Tempora et Mores: Family Values and the Possessions of a Post-Apartheid Countryside
Author(s): Hylton White
Source: Journal of Religion in Africa, Vol. 31, Fasc. 4 (Nov., 2001), pp. 457-479
Published by: BRILL
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TEMPORA ET MORES: FAMILY VALUES AND THE
POSSESSIONS OF A POST-APARTHEID COUNTRYSIDE
BY
HYLTON WHITE
(University of Chicago)
ABSTRACT
This paper examines a set of ritual responses to the challenges that post-apartheid
South Africa's political economy poses to projects of domestic reproduction in the
former Bantustan countryside of Zululand, where unemployment has limited the
capacities of young men to create marital households. In the case study on which
the paper is based, one such man's misfortunes are connected by divination to
the spirit of an older kinsman who disappeared while working as a labor migrant.
I argue that this connection and the rituals meant to confront it turn on fraught
symbolic relations between the present and two pasts: the past of apartheid migrancy
and a projected past of custom. Like the ghosts by which they are manifest, these
times trouble domestic life in the present because of contradictory developments
forcing unemployed migrants back on the values of private spheres while they
undermine the bases of rural households.
Not all peopleexist in the same Now. They do so only externally,by virtueof thefact that
theymay all be seen today.But that does not meanthat theyare livingat the same time with
others.Rather,they carryearlierthings with them, thingswhich are intricatelyinvolved.One
has one's timesaccordingto whereone stands corporeally,
aboveall in termsof classes. Times
olderthan thepresentcontinueto effectolderstrata,hereit is easy to returnor dreamone'sway
backto oldertimes.
Ernst Bloch, 1935 (1976: 22)
Introduction
Bloch's point in the passage above is not that the forms of life in
any society can be ordered on an evolutionary scale, a disparate juxtaposition of survivals and departures, but rather that the ghosts of the
old can be conjured up, palimpsestically, from within the uneven terrains of the new itself. Writing thus in the context of an essay on the
rise of German fascism in the 1930s, he argued, in particular, that
moments of seemingly unresolvable crisis and blockage could lead the
insecure classes of such an age to resort to the specters of other times,
both real and imagined, in order to render familiar, though falsely so,
? Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, 2001
Journal of Religionin Afiica, XXXI, 4
458
White
4Hylton
the causes of their uncertainty and endangerment. 'Peasants sometimes
still believe in witches...,' he observed, 'but not nearly as frequently
and strongly as a large class of urbanites believe in ghostly Jews and
the new Baldur' (1976: 26). And again: '[t]he infringement of 'interest
slavery'... is believed in, as if this were the economy of 1500; superstructures that seem long overturned right themselves again and stand
still in today's world as whole medieval scenes' (ibid.).
Some sixty years later, the problems of globalization have made for
similar feelings of insecure foreboding almost everywhere in the postCold War world; and especially so among the working and middle
classes whose lives and aims have been made increasingly marginal by
the calculus of free trade, foreign investment and fiscal restraint that
has so radically redefined the limits and purposes of the state under its
new, neoliberal policy mandates (see Turner n.d.). In more than a few
such instances, nativist appeals to the historical being of the people are
as much the response to experiences of economic incapacitation, and
resulting fears of social incapacity, as they were in Bloch's Depressionera Europe. But almost universally-and whether or not in the company of the more collectively-minded spirits of nationhood, ethnicity,
or autochthony-the sense of crisis pervading the current moment has
also ordered up one of the oldest ghosts of modern social thought: the
spirit of the family, as the besieged domain of moral life and cultivated
personhood. From child-molestation panics in North America (see
J. Comaroff 1997) to presidential attacks on homosexuals in Zimbabwe
and in Uganda, threats to what are imagined to be the enduring norms
and forms of family life are the idioms by which is conducted a very
great deal of conversation concerning our times and their troubles. And
so, fully three hundred years afterJohn Locke first found it necessary,
in his Two Treatises
for liberal thought to distinguishbetween
of Government,
the paternal and the political, the moral and the civil, the neoliberal
age has returned to us the specter of family values.
My aim in this paper is to examine how a particular species of
familist social consciousness is made amidst ritual activities at the crisisridden intersection of kinship and political economy in one corner of
contemporary South Africa. The countryside in my title is that of
Zululand: once the royal center of precolonial southeast Africa's Zulu
kingdom, now a rural periphery in the northern half of the postapartheid South African state's KwaZulu-Natal province. As its name
suggests, this new province is an amalgam of two entities: the 'white'
South African province of Natal, which was named for a 19th-century
British colony that lay on the Zulu kingdom's southern edge, but which
Family Valuesand the Possessionsof a Post-Apartheid
Countryside
459
incorporated parts of historical Zululand expropriated by settlers for
farming purposes; and the Bantustan or 'Zulu ethnic homeland' of
KwaZulu, named for the erstwhile Zulu kingdom itself but made up
instead of a patchwork of communal reservations, scattered across both
Zululand and old Natal, and established for the most part during the
region's early colonial experiments with segregationistrule. In the official
imagination of apartheid these were not just separate territories but
the sites for two completely separate, and temporally distinct, forms
of life: on the one hand, a European modernity that was based on
urban industry, commercial farming, and parliamentary governance;
on the other, an enclave of African tribal traditions, based on rural
homesteads with domestic subsistence economies, and ruled by chiefs
administering customary laws. In fact, of course, the divisions in this
landscape were notoriously of a very different kind.
