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AEGIS European Conference on African Studies
11 - 14 July 2007
African Studies Centre, Leiden, The Netherlands
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Between state and market: “near” or “neo”-liberalism in the new South Africa?
| Panel |
34. Post-apartheid: ethnographies of the South African transition
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| Paper ID | 520 |
| Author(s) |
James, Deborah
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| Paper |
No paper submitted
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| Abstract | Unashamedly market-driven and focused on ‘property’ rather than ‘rights’, certain aspects of state policy - such as that of ‘Land Reform for Agricultural Development’ – seem more a strategy for black economic empowerment than a means to alleviate poverty. Towards this end, new loans and forms of matching finance have been devised, envisaging the desirability of ‘doing business with a development ethic’. The paper documents cases in which people have tried to make use of these loan and development facilities. Many, in the process, have become doubly indebted - to the Land Bank as well as to ‘loan sharks’ - in attempting to gain access to cash inputs for farming. Even those farmers who have mustered their variously-acquired resources to locate themselves as fully-fledged ‘farmers’ within the new framework have experienced problems in becoming ‘beneficiaries’ of state-planned land reform. The paper shows how South Africa’s neo-liberal market-driven order is less novel than is sometimes assumed. Within the post-apartheid national context, there are carry-overs of older personnel and ideologies, yielding a confusing and often chaotic combination of “market” with “state” development in which the worst aspects of both may be present while allowing for the best of neither.
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