Sarah Mosoetsa - Eating from One Pot: The dynamics of survival in poor South African households

EATING FROM ONE POT

The dynamics of survival in poor South African households

SARAH MOSOETSA

Published in South Africa by:

Wits University Press

1 Jan Smuts Avenue

Johannesburg

2001

http://witspress.wits.ac.za

Copyright Sarah Mosoetsa 2011

First published 2011

ISBN 978-1-86814-533-1 (print)

ISBN 978-1-86814-786-1 (digital)

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the written permission of the publisher, except in accordance with the provisions of the Copyright Act, Act 98 of 1978.

Original cover artwork by Yda Walt

Cover design and layout by Hothouse South Africa

Edited by Michael Wessels

Printed and bound by Ultra Litho (Pty.) Ltd.

As I write these words we have just witnessed popular revolts against dictatorships in Tunisia and Egypt, showing how poverty not only breeds passivity but also collective fortitude and resolution. To be sure, these were not spontaneous affairs but emerged from years of underground and informal preparation -- preparation which included the working class at its center. Similarly, the anti-apartheid struggles involved a long, you might say century-long, preparation, spear-headed by South Africas black working class, together with such political organizations as the ANC and SACP. While the new South Africa has undoubtedly made many gains, the visions of the Freedom Charter seem to have receded into the past. Indeed, reading Eating from One Pot it is clear that for many postapartheid South Africa has made very little difference in terms of material and social well-being.

Sarah Mosoetsa investigates the fall out of plant closures in the garment and footwear industries of KwaZulu-Natal, South Africa, devastating the sort of communities that had been a center of the anti-apartheid struggles. Hers was no casual entry, but involved laborious in-depth field work over a period of several years, 2002-2004, immersed in the lives of the people she interviewed. She entered the hidden abode of household production to discover a very different world from the one painted by the merchants of social capital and livelihood strategies. Rather than the romance of poor people struggling together to survive, she found a fractious and often violent world. The household was an ever expanding site expanding in volume and density of intense conflicts between generations and between genders. Men, accustomed to wage labour, became ever more dependent on womens resourcefulness, on small informal earnings, subsistence production as well as unpaid domestic labour. As they become increasingly superfluous surplus labour irrelevant to or even dependent upon the domestic economy so they become more assertive of their patriarchal claims, more violent, more abusive. If the household contributed to social capital it was as likely to be negative as positive social capital.

Often a staple if minimal source of income, child support grants are channeled through mothers. They not only by-pass fathers but they also circumvent the actual care-givers, who are often the grandmothers. Young mothers run off with the grants leaving grandmothers holding the bag, having to somehow eke out an existence for all. Indeed, it is the elderly women who are the heroines of Mosoetsas stories, battling to keep the family alive, even helping neighbors do the same. But, precisely because they are the cement that holds the household together, they are also the target of the greatest abuse, the focus of the most unreal expectations, and attract the animus of accumulating desperation. The household is more likely to be the arena of warring or withdrawn individuals than a haven in a heartless world.

Mosoetsa takes us beyond the household into the community. Once again she tears away the veil behind the stereotype the stereotype of a unified civil society organizing the defense of community against market and state. To be sure she discovers resilient networks of reciprocity, embryonic burial societies, support from multiple churches and inspiring volunteerism around HIV and AIDs and other health issues, but all this is but a holding pattern as residents have to foot increasing bills for electricity and water delivery. The community is hobbling backwards toward a precipice. Before they get to the edge, they turn and appeal to the state with such committed organizations as the Treatment Action Campaign and the Concerned Citizens Forum, but the state replies with the force of arms, turning apartheid laws against the social movements. There is bewilderment on both sides as the community cant believe they have elected such a callous state, and the state cant believe the ingratitude of its citizens. The ANC is caught facing both ways, for and against the people. The trade unions are nowhere to be seen. Once so active in the townships, now the unions retreat to the ever shrinking workplaces of formal labour.

Behind the confusion lies a class recomposition, the emergence of what some have called class apartheid. The new multi-racial bourgeoisie is safely barricaded behind its gated communities. Standing behind the bourgeoisie stands a New South African state that has brought about the polarization of wealth and poverty, and has overseen escalating costs of basic public services electricity, water, telecommunications while opening the economy to cheap consumer goods, and thereby devastating the footwear and clothing industries among others. Whats left is a spluttering informal sector based on flexible exploitation, peopled by desperate ex-wage labourers, usually women working outside any protection from the law. Into this combustible mixture the expansion of grants drops like manna from the sky but in the absence of jobs their distribution is the subject of bitter quarrels and they are easily consumed without leading to genuine amelioration. Thats Sarah Mosoetsas message.

Its a familiar story, one to be found in Egypt where foreign aid was dispensed as concessions that redounded to the benefit of US geopolitical interests. Until, that is, the Egyptian people had had enough. But then they had a clear target a 30 year dictator just as in South Africa there had been racial apartheid. Today the target is not so clear since the market presents itself as a natural force, while the state claims bankruptcy. Protest bursts forth, but without a clear goal, a vision, or an organization, and without meaningful reform, it can get very unsavory.

Michael Burawoy

March 2011

The book began in 1999 when I first visited the shoe factories of Pietermaritzburg, KwaZulu-Natal. I was especially shocked by the working conditions of the women who were working in Manchester Road, an informal manufacturing area. I returned again and again to KwaZulu-Natal after that. I learnt of the many women and men who had lost their jobs in the footwear, textile and clothing factories and who were now trying to survive in their households. This shifted the focus of my research from the factory floor to the household and the community.

A number of individuals (often unbeknown to them) and institutions have played a role in the conception and realisation of this book.

My deepest gratitude goes to Professors Eddie Webster and Jackie Cock. Their intellectual guidance has made this book a reality. Eddie has mentored me from the beginning, and I am greatly indebted to him.

I am grateful to the Department for International Development (DfID). They made an important financial contribution to this study as part of their participation in the Crisis States Programme, co-ordinated by the Development Research Centre of the London School of Economics (LSE). I would like to mention Professor Jo Beall, in particular. Her intellectual contribution to my early work has been invaluable.