By forcibly restricting African households to these underdeveloped
countrysides, from which many black South African men were forced
to migrate for most of their adult lives to support their rural dependents, apartheid had the effect, under the mask of an ideology of dualism, of excluding African workers from the centers of wealth where
they labored. It was very widely expected that apartheid's end would
ameliorate the circumstances of poverty and alienation that rural black
South Africans had endured under its grasp. On the contrary, the same
economic problems that eventually impelled apartheid's collapse during
the 1980s and early 1990s have persisted into the present, exacerbated,
if anything, by the neoliberal statecraft of the post-apartheid government (Bond 2000), and resulting in extremely high unemployment among
the legions of former and future migrant workers. Rather than allowing rural migrants to achieve a more free and flexible integration with
the forms of urban economy, the present has seen them cast back into
the ever-dwindling confines of impoverished rural households instead.
Against this broader backdrop of frustrated desires for betterment,
here I trace the outlines of a case in which the past has come to possess one would-be migrant worker from Zululand-and done so in an
especially literal guise. In the story I tell, the ghost of an unemployed
young man's long-lost migrant elder returns to wreak havoc on his
body as it seeks to be reincorporated once more into the rural domestic sphere that it had left behind several decades before. Both in the
social explanation of these events and in the ritual practices used to
remedy them, a dialectic emerges which at once connects and disconnects a present of despair and a past that is imagined in profoundly
familist terms. At the same time, this ritual process also reinscribes the
460
Hylton White
young man's rural home as the local domestic foreground for precisely
the dualist landscape of migratory oscillations that existed under
apartheid-but in the absence of its former economic and political conditions. The present is thus conceived in relation not to one but to
two-and seemingly different-varieties of past: an ancestral past of the
homestead on the one hand and an apartheid past of migrancy on the
other. In fact, I argue, the histories of these two pasts are intimately
entangled with each other. And the form in which the first has come
to haunt the life of the now is a precipitate, I suggest, of the ways in
which the second has as well, in a wider context of interrupted postapartheid social transformation.
TimesEmbodied:A Stabbingand Its Social Elaborations
In 1996-97 I spent fifteen months doing ethnographic fieldwork in
Mfanefile, a settlement of several thousand black Zulu-speaking households scattered in clusters over some forty square miles of ridges and
valleys in Zululand's central interior.' Shortly after I settled down in
Mfanefile, I met a man I shall call here by the pseudonym S'khumbuzo,
for his story speaks to matters of remembrance.2 First, in fact, I met
his older cousin: a man who lived on a nearby mission settlement where
he owned a small convenience store (by night an informal tavern), and
one who had already made quite a name for himself as one of the
very few young men in the area who had built up a respectable home
for his mother and then invested his money in bridewealth cattle aimed
at bringing to that home a legitimate bride. His store was a popular
gathering spot for many people from miles around, and he let me make
much use of it early on to develop the contacts that I needed for my
research. After a month or so had passed like this, I decided to do a
survey of households in several surrounding rural neighborhoods, and
this is when my patron asked if I might not return the favor that he
had done me, by employing his younger cousin for the duration of this
exercise. They were not the closest of kin, but he called S'khumbuzo
umzala-his mother's brother's son-since his mother and S'khumbuzo's
late father bore identical clan-names. S'khumbuzo was approximately
my own age, and he had already finished his secondary schooling several years before. Like almost all his peers in the area, however, he
had found neither waged employment nor any avenues for further education. But if he had just a few weeks' decent pay, his cousin said, he
could hand some to his mother and use the remainder to buy a set of
presentable clothes and a taxi ride south to the metropolitan coastal
Countryside
Family Valuesand the Possessionsof a Post-Apartheid
461
city of Durban, where he could try to make something out of himself
as generations of migrants from the area had done.
One day while we were busy with this survey, S'khumbuzo told me
to visit his home the following Saturday for a beer-drink and a feast
to follow a sacrifice of two goats. When I asked him about the purpose of this event, he told me that it was two-fold. First, a yard should
not be left to continue too long without the 'smell' of beer and the
'noise' of a feast, for these are sensory indices that prove to the watchful spirits of the dead that the home they have left behind still has
honor and standing, making them proud of their heirs and predisposed
to performing benevolent acts on their behalf. Second, and as to the
timing of the event itself, of late there had been a good deal of strife
and trouble in the yard: the general state of affliction that is often in
indigenous terms called 'sickness' and which ranges in its positive signs
from physical illness to fighting, from poor personal luck to impoverishment. And problems of this order were so many now that S'khumbuzo's
kin had decided to offer food to their dead and ask them to intervene.
Once our work was finished a few weeks later, S'khumbuzo hosted
a beer-drink and he invited me to be present at a sacrifice of his own
in which he offered a fowl to the same ancestral spirits, asking them
to help him in his travels. In fact he never found the work he went
to seek in the city, but he began to travel back and forth between kin
in Durban and Zululand, and, though our own acquaintance thus attenuated, I often spent time with his family. And a little more than a year
later, close to the end of my stay in the area, I found myself invited
again to be present at a feast in their yard.
By this time, my sense of the purposive and pragmatic aspects of
sacrifice was much more developed and my language skills were good
enough to understand the speeches made before the beasts were readied for slaughter. Once again there was beer, and two goats offered
up to the family shades. But this did not end the parallels with the
previous performance, for in fact this event was itself a reiteration of
the one I had already seen, and now it was being held a second time
because that exercise had failed to achieve its desired outcomes.
Two months before I had come to live in the area, S'khumbuzo had
been stabbed during a tavern brawl in a black residential township near
a town that services local settler farmers as well as people in surrounding
ex-Bantustan areas such as Mfanefile. When I arrived on the scene
shortly afterwards and befriended his older cousin, as I now learned
retrospectively, S'khumbuzo's mother had called upon the prerogatives
of clanship and suggested to her sister-in-law that she might ask her
462
Hylton White
businessman son to use his own influence with me to help S'khumbuzo
start out on a better path in life. Now that they had known me for a
time, they disclosed with some embarrassment and humor these deliberately laid foundations of a relationship that till then I had thought
to be accidental.
