White, Postfordist

A Post-Fordist Ethnicity: Insecurity, Authority, and
Identity in South Africa
Hylton White
Anthropological Quarterly, Volume 85, Number 2, Spring 2012, pp. 397-427

(Article)
Published by George Washington University Institute for Ethnographic Research
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1353/anq.2012.0033
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AQ Special Collection:
Post-Fordist Affect
A Post-Fordist Ethnicity:
Insecurity, Authority, and
Identity in South Africa
Hylton White
University of the Witwatersrand
Abstract
The expression of ethnicity in postcolonial public life is typically regarded
as a regression to the legacies of a colonial rule of difference. Taking the
case of Jacob Zuma’s controversial appeals to his Zuluness in the run-up
to the South African elections of 2009, I propose a different analysis that
grounds a more contemporary mode of ethnic attachment in the dynamics
of post-Fordist sociality. Zuma’s supporters utterly rejected the concate-
nation of culture, local authority, and ethnic population. It was Zuma’s own
identification with Zuluness in his personal life that made him into an inti-
mate, of the very most up-to-date kind. Through this identification his sup-
porters hoped to inhabit an unmediated relationship with a powerful and
loving state, in scenes of embrace with ethnically grounded normalcy and
security. [Keywords: Post-Fordism, ethnicity, youth, South Africa, Zulu]
I n August 2009, South African humorist Fred Khumalo devoted a news-

paper column to the strangeness of collective nouns. Recalling gems
from his schooldays—a memory of elephants, an implausibility of gnus—
he went on to ask what names we might give groupings of folk from South
Africa’s many ethnicities. A flight of Englishmen? A restlessness of Zulus?
The suggestions mined deep veins of stereotypy until he came to the
Anthropological Quarterly, Vol. 85, No. 2, p. 397–428, ISSN 0003-5491. © 2012 by the Institute for
Ethnographic Research (IFER) a part of the George Washington University. All rights reserved.
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A Post-Fordist Ethnicity: Insecurity, Authority, and Identity in South Africa
question posed in his subheading: “What’s the collective noun for those
obsessed with people’s ethnic origins?” “We should be ashamed of our-
selves,” he commented:
The very fact that we are debating ethnicity is a disgrace. Is this

what we fought for? When we were in the trenches, we spoke about
nonracialism and anti-tribalism. But now that we are on the plateau
of victory and democracy, we are reverting to that shameful past of
ethnic bias. (Khumalo 2009)
Khumalo’s prompt was the rise of a national debate on the place of ethnic-
ity in post-apartheid politics, occasioned by the public appeals that newly-
elected President Jacob Zuma made to his Zuluness during his struggles
for party and national political office. How to explain the popular reception
of those appeals in 2009 is my object in this essay. But Khumalo’s com-
plaint also raises some immensely vexing problems of analysis. What are
collective subjects? What joins collective identity to a personal sense of
self? Most saliently for my own concerns here, how do such identifica-
tions place their subjects in history? How do we approach the historicity of
something like the wave of ethnic attachment that has swept through life
in South Africa in recent years, as it has in so many parts of the post-Cold
War world? What kinds of continuity and discontinuity make themselves
apparent here?
For postcolonial places such as South Africa, the accent of the last
generation of scholarship has been firmly on the side of continuity when it
comes to such questions. In postcolonial studies, it is an orthodoxy that
forms of identification such as ethnicity are legacies inherited from the
colonial order of things. From this perspective, the task of thinking is first
to locate the forms of colonial life in which such identifications originate,
then to trace the complicated relays of rule and response that carry them
forward into the postcolonial era. Without for a second disputing that eth-
nicity was intrinsic to the logics of colonial rule, I venture that resorting to
this older truth alone serves all too often to divert us from the dynamics
grounding ethnic attachment now. In South Africa, the identity of Zuluness
was intimately tied to modes of rule, accommodation, and resistance that
developed during the 19th and 20th centuries. But deriving Jacob Zuma’s
campaigns from these prior iterations of ethnicity distracts us from the
most important feature of the cultural affect that gathered supporters
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around him in the run-up to his election to the presidency. It overlooks

