but stagger under the weight of ingrained corrupt practices, arrogant entitlement, deliberately restricted resources, patriarchal, anti-democratic values, and political factionalism and manipulation. With regard to weak social morality and endless peremptory demands enforced by ready mass violence, provoking retaliation by the police, the common citizenry require but actively resist the extensive governance the government and its fragile institutions are unable to provide or sustain. Could it be, perish the thought that as the Italian proverb goes, the people are getting the government they deserve?
As South Africa goes, so goes Anthropology
A siamese-twinning of experience and self-projection, of identity and strategy, of simulation and dissimulation among the human subjects of our research in post-apartheid South Africa has led to paradigmatic fragmentation and conflict within the discipline. The English-speaking social anthropologists are shocked that the post-apartheid condition harbours the old forms of authoritarianism among new black leaders as well as among the citizenry. In dispute with the new grand narratives of modernization as we were with the old, anthropologists are almost as out of favour with the bureaucracy now, and it with us, as we were before liberation. Meanwhile, the attempts of our Afrikaans-speaking colleagues to retain their responsive relationships to government, and to substitute the term “culture“ for what was called “race“ appear to have had some success.
Our own efforts at practice-oriented introspection alerted us to the consequences of these realities for methodology. Ethnography now had to be pursued in a field saturated with factional politics, suspicion, antagonism, manipulation, disingenuousness and the ambivalent reflections of our subjects upon our researches and researchers. Indeed, perhaps this had always been the case. Our subjects were neither what they’d been thought to be, nor whom they claimed or seemed, and our categories were not reflected in situations on the ground. No one spoke for the community, though there was no lack of spokespersons. Many non-spokespersons wouldn’t speak to us at all, and those who would, wanted to ask rather than answer questions: Who were we? Who paid and sent us? Who and what did the research serve? What were we getting out of it? What would they get out of it? Could we get them attention, resources, services, justice or jobs? How could they be sure we got the “right“ impression? What, if anything, were we good for (Coplan 1998)?
Behind the uncomfortable silences of subjects who felt better safe than sorry were larger, more worrying questions: Was it simply the insouciant caution of the black American poet Paul Dunbar to wit; “Why should the world be over wise/In counting all our cares and sighs“ (Dunbar 1895), or were they in practical terms justified in trying to manage rather than engage us? It is apparent that our research subjects or interlocutors (ethnographic co-authors?) at this point have us figured out at least as well as we have them. And they have their own purposes for us and our work that are more important to them than ours. Most of the new generation of colleagues admit of none of this. “The People“ must be framed as the sincere source of authentic experience, and we of moral insecurity and privileged hypocrisy. In response to all this, a politics of not only of opposition, but politics in general, has come to dominate an anthropology desperate to demonstrate its bona fides to predictably radicalized students, and why “advocacy scholarship“ has become the order of our day (Jean Copans 2019).
Presently at our formerly “white“, now non-racial universities, there is great fear among academics of marginalization and even direct attack, based on long-lasting perceptions of anthropology as a colonial discipline impervious to populist political transformation. Professor Copans has spoken and written authoritatively on this dilemma as it has played out within Francophone African Studies (2000, 2006, 2013). In South Africa the result has been a consolidation of theoretical and empirical hegemony by the insurgent left, so that other political perspectives or indeed any perspective that is not overtly politically oriented have been publicly silenced. The agenda is to campaign on behalf of the “have-nots“, while attacking the existential legitimacy of the “haves“, the category to which academics guiltily believe they belong. Karl Marx is, as ever, the godfather of this insurgent hegemony, and Franz Fanon its totemic embodiment. And of equal concern, indeed, is the absence of any persuasive or fully coherent theoretical counter-discourse. The Comaroffs have done their indefatigable best to provide an alternative conceptualization of post-colonial ethnological theory (Comaroff and Comaroff 2009, 2012), but it has not the same apocalyptic rejectionist energy or self-conviction.
Of course it is not only in South Africa that the universities have, for the present, politically limited academic freedom and free speech. But as my life has become a longue durée, I have ceased to either lament or complain about this, or about my own present irrelevance. I am grateful that my department still tolerates my ancestral presence, and my spirit has moved on. I continue to hope, however, that the confrontation of advocacy with social reality will lead in the longer durée of scholarship to a re-orientation toward how the people are actually living and what they think and do about it. These would be the surest guidelines along the currently fashionable boulevard to “de-colonization“, and not faux-nativist rejections of cultural appropriation and globalizing hybridity so deeply imbricated in African world-views.
The case of Anthropology and “#FeesMustFall“
Journals, books, documentaries, and the internet are replete with accounts of South Africa’s “Fees Must Fall“ movement (2015–2017). Yet the issues that led to this rebellion and the severe crisis it caused have not been resolved, gone away, or ceased to influence teaching, scholarship, or academic life. Indeed, the value of the ethnographic “backstory“ for finding some form of resolution and a workable way forward is clearly evident. What did participants think, feel, say, and do on the basis of violently competing narratives, behind the doors of journalistic representation? In the case of the South African student protests of 2015–2016 demanding free tertiary education and the unspecified or undefined, “de-colonisation“ of the curriculum, certain realities played an important part:
1 Unemployment is high at more than 27% overall, and 52% among black youth. Economic growth is stagnant, and public corruption, bureaucratic obstruction, consumer debt, and over-taxation sap the efforts to spark recovery.
2 Tertiary education appears as the most direct and secure route out of unemployment and poverty and into some level of the “middle class“. Questions arise in popular discourse as to the justice of limitations on access to this seemingly straightforward social good. Yet even the 17% of high school leavers who do find places at university are understandably fearful of not finding suitable positions upon graduation.
3 Government policy has greatly increased tertiary enrolment, but poor primary and secondary level preparation and lack of funds are still exclusionary for many. Drop-out rates for both academic and financial reasons are counter-productively high. Lowered academic standards are acceptable to government, but understandably resisted by academics and university management.
4 The government scholarship program (NSFAS) has been greatly expanded along with various forms of student lending, but these still do not operate adequately to address the enormous extent of the felt or genuine need. The new management of the expanded, unavoidably unwieldy NSFAS itself admits that bureaucratic problems still hamper the equitable and efficient provision of student financial grants (Sunday Times 30 June 2019, Daily Maverick 19 June 2019)?
5 The current generation of black students were born after the transition to non-racial democracy, yet economic progress remains uneven and radically mal-distributed. Economic inequality and social exclusion as political issues have fulfilled the need and provided a focus for a sense of participation in a political “struggle“ of some kind for the present generation.
6 For 2015, University Councils, starting at my own university, ignored warning signs and raised fees as they saw necessary—10.5%— “as usual“. Spontaneous protests ensued. The movement appears to have begun idealistically among university