The matter had not ended with this material intervention, however,
for one of S'khumbuzo's sisters had also aligned the stabbing with other
domestic misfortunes, and had decided that it was time to seek the wisdom of a diviner. And here is the nub of the story, for this person
said that S'khumbuzo's stabbing had come about as a sign issued by
one of the family spirits: a grandfather's brother who more than thirty
years before had gone to seek work on the mines in Johannesburg, to
the north, and never been heard of again. It seemed, the diviner stated
now, that the man had been stabbed to death, and that he was buried
in an unmarked grave in one of the city's townships. Now he was trying to let the living know what had happened to him, because his wandering spirit was unable to return to the yard until a set of mortuary
rites was performed on his behalf. They would not be able to find his
actual gravesite, but two goats should be slaughtered: one to cleanse
the family of the spiritual wound resulting from the violence of his
death, lest it recur again and again as it had now with S'khumbuzo;
and a second to welcome him into the home after his brother's oldest
surviving son had brought him back from his exile. This he did by
processing around the edges of the yard-with a sprig of a special kind
that is normally used to draw a spirit back from an outlying grave,
and into the home, about a year or so after the person has passed
away-in order to fetch the prodigal elder in.
As I discovered now, all this had been done in the preliminaries to
the first feast I had attended there, and during the speeches uttered
then it had been asked that now the elder had come home again he
would help S'khumbuzo to find more lasting employment. This last
point is especially important, for together with the causal diagnosis of
his stabbing, it constructed the course of S'khumbuzo's life itself as an
empirical manifestation of his grandfather's brother's relations with the
family. And so when S'khumbuzo remained unsuccessful in his quest
for work after many months had passed, this fact suggested that something had remained amiss in the latter dimension as well.
Borrowing some money from his sister, S'khumbuzo had accordingly
gone to consult another diviner during one of his trips to the countryside.
This person confirmed almost everything that the first had explained
and prescribed, except for a single detail to do with the protocol of
the ritual they had performed. The second goat that they had killed
Countryside
Family Valuesand the Possessionsof a Post-Apartheid
463
at that time, she said, should in fact have been not one beast but two.
The first of these goats would have been to tell the spirits of the home
about the work that was being done, and its place within the collective life and history of the family, this animal being killed just before
the ghost was fetched, so that the dead would bring their spiritual powers to bear upon the efficacy of that act. The secondwas the one that
should have welcomed him into the home, being slaughtered for him
after his brother's son had brought him back from beyond. Since the
first of these latter two animals had been lacking in the construction
of the earlier ritual attempt, the spirits of the family dead had neither
comprehended nor assisted in the work, so that the ghost was still left
stranded, as a result, hovering just outside the bounds of the yard. With
speeches making apologies for this oversight, the family thus prepared
for the second sacrifice, where I learned this fuller version of the story
as they were killing the pair of goats that were meant to redeem their
prior omission-the first, of what originally should have been three,
having already done its cleansing work before the second's absence had
made impotent the third.
I end my account here only because it was shortly after this second
effort to fetch S'khumbuzo's grandfather's brother's spirit that my own
time in the area elapsed. On later visits, I found S'khumbuzo still unemployed, but his family was preoccupied with a cycle of feasts to do with
problems that troubled his sister's emerging affinal relationship with the
father of her infants. If events thus far and analogous cases were any
indication, however, it seemed very far from likely that the history of
the matter had come to an end-and it was almost a certain bet that
still more goats would go the way, in years to come, of the four that
had preceded them in the family's failed efforts to put it to rest.
TimesRevisited:Formsof a Dilemma
Perhaps the most striking aspect of the events that I have narrated
here is the web of tangled threads that connect various presents with
their pasts and futures alike. Note, for instance, the temporal conflation
between the first and the second attempts to fetch the ghost of
S'khumbuzo's grandfather's brother. Although the second effort was
imagined in part as negating and superseding the inadequacies inhering in the first, at an even more basic level the second divination had
warped the immediate present itself back to where it had already been
more than a year in the past. So in both cases, paradoxically, the work
of repatriation was being done now because it had never been done
before.
464
Hylton White
Looping or collapsing time is in fact a very common theme in the
temporality governing rites of passage in these parts, where life cycles
and their ritual representations are more often out of step than contemporaneous. One finds dowagers, for example, making prenuptial
gifts after their husbands are already long deceased, or women with
several children being accompanied by their own adolescent daughters
in performing public dances that are meant to announce their menarche. The issue in almost all such events is that some sort of misfortune draws attention to an omission that has hollowed out an earlier
moment in time. The death of a child might thus be rendered a sign
that her father never paid this or that part of the proper bridewealth
for her mother, or maybe that her mother never ritually marked her
own sexual maturity. Whatever the explanation, the point is that in
retrospect the life of the child becomes a contradiction, a being in a
world in which she has not been made to be socially possible, so that
the dead who are watching over her home neither recognize her as
theirs nor accord to her their protection. And so the living have to
return again and again to the past and to act as if they were agents
of its present, 'completing' what is now seen to have been fractured all
along by an absence. Some or even all of the people implicated within
that original moment might be dead, and then the living have to take
their places in time and to carry their absent bodies through the motions
of an appropriate performance. A young man might thus find himself,
quite literally, following in his late grandfather's footsteps as he faces
his elderly grandmother in a dance to recapitulate a wedding that first
happened fifty years before he was born.