the rise, that is, of new kinds of dispositions towards the authority of the
state, especially among the young and the poor, where support for Zuma
was strongest. In the following, I offer ethnographic sketches drawn from
the lives of several younger, poorer Zulu South Africans, to describe these
dispositions and to show how they departed from older lines of ethnic
attachment. My central point is that Zuma’s own embrace of his ethnicity
provided his supporters with the fantasy of a less mediated relationship
with the agency of the state, as a way of overcoming social exclusion
in a context marked by mass unemployment and personal insecurity. In
other words, I argue that the dynamics of identification with Zuma’s ethnic
person should be understood as features of a broadly post-Fordist social
situation. Entanglements of ethnicity, authority, and personal insecurity
direct us less to the legacies of the past, I suggest, and more to a global
present that has been defined for a decade now by trends towards a poli-
tics of “authoritarian post-Fordism” (Steinmetz 2003).
Why authoritarian post-Fordism? Why put the logics of post-apart-
heid society under this rubric? In Harvey’s classic account (1990), post-
Fordist sociality takes shape when the development of a new regime of
flexible accumulation, responding to the economic crises of the 1970s,
results in the appearance of intensified disorientation and fragmenta-
tion in everyday life. Harvey’s major claim is that the regime of flexibility
undoes the experiential grounds for many of the certainties of 20th cen-
tury modernist thought and culture. From this perspective, South Africa
could hardly fit the paradigm more precisely. The post-apartheid period
has seen all the modernist templates for a national liberal-democratic
dispensation, if not exactly shattered, then diffracted (Comaroff and
Comaroff 2003) through profound social changes based in economic
shifts that gathered steam in the 1970s and 1980s as apartheid entered
its final phase. The most important among these is the steady withdrawal
of capital from fixed, large-scale, labor-intensive production, resulting
in extraordinarily high rates of unemployment. This is transforming the
nature of change itself in a society where industrialization was long held
to be the motor of historical development.
But Harvey’s model is not just about the present in isolation, of course.
“Post-Fordism” illuminates the present by relation to a particular past, and
especially to the experience of mid-century industrial democracies, where
growth hinged on the coupling of mass production to mass consumption,
399
higher wages to higher productivity (Gramsci 1971). South Africa, by con-

trast, was a colonial society where profit came from the coercive exploita-
tion of cheap, unskilled labor. Here, the only main approximation to the
Fordist bargain lay in the privileged status of skilled white workers, lifted
from the Depression through a package including job reservation, high-
er wages, and welfare. But even so, there are grounds for applying the
Fordist/post-Fordist lens. The experience of the industrial democracies
left a definite stamp, for one, on the aspirations of black South Africans
subject to apartheid rule. Fordism elsewhere offered powerful images for
a social order of mass inclusion and citizenship through labor—images
that threw a powerfully critical light on the sociopolitical exclusion of a
millions-strong black working class. That same imaginary still structures
post-apartheid notions of citizenship (Barchiesi 2011), even though em-
ployment is now out of reach for most of the poor. South Africa is post-
Fordist in an important sense, then, even if the experience of Fordism itself
was aspirational rather than real (see Muehlebach 2011, Muehlebach and
Shoshan this issue).
In another sense, though, aspects of Fordism entered even into the
realities of working-class life in South Africa’s 20th century history. Even
for the period of colonial rule, scholars of South Africa have pointed to im-
portant dis-continuities that track the periodic reassembling of the social
world. The shift from segregation to apartheid proper, after World War II,
is thus something Harold Wolpe (1972, see Meillassoux 1981) grounded
decades ago with reference to the shifting connections of capital, law, and
kinship. Wolpe shows how demands for cheap migrant labor-power initial-
ly framed the organization of segregated native reserves, under customary
law, in the decades around the creation of the South African state in 1910.
By sustaining rural homesteads in at least partial self-sufficiency, this ver-
sion of indirect rule allowed for a situation where wages did not have to
bear the full costs of human and social reproduction. The collapse of these
agrarian institutions by the 1930s and 1940s thus produced a general cri-
sis—economic, social, and political—to which the response from above
was to essay more direct regulation of the conditions under which black
family life was tasked with making migrant labor possible. It would be dif-
ficult to argue that the resulting apparatus of ethnic bantustans or “home-
lands” made for the same classic feedback between increased consump-
tion and increased productivity that defined the shift to Fordism in other
places during those decades. Nonetheless, it is not too difficult to see
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a colonial variant on Fordism at work in the increasingly tight regulation

