the principles of rotation and regularity when distinguishing RCAs from other
mutual benefit societies.
2 METHODOLOGY
One hundred women and men who were members of different RCAs were
interviewed for the original project. These associations had from six to twentytwo
members each. Unstructured interviews with members which lasted from
one to three hours on average were the main method of research, but meetings
and events, organised by members of RCAs in these areas were also attended.
The interviews were conducted by the author and three research assistants,
two of whom were first-language Xhosa speakers. An aide-meÂmoire based on
Ardener (1964) was also used.
3 FEMALE-HEADED HOUSEHOLDS AND THEIR CONNECTION TO
MEMBERSHIP OF ROTATING CREDIT ASSOCIATIONS
Interest in, and concern about, households and families largely or solely supported
by women is not only theoretically significant but is directly related to
some of the major economic and policy issues confronting developing countries
today (Mencher & Okungwu 1993). Current thinking has moved away from the
premise that the female-headed household is a symptom of malaise or decay,
and this structure has instead come to be regarded as a commonplace social
arrangement in many societies throughout the world and a phenomenon which
has seen a significant increase during the past two or more decades.
The trend towards female-headed or female-centred families has also been
noted elsewhere in South Africa. Data from the University of South Africa's
Bureau for Market Research show that between 1962 and 1985 there was a
sharp rise in female- headed households on the Reef: from 14 per cent to 29
per cent as a proportion of all households. At the same time the proportion of
children over the age of 18 in households increased to 25 per cent and that of
``other household members'' to 20 per cent (Beittel 1992:217). Beittel notes that
Ellen Hellman in her important study of an urban African slum, Rooiyard, demonstrated
that the key to urban survival for African households was women's
work. She showed that by far the most substantial cash contribution by women
living in the slum yards was obtained from brewing and selling beer, and not
from wages (1948:37). Thus the proposition that the households of the urban
28

working class in South Africa are sustained solely by wages has long been
contradicted by evidence of non-wage sources of income.
The importance of the woman's contribution to family survival was increased by
the fact that transfer payments such as lobola (``bride-price'') or gifts were
infrequent or irrelevant; the main source of non-wage income was derived from
market activities. Few households without a pensioner or disabled member
received any transfer payments from the state. Government figures from the
early 1980s show that unemployed Africans drew only 0.3 per cent subsistence
from state unemployment benefits (Meth & Piper 1984).
Blumberg suggests that several conditions must exist for the establishment of
woman-headed or woman-supported families world-wide (1993:15). The first is
that the unit of labour, the unit of compensation and the unit of property accumulation
must be the individual independent of gender. Apart from China,
fewer sons, daughters or wives work solely as unpaid family help today. She
suggests that it is unhelpful to define the household in monolithic terms as an
income pooling entity with a single production function. Instead, men and women,
elders and juniors, have at least partially separate expenditure responsibilities.
There is some evidence that women heads of households hold back less of
their income for their personal expenditure. Chant's 1985 data showed that over
half of her sample of male heads kept as much as 50 per cent of their income
for their own use, whereas the female heads seemed to contribute all their
wages to family welfare. Women are also less likely to spend their money on
alcohol. Blumberg refers to a Coà te d'Ivoire study which showed that a doubling
of income under female control would lead to a 26 per cent decline in spending
on alcohol and a 14 per cent decline in spending on cigarettes (1993:28).
Another study which compared men and women earning the same amount of
money in a South Indian village showed that women contributed 91 per cent of
their income to household survival, while the men only contributed 76 per cent
of theirs (1993:28). Because of a more even income distribution in femaleheaded
households, even if there was a lower family income, members were
better off than in male-centred homes. Thus a basic proposition emerges that
women with provider responsibilities, if in control of income, spend more of it on
children's basic needs and a positive link emerges between women-headed
households and children's nutrition. Blumberg suggests that women's income
comes with a built-in ``synergy bonus'' ± what is not used to perform main
economic activities and enterprises will be spent on children's wellbeing.
29

Blumberg's second condition for the emergence of woman-supported families is
that women should have independent access to subsistence opportunities.
World-wide, women's participation in the labour market has increased at twice
the rate of that of men since 1950. This participation is particularly evident in
their involvement in the growing informal sector in most parts of the developing
world. More women than ever have the potential to maintain a separate
household, despite the few changes in traditional inheritance laws which militate
against women in patrilineal systems of inheritance (where property passes
to male heirs and which are found in most parts of Africa, including South
Africa) and a general decrease in the level of state welfare systems.
The third condition mentioned by Blumberg is that subsistence opportunities for
females can be reconciled with childcare responsibilities. One of the distinguishing
features of informal sector activities is that they can be combined with
having children. In many instances a child's labour can contribute to the mother's
income, for instance through the packing or selling of foodstuffs. Mutual
aid among women is also important: women rely on informal social support
networks consisting of nearby (or co-resident) kin, or neighbours. Interviews
conducted for this project bore this out for Rhini. Female-headed families are
more likely to have extended family members living in the house than their male
counterparts. Blumberg notes that the highest-ever recorded proportion of female-headed
households is in the Mathare Valley, a suburb of Nairobi, Kenya.
Seventy-five per cent of the women there brew and sell beer and sixty to
seventy per cent of the households have female heads. Poverty thus combines
with women earning their own income in the informal sector. But this occurs in a
country, which, like most of the rest of Africa has a tradition of separate management
of domestic units. For these women beer brewing brought in more
income than working as barmaids or domestic servants and it could be brewed
and sold at home (1993:19).
Blumberg suggests that providing women micro-entrepreneurs with planned
assistance will generate not only economic benefits for the women, but also
benefits for their children. The less isolated mother±child units are, the more
they share economic and childcare resources. In Grahamstown, those women
who find employment in the formal sector use the contacts they make there to
establish trade relations and sell, especially clothes, on commission. RCAs
flourish in places like the kitchens of the university residences where women
meet daily, and where tea and lunch breaks provide the opportunity to run the
clubs. The women interviewed used RCAs and other forms of voluntary savings
30

schemes as support mechanisms in their search for income-earning activities.
Most of these activities took place outside the formal sector and the women
made use of many different strategies to maximise their resources, including
calling on kin and neighbours for assistance in both childcare and business ±
usually small-scale trading. Men, however, seemed less successful in starting
or maintaining savings schemes and this appears to be related to an unwillingness
to forego spending available cash for future benefits. 2 In order to illustrate
the use made by poor women of RCAs to provide a support network
and assistance in entrepreneurial activities, three case studies have been
chosen, each of which shows how membership of an RCA can come to the aid
of single mothers in difficult circumstances.
4 FEMALE HEADS OF HOUSEHOLDS AS SMALL
ENTREPRENEURS: THE CASE OF SYLVIA MIYASO,
ILINGELETHU AND MASINCEDANE CLUB
Sylvia Miyaso is a female head of household whose life history shows the use
made of RCAs by women who are able to support themselves through small
business enterprises. 3 Sylvia was 42 years old at the time of being interviewed.
She was born in the small town of Peddie, about 50 km from Rhini and lived
there with her family until 1965. She completed Grade 6 in a school at Peddie.
Her father was not a wage earner but Sylvia said the family ``had their own
cattle'' meaning that they were comparatively well off as subsistence farmers.
However, in 1965 the family fortunes took a turn for the worse and Sylvia's
family moved to a white-owned farm at Kings Flats, close to Rhini, where
Sylvia's father worked for the white farm owner. Sylvia met her husband on a
visit to her mother's sister in Rhini. He worked for a furniture store there. Sylvia
and her husband were married by civil ceremony and at first lived with her
parents on the farm. Her eldest daughter, who is mentally disabled, was born in
1968. She lives with her mother and sells groceries from home to help support
the family. Sylvia has a son and younger daughter who are at school in Peddie
and are looked after by two of Sylvia's sisters, a teacher and a nurse.
In 1971 Sylvia came to live in Joza (a section of Rhini) with her husband and
lived with him until they separated in 1985. During her marriage she had never
been formally employed but had earned a little money from hawking. When she
left her husband, she moved into a house in Victoria Road, a slum area, and
rented four rooms for R40,00 a month. In order to support herself and her
children, she started by selling vegetables full-time, but now sells ceramic or-
31

naments and household items, as well as clothes which are bought in bulk from
factory shops in Durban.
Sylvia is part of a group of 60 people, some from Grahamstown and others from
as far away as Port Elizabeth, who buy and sell in a similar fashion. The group
is called Ilingelethu. It has a contract with a local bus company and hires a bus
each month to travel to the Reef and Durban to buy goods from factory shops.
The amount each individual spends varies, but Sylvia estimated that the very
least which would be spent by someone taking part in the group for the first time
would be R500,00 and that she usually spends R2 000,00 on each trip. She
would expect to make a 25 per cent profit on resale.
Most of the customers of Ilingelethu members are people with small but regular
incomes, for example, kitchen staff from the private schools in Rhini or Rhodes
University. Sylvia noted that Ilingelethu was popular with the public because
customers could buy clothes or ceramic ornaments on credit, and could negotiate
with the seller the method of payment and the amount of the monthly
payment. This amount will vary according to the earnings of the purchaser.
Sylvia said that if a customer was hard-up one month she would agree to waive
or reduce the instalment: something which large commercial shops such as
Edgars and Sales House would not do. She added that she always bought her
clothes and ornaments on commission, with her customers placing orders in
advance for what they wanted. Some of the factory shops the group used also
have catalogues. In this way there is no need to keep stock.
4.1 Masincedane Club
This club is a typical RCA and was established in 1988. Sylvia was one of the
founder members. She said that the main objective in founding the club was to
assist those women who had problems obtaining enough capital to join Ilingelethu.
The club consists of 22 members, all women, most of whom have been
members since its inception. Sylvia noted that in five years only two members
had left Masincedane. In order to accommodate a year's rotation, Masincedane
has been divided into two sections, A and B, with 11 members in each. The
rotation takes place from January to November, with each member taking one
turn collection at the fund. December is set aside as the month for the closing
party and funds are not contributed that month as members have heavy
household expenses relating to Christmas and New Year.
32

4.2 Contributions to Masincedane and rules
Each member has to contribute R50,00 in cash each month and this amount is
fixed for the year. While no extra amount is charged for late payments, in the
event of a member needing money urgently, she will be given a chance to
borrow from other members. The executive of Masincedane consists of the
president, the secretary and an organiser. The organiser looks after the organisation
of the parties and the secretary writes down the names of all the
members who make contributions and the amounts given by each one. These
officials are elected every year, but re-election is possible if members are satisfied
with the performance of their officials ± most officials have held office for
several years.
Like most other savings clubs to which informants belonged, there is no written
constitution for Masincedane but there are a few unwritten rules. One of these is
that members may not arrive late for meetings ± those who arrive late are
subject to a fine of R3,00. This amount is kept by the secretary or treasurer for
the end-of-the-year `closing party'. Each member pays R3,00 for refreshments
served at the parties. Members who speak out of turn, or who make vulgar
jokes or inappropriate comments may also be subject to spot fines and these go
towards the end-of-year party.
Usually, there is not uniform or symbols of identification for these associations
in Rhini, unlike the Mothers' Unions or other church groups. However, the
associations are publicised through invitations to friends to attend members'
parties and by making financial contributions when a member has lost a relative
or if a member's son has been circumcised. On this occasion all the club
members will go to the member's home with their presents, which may include
alcoholic drinks for the welcoming home party and financial contributions to
offset the expenses of the party.
If a member of Masincedane or a close relative of a member dies (mother,
father, child, sister or brother), a financial contribution is made to the family and
the club will allow the rotation to go to the bereaved member that month to help
with funeral expenses. She will then have to pay back the member who was
supposed to receive the money. If the member herself dies, there will be no
repayment required from the family. Sylvia said that the death of members does
not occur often but that of relatives does. Masincedane can thus be seen here
as an additional form of burial insurance.
While the basic contribution to Masincedane is fixed, additional voluntary
33

amounts may also be given by individuals to the person who is hosting the
party. These will be returned when the giver, in turn, throws her party. Extra
money which is given in this way has to be carefully calculated to take into
consideration the ability of the recipient to return the amount to the giver when it
is her turn. It seems that those who give an extra amount have a reasonably
accurate knowledge of the financial state of the recipient and it would be considered
bad form and embarrassing to ``double'' or give extra to a member who
could not afford to return this amount. Each member is free to use the money
she receives in any way she likes and because the money in Masincedane is
not lent on credit to either members or the general public, it does not earn
interest.
There is no written contract for members when joining or leaving Masincedane,
or when receiving payment. Sylvia noted that since all payments are made
openly at parties, every member witnesses the occasion. She said that there
had been no instances that she knew of where members resorted to a court of
law to get their money back, and she emphasised that honesty and trust between
members were very important. It became clear that a prospective
member would not be introduced to a club if her honesty was in doubt or if she
was known to have, for instance, a drinking problem which would endanger her
ability to keep up with her contributions.
4.3 Edna Bonombo and the Nomzamo Club
Slightly less than a quarter of respondents (23.6 per cent) were members of
more than one club or association. Sylvia and her close friend and neighbour,
Edna Bonombo, are founder members of the Nomzamo Club, in addition to their
membership of Masincedane. Like Sylvia Miyaso, Edna Bonombo is also a
single female household head, but she has never been married. She was born
on a farm outside Grahamstown and moved to Rhini with her parents in 1972
when they came to look for work. The family lived in Tantyi, a ward of Rhini, at
first but in 1991 Edna moved to Victoria Road, where she built herself a wattle
and daub house next to Sylvia's home. Edna completed Grade 7 and has never
been formally employed. She now sells clothes to make a living and buys them
through Ilingelethu. Edna has six children, four of whom attend school in Peddie
and live with relatives there, spending their holidays with their mother in Rhini.
34

4.4 Characteristics of Nomzamo
Nomzamo is much smaller than Masincedane, having only six members, all
women. They are not members of the same church, but have worked together
(they are all members of Ilingelethu) for some time. The members of Nomzamo
used to meet regularly to discuss business and introduce one another to new
items for sale and the umgalelo grew from this association.
Sylvia said she had got the idea of starting a club from a friend of hers in Port
Elizabeth who had invited her to attend a party given by an association there.
She had enjoyed the occasion and when she arrived back in Rhini, she discussed
starting Nomzamo with friends. It was clear from what Sylvia said that
both Nomzamo and Masincedane acted as supports for Ilingelethu and provided
a network through which these women could make business contacts and
friends at the same time. Sylvia remarked on the large size of the clubs in Port
Elizabeth and the fact that members there included both men and women. She
said that men would be invited to Edna Bonombo's party.
While in some clubs membership is based on residential propinquity, members
of Nomzamo are not all neighbours; some live in Joza (a section of Rhini) and
others in Extensions 4 and 5 (new housing areas built on Kings Flats). The
members also have different educational levels. For instance, one member of
Nomzamo is salaried ± she is a nurse ± while others are self-employed and
former domestic workers. Sylvia said that the main requirement for membership
was honesty. Members are allowed to belong to more than one association, but
only if they can afford the contributions to both. The club accepts no excuses for
non-payment of contributions and Sylvia commented ``for example, even if you
have a serious problem, like a death, you have to pay your contribution''. This is
in line with the findings reported by Burman and Lembete (1995:38) that women
in the Western Cape reported that it was unthinkable for a club member not to
pay her contribution. However, what may be stated here are norms governing
payments, rather than actual realities. Of the original six members of the
Siyazama money-lending club, only two remained at the time of the interviews.
Some of the members who left were parents of school-going children who could
not afford to keep up contributions and pay school fees; another member lost
her job and could not continue paying and a third owed the association money
and could not afford to pay it back. These are all problems which poor families
and households encounter, and which introduce a considerable element of risk
into these associations, in spite of the members' insistence on there being a low
rate of default in Rhini.
35