Only seldom in such cases is it recognized beforehand that the past
has a lack in a manner that is readily specifiable. Actually, given that
the past is so often retrospectively shown to be full of oversights and
errors, action in the present is usually framed by an extraordinarily
careful and reflexive attention to protocol and procedure, based on consultations with people held to know exactly what should be done. And
the speeches addressed to spirits during ritual acts are replete with humble apologies for whatever slips and omissions are-unwittingly-being
made. Rather than being apparent to begin with, then, the emptiness
of the past is only known through its future, these times being sutured
together by troubled memories, dreams, embodied repetitions like the
one that struck S'khumbuzo, and most of all by formal divination. In
the case at hand, S'khumbuzo's family could not have known they had
already been remiss in not returning their deceased migrant kinsman
to their fold, nor did they intentionally commit the errors that under-
FamilyValuesandthePossessions
Countryside 465
of a Post-Apartheid
mined their first attempt to do so. At all times, on the contrary, they
had acted in good faith, for these tears in the moral fabric were only
made to be manifest later through the appearance of wounds in
S'khumbuzo's body, and then the holes in his pockets.
When they came to perform the second fetching, then, S'khumbuzo's
kin were not just repeating what they had already tried to do, but once
again going back, even further, to the time when their kinsman was
murdered in Johannesburg, the time when they would have undertaken
to bring him home if only they had known about his death. If this is
a past that came to haunt their present as its future, though, their first
effort to put it to rest was troubled by their relations with a second,
still more distant past: the ancestral time that provides the knowledge
of protocol which is requisite to efficacious and fully complete behavior in the present. It was because they did not know what should be
done that their dead could not recognize what they were doing. And
so they faced a paradox that plagues the temporality of knowledge in
this countryside: the past's incompletion can only be known by way of
its ramifying effects in the future, but this is only so because the continuous present itself is disconnected from a past of ancestral fullness.
The knowledge that is requisite to life thus lies in the future and in
the distant customary past, but it is never simply available to consciousness in the present; and the gaps in the recent past, and thus the
tears in the present, are there because of this even greater chasm that
separates both of these times from a past construed as the temporal
site of true traditions.
There are no doubt many senses in which something resembling this
state of affairs has long existed in Zulu domestic worlds. The presence
of the past, the continuing lives of the dead, the role of rupture in divinatory diagnoses of suffering: all these are recurrent themes both in
the oldest ethnographic works on the region and in more recent monographs (Berglund 1976; Bryant 1949; Krige 1936; Ngubane 1977). But
the concrete form that the dialectic of temporal connection and disconnection assumes in this case also has to do with historically quite
specific dilemmas facing rural Zulu households, under apartheid and
in its aftermath. I turn now to examine those dilemmas under the
rubric of moral discourse concerning domestic relations and migrancy.
TimesDomestic:HouseholdReproduction
and the Moral Lives of Migrants
It is far from accidental that the course of S'khumbuzo's life was
construed here as a symptom of broader relationships with an elder of
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Hylton White
his grandfather's generation. Since siblings are commonly thought of
as identical persons, capable of replacing each other in many situations
and relations, the connection that S'khumbuzo had with this man was
homologous to the one that he had with his father's father himself, and
this is of a very particular kind in Zulu kinship. When men make ritual speeches, for instance, the first of the family spirits whom they call
on by name are those of their fathers' fathers, who then intercede with
others on their behalf. And in contrast to the relationship of authority
and respectful distance that holds between a man and his father, or
with people of his father's generation, that which holds between alternate generations is one of relative informality and ease. Women and
men two generations apart might thus enter into ribald joking relationships with each other, invoking the signs of courtship and the banter
of sexual love in their dealings, while grandparents and grandchildren
of the same sex might be referred to-by extension-as individuals who
have romantic objects in common.
Like the relationships between same-sex siblings, the closeness and
even identity of alternate generations is a connection profoundly rooted
in the processes of domestic reproduction. Since marriage, as in many
parts of Africa, is normatively created through bridewealth transactions
of cattle for wives (see Kuper 1982), and since brothers at least theoretically draw the cattle for their marriages from the same familial herd,
in the event of a man's premature death or impotence a sibling might
stand in for him by 'entering the house' of his incapacitated brother's
wife and continuing to father children with her in his name. Likewise,
the family of a woman who is barren might be called upon to fulfil
the terms of bridewealth exchange by providing a younger sister that
will bear her children for her with her husband. As Hutchinson says
in describing similar substitutionsfor Nuer in southern Sudan, the mediation of kinship through cattle allows no less than for death or other
material interruptions to be transcended, by completing the identities
of named social persons even in their bodily absences (1996: 59-62).
But if the point of these replacements is to ensure that men can have
children, and especially sons, by no means are these sons sufficient
themselves to secure their fathers' social perpetuation. It is only when
they have come to marry in turn, and to father sons of their own, that
the recursive continuities of domestic lives and identities are assured.
So it is in and through the homestead of his grandson, not his son,
that a man becomes not just a respected father but a remembered
ancestral spirit as well. His grandson is the embodiment of his futurity.
At one level, then, the fact that the moral imagination connected
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Family Valuesand the Possessionsof a Post-Apartheid
467
S'khumbuzo's stabbing wound to the fate of his grandfather's brother
was congruent with a more basic and encompassing social relation
between their persons-a relationship embedded in the reproduction of
households through the circulation of bridewealth in the marriages of
successive generations. So far I have presented this as a process that
concerns primarily men in a single agnatic line, but bridewealth cattle
'clear the path' that joins two separate homes in a relationship of
affinity: the path on which a wife moves in the other direction, in turn,
on her way to build a house for herself and her children in a homestead named for her husband. Marriage is thus an appropriation of
exteriorreproductive powers, turning them into the bases for a sphere
that is now embedded in the yard: a hearth, that is, where wifely works
produce domestic futures that are eventually objectified in the personhood of patriarchs and in the masculine relationships of memory I have
discussed here.
