Races to consume: revisiting South Africa's history of race, consumption and the struggle for freedom

Abstract In 2007, Smuts Ngonyama, then leading spokesperson for the South African government and the ANC, triggered a public controversy by proclaiming, 'I didn't join the struggle to be poor': a frank conjunction of liberation with wealth and what it can buy. For all the vociferous critique of Ngonyama, there are many whose life trajectories seem to underwrite his position. This article reflects on some of the historical antecedents of this version of freedom, arguing for an historically constitutive relationship between the regulation of race in South Africa and the regulation of consumption. Keywords: Raceconsumptionconsumerismapartheidpost-apartheidliberation The 2009 Ethnic and Racial Studies Lecture, delivered at City University London 7 May 2009 The 2009 Ethnic and Racial Studies Lecture, delivered at City University London 7 May 2009 Notes The 2009 Ethnic and Racial Studies Lecture, delivered at City University London 7 May 2009 1. Malema's political positioning is variously interpreted. Arguably, having styled himself as provocative and precocious, he can take public positions that others might feel inhibited to take. This is not to say that he represents any consensus in the ANC or black society at large; indeed, he is ridiculed as often as he is applauded – rather, that he expresses one strand of opinion – influential, if contested – with a particular kind of clarity. 2. The Times, 6 March 2009, 'ANC taught Sam manners'. 3. Apartheid historiography includes a long-standing interest in the relationship between race and class. This paper holds a lens to the subjective life of class as an aspect of this relationship that has been under-researched to date – without the time to explore debates about the articulation of race and the structural workings of class. See Posel (Citation1991). 4. A 'genealogy of absence', as Mica Nava puts it, could be produced to account for these gaps in historical scholarship, in which the effects of dominant Marxist paradigms in rendering questions of consumerism uninteresting and/or unimportant would loom large – along similar lines to Nava's diagnosis of the comparable dearth of feminist research on the subject until relatively recently. 5. Elements of the argument, however, would also be applicable to the people South Africans call Coloureds and Indian, although their specific histories merit analysis in their own right, to take account of the racially differential policies administered by the apartheid state, including in respect of consumption, and popular responses to them. 6. The symbolic politics of commodities is deeply gendered, with race and gender closely intertwined with the subjective life of class. Space constraints have prevented anything more than a scant signal of these connections. See e.g. McClintock (Citation1995) and Magubane (Citation2004). 7. Women were excluded from the provisions of the legislation dealing with the political representation of 'natives'. The implications of these exclusions and the racial common sense that they reproduced merit greater discussion than is possible in this paper. 8. This paragraph draws heavily on research insightfully undertaken for me by Amanda Ballen, for which I am extremely grateful.