Nomzamo Club has its own officials: a president, treasurer and secretary.
These people are elected on the basis of their perceived capabilities. While the
club does not have any branches, it does work closely with two other associations.
One of these is Masincedane and the other is an association in Port
Elizabeth. Books are kept in which minutes of the meetings are recorded by the
secretary and a constitution is also available. This latter aspect is unusual, since
most of the clubs that our informants belonged to had no written constitution.
The fact that Nomzamo does have one may have been as a result of the
influence of the Port Elizabeth association. Sylvia said that while she had never
heard of any legal actions taken by clubs over non-payment, some Port Elizabeth
associations have their own lawyers. This suggests that the fact-to-face
nature of the community in Rhini obviates the need for legal action, while in a
large city members are more easily able to evade their responsibilities.
Nomzamo had no uniform nor any formal means of identifying members, and
Sylvia indicated that members were considering this issue but were thinking
along the lines of an identifying badge or rosette rather than a uniform. Nomzamo
does have entertainment: both a closing party at the end of the year and
also monthly parties, which take place at the home of the member whose turn it
is to receive the fund, but no alcohol is served on these occasions.
4.5 Contributions to Nomzamo
All contributions are made in cash and the basic amount is the same for all
members, R200,00 a month. This is twice the amount of the contribution made
by most clubs, which was R100,00 a month. Four of the clubs studied had
contributions of R250,00 a month and two had R500,00 a month, a high amount
considering the general level of poverty in Rhini. Each member of Nomzamo
also decides on an additional amount which she may give, depending on her
own financial position and the financial position of the member whose turn it is
to receive the contributions, and on the amount of support the member wants to
give. A member who chooses to make two contributions in this way is said to be
``doubling'' and will expect the same amount, or more, back when her turn to
receive comes. Other associations, or clubs, which the receiving member has
links with, will be invited to her party and will give her a lump sum.
36

4.6 The order of rotation in Nomzamo
There is a meeting of all Nomzamo members early in January, and at this
meeting each member chooses the month in which she wants to receive the
fund, known as ``her turn''. The order of rotation is decided on by mutual consensus
in response to the financial needs of individual members in the sixmonth
period, for each woman knows when she will need money. For example,
Sylvia said that in January some women needed money to send their children to
school. She added that there was not usually a problem with two women
choosing the same month, but that there was a reluctance to take turns in the
early months. This might seem strange, since those who have turns first are in
effect receiving an interest-free loan, but the attractions of membership may lie
in the members' ability to persuade their friends to ``double''. At the beginning of
the year, funds are low after the expensive Christmas season and few members
will be able to ``double''. Sylvia said that no written contracts are required when
joining Nomzamo because members ``just trust each other''.
4.7 Edna Bonombo's ``turn''
The party that Edna Bonombo held when it was her turn to receive the fund from
Nomzamo, was a large one which members of clubs in Port Elizabeth attended
as well as Nomzamo members from Rhini. Proceedings began in Edna's house
in Victoria Road on a Sunday afternoon with a short prayer offered by a member
of the Siyazama association from Port Elizabeth. This was followed by a
reading from the Bible, and the proceedings were opened by the president of
the Port Elizabeth association reading the programme of events for the afternoon.
The programme included the introduction and welcoming of the visitors,
``best wishes'', a guest speaker, a toast, and then the handing over of the
contributions. Proceedings ended with a braai and an amount of R258,00 was
contributed by guests and visitors towards the food for the party.
The speaker who made the opening remarks narrated the history of the initial
contact between the Port Elizabeth association and the Nomzamo Club. The
guest speaker was asked to speak on any topic of her choice and chose a
reading from the Bible (the book of Job, chapters 21 and 22). A toast was
proposed to Edna Bonombo, the contributions were brought forward and the
amounts given were written down by the secretary. The total amount came to
R5 968,00, made up of contributions from individual members of Masincedane
A and B and Nomzamo as well as the association from Motherwell in Port
37

Elizabeth. Three women arrived late and they were each fined R3,00, and these
fines were added to the general pool.
4.8 A deserted wife assisted by Masakhane
Not all umgalelos in Rhini cater for self-employed women who can afford to
contribute R200 to R300 each month. The case of Ellen Subakwe shows that
women who are able or willing to forego employment in the formal sector may
be better off than those earning a pittance as domestic workers. Ellen is a
domestic worker in a private home in Grahamstown, where she has worked a
six-day week since 1977 and in 1992 was earning R6,00 a day. She described
herself as ``doing everything'' for her employers. Ellen, who was 50 years old at
the time of the interviews, was born on a farm outside Grahamstown and attended
school for two years. After her marriage she moved with her husband
and in-laws to Grahamstown where they lived in a poor squatter area, known as
Kenya location, near the Old Cemetery. Ellen's husband has now moved away
from Grahamstown and no longer visits his family or sends them money. They
last saw him in 1989. Ellen is thus effectively a female head of a household. She
has two unemployed sons living with her and a daughter in Grade 11. Her
younger son left school because of the school boycotts and worked at the
Albany Bakery in Grahamstown until 1991, when all the workers were fired and
the bakery closed because the workforce went on strike. This son has not
worked since. Ellen's daughter has a child of five years and receives a grant for
the child as the child's father has died. In addition to her own children, Ellen
looks after two sons of her husband's brother who attend school in Rhini. She
said she gets no money for the boys' keep from their father and all the children
depend on her. Her daughter sells bottled beer to add to the family income.
Ellen Subakwe's household is typical of the poverty-stricken circumstances
prevailing in Rhini. One assumes that extras in the form of food and clothing
must have been substantial to induce her to continue working for such a low
wage. Her comment that she ``does everything'' for her employers suggests that
they are elderly and possibly infirm, and that she may remain with them out of
loyalty. Many employers of domestic helpers have laid off workers in the past
few years and domestic work is increasingly difficult to obtain. Nevertheless, it
remains one of the few sources of formal employment in the town. Preston-
Whyte comments that domestic workers should be classified as part of the
informal economy, as they earn relatively low wages and lack employment
contract benefits such as pensions and medical aid (1991:34). Domestic
38

workers, as Ellen's circumstances show, also have little protection against
exploitation by employers, especially when jobs of any kind are scarce.
Ellen's household is also typical of that of many informants interviewed in that it
was she and her daughter who had income-generating activities ± none of the
men had similar activities. The household survives on a combination of state aid
(welfare grant), Ellen's meagre wages and her daughter's sale of beer. Preston-
Whyte suggests that between jobs domestic workers often resort to ``true''
informal-sector activities, such as small-scale hawking, dress-making or begging
and even when employed they may augment their wages in this way
(1991:35). She notes that it is largely when women begin to look to the future
that they step up their attempts to make extra money and that the balance
between wage work and making ``extra money'' begins to alter in favour of the
latter (1991:41).
Ellen is a member of an RCA called Masakhane (``Let us Build Each Other''). It
was founded in 1984 and has six members. Ellen was introduced to the association
by a friend who is also a member of the same church. She noted that
while membership is theoretically open to all, at the moment the members are
friends and fellow church members.
The organisation began with the members contributing R25,00 each a month
but then they decided that with the rapidly rising cost of living they needed to put
in more money, and now they contribute R50,00 each a month. The first rotation
begins in January and ends in June, and in July a new rotation begins again.
This means that each member of Masakhane has two payouts during the year.
Ellen noted that because this association consists largely of domestic workers
who have small incomes, the members are not obliged to buy expensive presents
for one another. Instead, they purchase useful household items such as
sets of glasses, cups and cutlery. These gifts are in addition to the cash amount
received by each member when her turn arrives.
4.9 The organisation of Masakhane
Despite the small size of Masakhane, it has an executive consisting of a president,
secretary and treasurer. The president chairs the meetings, while the
secretary takes minutes and the treasurer is responsible for keeping records of
all money contributed by members. Ellen said that the officials had not changed
since Masakhane was founded ``because the other members want them to
39

continue and they are performing their duties well''. Tea and biscuits are provided
at the monthly meeting by the hostess who receives the contributions.
Nomzamo and Masakhane illustrate the different scale on which RCA's of this
sort can operate. While Nomzamo caters for self-employed women with a wide
social network that extends as far as Port Elizabeth, the same functions are
fulfilled on a much smaller scale for impoverished domestic workers in Grahamstown.
Common denominators for both organisations relate to the method
of recruiting members which is by personal recommendation; in the case of
Nomzamo the women also belonged to Ilingelethu and knew one another from
that association, and in the case of Masakhane were members of the same
church.
Many members of imigalelo stressed the social aspect of membership. Sylvia
Miyaso felt that these associations helped to break down barriers between
women of different social status. She meant that they often included professional
women as well as those who had little formal education. Income levels
tend to be approximate, however. In Ellen Subakwe's case, her membership of
Masakhane was, no doubt, important as a line of credit as well as being an
opportunity to meet friends socially in an approved setting. Edna Bonombo
commented that the husbands of members were sometimes disparaging about
these associations, seeing them as a waste of money, at least when it was not
their wives' turn to receive the contributions, ``but when money is coming to the
family they commend their wives for their involvement in such clubs''.
Edna added that in most churches ``these clubs are acceptable because most of
the members are also involved in Women's Unions''. Sylvia Miyaso, however,
differed and said that ``church people criticise these associations because they
become well known and better known than the church, and then people lose
their interest in the church and become more active in the work of the association''.
The problem here may relate to the amount of money involved and the
feeling among church officials that sums that would previously have gone to the
church funds may now be used to support RCAs instead. Some informants said
that the churches condemned imigalelo saying that these organisations promoted
gambling, but this was countered by those who said ``we are using
money to make money''.
40

5 CONCLUSION
RCAs, known generally as stokvels in South Africa and as imigalelo in the
Eastern Cape, provide an important means for poor women, and especially
woman heads of households, to save money. At the same time they function as
networking organisations where these women are able to make contacts who
can assist them in joining business organisations such as Ilingelethu. The
success of the organisations is due in no small measure to their tight-knit
membership and values of honesty and trustworthiness. Members pride
themselves on caring for one another and apart from the social aspects of the
meetings, the tea parties or braais, they also offer financial and practical assistance
to bereaved families of members and in this way perform some of the
functions of burial societies. The scarcity of waged employment in South Africa
has meant that poor women, especially those responsible for their children and
elderly family members, have created niches in the informal sector, buying and
selling goods, to enable them and their dependants to survive. Membership of a
RCA is a vital link in this process.
NOTES
1 G Buijs & G Atherfold. 1995. Savings and money lending schemes: how rotating credit
associations help poor families. Pretoria: Human Sciences Research Council Report HG/MF 19.
2 See also G Buijs. 1998. Savings and loan clubs: risky ventures or good business practice? A
study of the importance of rotating savings and credit associations for poor women. Development
Southern Africa 15 (4):55±65.
3 The proper names of the women interviewed have been changed to preserve anonymity.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Ardener, S. 1964. The comparative study of rotating credit associations. Journal of the
Royal Anthropological Institute 94:201±29.
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and transforming households: The constraints of the world economy, edited by J
Smith and R Wallerstein. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Blumberg, R L. 1993. Poverty versus ``purse power'': the political economy of the mother-child
family, in Where did all the men go? Female-headed/female-supported
households in cross-cultural perspective, edited by J P Mencher and A Okungwu.
Boulder Col: Westview Press.
Burman, S and Lembete, N. 1995. Building new realities: African women and ROSCAs in
urban South Africa, in Money-go-rounds: the importance of rotating savings and
credit associations for women, edited by S Ardener and S Burman. Oxford: Berg.
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Chant, S. 1985. Single parent families: choice or constraint? The formation of female
headed households in Mexican shanty towns. Development and Change
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Hellman, E. 1948. Rooiyard: A sociological study of an urban native slum yard. Cape
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Mencher, J and Okungwu, A (eds). 1993. Introduction, in Where did all the men go?
Female-headed/female-supported households in cross-cultural perspective.
Boulder, Col: Westview Press.
Meth, C and Piper, S. 1984. Social security in historical perspective. Carnegie Conference
Paper no 250. Cape Town: Second Carnegie Inquiry into Poverty and
Development in Southern Africa.
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42

The New Partnership for Africa's
Development: last chance for
Africa?
Richard Cornwell
Senior Research Fellow
African Security Analysis Programme
Institute for Security Studies, Pretoria
The document outlining the nature of the New Partnership for Africa's Development
(NEPAD) is a long and exhaustive one, and it would be as well to
examine the premises upon which it appears to be based.
The New Partnership for Africa's Development is a pledge by African leaders,
based on a common vision and a firm and shared conviction, that they
have a pressing duty to eradicate poverty and to place their countries, both
individually and collectively, on a path of sustainable growth and development
and, at the same time, to participate actively in the world economy and
body politic ...,(NEPAD 2001:para 1).
Paragraph 71 of the same document reads:
African leaders have learned from their own experiences that peace, security,
democracy, good governance, human rights and sound economic
management are conditions for sustainable development. They are making a
pledge to work, both individually and collectively, to promote these principles
in their countries and subregions and on the continent (NEPAD 2001:para
71).
43 Africanus 32(1)2002

To what extent will these statements reflect a likely future for Africa? One must,
of course, issue a caveat about the practice of prediction. The difficulty of
prediction is based on the realisation that much of human history consists of the
unintended consequences of decisions based on imperfect knowledge and no
small measure of wishful thinking and self-deception. If there was any need to
test the truth of this commonplace, then the evidence has been available in
abundance in Central±Southern Africa over the past three or four years.
The best starting point for the exercise we are about to undertake is to establish
as clearly as we can where we find ourselves at present. 1 I am far from certain
that most of us have done this accurately. Certainly the dominant discourse in
the public realm seems well wide of the mark. In my view this state of affairs is
the result of our unconscious or conscious acceptance of a set of assumptions
so banal as to be taken as virtually self-evident, not least of which is the putative
causal link between security, stability and development (Duffield 2001:1±43).
First among these assumptions is the issue and role of globalisation and, by
extension, what it implies or could imply for Africa. As important, and connected
to this are other perceptions about the role of the state in providing security to
African societies and the relationship of the state to its security apparatus and,
finally, there is the acceptance at face value of the primary commitment of the
leaders of Africa's political class to the development of their countries and
citizens (Clapham 1996:4±5).
Let us start with the first assumption, about the role, actual or putative of globalisation.
This is a phenomenon that probably looks substantially different
when viewed from the South African as opposed to the African continental
perspective. Of course, the states of the Mediterranean littoral and that other
African giant, Nigeria, will share some of South Africa's perceptions, because of
the relative size and sophistication of their economies, which make it more
likely, though far from certain, that they will benefit on balance from this latest
transformation in global capitalism.
Much of the thinking behind NEPAD seems to be predicated upon this assumption.
Here we are, as South Africa, a major player in African terms, aspiring
to assist the continent out of its globally marginalised position, in the
process ourselves emerging as a modest, middle-level power. To achieve this,
our leaders are willing to embrace the inevitability of the historical triumph of a
process commonly known as globalisation, satisfied with the claims of its high
priesthood that allowing the unimpeded operation of market forces and the flow
44

of goods and capital (if not labour) will deliver massive and irreversible material
benefits to our country and the bulk of its people. This, in turn, will allow our
government to care more effectively for the welfare and security needs of the
masses, creating an exemplar and agent for change in the revitalisation of the
African continent as a whole. As an adjunct to the broad human security benefits
we expect to ensue from our insertion as a fully-fledged partner in the
globalised economy, we also hope to create a new governance and security
order based on commonly accepted rules and underwritten by the international
community of states at regional, continental and global level.
Well, what is wrong with that? Quite a lot really.
A common popular perception is that South Africa has the potential to become a
rich, industrialised, developed country, comparable with the affluent economies
of the Northern Hemisphere. Brief acquaintance with the major cities, their
striking skylines, and the suburban shopping malls and mansions cherished by
a small class of conspicuous consumers lends a spurious credibility to this
picture.
By African standards certainly, the country has reached a high level of economic
development. Its gross national product (GNP) is more than three times
that of the other 11 members of the Southern African Development Community
(SADC) put together, is three times larger than that of Nigeria and twenty times
larger than that of Zimbabwe.
In the global context, however, it is a middle-ranking, semi-industrialised
economy. In addition, and most importantly, it has one of the most skewed
patterns of income distribution in the world. Some 51 per cent of annual income
goes to the richest 10 per cent of households; less than 4 per cent of annual
income goes to the poorest 40 per cent of households.
The gap between the rich and poor in South Africa is a wide one. More significantly,
it has tended historically to correlate closely with the racial classifications
until recently imposed by white-dominated governments on the national
population. This has provided much of the dynamic of South African politics in
the past, and attempts to redress these imbalances and create a more equitable
society will continue to provide the leitmotif of the political economy for the
foreseeable future.
According to many well-informed foreign observers, South Africa has the potential
for striking economic success over the next two decades and beyond,
45