If the circulation of bridewealth cattle is thus what anchors the patriarchal encompassment of domestic spheres, as figures of social personhood in space and time, for much of the 20th century such a movement depended almost always on another: the passage of male migrant
workers back and forth between their rural homesteads and their places
of (primarily urban) work. With the destruction of independent African
polities based on cattle wealth, by the early 20th century the combined
effects of colonial conquest, widespread dispossession and enforced proletarianization had turned places like Mfanefile into countrysides proper:
hinterlands defined now not so much in terms of their own social and
geographical properties, but rather by their relationships with urban
centers. Likewise, African households in what were, by then, the settlements of the periphery had come to depend much less on agricultural
production and on local chiefly patronage for survival, and increasingly
on commodities that were bought with the wages of work performed
at a distance beyond the domestic realm instead. In some ways, of
course, these are very general properties of capitalist development, but
apartheid had the peculiar historical effect of combining the separation
of work and home, on the one hand, with the geographically dualist
development of the city and of the countryside on the other. It was
only in the countryside that most black South Africans were permitted
by the law to establish domestic lives, but to acquire the wealth by
which they could create and support the households that objectified
their names, men had to leave them behind in order to seek out work
in the cities or in the areas of commercial settler farming. In short,
then, the work of rural domestic reproduction in its patriarchal form
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Hylton White
was dependent on the capacities of adult men to integrate the proceeds
of their rural-urban travels with the circulation of bridewealth that
enabled them to encompass the domestic work of women.
Keeping this broader frame in mind, let us return to the bodily isomorphism at the heart of the moral discourse in our story: the stabbing that first murdered S'khumbuzo's elder in Johannesburg then
threatened S'khumbuzo's own life in Zululand. Woven into the fabric
of this homology there are actually two distinctive and historically quite
particular anxieties concerning the relationships between migrants and
their rural homes.
The first surrounds the figure that Xhosa-speakers of the Eastern
Cape province used to call itshipa,from the English word 'cheap': 'Itshipa,
the absconder, is... the one who leaves his parents, wife or children
in the country without news or knowledge of him. He has cut himself
off from the home community; he is lost almost as completely as by
death' (Mayer 1961: 6).
On the terrain of oscillatory migrations under apartheid, this figure
was one who failed to return his person and wages from the towns and
to invest them thus in regenerating the rural home that testified to his
character and his commitments to his kind (see J.L. and J. Comaroff
1992: 155-78). This is exactly how S'khumbuzo'sprodigal elder appeared
to have abandoned the ties that bound him once to Zululand, and the
divinatory vision of his frightful death, alone and far away, was evocative of all the fears associated with willful isolation from the home as
the source and moral purpose of one's being.
S'khumbuzo's own stabbing was an event that emerged, however, in
a very different landscape. If the nightmare under apartheid was the
callous disregard of an itshipa,in the post-apartheid age it is the antisocial violence that is committed by the tsotsi, or in Zulu terms the
He who was cheap in previous times
young thug who is called isigebengu.
was the one who had found independent means in town, but was unwilling to avail them to the well-being of his home, but he who stereotypically disturbs the social order now is one who, by contrast, does
not have any means at all, who is unable, out of poverty, to make
himself the subject of familial regeneration, and who thus declines
into an immoral condition that is fraught with chances for violence,
disease, and death. This is what S'khumbuzo's kin foresaw and feared
in his injuries, sustained in a drunken fight in a hopeless peri-urban
township space, and their aim was thus to get him onto a track of
responsible migrancy, whereby he might build up his rural home by
working elsewhere.
Countryside 469
of a Post-Apartheid
FamilyValuesandthePossessions
The obvious difference here is between a figure who willfully does
not come home to the countryside, and another who is incapable of
leaving it for the city. They share a common telos, a violent, undomesticated fate, but where this was once regarded as an unfortunate
exception, now it is widely taken to be an involuntary norm-a pessimistic turn that tells of very material changes in the condition of society. But it is noteworthy, then, that despite the very different kinds of
anxiety that were raised by S'khumbuzo's wounds and those of his
elder, a single solution was given for both in the forms of the ritual
transformations narrated here: restoring the social-dualist geography,
that is, and the domesticated morality, of migrancy as it was under
If one man was being brought back from the city, the other was
apartheid.
being sent away to find his fortune in it. Let us examine this paradox
now by way of the spatial construction of the rituals that present it.
Timesin Space:DomesticRealmsand MigratoryGeographies
S'khumbuzo's home was a roughly rectangular yard, set on a sloping ridgeface some hundred meters or so from the main road winding
through Mfanefile. It had two separate entrances: one opening out,
from the top, onto a path towards the road, the other leading down,
towards a valley stream, in the opposite direction. When the man of
S'khumbuzo's father's generation who led the fetching rituals sought to
bring the exiled elder's spirit into this space, on both occasions he took
the branch he had cut for the purpose and exited the yard through
the lower gate-just below where the family would have built their
domestic cattle kraal, in the center of the yard, if they had owned any
such animals, which they did not. Moving in an anti-clockwise direction around the fence, he waved the sprig in the air while he called
the spirit's name. When he reached the path above that led to the
road, he halted and made a special point of waving the branch towards
the nearest place where vehicles stop on their way to the local town,
where the bus depots and taxi ranks for Durban andJohannesburg are
located. Moving back down the other side towards the lower gate again,
he entered the yard and took the sprig through the center, past the
space where the kraal would have been, and up to a house at the very
of the home, a shrine
top of the yard-the 'great house' (indlunkulu)
it in the gloom at
he
laid
that is named for its grandmother-where
the innermost rear: a place, with a spear named for the grandfather
of the home on the wall, where there hover family spirits in domestic
spatial consciousness in Zululand. It was here too that he made his
470
Hylton White
various speeches to the dead as he presented three of the goats that
were involved in these respective ritual processes, before he killed them
outside, 'above the kraal', with the spear that he took from this same
place to that end. And afterwards he returned their flesh to this place
as well, to hang next to the spear against the wall and to be licked at,
overnight, by the domestic spirits gathered there. (Because of its polluted associations, the very first of the four goats was slaughtered and
buried at a distance beyond the yard.)