though the realisation of this potential is by no means guaranteed. As the World
Bank noted recently, South Africa must cope with a number of obstacles in its
quest for faster growth in output and employment. Its production structure is
highly capital-intensive and inward looking; it has a largely untrained and undereducated
labour force, and its urban structure inhibits the productivity of unskilled
labour and is not conducive to the growth of the informal sector. In
addition, we have in the HIV/AIDS pandemic a threat to human security unparalleled
in recorded human history, with its epicentre in Southern Africa.
A further inhibiting factor is the general lack of investor confidence arising, in
part, from uncertainty about future government policy. This hesitancy partly
reflects the generally disappointing, if not disastrous, experience of outside
investors in Africa following the optimism engendered by the end of colonial rule
in the 1960s. With ample investment opportunities available in the Far East,
Eastern Europe and elsewhere in the world, South Africa will come under close
scrutiny before it receives a substantial inflow of private capital. Of course,
inflow of capital, though it may be a necessary condition, is not of itself a
sufficient condition of economic growth as conventionally measured, let alone of
development.
Recent occurrences have also served as a reminder that what flows in may flow
out just as suddenly. The volatility of the money markets that has propelled the
government into issuing its macroeconomic blueprint in itself demonstrates the
unprecedented mobility of capital, not to mention the overriding importance of
sentiment, rumour and anticipated short-term profit or loss that drive the market
(Millman 1995:passim).
Perhaps a more fundamental question ought to be raised, and this applies to
virtually every part of the ``developing'' world: whether the economic development
path being implied by the free-market strategists is actually available to
the mass of underdeveloped countries. A glance at the evidence would suggest
that it is not, and that the promise of material progress implicit in the bargain
being struck is every bit as historically absurd as that offered by the proponents
of scientific socialism (Castells 2000; Rist 1997:93±122).
A recent report by the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) indicates
that for all the unprecedented growth of the global economy over the
past few decades, the number of people living in appalling poverty has increased.
It also points to the ever-widening gap between the very rich and the
mass of people, even in the developmentally advanced nations. Of ``catching
46

up'' or ``trickle-down'' there is little evidence. During the last 30 years the world's
gross domestic product (GDP) has expanded from US$4 trillion to US$23 trillion.
Over the same period the share of world income for the poorest 20 per cent
of countries has declined from 2,3 per cent to 1,4 per cent. Simultaneously, the
share of the richest 20 per cent grew from 70 per cent to 85 per cent. A similar
progression is noted within countries. On this view one might go further to ask
whether the development trajectory of the wealthy nations will prove viable for
them either, even in the medium run. The triumphalism of the free-marketeers
following the collapse of the Soviet Union and its satellite economies seems
somewhat premature if one considers the social blight afflicting many postindustrial
nations, the erosion of the welfare state accompanied by radical demographic
change, and the steady growth of a disaffected and often criminalised
underclass in those societies (Castells 2000:73±82: Faux & Mishel
2000:93±111).
In short then, we have yet to see that globalisation will deliver to Africa what its
advocates claim. Africa, as a very small player in the context of the formal
global economy, reacts more violently to the squalls and gales worked up by
market sentiment than do the larger states upon whose experience most
generalisations on political economy and security are based. For Africa to gain
equitable access to the global market certainly requires that the dominant
players forego some of the extremely unfair advantages they currently enjoy.
For all that we have heard from Mr Blair and from President Chirac, do we really
imagine that they are about to tackle the Common Agricultural Policy that keeps
Europe's farming sector solvent? Is President Bush of the United States of
America (US) made of the sort of stuff that will convince American workers in
the textile, garment or farming industries that they have to forfeit their jobs in the
interest of global equity? Remember, all this was broached at the June meeting
of the G8 in 2002. Remember, too, that the global economy is in deep recession.
I find it far more compelling to believe that by June the leaders of the G8
would have given more serious attention to Japan's banking crisis and the
possibility or reality of an American war on Iraq, with all its ramifications for the
stability of the Middle East as a whole (Sandbrook 2000:131±147).
I know that since 11 September a great deal has been said about the dangers of
the rich ignoring the claims of the marginalised, and about the viability of an
inequitable world system. These are certainly moral considerations. Historically
speaking, however, they are naõÈ ve and when US Treasury Secretary Paul
O'Neill talks of the possibility of all the world's people being able to aspire to,
47

and achieve, living standards comparable to those of twenty-first century
America he merely demonstrates the shallowness of much thinking about the
nature of the global economy. Africa, with the exception of the Horn and the
Mediterranean states, is not going to feature on the radar screens of the antiterrorism
units of the First World. Its declining state systems may well provide
opportunities for drug-dealers, gun-runners and money-launderers, but these
can be policed by international conventions and the co-operation of pliable,
though not necessarily democratic, regimes. In certain circumstances any form
of state will serve the purposes of wealthy non-Africans (Duffield 2001).
The idea that the choice for Africa lies between a US and an African Union
based on the European model is also essentially absurd, in that neither of these
prototypes is historically or functionally applicable. Both emerged at a particular
juncture and subsequently evolved largely as the consequence of peculiar
historical circumstances. Neither has achieved what might be regarded as ``final
success'' or an end state: the arguments about federal versus states' rights
continues in the US, as do the debates about the relative powers of sovereign
European governments and the authorities in Brussels. Furthermore, these are
models based on the existence of strong, capable and effective nation states,
occupying a dominant position in the global economy.
Contrast the situation with that of Africa. We are a continent of more than 50
states, many of which lay claim to a juridical existence only because they are
represented at international forums. In some respects we may find that the
reasons for joining a ``stronger'' continental body would be to reinforce the
mythic omnipotence of the state and, of course, the e lites that own it. This is a
point touched upon by several African commentators, many of whom are at the
same time optimistic that the African Union project can be made to work for the
African peoples in general. Yet it is difficult to believe that adequate space will
be made for what is widely referred to as African civil society, especially if that
civil society seeks to make use of the apparatus of the African Union to raise
criticisms of their rulers that are impossible or illegal to voice at national level.
What Basil Davidson has called ``the brutal divorce between rulers and ruled''
continues to apply across virtually all of the continent, and one cannot imagine
that a union designed by the beneficiaries of state power, however attenuated,
would be allowed to work to any other advantage than that of the dominant
political class. This raises an absolutely fundamental point: that in the global
scheme of things we assume that the state apparatus exists largely to protect
the security of its citizens. Across much of Africa, and other parts of the world,
48

this is simply not so, and much of the world's population views the formal
security forces as one of the most potent threats to its security and therefore
seeks to disengage and find refuge from the grasp of the state and its uniformed
officials. This surely has to factor largely in any considerations of continental
security and defence debates (Clapham 2001:59±69).
At the same time as Africa is swept along in the economic torrent, the international
political environment has also become less favourable in terms of
systemic stability. Contrary to most popular expectations, the end of the bipolar
rivalry has not made the world an altogether more peaceful place. Ironically, the
end of the Cold War has contributed to the threat of Africa's marginalisation in
world affairs, just as it helped pave the way for the revolutionary political
transformation now under way in South Africa. The end of bipolar superpower
rivalry has robbed Africa of whatever strategic significance it had. Suddenly, the
continent and its supporters have an extraordinary task ahead of them: to
convince increasingly hard-headed policy-makers in the rich North of the need
to assist a region whose problematic economies and poor future prospects
seem less and less relevant to the growth of richer countries (Martin & Schumann
1997:1±11).
The end of the Cold War also restricted the policy choices for the majority of
African states. These states were caught in a massive and deepening economic
crisis characterised by the debt trap, and their choice was limited essentially to
policies approved by the technocrats of the International Monetary Fund (IMF)
and World Bank, irrespective of their problematic socio-economic and political
consequences of ideological and aid sponsors which have been restricted to
those espousing the Washington consensus. If this was the period of Africa's
second democratisation, this ensured that what emerged were ``choiceless
democracies'' (Mkandawire 1999:119±136).
There were adverse consequences for human security in Africa too. Some of
these related to the incompatibility of the economic and political courses being
advocated for these very weak states. In the case of Africa it is clear that the
argument about the interconnectedness of political and economic liberalisation
is based upon dubious premises. Structural adjustment programmes have
played no small part in destabilising the political framework. The outcomes of
policy application are frequently perverse. In an attempt to restrict the damage
done to client±patron networks, privatisation often takes on the form of crony
capitalism, in which state assets are sold off to political allies. With the emergence
of a ``New World Disorder'', domestic support has to be sought and
49

nurtured, and the fragile political systems of the continent are finding it difficult
to survive now that the familiar scaffolding of the Cold War has been dismantled.
Let us take another assumption: that the international security system has to be
based on the arrangement of interstate relations. The state has been the most
prominent feature of the international political system for so long that it is easy
to take for granted the permanence of its role in the organisation of society.
Lately, however, there is growing attention to the erosion of the power of the
sovereign state. Usually this centres upon the impact of what is generally referred
to as globalisation, and the emergence of major transnational economic
and financial actors able to shift their operations almost at will and answerable
to no one nation's political masters. This has signified the removal from the
control of the state of several instruments of economic sovereignty. Indeed,
there are some who would argue that we are beginning to see the privatisation
of sovereignty itself (Clapham 1996:244±274; Cilliers & Cornwell 1999:227±
245).
The reduction in global ideological conflict has reduced the political and military
incentives for outside powers to intervene on the continent; and, as I have
indicated, an Africa omitted from the calculations of external rivals has not
become a more peaceful place. That local disputes are now less globalised
means that outside powers have less influence on the conduct, termination and
outcome of these conflicts. Local rivalries and antagonisms are given freer rein,
being more remote from world centres of power and insignificant in terms of the
global system. African states can no longer rely on outside assistance to end
local wars that are no threat to vital foreign interests (Dewitt 1993:2±3).
External non-state actors have stepped into the void left by the international
community, sometimes as proxies, sometimes as independent agents, able by
virtue of their wealth and command of expertise to influence events to their local
and often short-term advantage. It is for all the world as if Africa has returned to
the 1880s, and the age of the chartered companies, marking out their enclaves
in an otherwise disorderly environment. Indeed, some of the colonial states of
Africa owe their origins to such companies.
This is the reverse side of globalisation. Transnational companies, having demanded
a new set of global rules which have effectively undermined the state in
certain of the world's margins, are now able to provide just as much of the
apparatus usually reserved for the state to carry out their businesses in relative
safety and at great profit ± their bargaining advantage being apparent. Their
50

worries now focus on their competition with others of their ilk, and their relative
abilities to co-opt such parts of the state's political apparatus as still have some
status in law.
If, indeed, we are witnessing the end of the post-colonial state system in Central
Africa at least, how are we to reconfigure our understanding of what is to
replace it? Some authors have suggested that rather than seeing the boundaries
of post-colonial states as the framework for understanding the continent,
we should instead see how Africa is essentially divided in the considerations of
external players into Afrique utile ± usable or useful Africa, linked in various
ways to the global economy ± and Afrique inutile ± useless, unprofitable or
disposable Africa. Those parts that are regarded as useful, or as containing
exploitable resources are provided with a modicum of protection and are linked
to the global economy. Those that are devoid of such attractions are consigned
to the margins and left to their own devices, so that, in effect, we have a new
``apartheid'' of administration and security. In effect, Africa is again divided,
between those under protection and those without. The implications for the
political and economic future of Africa are profound. For most of Africa's peoples,
the state has long since ceased to be the provider of security, physical or
social. Only the ``useful bits'' will be recolonised by the forces of the outsiders.
The historical difference between citizens and subjects will be reconfigured
(Lock 1999:11±36).
Other considerations about the nature of state security in Africa also have to be
borne in mind. Christopher Clapham's work on the African state has identified
the difficulties of applying Western assumptions about the nature of state security
in much of Africa. He points out that in many cases concerns for state
survival are subordinate to those connected with the personal security and wellbeing
of the incumbent leadership. The apparatus of juridical statehood is then
appropriated to serve the requirements of this fixation. To put it rather more
bluntly: a head of state is recognised in international law as able to conclude
contracts on behalf of that state, which can be incredibly useful if he or she
intends to profit personally from his or her tenure of office (Clapham 1996).
A method employed by rulers in circumstances in which little more remains of
the state than the abstract and juridical is to create a parallel political authority,
where personal ties and controls replace failing institutions. William Reno has
termed this the shadow state, in his pathfinding work on Sierra Leone, which
examines the role of informal markets in the construction of alternative extra
state power networks, underpinning political and economic privilege. So potent
51

and pervasive are these networks that, by manipulating the vestiges of state
power, they are able to frustrate and bend to their own purposes interventions
by the international financial and donor community designed to undermine the
informal sector and strengthen the structures of the state. It is against this
background and in this context that the military activities and interventions of
state, regional and private security forces have to be analysed (Reno 1998).
The effective criminalisation of the state contributes to the unrestrained privatisation
not only of the productive sectors of the economy, but also of sovereignty
itself and the sovereign functions of the state ± the maintenance of
customs barriers, the concession of territories or harbour enclaves to foreign
entrepreneurs, the preservation of internal security and national defence, and of
peacekeeping. Globalisation has facilitated the expansion of international crime
at least as much as it has opened the way for legitimate enterprise. The threat
to human security implied by this development will also have to be borne in
mind (Castells' 2000).
In short then: Africa has so far managed to resist conditionality, or pervert the
intentions of its authors. Democratisation and good governance will not be the
best lens through which to observe the continent, as shadow networks of power
emerge in reaction to the privatisation of the state and the economy. Informal
and illicit trade, financial fraud, and systematic evasion of rules and international
agreements will be some of the means used by certain Africans to survive the
tempest of globalisation (Reno 1998; Martin & Schumann 1997:196±226).
What Chabal and Daloz have called the political economy of disorder offers
opportunities for those who know how to play the system. Informalisation affects
politics as well as economics. In many respects, what we are seeing in the
conflict zones of Africa is the playing out of rivalries for the control of scarce
resources and the manipulation of business links ± licit and illicit ± to the benefit
of the entrepreneurs of violence. On the back of these resource wars vast
profits are to be made on the transportation of other things, from guns to food.
To most of us it seems a commonplace that war and conflict must impede
economic growth and development, and so they do. However, they may also
create opportunities for enrichment of the few. The economic agendas of civil
wars are only now beginning to receive the analytical attention they warrant
(Chabal & Daloz 1999).
If this analysis of the African state is applied to the current wars raging in and
around Central Africa, then we must adjust our thinking and assume that we are
52

dealing with is a set of pseudo-states in which the interest of the community and
the rule of law count for nothing. The problem is that the current international
diplomatic and security architecture is unable to cope with this type of crisis. It is
partly a matter of scale, of course, the equivalent of a body being overwhelmed
by massive infection. However, it is also more than that. Current diplomatic and
security arrangements are state-centred and predicated upon regarding states
as the primary actors in international affairs. In Africa this is simply no longer so.
There are regional alliances forming between private actors, or leaders who
appropriate the framework of the state to their own ends and in their own private
interest. In this environment the United Nations finds itself ill at ease, having to
deal with individuals both as the source of power and wealth, and as the origin
of ambiguous signals in a rapidly changing environment (Clapham 1996:244±
266).
NEPAD represents a noble attempt to alter this picture of an African future. Its
authors claim that ``we will determine our own destiny''. I hope they are right,
though I fear that Africa's future path will be more messy and interesting than
that. Men may well write their own history, but not entirely as they wish.
To conclude on a more positive note: what can Africa, and in particular
Southern Africa, do to fulfil its part of the proffered bargain? Let us remember
that the outside world, if it is indeed serious about the NEPAD quid pro quo, is
likely to want evidence of the quo before it releases the quid. Put bluntly, Africa
is not going to receive massive debt relief, nor attract investment of a significant
volume if it does not, collectively, put its governance house in order. Investors of
a permanent rather than ephemeral variety look for a number of things: respect
for property rights and the predictability and transparency of administrative and
legal systems being among the most important. Nor do they draw fine distinctions
between the performance of individual states from the same region. The
Zimbabwean crisis is a case in point, though there may be any number of
reasons for quiet diplomacy on Pretoria's part, regional solidarity with a thoroughly
repellent regime should not be seen as one of them. The result is that,
for this and a number of other reasons, outside investors and diplomatic representatives
are baffled by what they can interpret only as a non-policy of
expedient drift.
To succeed, even moderately, NEPAD is going to demand the commitment of
political leaders here and elsewhere to policies that may cause them considerable
discomfort in the short to medium term. It is, in a way, a self-denying
ordinance. Whether the politicians meet the challenge should determine how
53

history and their citizens judge them. For my part, I have a suspicion that Africa
will achieve its rebirth despite, rather than because of, their actions.
NOTE
1 This article is based on a paper delivered at a workshop on the New Partnership for Africa's
Development (NEPAD) organised by the Hnns Seidel Foundation in Dar-es-Salaam, 24±26
February 2002.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Castells, M. 2000. The information age: Economy, society and culture, volume III: end of
millennium. Second edition. Oxford: Blackwell.
Chabal, P and Daloz, J P. 1999. Africa works: Disorder as political instrument. Oxford:
James Currey.
Cilliers, J and Cornwell, R. 1999. Africa ± from the privatisation of security to the privatisation
of war?, in Peace, profit or plunder? The privatisation of security in wartorn
African societies, edited by J Cilliers and P Mason. Pretoria: Institute for
Security Studies.
Clapham, C. 1996. Africa and the international system: The politics of state survival.
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Ð 2001. The changing world of regional integration in Africa, in Regional integration in
Southern Africa: Comparative international perspectives, edited by C Clapham, G
Mills, A Morner and E Sideropoulos. Johannesburg: SAIIA.
Dewitt, D B. 1993. Introduction: the new global order and the challenges of global security,
in Building a new global order: Emerging trends in international security,
edited by D B Hewitt, D Haglund and J Kirton. Toronto: Oxford University Press.
Duffield, M. 2001. Global governance and the new wars: The merging of development
and security. London: Zed.
Faux, J and Mishel, L. 2000. Inequality and the global order, in Global capitalism, edited
by W Hutton and A Giddens. New York: New Press.
Lock, P. 1999. Africa, military downsizing and the growth in the security industry, in
Peace, profit or plunder? The privatisation of security in war-torn African societies,
edited by J Cilliers and P Mason. Pretoria: Institute for Security Studies.
Martin, H P and Schumann, H. 1997. The global trap: Globalisation and the assault on
democracy and prosperity. Pretoria: HSRC.
Millman, G J. 1995. Around the world on a trillion dollars a day. London: Bantam.
Mkandawire, T. 1999. Crisis management and the making of choiceless democracies, in
State, conflict, and democracy in Africa, edited by R Joseph. Boulder, Col. Lynne
Rienner.
NEPAD. 2001. New Partnership for African Development .
Reno, W. 1998. Warlord politics and African states. Boulder: Lynne Rienner.
54

Rist, G. 1997. The history of development: From Western origins to global faith. London:
Zed.
Sandbrook, R. 2000. Closing the circle: Democratisation and development in Africa.
London: Zed.
55

Economic globalisation, industrial
restructuring and development in
the Eastern Cape Province: an
examination of selected issues
Richard J Haines
Chair of Sociology and
Head: Development Studies Group
University of Port Elizabeth
Peter Cunningham
Deputy Director: School of Social Sciences
and Humanities
Head: Human Resources Management
Programme
University of Port Elizabeth
1 INTRODUCTION
The impact of South Africa's economic transformation and the globalisation of
economic relations still need to be assessed qualitatively and quantitatively.
This article 1 addresses aspects of this debate with specific reference to the
Eastern Cape.
Economic globalisation has had a dramatic impact on the Eastern Cape, and
contributed to an observable restructuring of industrial production and work
processes. Probably the most devastating and observable effect has been the
Africanus 32(1)2002 56

job losses in manufacturing over the last two decades, a situation which has
been compounded by tariff reduction, weak controls on illicit imports and economic
deregulation which has hastened the shift offshore of various local
companies. However, this region's engagement with globalisation is mediated
and shaped by the nature of state intervention in industrial policy and by continued
spatial economic inequalities.
2 A DEVELOPMENT OVERVIEW OF THE EASTERN CAPE
The Eastern Cape is the second poorest of South Africa's nine provinces in
terms of income generation. Its two major cities, Port Elizabeth and East
London, have a long tradition of manufacturing in sectors such as the motoring
industry, clothing and textiles, and food processing. Both urban centres have
experienced industrial decline, especially in the 1980s. While there are signs of
recovery, especially in Port Elizabeth, the economic future of the province is still
problematic (Driver 1998).The main sectors of the Eastern Cape economy are:
. agriculture, forestry and fishing
. manufacturing
. trade, catering and accommodation
. community, social and personal services (Central Statistical Services 1995).
Since 1996 regional development planning in the Eastern Cape has centred on
spatial development initiatives (SDIs) with the professed aim of generating
sustainable employment (Hosking & Jaunch 1997).
3 RELEVANT TRENDS IN THE EASTERN CAPE
Research is required in a range of areas to determine the nature and dynamics
of the impact of globalisation on the work environment in the Eastern Cape, and
South Africa more generally. What follows are some orientating and selected
comments.
Firstly, there are distinct signs at regional level of a growing disenchantment
with the neo-liberal economic strategy and policies of government. For instance,
in the PEDU region, leading representatives of the South African
Communist Party (SACP) and Congress of South African Trade Unions (Cosatu)
have opened discussions with certain academics to develop their critique
of the Growth, Employment and Redistribution (GEAR) Programme and its
57

applications, and to enunciate alternative economic development visions. A key
concern is the high unemployment rate ± a reflection of continued retrenchments
in manufacturing and service industries, and the seeming lack of a coherent
job-creation policy at local and national levels (interview: L Nccwangu,
6 November 2000). There is a trend to greater use of sub-contracting and
outsourcing, and using more in the way of contract, casual and agency workers.
This appears to be in line with national and certain international trends (Leicht
1998: Webster 1999).
Secondly, and meriting further exploration, are signs of the partial marginalisation
of the unions in strategic discussions regarding local economic development
(LED).
Thirdly, the region has had a vigorous trade union tradition, but interestingly, its
rates of industrial action have moved below the national average. Also, labour
relations in the major companies do not appear to have advanced in a progressive
direction; issues of increased worker participation in production processes
appear to have been placed on the backburner. Indeed, certain
companies have tightened the application of disciplinary rules and procedures.
Fourthly, of late there has been a significant increase in the application of
information systems and information technology (IT) to work processes in the
larger and more capitalised companies, and this constitutes part of this article.
To what extent these represent new forms and systems of surveillance
(Prassad 1998) is a moot point, and merits national and comparative research.
The introduction of automated work processes in manufacturing in the region
has its origin in the early 1980s. Soon after the introduction of robots, management
turned its attention to the automation of clerical processes. This
strategy converged with the emergence of computer-based programmes that
seek to transform clerical work and the re-engineering of production process. 2
Concomitant with the globalisation ± cross-nation economic interdependence ±
in the automotive industry are a number of work, organisation and management
strategy changes. The causal factors for such changes are debatable. However,
there is widespread support that they relate to the development of IT,
national and international competition, and market and customer demands.
Listed, these changes include:
. The virtualising of business
. Joining of people electronically
58

. Telecommuting 3
. Availability of information at a manager's desktop enabling global operations
. Scenario building for organisation transformation and personnel planning
. The migration from a centralised human resources function to the utilisation
of a company's intranet ± a corporate computer-based communication
network ± to perform such functions as training, providing employees with
information, internal and external recruitment, and so on
. Work process and activity re-engineering
. An emphasis on
± network organisations
± collaborative and partnership management through the development of
strategic alliances
± knowledge management ± the accessibility of information to increase an
organisation's competitive advantage through the harnessing and application
of intellectual capital
. The growth of a knowledge-based workforce
. The automation of data collection and storage, increased accessibility to
real-time information, and the shortening of response and decision-making
time
. Flexible working in terms of product, employment conditions and remuneration.
Although these and other trends are cited in the literature of work in the information
age, evidence of such change in the Eastern Cape Province is either
marginal or completely absent in most enterprises.
4 PARADIGM SHIFT OF HUMAN RESOURCE MANAGEMENT 4
There is no doubt that dramatic changes, internal and external to companies in
the past decade, have resulted in human resource (HR) managers being
confronted by new challenges. Such changes coincide with the international
shift from a manufacturing to a service economy. Externally, they have been
forced to address issues of global competitiveness, and internally a demand to
facilitate the increasing request by all for participation in the decision-making
processes. By broadening the role, HR management has become more complex
and diverse since it is increasingly being integrated into strategic and
business planning, and there is the expectation that needs to conceptualise
itself within the broader context of business, and add quantitative and qualitative
value. Through this process, it is moving beyond the administration of
59

traditional activities of employment to play a greater, sophisticated strategic
role. This transformation is facilitated, or it could be argued enabled, through the
application of computerised HR information systems.
5 APPLICATION OF THE WORLD WIDE WEB
In the last decade growth of the Web and the Internet, and the associated dot
com sites has come to define the future of how business will or should be done.
In an attempt to leverage business, pressure is placed on management to utilise
the estimated seven million unique sites available on the Web ± of which 40 per
cent are public sites that offer content that is freely accessible by the public. To
date, of the 1,8 million South African Internet users only a small fraction buy
online ± estimates range around 1 per cent of total retail sales 5 Parallel to this
development is the utilisation of Intranets, extranets 6 and e-tailing. 7 In some
aspects, the conducting of business electronically is not entirely new in the auto
industry. 8 Business-to-business (B2B) e-commerce or e-procurement is an
extension of what has been occurring for a number of years in the automotive
industry, namely the transmitting of orders and payments via electronic data
interchange (EDI). The only difference is that the Internet is now a better way of
conducting EDI transactions. Besides improved efficiency, one of the prime
drivers of this process is to cut the long-term running cost of a business. 9 The
effort to cut-cost has manifested itself in, for example, online price negotiations.
10
For many managers, this requires a shift of mindset ± to make use of business
intelligence software to assess their (Internet and related e-commerce) effectiveness
and become part of the global economy ± in terms of global best prices
and services, manufacturing and distribution. Concomitant with the shift of attitude
of how to do business is the re-conceptualising and transformation of the
value chain.
This change is facilitated by the introduction of a product such as mySAP.com,
which is built on an open integration Internet-based business framework with
flexibility, scalability, performance and robustness to ensure global business
assimilation. Using value-based management principles, the streamlining of
business processes and business solutions, System Application Product
(SAP), 11 as an integrated Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) system, provides
the business backbone to e-commerce. Broadly stated, a company using
60

SAP back office software can trade with any other company, once they sign up
to the SAP mySAP.com marketplace. By extending the boundaries of business,
it enhances the possibility of collaboration of entire markets by spanning national
boundaries. SAP defines this new way of doing business as collaborative
business (c-business) ± the leveraging of the power of the Internet to join
customers, suppliers, services and business partners. It combines the concepts
of best practice and business scenarios within the context of e-commerce,
customer relations management, supply chain management, business intelligence,
enterprise resource planning, project management, resource management,
knowledge management, field services, business process
outsourcing, application hosting, billing and business support.
The debate in the region as to whether to become a full partner of the Internet
revolution remains largely at the boardroom level. Having implemented SAP R/
3 v4.6, or considering implementing it in the near future, signals that all manufacturers
in the region realise the potential of utilising the Internet either to retain
or gain a competitive advantage in the age of global industry ownership and
manufacture.
A further point of consideration is the ongoing concentration of domestic finance
capital (and associated investment) in the Gauteng and Cape Town regions.
Investment patterns appear to favour these centres as well as Durban, rather
than cities in the Eastern Cape province. This, in turn, compromises local capitalist
development and the creation of new work opportunities.
6 DEFENCE OFFSETS, INDUSTRIAL RESTRUCTURING AND
ECONOMIC DEVELOPMENT
Macro-level industrial restructuring in the Eastern Cape has been significantly
influenced by state-led and primarily exogenous initiatives which have tended to
reinforce the dominance of the Mineral Energy Complex (MEC) in the South
African industrial economy (Fine & Rustomjee 1997; Bloch 1999). Such initiatives
also appear to have done little to counter the relative peripheral economic
status of the Eastern Cape. Moreover, they appear to have undercut
more endogenous development alternatives. Dominant state investment in the
industrial development has been the Coega Industrial Development Zone (IDZ)
project which is, in turn, tied up with the controversial R51 billion procurement
deal for the South African National Defence Force (SANDF). It is in this venture
61

that one sees the coalescing of two key elements of South Africa's exportorientated
industrial strategy. 12 A 1998 Department of Finance confidential
audit underlined two initiatives within the Department of Trade and Industry
(DTI) as specifically reinforcing a partial shift to public ± private partnerships
(PPPs):
. the Industrial Offset Programme (IOP) ± incorporating the Defence Industrial
Participation Scheme (DIP)
. the Spatial Development Initiatives (SDIs).
In theory, SDIs provide the private sector with the opportunity to utilise government
resources to realise the potential of under-utilised and marginalised
areas. A central concern of the SDIs is to promote a shift from import substitution
to exports and international competitiveness. An important aspect of
this is the establishment of Industrial Development Zones (IDZs). These are
geographically defined areas in which incentives are made available to selected
firms to establish themselves. Unions tend to view them as covert export processing
zones (EPZs) (Newman 1998). Likewise, the shift to PPPs and privatisation
of public enterprises has been resisted by unions, though some
concessions have been made to government (Haines 2001).
Under guidelines that took effect from September 1996, all government and
parastatal contracts with an import content exceeding US$10 million, must include
an industrial participation (IP) component. The value of the offsets should
comprise a minimum 30 per cent of a bid's imported component for civilian
contracts. For defence contracts the offsets should comprise 50 per cent of a
bid's imported components.
Unlike the East Asian model of export-led industrialisation, South African industrial
policy in the early twenty-first century is characterised by a growing
reliance on privatisation, quasi-privatisation and differing forms of public ± private
co-operation to help provide infrastructural investment and some degree of
social capital formation. The IP and SDI strategies, however, have an ad hoc
element to them, and can contribute to opening up of the South African economy
in an unsystematic fashion. One needs to appreciate too, that the discourse
of globalisation has benefited certain local business and political e lites.
The discourse centred around GEAR probably provides more legitimation for a
series of deals with multinational and transnational capital. It has also helped
62

facilitate the quickening of the shift offshore by South African companies ± one
of the more disturbing economic developments in post-1994 South Africa.
The unions and the SACP, though critical of GEAR, have not been that effective
in countering such developments. In part, this is a reflection of efforts to sustain
the tripartite political alliance between the African National Congress (ANC),
Cosatu and the SACP (Buhlungu & Psoulis 1999). It also represents the difficulty
of comprehending the complex changes occurring in the South African
economy. The exigencies of empowerment alliances (including the business
enterprises of the unions) have probably compounded the difficulties in decoding
the deeper processes of economic and industrial restructuring.
With the decline of the nation state as protector of the social and economic
wellbeing of workers and communities, the ``local'' and ``global'' are emerging as
key orientating analytical and spatial units in the debate between adherents to
the neo-classical economic paradigm, and those seeking to provide an alternative
social and economic development paradigm (Tolbert, Lyson & Irwin
1998). Within the last-mentioned paradigm there is a growing emphasis on how
local communities will assume the burden of sheltering workers, and providing
opportunities and other welfare functions. Communities are slowly but imperfectly
beginning to seek ways to mute the pressures and forces of global
accumulation and competition. An associated development is the growing interest
in the relationship between local capitalism, civic engagement and socioeconomic
wellbeing (Tolbert, Lyson & Irwin 1998, Amin 1998, Best 2000).
7 THE INDUSTRIAL APPLICATIONS OF THE DEFENCE OFFSETS
In September 1999, the Cabinet finally gave its approval, in a slightly revised
form, for the SANDF's arms acquisition programme ± then estimated at R29,9
billion. The items included fighter and trainer aircraft, Corvettes, submarines
and two types of helicopter. To spend so much money on arms procurement
from abroad was a major blow to the local defence industry. The South African
government, to justify its decision to purchase from foreign suppliers and to win
public support for the arms deal, has continually stressed the potential positive
effects of the proposed IP offers (otherwise known as offsets) on investment,
job creation and growth in the local defence-related industry and the national
economy. At the time of approving the programme, the government stated that
63

the foreign suppliers had made IP offers worth R104 billion which would result in
the creation of 65 000 jobs over a period of seven years. 13
The benefits to the South African economy of the arms procurement package
would seem to be more problematic, when one considers the growing literature
on the economics of defence offsets (e.g. Matthews 1996; 2000; Martin 1996).
This leads Batchelor and Dunne (2000) in a recent preliminary study of the
SANDF procurement programme, to argue that the case for the economic
benefits is not clear. They suggest that the foreign supplier's non-defence IP
offers are questionable, and argue that the danger exists that resources will be
mis-allocated to strategic industries and capital-intensive mega-projects, as
happened under apartheid. They conclude that the implications for industrial
policy and restructuring implicit in some of the offsets have not been thought out
fully, and that the alternatives have not been given adequate consideration.
At a more popular level, both the financial viability, and social and economic
morality of the programme have been questioned by several civil society
groupings, certain political parties and defence analysts. Furthermore, media
revelations have indicated a disturbing set of accumulation practices by certain
members of the political e lite and associated business partners. 14
On a macro-economic level, the arms procurement and related scheme will
have a knock-on effect. In 1999, the Institute for Democratic Alternatives for
South Africa (IDASA) Budgetary Group, working with a conservative figure
(below R29,9bn) anticipated that the procurement package, despite being
spread out over several years, would increase defence's share of the budget,
and reduce somewhat the percentage allocated to infrastructural and public
works programmes (see Tables 1 and 2). This will, in turn, undercut the provision
of more funds for poverty relief and infrastructure provision, and affect the
more peripheral provinces such as the Eastern Cape. Furthermore, Batchelor
and Dunne (1999a) argue that the arms acquisition programme would lead to
more imports and place pressure on South Africa's balance of payments. This
is borne out by the rising cost of the arms procurement package, from R30
billion in late 2000 to R51 billion (and rising) by mid-2001. In addition, there is
the R20 billion to be paid in interest charges (Newsweek, April 2001).
64