These various movements can readily be interpreted as tying together
the poles of classical labor migration from countrysides like Zululand.
Fetched in from the roadside of his motion away from his home, the
wandering spirit was taken to a space of masculinity and ancestry at
its core. It was also in this place at the back of the 'great house' that
S'khumbuzo made his own sacrificial request for help in the interim,
for his quests down that very same road, and on the dawn of his leaving home he performed a widely followed practice marking migrant
workers' departures: stopping below the spear in order to say farewell to the dead, with his travelling clothes upon him and his bags collected beside him, then moving for the gate without returning to his
private room.
The ethnographic record of proletarian social life under apartheid
in southern Africa is filled with examples of reflexive symbolic acts like
these, signifying the ebb and flow of migrant workers' passages and
representing the ends to which ideally they were put. Whether these
took the form of beer-drinksat the homes of returningworkers (McAllister
1980, 1985), or of initiation and marriage rites, based on wages remitted by migrant youth (Sansom 1976), or of genres of competitive performance whereby migrants rendered musical their landscapes and their
travels upon them (Coplan 1994; Erlmann 1996), the crux of the matter
was much the same: by tying the life of the road to that of the rural
home, the proceeds of moving away down those roads were submitted
to the sustenance of the domestic sphere, and not to private whims
and satisfactions.
But to reiterate these values in relation to the domestic realms of
the present is exactly where the times reveal themselves to be possessed
by the forms of an older kind of political economy. Local rites of passage such as the ones I have recounted for S'khumbuzo's home in
Zululand comprise the domestic foreground for a very particular kind
of national landscape: a racially divided terrain of exile and migration,
settler cities and Bantustan peripheries, that is now supposed to be dead
and buried-indeed, the destruction of which provided the central aims
Countryside 471
of a Post-Apartheid
FamilyValuesandthePossessions
of the struggle against apartheid. And overturned it had to be, let us
recall, for the apartheid terrain was itself an objectification of a temporal order replete with contradictions: a capitalist modernity dissembled by the claim that it covered only sections of the South African
region, co-existing with pockets of the precolonial past that were enclaved,
at a remove, in the countrysides of custom.
So how do we account, then, not only for the persistence of a countryside where rituals of migration are performed, even in the real absence
of the passages they are supposed to mark, but also for the role of a
projected time of precolonial 'custom' in explaining how these efforts
fail to overcome the dilemmas that they address?How did S'khumbuzo's
fortunes and his feared decline into thuggery come to be tied to those
of his disappeared migrant elder, a figure who embodied the moral
failings of a very different moment? And how did the oldest shades of
this home-the spiritual bearers of precolonial custom in the consciousness of their latter-day heirs-come to be involved in a context severed from the social order of even the most immediate precolonial times
by not just one but two revolutions: the rise of a colonial modernity,
from the late 19th century on, and its supersession, into a neoliberal
postcolony, at the end of the 20th?
and the Crisesof Reproduction
7imes Stalled:DomesticTransformations
Let me begin to draw these threads together by returningfor a moment
to the spatial constructs described in the section above. If the man who
led the spirit fetching sought through his movements to reconnect the
ends or poles of the normative migrant journey-the road away from
the home and the ancestral shrine of its 'great house'-he did so by
way of another space that lay between these two: the cattle kraal at
the center of the yard, which he skirted in his motions with the branches
bearing the ghost, and to which he returned with sacrificial offerings.
But this poverty-stricken household had neither cattle nor a kraal in
which to contain them, and so he mediated his passages with reference
to a space that did not exist in the empirical world of the present.
The presence and absence of cattle kraals is the object of a very
great deal of commentary in contemporary Zululand. Since it is the
purchase of cattle with wages that historically has supported the process of patriarchal domestic reproduction for migrant workers-articulating the proceeds of labor alienated beyond the home on the one
hand with the circulation of bridewealth goods in local affinal bonds
on the other-the absence of cattle and cattle kraals speaks volumes
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to the transformation of rural domestic spheres. As one widely respected
but rather curmudgeonly older man put it to me:
It used to be you'd know that your neighbor's boy was back from the city when
you heard the sound of new cattle, bellowing in his father's kraal. Now you know
he's back when you hear the noise of his new cassettes playing on his radio while
he's walking up and down the road outside-talking up all the girls he can, even
though he doesn't have any work, or any animals to give to their families.
By moving around the yard as if it were centered upon a kraal, the
ritual gestures recounted here invoked the wealth possessed in that space
as the center of the life of the home and the linchpin of its relationship
with broader terrains of migrancy. And because cattle and kraals are
profoundly masculine properties, this representation reveals another side
to the moral values that are bespoken by ritual efforts to contain the
journeys of migrants within the ambit of the homes they leave behind.
For what seems on the one hand to signify selfless domestic commitments, and thus accountability to others, is at the same time a particular self-construction of the migrant worker's person. By turning wages
into the grounds for building up a household in the countryside, a
household centered on cattle which allow men to encompass the labors
of wives, a migrant might at once produce himself as an adult man
and objectify his name within the rural domain (see Ferguson 1990:
138-66). Under apartheid, then, the fulfillment of the male migrant lifecycle could provide forms of masculine social value that themselves connected the geographical poles of the apartheid terrain, at the same time
as these poles were being created and kept apart by the regional political economy that enforced labor migration.