Table 1 Service Shares and Growth (as percentage of total) (IDASA 1999)
1988/1999 1999/2000 2000/2001 2001/2002 2002/2003 1999 to
2002/2003
Average
Annual
Growth
Social
Services 53.8 53.8 53.7 53.6 54
Education 27.9 27.5 27.7 27.6 27.8 6.4
Health 14.5 14.8 14.6 14.6 14.8 6.2
Welfare 11.4 11.5 11.4 11.4 11.4 5.8
Protection
Services
Defence and
Intelligence 7.1 6.6 8 8.3 8.5 14.9
Integrated
Justice
System 13 13 13.3 13.2 13.2 6.6
Economic
Services 7 6.6 6.5 6.7 6.8 7.1
Infrastructure 14.8 12.3 11.1 11.1 11 2.4
Administration 4.4 6.3 6.6 6.4 6.4 6.7
Total 100 100 100 100 100 6.5
65

Table 2 Defence spending as percentage of the total budget (IDASA 1999)
1988/99 1999/00 2000/01 2001/02 2002/03
Defence 11.4 11.4 14.6 16.1 17.3
Total 160.9 169 181.9 193.1 204.2
Defence % 7.1% 6.7% 8.0% 8.3% 8.5%
8 THE COEGA INDUSTRIAL DEVELOPMENT ZONE (IDZ)
The idea for an IDZ and harbour, was a response to a 1996 proposal by the
metals and mining conglomerate Billiton to construct a zinc refinery (R2,7bn at
1998 prices) in the Eastern Cape (Le Quesne 2000). A PPP was set up, with
plans for the construction of a large deep-water harbour to service a heavy
industrial site with Billiton's zinc refinery as the anchor tenant. The projected
harbour was originally conceived of as a bulk handling port. The PPP (now
known as the Coega Development Corporation) secured government funding in
the order of R8 million, and longer term funding from the parastatal Portnet,
which is responsible for the management of South Africa's major commercial
ports. Billiton subsequently withdrew as anchor tenant. During the closing
months of 1998 and in 1999 the defence offsets were seen as providing potential
anchor tenants for the ailing project. 15 In 2000 the Anglo-Dutch consortium
P&O Nedlloyd and TCI were the preferred private partner for the
project, and this led to re-configuration of the port and a shift from a bulkhandling
facility to a container hub (Financial Mail 26 May 2000).
There have been changing scenarios regarding the defence offsets planned for
the Coega IDZ. Ferrostaal, Danielli and Thyssen ± firms linked with the Corvette
and submarine consortiums were identified as potential anchor tenants, providing
a stainless steel mill, a speciality steel mill and a galvanising mill respectively.
These firms also apparently committed themselves to small,
medium and micro enterprise (SMME) development in ventures coupled with
stainless and speciality steel beneficiation (Coega Development Company
(CDC), 2000). British Aeropace (BAE) Systems subsequently committed itself
to projects within and outside the CDC IDZ, including a leisure and community
centre in Uitenhage.
In February 2001, the CDC project manager was unable to confirm any of the
66

potential input investments, but the growing public and media scrutiny of the
defence procurement deal has contributed to pressure on government and the
firms concerned to finalise the relevant offset investments. Interestingly, Ferrostaal
± which announced its withdrawal from the Coega IDZ in early 2000, and
its intention to establish a joint project with Columbus Steel elsewhere in South
Africa ± appears to have reconsidered its position, but will look to establishing a
smaller steel plant than originally planned.
The need for a new container port is questioned by a range of critics. Port
Elizabeth's own harbour is functioning at only 45 per cent capacity, and South
Africa appears well supplied by existing harbours such as Durban, which has
better road and rail networks. Indeed, this was one of the reasons government
gave in the early 1990s for not siting a mini steel plant in Port Elizabeth. The
Port Elizabeth rail linkage is a single carriage one, as opposed to the double-rail
system operative on the Gauteng Durban line, and significantly longer and
slower. Spoornet does not possess the funds to build a double-track line to Port
Elizabeth, and to service the new container port the network would have to run
at a loss as opposed to the small profit they currently make on the Gauteng ±
Durban line (Noseweek, March 2001). Indeed, there is evidence that P&O
Nedlloyd's involvement in the CDC project has been secured in part by a covert
arrangement which provides P&O Nedlloyd with a guaranteed container traffic
and subsidised port infrastructure (Noseweek, March and April 2001).
More generally, scholars such as Patrick Bond contend that Coega will cost too
much in public funding and will oblige the Nelson Mandela Metropole to divert
funds from municipal services, further reinforcing existing inequalities left by
apartheid (Financial Mail 26 May 2000). A number of environmental and civil
society groupings and activists have waged a long campaign against the project,
emphasising the short-circuiting of the public participation process, and the
absence of suitable and updated environmental and economic impact studies.
16 Increased media and public criticism of the nature of the arms procurement
deal, has placed further pressure on government to demonstrate the
positive spin-offs from the IP programme, and from the defence procurement
venture in particular. Thus from government's point of view, it is important that
the CDC proceeds with the promised and anticipated offset investments.
The CDC's 2000 estimates of current and potential investment opportunities are
listed in Table 3. They calculate the total value of opportunities in the region of
R11,4 billion, and stress that R8,4 billion of these investments, which are represented
by the envisaged steel plants, would only be directed to the Eastern
67

Cape if the Coega Port were built. This, the CDC stresses, ``emphasises the
strategic importance of the Coega project in the overall development of the
Eastern Cape'' (CDC 2000:3). Table 4 encapsulates the CDC's (problematic)
argument that these potential investments would create a ``critical mass'', allowing
for a leveraging of these investment opportunities to other sectors.
Table 3 Current investment opportunities (Coega Development Company
2000)
Container Terminal
Stainless Steel Mill
Speciality Steel Mill
Galvanising Mill
E-commerce Park
Port Common
Infrastructure
Fuel Depot
Bulk Materials Export
Cement Plant
Common-user hub container terminal with estimated
throughput of 500 000 containers; estimated initial investment
R0,6 billion
Beneficiation of materials, export of stainless steel
sheet in rolls and structural elements; estimated initial
investment R4,8 billion
Beneficiation of materials, export of specialist steel
produce; estimated initial investment of R1,8 billion
Galvanising of steel sheet, export of finished producet;
estimated initial investment of R1,8 billion
Three hundred hectare facility for e-commerce and information
technology; estimated initial investment of
R0,1 billion
Breakwaters, quay walls, dredging, and so forth; estimated
initial investment of R1.5 billion
Storage and handling facilities for liquid fuels; estimated
initial investment of R0,3 billion
Materials storage and handling facilities for manganese,
coal and iron ore; estimaed future investment of R0,4
billion
New cement plant with potential for export of clinker
and/or finished product; estimated future investment of
R0,25 billion
68

Table 4 Current employment opportunities (Coega Development Company
2000)*
DIRECT
INDIRECT
Construction Production Construction Production
Port 2 000 250 3 000 375
Infrastructure 300 500 450 300
Ferrostaal 4 000 500 6 000 750
Danielli 4 000 500 6 000 750
Thyssen 2 000 250 3 000 375
Container Terminal 1 000 250 1 500 375
TOTAL +14 000 +2 500 +20 000 +3 000
* These figures must be dealt with very cautiously and are only a conservative estimate at this time
until confirmed by investors
The methodology used for these calculations is not available, but the estimations
appear to be unduly optimistic. For one, Ferrostaal's downgraded steel
plant may impact somewhat on job-creation prospects, and certain anticipated
internal and external linkages within and outside the IDZ. An earlier economic
plan of the Coega IDZ ± when the Billiton zinc refinery was still the designated
anchor tenant ± showed a suspect use of multiplier methodology, and substantially
overestimated the amount of direct and indirect jobs created (Hosking
1998). Given the capital and technology-intensive nature of the plant, much of
the demand would be for high-level technicians, which would have necessitated
hiring a good proportion of personnel from outside the region. Batchelor and
Dunne (1999a:14) stress the downward revision between November 1998 and
June 1999, of the estimates of revenues from exports and local sales (down
from R24bn to R13bn) from the envisaged Ferrostaal steel mill at Coega.
There is some evidence to suggest that the CDC has sought to control and
channel secondary investment and procurement activities, to work through
69

ather than allow a more incorporative set of dealings with businesses, SMMEs
and parties concerned in the PEDU area. 17 Despite the fact that the motor
industry in the Nelson Mandela Metropole ± Delta Motors, Volkswagen South
Africa (at Uitenhage) and a Ford engine plant ± are invoked as major beneficiaries
of galvanised and specialised steel, there appear to be little or no
formal linkages between these firms and the CDC. Furthermore, by mid-2001
none of the local motor firms appeared to be involved in ventures to explore IP
ventures with the British and German consortiums (interview: A Young 15 June
2000; March 2001).
The defence offset investments targeted for the Coega IDZ have a seductive
quality to them. They seemingly offer a way to help salvage and/or finance an
expensive macro-level project; and help deflect criticisms of the value of that
project. They also provide a range of investment input ± mostly of a heavy
industrial nature ± which privilege a particular developmental trajectory in the
Eastern Cape at a time when the province needs to examine closely its areas of
competitive advantage ± areas which seem to lie at least in part with a more
systematic and sustainable utilisation of natural capital. More generally, they do
little or nothing to force a rethinking of the nature of industrial policy and development
at local and national levels.
The key problem is that macro development alternatives which allow for labourintensive
employment and sustainable use of natural resources appear to be
dismissed without due consideration and debate. In a comparative analysis of
permanent on-site (direct) income and employment generated by the CDC IDZ
and Harbour project, and that generated by an alternative agriculture±tourism
model, Hosking (1997; 1998) argues that the returns on investment are significantly
higher with the last-mentioned alternative. Critics have also stressed
the neglect of the economic aspects of the environmental impact of the CDC
IDZ (Le Quesne 2000, Hosking 1997, 1998; Financial Mail 26 May 2000). They
maintain that a range of natural capital enterprises ± agriculture, aquaculture,
salt processing and ecotourism would be adversely affected by the CDC project.
Overall, there should be a far stronger focus on the sustainable utilisation
of the abundant natural capital resources in the province, and a more determined
attempt to create more urban and rural jobs, as well as an exploration
of the evident synergies between natural and high-technology capital. As regards
the last-mentioned point, the emphasis on Coega has seen plans for a
high-end science park and IT-orientated innovation hub for the City of Port
Elizabeth being marginalised. 18 70

9 THE COMAU/AIMS EXPERIENCE
The significance of the offset deal for the Comau/Aims Corporation is worth
some lateral reflection. This Uitenhage-based company is probably the leading
specialist engineering group in the economy of the Nelson Mandela Metropole,
with advanced capacity in Articulate Intelligent Manufacturing Systems. Its
defence-related business is something of a sideline at this stage, although there
are possibilities of additional orders from the likes of BAE. The bulk of its work is
derived from the automotive and tyre industries, and from export orders, rather
than from South African businesses. Interestingly, several of its orders are in
the form of sub-contracts from international firms contracted by the large Port
Elizabeth-based motor and tyre companies. In most instances, the international
firms do little more than add a substantial management fee and outsource back
to the Nelson Mandela Metropole. In effect, their local capacity for specialist
outsourced work is neglected in favour of overseas companies (interview:
P Wolfaardt 2 June 2000).
Thus the company's competitive advantage within the Nelson Mandela Metropole
is not maximised, and articulated in any substantive manner with cluster
arrangements in the regional space economy. Furthermore, the CDC's failure to
utilise this expertise adequately, is indicative at a micro-level of the broader
problems the CDC IDZ has in linking with the local economy.
The degree to which successful offset projects can contribute to technology
transfer can also be questioned. The R22 million deal concluded with BAE
Systems for the manufacture of missile pylons for the Grippen fighter has been
completed successfully. The pylons were, however, semi-manufactured and
returned to BAE Systems for wiring and final machining. The local company
was not informed of how the pylons would be mounted on the wing of the fighter
in question (interview: P Wolfaardt 2 June 2000), although BAE Systems points
out that this contract is a prototyping exercise. Nevertheless, this does suggest
that the degree of technology transfer might be more limited than expected and
does emphasise the need for monitoring at sub-national levels if the maximum
benefits are to be gained from the scheme. In this and other respects, the
current defence procurement exercise has, in effect, seen the dilution of local
technological expertise built up in South Africa's arms industry. 19
11 CONCLUSION
This article is a provisional and impressionistic study of the impact of globali-
71

sation and industrial restructuring on the Eastern Cape province, and examines
selected macro and micro-level aspects of the reshaping of the work environment.
It suggests that the engagement with the forces of globalisation is more
complex, uneven and mediated than is often assumed.
The first section deals with relevant trends in the region which have not occurred
in isolation to developments regionally, nationally and internationally.
Implementations of ERP systems in, for example, the auto industry in the
Eastern Cape Province which are said to enable a leveraging of the capacity of
the Internet still need to be realised. Entry into the globalisation of the industry
has been uneven ± with auto assembly and sales permeating national boundaries
quicker than administrative processes.
The second section of the article shows that defence offset projects in the
Eastern Cape have been largely directed to the CDC IDZ project, with little
attempt by local and provincial government to incorporate them in meaningful
LED strategies. It is argued that the IP projects from the large defence procurement
package, will not benefit the Eastern Cape much in structural terms;
indeed, the incentives create further contradictions and undermine local capitalism,
as well as alternative and more sustainable macro development options
for the province. There is also little in the way of technology transfer in IP
investment; indeed, local technological capacity can be comprised. It is further
suggested that defence offsets, partly because of their ad hoc and projectorientated
nature, have a more significant and unanticipated impact on the
national space economy.
NOTES
1 This article is based on a paper presented at a conference held in Pretoria, 8 to 9 November
2000, entitled `The impact of globalisation on the world of work', organised by the National
Research Foundation, Institut FrancË ais d'Afrique du Sud, the Centre National de la Recherche
Scientifique and the Human Sciences Research Council.
2 Although the latter cannot be ignored in discussions of the transformation of work, for the sake of
brevity, this section of the article focuses on the implementation of human resources information
systems.
3 Working away from the traditional fixed office on a full or a part-time basis, and communicating
electronically rather than being physically present at the place of work.
4 Although not the focus of this article, the restructuring of the role of human resources is an
important variable in the globalisation debate Ð as both a cause and an effect.
5 This is a significantly different from the United States US where, according to Simon Pollard,
European vice president and service director of AMR Research, there are now more than 700
electronic marketplaces. Forrester Research estimates such marketplaces could account for 54
72

per cent of B2B trade in the US by 2004 (http://sap.ittoolbox.com/ news/ dispnews.asp?i
=25654)
6 Computer networks that link an enterprise to a supplier or supplier network creating a related
community of specific enterprises and suppliers.
7 Online catalogues of services and products at a fixed price.
8 A number of multinationals which resemble the development of EDI, are banding together to
form their own marketplaces of suppliers. On 25 February 2000, General Motors, Ford and
DaimlerChrysler joined forces to purchase an annual $240 billion worth of parts from 50 000
suppliers through such a marketplace, subsequently christened Covisint. (http://sap.ittoolbox.-
com/news/dispnews.asp?i=25654
9 John Brown CEO of BP Amoco, says that it is estimated ``that electronic trade could cut
purchasing costs from an estimated US$100 per order to a figure much closer to US$10'', and
furthermore, ``the real gain would come from the opportunity to leverage their joint purchasing,
power'' (http://sap.ittoolbox.com/news/dispnews.asp?i=25654).
10 This is seen as a potential downside of cost-cutting for ``[t]he more potential vendors in a
marketplace, the greater the opportunity to play one vendor off against another ....Already
some large companies are using B2B marketplaces to conduct `virtual auctions', where they
post their requirements online, and suppliers bid down the price at which they will supply the
goods in question'' (http://sap.ittoolbox.com /news/dispnews.asp?i=25654).
11 SAP R/3 is an enterprise-wide integrated software solution which integrates the entire supply
chain into an automated information infrastructure. Through its application an enterprise is able
to integrate strategic decision support, data warehousing, planning and simulation, optimisation,
forecasting, sales force automation and customer relationship systems in a closed loop with
core financial, logistic and the systems. It enables real-time access to find, structure and edit
information in addition to the provision of ready-to-use templates for strategy maps, modelling
and the seamless flow of information.
12 South Africa's shift to an export-orientated industrial (EOI) model took place in the early and
mid-1990s, but the model was further developed and more explicitly linked with macro-economic
policy in the enunciation of the neo-liberal GEAR in July 1996. It was subject to amendments
and extensions in the late 1990s (see, for example, Chang 1998; Fine 1998).
13 The industrial participation portion of the bid is assessed according to ``credits'' awarded for each
type of benefit. To illustrate, the number of credits for job creation should equal the estimated
value of salaries and wages. New investments, research and development, and links with
disadvantaged persons (either as shareholders or contractors) earn double credits. Bidders
must fulfil their obligations within seven years, and must provide a performance guarantee equal
to five per cent of the offset component. Once the contract is awarded, the supplier must file biannual
progress reports.
14 The most detailed investigation and coverage of the current arms procurement can be found in
the Mail & Guardian (since early 2000) and Noseweek, February and April 2001 issues in
particular. See also the Sunday Times 25 March 2001; and 1, 8, 22, 29 April 2001 for anecdotal
coverage.
15 The involvement of the DTI director of Special Projects, Dr Paul Jourdan, in the second round of
the negotiations with the overseas defence consortiums, appears to have been influential.
Coega was one of the flagship projects in his division's stable. Jourdan, who is currently CEO of
parastatal Mintek, emphasised the importance of South African maintaining its competitive
advantage in the mineral-energy complex, and attempting to diversify from such a base as did
the communications technology firm Nokia from its original roots in the forestry industry.
16 Several of these groups formed the Mandela Metropole Sustainability Coalition in early 2001.
73

See the MMSC Website (www.coega.org) for further details regarding the campaign against the
Coega development.
17 While the CDC initially approached COMAU/AIMS to assist in sub-contracting work in the IDZ,
they have never re-established contact or responded to a proposal drawn up by the engineering
company for empowering local technicians to participate in process engineering and control
aspects of the steel plants in the zone. Rather CDC have apparently drawn on four major subcontractors,
with an essentially national as opposed to local profile (interview: Mr Pieter
Wolfaardt, Technical Director, COMAU/AIMS, 2 June 2000).
18 Minutes of Port Elizabeth Science Park Working Group, 1999±2000.
19 For example, the arms supplier Thomson (using its local subsidiary ADS) has managed to have
CCII, a Cape Town high-tech company that has spent years developing an information system
to the South African navy's specifications, excluded from the procurement contract. Thomsons
have included an outdated system which they could not sell elsewhere (Noseweek August
2000).
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76

Truth, reconciliation and resolution
in South Africa
Gavin Bradshaw
Director, Institute for the Study and
Resolution of Conflict and senior lecturer in
Politics/Conflict Studies
School of Social Sciences and Humanities
University of Port Elizabeth
The Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) represents an attempt to do
justice restoratively, but an incomplete attempt. Only time will tell whether the
gaps will be fatal (Zehr 1997:20)
1 INTRODUCTION
This article examines South Africa's Truth and Reconciliation Commission
(TRC), 1 as an attempt to resolve some of the more deep-rooted aspects of the
South African conflict. The focus will only be on the broader aspects of the TRC
± including its origins, the motivation behind its establishment and the terms of
that establishment. A critical evaluation of the efficacy of the TRC will be provided,
within the theoretical framework of the protracted social conflict paradigm
of Burton, Azar and others. It is beyond the scope of this article to provide a
definitive and comprehensive study of the TRC in its own right. That work has
been done elsewhere. 2
In particular, there will be an examination of the relationship between peace,
justice and truth in the reconciliation process. The critical analysis provided is
intended to serve a theoretical purpose, and should accordingly be viewed in its
77 Africanus 32(1)2002

theoretical context. It is in no way intended to detract from the largely positive
contributions made to South Africa's recovery from apartheid by the TRC.
Many processes characterised the democratic transition in South Africa. Most
obviously, were the talks about talks that led, eventually, to the Convention for a
Democratic South Africa (CODESA) negotiation process, and then the multiparty
negotiations. These were followed by the elections themselves, in April
1994, and beyond the elections, the hammering out of the final national constitution.
During this period, the South African transition produced two dedicated
conflict-resolution, or conflict management mechanisms, the National Peace
Accord (NPA) and the (TRC). 3
The NPA proved extremely effective in that it provided the short-term conditions
for the holding of elections. That is what it was initially designed to do. Once the
elections were held, there were no further resources made available to sustain
the NPA, and it was eventually discontinued. The prime movers all found places
in the new government or in the private sector (Bradshaw 1999:4).
The processes mentioned above, as part of the larger conflict-resolving process
in South Africa, are not extraordinary. They are much as one might have expected
and flowed quite naturally from the interactions of the parties themselves,
muddling their way through the exigencies of conflict and a democratic
transition, without the assistance of any specific outside intervention. According
to the proponents of the deep-rooted conflict theory, however, such conventional
approaches would have been unlikely to prove successful in a situation of
protracted conflict. Theoretically, the level of conflict in South Africa needed
something deeper to deal with the underlying emotions. The South African
conflict involved myriad instances of violence, at multiple levels. Hamber (sa:7)
lists some of the forms of violence as follows:
Pervasive structural violence and oppression; extensive state abuses, like
torture, assassinations and detention without trial; the use of paid vigilantes
and third force operatives to carry out assassinations and terror attacks;
large-scale inter-community conflict; armed resistance from the so-called
liberation forces; and abuses committed by the liberation forces against
those within its own ranks who were suspected of being informers or traitors.
It is widely accepted that these experiences would leave deep scars ± not only
on the victims, but also on society in general. Such scars would likely get in the
way of a full resolution of the South African conflict. It is, for instance, widely
78 Africanus 31(2)2001

accepted that children who have been exposed to the violence of abusive
parents will, in turn, themselves have a better chance of growing up to become
abusers. The question therefore arises: what about the entire generation of
South African youngsters, fuelled by massive violence in the country's townships,
or in campaigns against their compatriots inside and outside the country
during military service? What conflict management process could take care of
these deeper hurts? Could the simple product of a negotiated settlement accommodate
that level of feeling? Certainly, the proponents of the theory of
protracted social conflict would have us believe that it could not. 4
Clearly, its leadership did realise that South Africa needed an additional process
to confront the dark deeds of the past. The mechanism decided upon, was
a TRC similar to the one that had been implemented in Chile.
The TRC, unlike the NPA, was not designed to put out fires. Its function was to
deal with the longer-range issues. Although never articulated as such, its job
was to deal with the protracted aspects of social conflict in South Africa. Leadership
had an understanding that the deep-rooted conflict could not simply be
put aside by a negotiated compromise. The pain of the past had to be worked
through in a longer and more thorough process (Asmal 1996:6±11). Conflict
theorists and social scientists more generally all tell us that this is the necessary
and difficult path out of deep-rooted social conflict. The origins of the TRC and
the motivations for its establishment need therfore be examined more closely.
2 ORIGINS OF THE TRUTH AND RECONCILIATION COMMISSION
The South African TRC resulted from the flowing together of a number of
initiatives in the early 1990s. According to Alex Boraine, the idea of a truth
commission emanated from the African National Congress (ANC), in response
to accusations levelled against it of human rights abuses in some of its training
camps outside South Africa (2000:11).
Having held its own commissions of inquiry in response to these allegations,
and to create a more thorough understanding of human rights abuses, it believed
that there was a need for a process by which all parties to the South
African conflict would be held accountable for their past actions.
The chief mandate given by the National Executive Committee of the ANC for
the establishment of a TRC was simply, ``to get to the truth'' (Asmal 1994).
79

Kader Asmal also produced preliminary work towards the preparation of an
indictment against apartheid which was never completed because of the historical
announcements of the then president, F W de Klerk on 2 February 1990
(Boraine et al. 1994:34). Asmal next gave form and content to the ANC's proposal
for the establishment of a post-settlement truth commission in his inaugural
lecture at the University of the Western Cape on 25 May 1992 (Boraine
1994:ix±xvii).
Around 1992 there were other initiatives as well that would add to the impetus
for a truth commission. It was while on study visits to Eastern European societies
in transitions to democracy, that an Institute for a Democratic Alternative
for South Africa ± (IDASA)-sponsored group, including Boraine and others, was
first drawn to the issue of how societies deal with past human rights violations
(Boraine 2000:14±16).
This theme inspired the subsequent organisation of a conference held in
Somerset West in February 1994, which included as participants a number of
very prominent human rights scholars and activists from Latin America, Eastern
Europe and South Africa, to consider the problem, and shed light on the matter
of a truth commission for South Africa (Boraine 1994:ix±xvii). A number of ideas
were generated which eventually informed the design of the TRC. A second
conference, entitled ``Truth and Reconciliation'', was held in Cape Town, with a
more South African focus. The new Minister of Justice, Dullah Omar delivered
the keynote address. This conference further developed the idea of a truth
commission, which was by now, also being taken forward in government circles.
The ANC had approached Boraine about steps to be taken to translate the
ideas on a truth commission into a plan of action (Boraine 2001:30). This
eventually resulted in Boraine sending Nelson Mandela a draft proposal for
such a commission. After the 1994 election, the Minister of Justice, Dullah
Omar, and Boraine worked in partnership to bring the TRC design to fruition.
Following much input from civil society, and after extensive hearings, the South
African Parliament passed the Promotion of National Unity and Reconciliation
Act, 1995 (Act 34 of 1995) in July1995, which was the enabling act for the
TRC. 5
After a public nomination and selection process, 17 commissioners were appointed,
based on their impartiality, because they did not have too prominent a
political profile, and by reason of the fact that they represented a broad
80

crosssection of the population. Archbishop Desmond Tutu was to chair the
commission (Hayner 2001:41).
3 THE ORGANISATIONAL STRUCTURE OF THE TRC
The Act made provision for three committees.
3.1 The Committee on Human Rights Violations
Provided for under section 12 of the Promotion of National Unity Act of 1995,
this committee was responsible for investigating cases of human rights violations
committed in a political context between 1 March 1960 and 9 May 1994.
The committee gave people who suffered human rights violations an opportunity
to tell their stories and to speak of their losses and suffering. It decided
whether someone was a victim as defined in the law governing the work of the
commission. The committee was assigned the task of investigating these violations,
finding out who was responsible, how it happened and of holding public
hearings. It must ultimately submit a comprehensive report of its findings and
recommendations.
3.2 The Committee on Amnesty
The amnesty committee processed and decided upon individual applications for
amnesty from people who committed crimes or human rights violations within a
political context in accordance with strict criteria for amnesty. Although this can
be somewhat ambiguous, certain standards, known as ``Norgaard principles''
were nevertheless utilised to gauge the degree of political intent behind a crime.
This committee facilitated and promoted the granting of amnesty to perpetrators.
The TRC advocated individual application for amnesty, rather than
blanket amnesty. Applicants had to make full disclosures of offences in order to
qualify for amnesty and had to appear before the amnesty committee in hearings
that were open to the public. If someone had been granted amnesty, the
people who suffered as a result of their actions could not claim damages or lay
criminal charges. In many instances this proved to be a bone of contention.
3.3 The Committee on Reparation and Rehabilitation
This committee received applications provided for under section 23 of the Act
for reparations from any person who was of the opinion that he or she had had
81

suffered great harm, loss and/or suffering as a result of human rights violations.
After considering each individual application, the committee would determine
whether the applicant qualified for reparation and rehabilitation, and endeavoured
to restore human dignity in some way. However, the problem which
persisted and hampered the success in this matter was a lack of resources and
access to funding (Hayner 2001:41; 42).
At its second, full meeting, the commission also decided to maintain regional
offices in four centres, being Cape Town, Johannesburg, Durban and East
London (Truth and Reconciliation Commission Report:24).
4 MOTIVATION
Some of the motivation for the establishment of the commission has already
been discussed in the section on its origins. However, if the TRC as a conflictmanagement
mechanism is to be properly evaluate within a strict context of the
theory on protracted social conflict, it is important that we know what the motivations
were of its founders.
According to the report of the commission:
The Promotion of National Unity and Reconciliation Act charged the Truth
and Reconciliation Commission with investigating and documenting gross
human rights violations committed within or outside South Africa in the period
1960±1994 (TRC Report:1).
As has been mentioned before, the prime motivation was therefore to be the
uncovering of the truth. Many of the atrocities committed on all sides, were
committed clandestinely, and were denied by both the apartheid state and its
challengers. The ``common-sense'' point has repeatedly been made in the literature
on the TRC, that, if there was to be any forgiveness to underpin a new,
democratic society in South Africa, then the victims had to know whom they
were forgiving, and what they were forgiving them for, at the very least.
Beyond this primary motivation, however, are a number of other secondary
motivations that are extensively articulated in the enabling legislation, the report
of the TRC and the academic literature that the commission has generated.
These motivations are essentially derivative ± they spell out the reasons ``why''
the truth is important.
82