Notions of what constituted proper Zulu custom also fulfilled very
particular mandates under these older political and economic conditions. On the one hand, the idea of custom attached to ancestral time
a moral economy of respectful gestures thought to be essential to the
collective being and future of the home. Ancestral time was the other,
then, to the time of labor alienated elsewhere down the road. But this
same respectful economy also represented capacities for self-realization
that were available to male migrant workers if they married and made
homes under their names: homes in which, despite their bodily absences,
they might still be honored by those who remained just as the absent
dead themselves were respected by the living. And so migrant workers' ancestors represented not just distant elders, the guardians of morality and vitality in domestic life, but also possible selves to be crafted
by subsuming city and countryside into works of domestication-while
enclaving the countryside, at a distance from the city, as a realm of
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473
separate protocols and potencies (see Comaroff and Comaroff 1992:
146-75). Custom was the hieroglyph, one might say, for the forms of
patriarchal value that migrants sought by turning urban labor into the
grounds for rural marriage.
It makes sense on this basis that so many migrant men were committed to the geography of dualism that underpinned apartheid and
their exclusion, along with their kin, from the benefits of citizenship
and urban civil society. This division in the terrain provided the broadest
grounds for the processes of self-creation represented as moral behavior through the same ritual practices that marked and accorded meaning to migrant travels. And the fact that this broader regional terrain
should be implicated in rites such as those recounted here for the present is in part a continuity with terms that were created under apartheid
itself. Its anxious reappearance in the present also tells us, though, of
substantive historical departures, among the most important of which
is the fact that the era of migrancy does indeed appear to be overnot because work is no longer forced to be migratory, but rather because
there is no work at all, or at least so very little as to make it a distant fantasy for most young men in places such as Mfanefile.
The reasons for this development are complex, and they are not by
any means limited to South Africa, let alone to Zululand. Analogous
conditions have taken hold wherever globalism and neoliberal policies
have dismantled national industries and bureaucracies, and thus left
such a blight of unemployment in their wake that they seem to threaten
the bases of sociality itself. And this is why a figure like the tsotsi or
the thug has merged in moral imaginations almost everywhere in the
world of late, for one of the very general characteristics of the present
age is that masculine 'youth' seems in it to change from a category of
persons that is generationally based into one that is structural instead:
a permanent and dangerous exclusion from the means of social adulthood and communal responsibility (J. and J.L. Comaroff 1999: 28592; Diouf 1999).
It is thus a matter of no great surprise that in our story the only
man who is able to honor his social obligations is a businessman who
profits from his trade within the countryside, rather than a worker sending wages from the city. This speaks all too well to the decline of one
economic class and the rise in post-apartheid times of another; one
that by definition can only contain a distinctive few. But let us take
another look as well at the figures who really motivate the action in
these events. In times of formal ritual work, men come very much to
the fore. S'khumbuzo performs a sacrifice, directed at the spirits of his
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patriline, and one of the elder men in his family leads the work of
repatriating their long-lost kinsman's ghost and entreating the same
agnatic spirits S'khumbuzo had addressed. It was one of S'khumbuzo's
sisters who first went to consult a diviner, though, and later she provided the fee for the second divination as well. And when S'khumbuzo's
mother wished the entrepreneur to help out through his connection to
me, she went not straight to him but instead to his mother, whom by
clanship she called her sister-in-law.
If relationships based on women have for a long time been the unspoken grounds of a kinship structure reckoned in patriarchal terms, more
recently these ties have come to govern domestic life and sociability in
everything but name. The loss of formal industrial employment has left
most young men unable to gather bridewealth means, and thus to create rural households of marriage through which they might exercise
masculine social identities. At the same time, the abolition of racial
laws that once constrained voluntary mobility has sponsored the emergence of an expanding informal sector, straddling urban and rural spaces
in complicated circuits in which women by far outnumber men as the
agents of microenterprise. And in this new national terrain, as in many
parts of the world, a different kind of domestic realm has emerged into
view as well: one in which adult men are largely marginal, and marriage
all but a memory, while bonds of female filiation, siblingship and friendship undergird not just the material lives of households but their sociological composition as well (Ross 1995; Spiegel and Mehlwana 1996).
These terms of an intersecting class-and-gender revolution account
not only for the dilemmas of male youth, but also for the ways in
which attempts are made to resolve them. For if the decline of industry has first made its mark in the social fortunes of young men, it has
ramified very quickly into the lives of others as well, through chains of
obligation and neglect, and through chilling levels of violence. But the
pressures which undermine industrial work in the current moment also
undermine the public institutions that are necessary for cohesive collective responses to such developments, whether these be state interventions, aborted under neoliberal fiscal restraints, or trade unions that
have been weakened by the scale of unemployment. And so the burden of dealing with social problems falls to private efforts instead, and
thus above all to women, who have been dealt the burdens of private
responsibility through the very same historical process too.
It would be one thing if these new forms of domestic life represented
a decisive break with the class-and-gender arrangements of the past;
that is, if the transcendence of apartheid had enabled rural women, at
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475
the same time, to transcend the social limits that the conjuncture of
labor migrancy and bridewealth marriage had placed on them and their
households. But for most black South Africans, especially the rural poor,
the combination of economic decline and state paralysis means that the
post-apartheid era marks less the transcendence of the apartheid social
order than its chaotic disintegration, and this holds true as much for
the domestic sphere as it does for civil society, economy, and polity.