Boraine (2001:47±48) summarises the following as the aims of the TRC as
formulated by the Minister of Justice, namely to
. return to victims their civil and human rights
. restore the moral order
. grant amnesty to those who qualified for it
. create a culture of human rights and respect for the rule of law
. prevent the violations of the past from ever happening again.
Omar (in Boraine, 2001:71) also describes the aim of the TRC as follows: ``To
facilitate the healing of our deeply divided society on a morally acceptable
basis''.
Indeed, the use of terminology including the healing concept became increasingly
significant. Andre du Toit (in Minow 1998:321) makes the point that as
various religious leaders became more involved in the work of the commission,
religious style and symbolism replaced the political and human rights concerns.
In his opening address of the first meeting of the TRC, its chairperson, Archbishop
Desmond Tutu stated that: ``are a wounded people . . . we are all in need
of healing'' (Wilson 1996:15).
The terms healing and reconciliation resonate deeply with the language of the
basic human needs scholars, and their quest for the complete resolution, as
opposed to the mere settlement, of conflict. It is here that the role of the Truth
Commission becomes interesting from the perspective of this thesis. The relationships
between the telling and hearing of the truth, and the process of
healing and the dispensing of justice are relationships that will be examined in
greater detail later in this article. The transformation from individual healing to
national reconciliation is also one that bears closer examination.
4.1 The need for healing
As has already been alluded to, the term healing has become one of the oftstated
purposes of the South African TRC. The point has also been abundantly
made that apartheid, and the struggle to overthrow it, produced extensive
violence, which will have traumatised many and left scars on the collective
South African psyche. Hamber, for instance, is of the opinion that ``the pervasive
nature of the violence has undermined the moral, interpersonal and social
fabric of the society'' (1995:3). Kollapen, in the same vein, argues that, given
the post-election scenario of nation-building and a government of national unity
83

and national reconciliation, the focus of any pertinent and efficacious way forward
should be on ``healing'': ``It follows therefore that there has to be a diagnosis
of what transpired, why it transpired and ultimately who was responsible.
The history and the interests of all South Africans would certainly demand
nothing less'' (Kollapen in Liebenberg, 1996:127). Otherwise we face an enduring
and corrosive silence, misled by an unweighted perspective of the past.
Whatever emerges, one of the main objectives of the TRC was that it enabled
South Africans to come to terms with their past (Dullah Omar, 1994, in an
interview cited in Liebenberg 1996:133). People have been dehumanised, and
citizens and their rights abused.
Minow (1998:319) makes a statement reflecting a common assumption, and
then asks the following important question:
Expose the terrible secrets of a sick society and heal that society. Is this an
assertion that can be tested, or instead an article of professional, cultural, or
religious faith?
Numerous scholars assert the importance of a telling of the truth, or the accounting
of the stories of the victims of human rights abuses, as a very important
step in the healing process. It is regarded by many as an almost selfevident
tenet of psychology. For instance, Minow, quoting Herman's work asserts
that: ``The fundamental premise of the psychotherapeutic work is a belief
in the restorative power of truth-telling''.
Hayner supports this assertion as follows:
There is a multitude of studies showing that repressing intense emotional
pain leads to psychological trouble. Indeed, one of the cornerstones of
modern-day psychology is the belief that expressing one's feelings, and
especially talking out traumatic experiences is necessary for recovery and for
psychological health ± it is often asserted that following a period of massive
political violence and enforced silence, simply giving victims and witnesses a
chance to tell their stories to an official commission ± especially one that is
respectful, non-confrontational, and interested in their stories ± can help
them regain their dignity and begin to recover (2001:134).
This argument is further supported by other scholars, such as Hamber (1995:3±
5). It is focused, very specifically, only on the very individuals who suffered
84

gross human rights violations. It is a psychologist's perspective on the healing
of traumatised individuals.
The critical question that needs to be considered, is whether the emphasis
should be on the few individuals who have been specifically victimised, or
whether the focus should be on the society as a whole? Furthermore, is the
treatment of a group of individuals, in the form of psychotherapy for symptoms
similar to post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) transferable to the nation as a
whole? Does that require something totally different?
4.2 Individual versus national healing
Giliomee has called the activity of the TRC, the practice of ``mass psychiatry''.
This statement brings into focus one of the tensions in the activity of the TRC.
Winslow (1997:24) makes a vital point in this regard: ``The ultimate objective of
the TRC, it would seem, is to heal `victims', heal `perpetrators', and `heal' the
nation. But is it possible to heal both individuals and the nation at the same time
and through the same process?''
Winslow, as a trauma counsellor, is most concerned about the experience of
the individual victims who have testified before the commission. He does go on
to state that he is of the considered opinion that the opportunity for healing for
those individuals who gave testimony is very limited, especially because they
do not have the same support available as is typically afforded to those undergoing
psychotherapy. He believes that while the nation may be a nett
beneficiary of this process, the actual victims would likely remain the losers
(Winslow 1997:24±8; 40±2).
I find that a highly questionable conclusion on a number of counts. Firstly, it is
almost impossible to tell what effect the hearings had on the rest of society. It is
quite likely that although some will be healed, others will be frustrated, many will
be hurt and others outraged by them. Secondly, it is, furthermore, difficult to tell
the extent to which hearings were available to all and sundry on the mass
media, as not all South Africans have access to television sets. Thirdly, and
more importantly, is the question of whether psychotherapy can be conducted
at a distance and by proxy. Finally, the deeper, less specific hurts; the comprehensive
poverty caused by exclusion and oppression in general, were also
not a part of the hearings, and this is perhaps the most pervasive, structural
legacy of apartheid.
85

4.3 The value of truth
The Promotion of National Unity and Reconciliation Act, 1995 (Act 35 of 1995)
is based on the principle that reconciliation depends on forgiveness, and that
forgiveness can only materialise if events and admissions are fully disclosed.
President Nelson Mandela said in 1995 after the signing of the Act that ``only the
truth can put the past to rest'' (Frost 1998:140), and as Dirk Coetzee, the selfconfessed
killer responsible for the deaths of the Cradock Four has suggested,
``you can't forgive and forget the past if you don't know what it is'' (in Frost
1998:159). According to the then Minister of Justice, Dullah Omar, ``If we sweep
things under the carpet, reconciliation will be short-lived'' (Newsweek 1995).
Regardless of the ability of the TRC to contribute to national healing, or reconciliation,
it can at least, through the hearing of victims' narratives, accomplish
some very useful goals. The collected information from amnesty
applicants will help provide a fuller picture of the past, to provide a public record
of atrocities, so that those atrocities cannot easily be repeated in future. In this
sense, the TRC can provide a fuller account of the history of a regime, than the
more specific information elicited at a trial. It can help the survivors of atrocities
regain trust in government (Minow 1998:325±339). Because of the secretive
nature of the vast majority of the abuses that have taken place, one of the great
values of the uncovering of the truth is that it will make it impossible for the
perpetrators to continue denying the very existence of those atrocities. The
telling and hearing of the truth will also allow the victims to interact with their
abusers, in a more assertive way; in a different power relationship.
4.4 The amnesty question, and truth versus justice
As has already been mentioned, the South African TRC drew from the experiences
of previous truth commissions, such as those of Argentina and Chile,
which had to deal with their pasts by means of appointed or commissioned
bodies. Although the TRC chose to draw most heavily on the Chilean model,
rather than the others, it also tried to avoid the pitfalls of other commissions.
Whilst attending a discussion of the Argentinean commission, Liebenberg has
noted that while that commission ``succeeded commendably during the `truth
phase' in unearthing and exposing the past, it fell short during the `justice phase'
in dealing with the perpetrators of human rights abuses and providing restitution
for victims'' (Liebenberg 1996:140).
Although truth may be a necessary component of the reconciliation process, it
86

is certainly not a sufficient component. As conflict-resolution scholars Davidson
and Montville put it: ``overcoming psychological barriers does not resolve a
conflict'' (1982:153). However, once barriers are removed, there is scope for
new social possibilities.
The South African Truth Commission was unique among truth commissions, in
that it had been the only such commission empowered to grant amnesty to
perpetrators of abuses under the Act. It is probably this aspect of the TRC that
has given rise to the most intense criticism.
Barney Desai of the Pan Africanist Congress stated the following concerning
the commission:
The cries of torture and abuse still ring in our ears. The Fallen are deeply
etched in our memory. The millions who were forcibly removed from their
homes remain bewildered and disorientated. The abused know their abusers
and they are now the accusers. They seek justice, they seek retribution for
the atrocities committed against them . . . [South Africans] would be living in
a fool's paradise if we believed that merely telling the truth will end human
rights abuses . . . (in Boraine, Levy and Scheffer, 1994:xii±xiii).
H W van der Merwe, one of the foremost South African scholars working in the
conflict field more than a decade prior to the establishment of the TRC, wrote at
length on the relationship between peace and justice in resolving conflict in
South Africa. He made it abundantly clear that although neither value was
perfectly and fully available, the idea of peace without justice in the South
African context would fall far short of the mark (1989:1±3). Although he was
writing before the South African transition to democracy, about the fact that
peace would not be available without at least a political transformation to a more
participative and more equal society, the point still holds. There is the important
issue of the need for justice to be done and for justice to be seen to be done if
peace is to have its full meaning. Others have also explored this theme, and
state the case for a relationship between peace and justice. 6 Again, shortly
before his death in 2001, van der Merwe expanded on his critique of the TRC
from this perspective. Writing on the commission, he states:
What I objected to at the time of its establishment was the insistence by its
proponents, including justice Minister Omar, that the purpose was not to
punish, as if punishment were something evil: if any of us had such a motive,
we should be ashamed of it. Apart from my feeling that this claim was not
87

quite honest it also, in my view, contributed to the rejection of the Commission
by many people who would have supported it had the deep-seated
need in all of us for some form of punishment been publicly acknowledged
(2001:215).
Consideration must be given to the victims. This was one of the reasons why
the Chilean Commission is generally seen to have been so effective. It kept its
primary focus on the victims. Desai further advocated that ``the violators be
named and put on trial. It is imperative that justice is seen to be done'' (1994:xiii)
[italics mine]. This reflects the sentiments of the family members of the victims
of human rights abuses such as Dr Fumbatha Mxenge, whose brother, Griffiths
Mxenge, a civil rights lawyer, was one of the ``Cradock Four'' killed by hit men
under the command of Dirk Coetzee. Dr Mxenge opposed the idea of amnesty,
saying that ``we will be happy when justice is seen to be done'' (Frost1998:158).
This attitude is not racially bound, but similarly echoed in the feelings of others
who lost family members or loved ones, like Chris Ribeiro who stated that
``justice is needed. By justice I mean prosecution'' (Financial Mail, May 3 1996).
The abovementioned opinions are given support by Hayner (2001) in a series of
anecdotal accounts, but also citing scientific, psychological evidence to the
effect that a simple telling of the truth is insufficient to lead to a healing process.
She writes:
Most studies of healing from political violence measure the positive effects of
psychological support over a period of time; these studies show that when
victims are given a safe and supportive environment to talk about their suffering,
most eventually see positive results. Typical symptoms of repressed
trauma, such as nightmares, emotional problems and sleeplessness, often
recede. Truth commissions, however, do not offer long-term therapy; they
offer survivors a one-time opportunity to tell their story, usually to a stranger
whom they will likely never see again. Some anecdotes of the effects on
victims giving testimony to truth commissions are very positive; others are
very worrisome. There has been no study to date of the psychological impact
of truth commissions on survivors, but the evidence that is available is enough
to raise some serious questions (2001:135).
In fact, there is much evidence to suggest that the truth-exposing process may,
in fact, do further harm to the victims. Some of those who give testimony before
truth commissions can be re-traumatised, according to psychologists. Witnesses
upon embarking on the process may display the set of symptoms
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known as PTSD, including confusion, nightmares, exhaustion, loss of appetite
or sleeplessness (Hayner 2001:141).
In this vein, Michael Lapsley, a priest who was badly injured by a parcel bomb ±
and who has subsequently worked to assist the victims of human rights abuses
± has stated the following: ``If you have a physical wound, you take off the
bandage, clean the wound, and rebandage it. But people take their clothes off in
front of the truth commission and don't get an adequate opportunity to put their
clothes back on. It is naõÈ ve to think that it takes five minutes to heal. We'll spend
the next hundred years trying to heal from our history'' (Hayner 2001:141±143).
While there is a resistance to facing up to painful truths operating at an individual
level, there is some evidence to show that there may be a similar effect
at national levels as well. Thus certain countries, such as Mozambique and
Cambodia, that have suffered extensively from extremely violent internal conflict
have, while seeking reconciliation, deliberately avoided the route of a truth
commission, believing that to open the wounds of the past conflict, would be
counterproductive (Hayner 2001:185±200).
In 1978, in the Washington Star, an American-educated Palestinian scholar,
Fawaz Turki, offered an interpretation of his people's wounds and anger:
A people who are having their minimal demands for justice rejected will
predictably brood on themes of despair, or be motivated by new political
impulses of defiance and avowed struggle (cited in Davidson and Montville,
1982:152).
What this demonstrates is that there needs to be a sense of truth and confession
about the past before, or in order to, being able to continue with the
issues of the present; before planning a future committed to unity and justice.
4.5 The question of prosecution
There are many who believe that since the perpetrators of heinous crimes
against humanity have now been exposed, they should be punished. But in
South Africa, that will occur only in exceptional circumstances. The price to be
paid for truth in the South African case is amnesty for the perpetrators. Van der
Merwe makes a very strong argument for punishment and an associated criticism
of the commission, as follows:
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Although retribution is popularly seen as primitive emotionalism, a form of
pointless revenge, it actually constitutes a firm principle in most legal systems
as well as in certain strands of theological thought. It is a basic principle
of justice that a wrong should be righted ± that the offender deserves punishment.
Punishment as retribution is the paying of a debt to one's fellow
citizens. It is true that there was an element of punishment in the sessions of
the Human Rights Violations Committee where perpetrators were exposed
and publicly humiliated. For some this amounted to severe punishment,
because acts that they committed during the apartheid regime which brought
them honour and promotion were revealed as atrocities and violations of
human rights, now punishable by law. But, by and large, the Commission
failed to achieve reconciliation in the larger society by denying the role of
punishment as a form of redress in the healing process (2001:215).
For those who support the idea of the fulfilment of justice and who see the
necessity of prosecution, there must also be prosecution of some perpetrators
so as to reinforce and re-establish faith in the rule of law. ``Truth telling alone
without any form of justice to victims of abuses will not suffice'' (Onyegbula
1998).
Many South Africans feel that insufficient prosecutions have materialised, or
that investigations have not been thorough enough ± especially in the cases of
key individuals such as Winnie Madikizela-Mandela and former State President,
P W Botha.
The reason for the necessity of prosecution is that it sends the signal that
impunity will not be tolerated. There are important questions to be asked here,
concerning whether the dramatic rise in lawlessness in South Africa has not
been at least partially fueled by a relativist approach to justice in such a highprofile
organisation as the Truth and Reconciliation Commission? This is obviously
not the TRC's fault, but the way in which justice is portrayed and utilised
sets a precedent and will impact on other aspects of society in the future.
Related criticism that could be brought to bear on the lack of punishment being
meted out, is based on the belief that a new democratic system should be seen
to be based on the rule of law. No one should be beyond the scope of justice.
Huntington writing on transitions to democracy thus draws our attention to the
argument that perpetrators of crime should be prosecuted because of a moral
obligation to victims and families. Prosecution is also necessary to deter future
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violations and to assert the supremacy of democratic values, encouraging the
public to believe in them (1991:213).
The supporters of the search for truth in exchange for amnesty make very
strong arguments in its favour. Most telling, is the fait accompli argument, which
points to the South African Constitutional requirement that perpetrators of gross
human rights abuses be granted amnesty in exchange for a full account of their
involvement in activities ``associated with political objectives and committed in
the course of the conflicts of the past'' (Minow 1998:320). In terms of this
argument, there was no other option available to the TRC. Those who support
the particular constitutional requirement argue that it was the only way to
achieve a constitutional settlement in South Africa. In its absence, they argue,
the perpetrators of abuses would never have accepted a settlement, and would
have been in a position to destabilise any political processes. They argue that it
has to be seen in the light of the fact that the South African transition was
based, not on the defeat of either side, but rather by a joint decision to end
hostilities.
Others support the route taken by the TRC, as, in all respects, a more suitable
option than that of pursuing prosecutions. Minow (1998:324), for instance,
maintains that ``litigation is not an ideal form of social action''. Victims and
witnesses suffer ordeals of testifying, and cross-examination, without being
afforded the prospect of directly narrating their experiences. Prosecution and
the evidence given at trials will similarly not permit the production of a complex
narrative about the trauma of the entire nation. Hayner also points to the fact
that prosecutions may not be possible in many cases due to conditions in
traumatised societies including:
The fact that there may be a poorly functioning judicial system, characterised
by corrupt or compromised officials, or there may be a lack of concrete
evidence for the kinds of deeds perpetrated by highly secretive organisations.
Also, cash-strapped judicial systems have little or no witness protection
programmes, police and public prosecutors may lack the skills to
investigate and present strong cases. Very often, judges and public prosecutors
are underpaid, courts operate with inadequate physical and financial
resources, and without basic administrative support, and blanket amnesties
have been passed by previous regimes. Sometimes there is a lack of political
will to tackle `difficult' cases. Judges have also been killed in some cases
(2001:89).
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In the South African case, two particular prosecutions, including the muchpublicised
trial of former Minister of Defence, Magnus Malan, were used to
support this argument. In this case the standard of the evidence brought against
the accused was simply inadequate to the task. It is felt that these accused
might have contributed more to national reconciliation by a process of confession
and amnesty within the TRC (Hayner, 2001).
In addition, strong arguments are made in favour of the TRC process ± against
those who argued against the principle of amnesty in exchange for the truth.
Supporters of the South African TRC process argued that it was infinitely preferable
to a blanket amnesty, which is often the solution in these cases. The
point is made that in the South African case, amnesty was never granted willynilly.
It was only granted under certain circumstances, including if the deeds
were committed out of political conviction, or on the instruction of superiors. The
amnesty granted was never a blanket amnesty ± it was always only granted on
an individual basis, and only in exchange for the full, corroborated truth. There
was no condition of an expression of contrition required of the confessors. The
perpetrators never got off scot-free. They were embarrassed by the process
and publicly exposed for what they really were.
A plea was made for a broader view of justice to be taken. Some scholars
argued for a distinction to be made between two types of justice, namely retributive
justice and restorative justice (Zehr 1997:20). Whereas, in the retributive
view, justice demands the punishment, or prosecution of offenders, the
restorative view seeks a restoration of relationships and assistance of some or
other kind to the victims, to heal wounds and mend damage. It is argued that the
latter route is a more constructive one for societies recovering from violent
conflict. Seen in this light, there is no denial of justice by the TRC to victims of
abuse in South Africa.
5 THE TRUTH AND RECONCILIATION COMMISSION AND
REPARATIONS
5.1 The nature of reparation
Reparatory measures cannot bring back the dead or adequately compensate
for pain or suffering, but they can improve the quality of life for victims of gross
human rights violations and/or their dependants. While these measures might
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include money, financial payment is not the only form of reparation and rehabilitation
that the committee recommended.
5.2 The importance of reparation
Victims of human rights abuses have the right to reparation because of the
losses that they might have suffered; be they physical, financial, emotional or
psychological. Victims particularly needed to be compensated in some way
because the amnesty process meant that they lost the right to claim damages
from perpetrators who were given amnesty. According to The Promotion of
National Unity Act 34 of 1995, the President and the Ministers of Justice and
Finance are required to establish a President's Fund, from which reparations
might be paid.
Examples of reparations that might have been granted were
. Individual reparation grants (IRGs): which might entail meeting needs such
as medical, educational or housing needs.
. Symbolic reparation: legal and administrative measures might also have
been granted, such as the issuing of death certificates, exhumation, reburials,
clearing of criminal records or the issuing of headstones and
tombstones.
. Community benefits: include the renaming of streets and facilities, culturally
appropriate ceremonies or memorials and monuments.
. National benefits: include the renaming of public facilities, a day of remembrance
and reconciliation as well as the founding of monuments and
memorials.
. Community rehabilitation: which included the initiation of health-care and
mental health-care programmes or facilities, housing projects, and special
attention to educational needs and infrastructure.
The need for reparation obviously takes on great importance when the dominant
perspective is one that is based on a restorative, rather than a retributive
view of justice.
6 CRITIQUE
The TRC came in for much criticism. One can differentiate among criticism on a
number of different grounds.
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6.1 Bias
In the main, the criticism has been concerning a perceived lack of evenhandedness,
or the extent of bias displayed by the commission. There was
early criticism concerning the composition of the commission, and once the
report appeared it was condemned for being biased against some of the parties.
It is noteworthy that some of the most telling criticism on that score emanated
from two of the main parties to the South African conflict, namely, the African
National Congress and the National Party. Some stated that this two-sided
critique seemed to suggest that the TRC must have been quite impartial in its
attempts to get at the truth.
There have, however, been some quite serious criticisms on this same count of
a lack of impartiality from the highly regarded South African Institute of Race
Relations. Jeffery, in her critical work on the TRC, writes that the TRC failed to
provide explanations for thousands of killings in Natal and on the East Rand in
the years between 1989 and 1994. This lacuna creates a seriously one-sided
report, according to her (Financial Mail 30 July 1999:34;35).
It seems that, no matter how much effort is put into impartiality on the part of a
body such as the TRC, given the deep-rooted and long-standing nature of the
conflict in which they have been engaged, there are bound to be those who feel
that they have somehow been disadvantaged in the process. It is difficult to
envisage how the TRC might have been constituted in a way that was more
consultative, or more representative of the broad spectrum of values and interests
that comprise South African society.
6.2 Process
What is of greater interest, however, is the actual nature of the process, and
whether that was appropriate to the purpose of the South African TRC.
What has been very evident to this author, in an examination of the literature on
the TRC, has been the decided lack of a conflict-resolution, or conflict-management
perspective. There has been an almost total lack of a theorising of the
TRC process within a theory of social conflict, and none at all in terms of
theories of deep-rooted social conflict. The vast majority of the scholarly output
takes either a legalistic point of departure, a psychological perspective, or a
religious view of the subject. There seems to be very little consideration of what
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is required to manage, or resolve a deep-rooted social conflict of many decades
standing.
Much of the commentary on the TRC process has evaluated it from a psychological
point of view (Hamber 1995; Hayner 2001; Minow 1998; Herman
1992). In this regard, as has already been mentioned, the ``treatment'' of truthtelling,
is akin to that of PTSD. It is taken quite simplistically that what is good for
a traumatised individual, will also be good for a traumatised nation of individuals.
If the goal is the healing of social conflict, however, it must be understood
that society is a collective, in which each will hear and react to the
narrative in different ways. If the goal is the healing of specific victims only, then
the telling of their truths may be more helpful, provided that the environment of
the telling is sufficiently receptive and sympathetic (Hayner, 2001:141). There
seems to be a dearth of scholarly literature on the social psychology of national
healing processes, and only a very tenuous link can be demonstrated between
individual processes and social ones. There is also, an admonition among
those, from the psychological perspective, as to the ability of the TRC to
counsel victims effectively, and bring about real healing, even at that level. 7
The TRC was tasked from the outset to be victim-orientated. The definition of
victim was highly specific and included only those who specifically suffered
human rights abuses. The TRC heard testimony from approximately 20 000
victims. In this sense, where those specific individuals were concerned it may
have been successful. Unfortunately, in respect of the larger social conflict, the
TRC did not address the wounds of the millions of those devastated by the
policy of apartheid.
The TRC exercise was clearly a very useful one from the perspective of uncovering
the truth of specific incidences of human rights abuses. In this sense,
as has been mentioned earlier, it can make the repetition of such abuses in
future, very difficult. It also contributes information towards the development of
a new narrative of the South African conflict ± one that differs from the official,
apartheid-based account.
However, the evaluation of the South African TRC from this perspective also
provides a mixed picture, as a result of the large number of abuses that were
never examined by the TRC (Jeffery 1999) and also the fact that the structural
issues, the more generalised system of apartheid itself, the systematised oppression
did not fall within the scope of the TRC's activities.
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The issue of justice has already been covered. The issue of whether or not
justice has been done; of what kind of justice has been dispensed, and what is
appropriate to the South African reality were also addressed. There are numerous
definitions of peace, and certainly most experts will affirm that peace is
more than a simple absence of violence. It is certainly not an absence of
conflict. Many definitions of peace include a reference to a state of justice.
Perhaps this is one of the reasons why the TRC seems to leave so many people
on all sides essentially dissatisfied. Has it managed to capture adequately, the
essence of the delivery of justice for the people of South Africa? H W van der
Merwe, who can be regarded as the father of the conflict-resolution school in
South Africa, certainly believed that it did not.
6.3 A lack of sufficient reparation
One of the most broadly held views in the literature on the South African TRC is
that the issue of reparations has not been adequately addressed. 8 Although the
President's Fund was set up for this purpose, criticism has been that enough
resources have not been put aside and that the process of disbursement has
taken far too long. The issue of reparations is particularly important because of
the fact that the TRC operates within a restorative justice paradigm and because
retributive justice has not been available. According to Minow, ``Only if
the recommendations for reparations are followed with concrete actions,
though, will these aims [of the TRC] promise to bear fruit'' (1998:323).
7 CONCLUSION
A thorough review of the literature on the TRC indicates that this initiative was
not conceived explicitly within the theoretical framework of protracted social
conflict. Indeed, very little of the literature seems to have been inspired at all by
the general ``conflict-resolution'' area of studies. 9 Most of the ideas that underpin
the TRC are gleaned from the fields of the psychology of trauma and the
healing of trauma, the legal debate around prosecution and human rights
abuse, and religious themes of forgiveness and redemption. The main impulse
of the TRC was to glean as much information about the atrocities of the
apartheid past, to expose the abuses and to help the victims to come to terms
with them.
In terms of the TRC's achievements, the messages emanating from the
scholarly debate surrounding it are mixed indeed. There is no doubt that truth
96

has been uncovered and widely publicised. There are debates that rage,
however, and challenges that are issued, about the extent of that truth and its
quality. It has certainly not been a complete process.
There is also no doubt that there has been a public grieving process. Whereas
some conflict-management scholars see this as a necessary and important
aspect of national reconciliation, there are questions asked by many that deliver
no satisfactory answers, such as: were the victims not re-traumatised by their
giving of evidence before the TRC? and the weight of the argument seems to be
that no doubt, under the process of the TRC, they probably were.
Then there is the question surrounding whether the individual truth recounting
could be translated into a national healing process, and on this, the jury is still
out. Certainly, no truth commission elsewhere received as much public media
coverage as the TRC. The nagging question still remains, however, about how
the truth was received and by whom, and whether or not attitudes had been
transformed. It is quite true, as Hayner states, that there are now very few
South Africans who would openly admit to ever having supported the apartheid
system; implying that the TRC process was responsible for exposing the heinous
deeds of the past and moving them ``beyond the pale'' of acceptable
human behaviour. While the TRC may well have had such an impact, it is
impossible to prove, as there were very few South Africans who would have
been prepared to admit their support of the previous system, even before the
activities of the TRC got under way in 1996.
Every commentator on the TRC and its activities were at pains to point out that
success of the restorative role of the commission was going to be largely dependent
on the South African government taking the recommendations of the
TRC concerning the making of reparations, seriously which, to date, has not
transpired.
Finally, the only way to judge the TRC's impact in the area of national reconciliation,
will be through the mechanism of social research. It will be necessary
to revisit those polled by the Markinor survey of 1998, to establish
whether the individuals concerned have subsequently experienced any healing,
and whether or not the general public feel positive about the future and the role
that the TRC has played in its delivery.
In conclusion, in our attempts to assess the role of the TRC, it would seem as
though ± as in so much else pertaining to South Africa's transition to democracy
97

± that this aspect of the miracle has been at least partially successful, by just
muddling through; by somehow arriving at processes that have contributed
greatly towards building peace in the country in an effective, if somewhat
confused, fashion.
One should not simply accept, however, that the TRC has been the final contribution
towards a stable and peaceful society. Practically all scholars consulted
have been at great pains to stress the fact that the TRC can only be a
part of the larger process. Reparation will have to follow, economic justice must
be achieved, back-up counselling for victims of abuse is necessary, and so on.
There is a long-term process that must not be relinquished. Furthermore, the
high incidence of violent crime, rampant corruption, and an inability to achieve
anything even resembling a social consensus on damaging public issues, such
as the economy and a coherent HIV/Aids policy, perhaps point to the fact that
many important issues have been avoided, or imperfectly engaged by the TRC,
and that the government has so far failed in its delivery with respect to policies
with restorative potential.
NOTES
1 The article is based on a chapter in a doctoral thesis dealing with the dynamics of deep-rooted
social conflict in South Africa with specific reference to the Truth and Reconciliation Commission
and the National Peace Accord.
2 See, for instance, Alex Boraine's study A country unmasked covering the history, accomplishments
and major issues of the TRC. Jeffery, in her The truth behind the Truth Commission also
provides a comprehensive analysis, as do C Coetzee, and S Nuttal in their book Negotiating the
past: the making of memory in South Africa.
3 An account of these processes can be found in Bradshaw and Cloete (1999): Conflict
management in deep-rooted social conflict: lessons learned in South Africa.
4 See, for instance, the following works of John Burton: Deviance terrorism and war, and Global
conflict: the domestic sources of international disputes, for extensive discussion of the
weaknesses of conventional negotiation and mediation in situations of deep-rooted social
conflict, and the need for problem-solving workshops, or similar processes to deal with it.
5 See Alex Boraine's A country unmasked, for a detailed account, including meetings, hearings and
submissions, of the process behind the promulgation of the Act.
6 John Paul Lederach, conflict-resolution scholar±practitioner, for instance, maintains that
reconciliation occurs in the space occupied by four concepts: truth, mercy, peace and justice
that ``stand in paradoxical tension with one another''. Odendaal, following Lederach, appeals in an
article in Track Two (1997:4±6) for the balancing of these four concepts in South Africa. If true
reconciliation is to be achieved, the need for truth will have to be tempered with mercy.
7 Lapsley, Hamber, Herman, Winslow and Hayner all repeatedly caution with regard to the dangers
of incomplete counselling, or a lack of, or a need for further psychological support for victims. The
danger of initiating renewed PTSD on the part of the victims, as a result of their evidence giving is
also warned against.
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8 Hayner refers to the fact that, although an initial sum of US$600 million towards reparations was
provisionally agreed upon by the South African government, and a reparations policy of providing
each victim an amount of US$3 500,00 a year for six years, only $16 million was eventually set
aside, as late as 1998. There was great frustration well into the year 2000, as additional
allocations for reparations were not yet forthcoming. Zehr, in his 1997 article, also accuses the
TRC of addressing the reparations issue ``belatedly and incompletely''. Botman, reaffirms the
importance of ample reparations, when he states that ``The victims have an undeniable right to
claim economic restoration from the perpetrators as well as the state'' (1997:38).
9 Odendaal's 1997 article in Track Two magazine, and Hamber and Kibble's article in this regard,
are two notable exceptions.
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Boraine, A. 1996. Healing our Land. S A Now 6:14±20.
Ð 2000. A country unmasked. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Bradshaw, G. 1999. Truth, peace and justice: an uneasy relationship in South Africa's
Truth and Reconciliation Commission. National Conference on Peacemaking and
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Bradshaw, G J and Cloete, L. 1999. Conflict management in deep-rooted social conflict:
lessons learned in South Africa, in Preventive diplomacy and peace-building in
Southern Africa, edited by M Baregu. Harare: Sapes Books.
Coetzee, C and Nuttal, S (eds.). 1998. Negotiating the past: the making of memory in
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Davidson, W D and Montville J V. 1982. Foreign policy according to Freud. Foreign
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Financial Mail. 1996. Mass psychiatry confuses quest for the truth. Financial Mail. 3 May,
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Hayner, P B. 2001. Unspeakable truths: Confronting state terror and atrocity. London:
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NOTES TO CONTRIBUTORS
Contributions to AFRICANUS are welcomed and should be submitted in English. The length of an average article
is 4 000 words, research notes 2 000 words, and book reviews 500 words, but in exceptional cases longer
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AFRICANUS aims to be a conduit between the academic debate on, and the practice of, development. Therefore,
contributions should reflect
. practice (case studies dealing with practical aspects of development)
. theory (debate and reflection on development theory in respect of the Third World in general but southern Africa
in particular) ± in other words, the application and interpretation of theory in the Third World and particularly in
the southern African context.
Contributions are subjected to peer evaluation. The manuscript should be typed in one-and-a-half or double
spacing. One hard copy and one electronic copy of the manuscript, preferably in WordPerfect 8, should be
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This journal uses the Harvard reference technique. This technique involves inserting, in the text, the author's
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Direct quotes from books, edited contributions and periodical articles used in the manuscript:
``Ignorant of the law, without legal advice, competing for employment and services with others in a similar
condition, the household is an easy victim of predation by the powerful'' (Chambers 1983:110).
Paraphrasing or indirect references:
Chambers (1983:110) points out that poor households are powerless and vulnerable.
Example of a list of sources consulted:
Chambers, R. 1983. Rural development: putting the last first. London: Longman.
Griffen, K. 1986. Communal land tenure systems and their role in rural development, in Theory and reality in
development: essays in honour of Paul Streeten, edited by S Lall and F Stewart. London: Macmillan.
Rogerson, C M. 1992. Feeding Africa's cities: the role and potential of urban agriculture. Africa Insight 22 (4).
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101

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