Explaining this fact requires looking more closely at the shifts that
are occurring in domestic composition, away from marital households
and towards bonds of siblingship and matrifiliation focused on cores of
unmarried women and their children. By no means are these relations
new departures. Rather, they are exactly the sorts of relation that in
this region have long composed the elementary maternal or uterine
houses that women produce through the works of rearing children and
providing food: houses that men appropriate, in turn, into homesteads
under their names, by circulating bridewealth goods such as cattle in
their marital transactions (see Kuper 1982: 10-40;J.L. andJ. Comaroff
1992: 133-41). What is happening, then, is not so much a revolution
within the kinship order as it is the generalization of its most partial
structural forms, in the absence of the means by which men historically
have encompassed them. Since the income women earn in informal or
service sector activities is a poor replacement for urban-industrialwages,
what is more, the loss of marital prospects based on male labor migrancy
is experienced not as grounds for female autonomy but rather as a
general decline into misery. The problem that is facing rural households, then, is not that new relationships are coming into existence but
that older ones have lost their fundamental conditions of being.
Here, then, is the crux of the matter. On the one hand, while a
wave of globally-driven economic crisis has rolled across the South
African region, culling male migrants in their millions from the urban
wage-labor market, the post-apartheid state has also retreated from its
mandate to ameliorate the lives of black South Africans, forcing these
former workers back on the private goods of their rural households
instead. On the other hand, however, and for precisely the same material
reasons, the processes by which these rural domestic spheres were created under apartheid have collapsed as well, leaving a social vacuum
that cannot be filled in the absence of a thorough political-economic
restructuring-a task that is impossible under current neoliberal constraints. What is left to rural householders, then, is not the optimistic
spirit with which the post-apartheid era was born, but possession by
the ghost of apartheid itself, neither vanquished as it was meant to
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be by the new nor quite lively enough to sustain the social forms of
the old.
Hence, I suggest, the curious and seemingly paradoxical forms in
which the past is made manifest within the events that followed
S'khumbuzo's stabbing. To tie his bodily fate to that of his missing
migrant elder was to hope that he would succeed where the former
had long ago failed, by tying together the poles of city and countryside and making himself a man of name and substance. But to do so
was to cast him into a time that was not his-a temporal displacement
made vividly evident in the ritualized organization of his yard around
an absent kraal, construing it as the foreground for a landscape that
was as lost to the home as the prodigal migrant himself. Because the
means were thus lacking for the alignment of social intent and ritual
form, the latter was bound to fall short of its primary purpose: to mark,
that is, the beginnings and ends of migratory journeys. Yet the absence
of those same means also explains the explanation that was offered for
this failure. Since the point of successful migrancy under apartheid was
to remake the male migrant as a remembered and honored patriarch
in the countryside, in the image of his ancestral spirits, the gap between
S'khumbuzo and that prospect was a chasm between the present and
the past of ancestral custom as well. Both his possession by the familial
past as well as his spiritual alienation from it, then, were not so much
grounds as products of his material incapacity to create his social future.
Conclusion
The trouble with spirits and specters, as a well-known critic of alienation argued once, is not so much that they represent human illusion,
but rather that their lives among us are symptoms of the contradictions and crises in our own; and so, 'for instance, after the earthly family is discovered to be the secret of the holy family, the former must
then itself be criticized in theory and revolutionised in practice' (Marx,
Theseson Feuerbach).
Marx did not mean by this comment to provide a critique of the
family per se, though elsewhere he certainly did so, but rather to make
a more metaphorical point about the alienation of consciousness in capitalist society. When he wrote this passage in 1845, Europe was still
in the throes of that age of social and political revolutions that we
generally interpret as the birth of a new civility: the birth of such institutions, that is, as free markets for our commodities and liberal states
for our citizenship. And such institutions were meant to overturn the
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Family Valuesand the Possessionsof a Post-Apartheid
477
parochial bonds of kinship and of patriarchy that characterized all earlier forms of life for liberal minds. By resorting to the idiom of familist
thought and practice, Marx was suggesting the irony that the new life
might be just as possessed as others by its own forms of bondage and
partiality.
A hundred and fifty years later, he might have been surprised at
how literally his ironic conjunction of family and modernity can be
read. As a newly resurgent liberal project seeks to free acquisitive consumers from the 20th-century's old regimes, and now on a global scale,
these subjects seem to find themselves haunted everywhere by the ghost
of the family earthly and holy alike. By working through a single ethnographic case, I have attempted in this paper to examine how a particular instance of familism is produced out of the meeting points of
domestic life and political economy in contemporary South Africa. The
form that this assumes within the story I have told is quite specific to
the history of the landscape in which unfolds. By no means are its most
general outlines unique to those terrains, however. The current constriction of economic and public life under globalizing pressures has
had the effect of forcing people back on the private sphere in many
parts of the world, even as those very same pressures undermine the
social conditions of domestic possibility-and this is very fertile ground,
as the case here shows so well, for the growth of fraught concerns with
family values. As long as social futures cannot be forged, the most
parochial pasts possess their voids.
NOTES
1. The fieldwork on which this paper is based was funded with generous grants from
the Wenner-Gren Foundation for Anthropological Research, the Division of Social
Sciences at the University of Chicago, and a MacArthur Scholars Fellowship from the
Council on Advanced Studies in Peace and International Co-operation at the University
of Chicago. Zolani Ngwane, Neville Hoad, Kelly Gillespie, Paja Faudree, Amy Stambach
and Brad Weiss have provided invaluable commentary on drafts of this material.
2. From the causative ukukhumbuza
('to remind'), as in a mnemonic or a memento.
Nominalized and contracted, S'khumbuzo is quite a common Zulu personal name.
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