of familial life here around the rhythms of work (see Gramsci 1971). As I
point out below, this articulation of family life and work was fundamental
to the forms of ethnic attachment that developed during the 20th century.
Its collapse in a situation of mass unemployment is essential, too, to the
new kinds of attachments that I argue were at work in support for Zuma’s
campaigns for office.
Regression Analysis
Let me start with a scene in the public eye. At a ceremony in Pretoria in
May 2009, Jacob Zuma became democratic South Africa’s fourth presi-
dent. As he mounted the stage to take the oath of office, he stopped for a
moment to crouch down at a chair where Nelson Mandela sat, visibly aged
and frail. Their words went undetected, but the footage of that moment
left the press with a signature image for the event. Its purchase is not hard
to discern. Mandela was the first, of course, to hold the office Zuma was
assuming, while Zuma was likely the last of Mandela’s successors to take
office while the latter was alive. This made the juxtaposition a compelling
device for a public trying to diagnose the state of the democratic dispen-
sation 15 years in. Commentaries and comedic variations on the pairing
of the two presidents proliferated subsequently. Some pointed out that
Zuma shared Mandela’s popular touch, but most were much less kind to
the younger leader. Zuma’s implication in a seemingly endless succession
of sexual scandals provoked a noted cartoonist to compare Mandela’s fa-
mous Long Walk to Freedom with a book about another four-letter act that
ended in -k in this instance (Zapiro 2010). And after Zuma acknowledged
the birth of his 20th child, out of wedlock, an op-ed commentary noted
that this president was also on his way to being the father of the nation—
but all too literally (Rostron 2010).
The force of these unflattering comparisons was the sense that Mandela
and Zuma represented a pair of parentheses around the liberal optimism
of South Africa’s transition. In this view, while the exceptional Mandela
had embodied hopes for a state of cosmopolitan inclusion, Zuma marked
the appearance of a woefully unexceptional style of postcolonial politics.
His battle with Thabo Mbeki for the leadership of the African National
Congress (ANC) had exposed abuses of state institutions by almost every
wing of the ruling party. Most notably, his rise had seen an unabashed
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appeal to ethnicity as an organizing principle of legitimacy and belonging

in public matters. The latter came into view, if not for the first time then
most infamously, at his trial on charges of rape in 2006. At a key moment in
his defense, he was reported to have justified his sexual conduct by talk-
ing about “my Zulu culture” (a phrasing to which I return below). For this,
he earned a lampooning in the national press, and strong rebukes from
those who saw his actions as a threat to the country’s new constitutional
guarantees on gender and sexual equality (Hassim 2009). But his refer-
ences to ethnic right struck an even stronger chord among his supporters.
Women wearing traditional Zulu dress burned herbs at court to protect
him from evildoers, while young men wore t-shirts with the moniker “100%
Zulu Boy” that Zuma had embraced for himself. The issue of his ethnicity
was publicized beyond the trial as well. Footage appeared of him wearing
ethnic dress with the Zulu king. When he took a second wife in 2008, much
was made not just of his polygamy but also of the staging of his wedding
as a traditional event. The imagery of Zuluness became an integral ele-
ment, then, of the popular phenomenon the press had termed Zumania.1
Since the context shadowing all of this was Zuma’s fight for the highest
public office, commentators also asked what implications these gestures
held for a future under his leadership. Coming during a period marked by
the “xenophobic eruption” of 2008 (Steinberg 2008), appeals to ethnicity
in public life presented troubling prospects.2 Even Mangosuthu Buthelezi,
longtime Zulu nationalist and doyen of ethnic politics in South Africa,
raised eyebrows by expressing the unlikely worry that all of this talk about
Zuluness risked stirring dangerous passions.
What was striking in a great many of these criticisms was the sense
they conveyed that an ethnic turn in politics amounted not just to danger
but to disgrace. Fred Khumalo’s comment that South Africans should be
“ashamed” of themselves was one among a multitude of similar interven-
tions. Take Karima Brown, for instance, then the political editor of a ma-
jor national daily. “[T]he run-up to the ANC succession dogfight has seen
campaigners resort,” she observed, “to one of Africa’s oldest and most
shameful chasms—ethnicity—to cobble together support for their can-
didates” (Brown 2007). This by way of contrast, she wrote, to the ANC’s
prior leadership in fighting ethnic politics since it was formed in 1912 to
oppose colonial discrimination. Appeals to ethnicity are shameful, then,
because they regress to an earlier time. But note that these assertions are
agnostic on what sort of past provides the destination for return. It could
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be the primordial past taken literally: the past that predates and threat-
ens national modernity. But as Brown herself notes, the discourse of the
ANC had insisted for a very long time that ethnicity be treated as a tool
of colonial dominance. Read against that intellectual history, the criticism
coming from Khumalo, Brown, and many others came off less as a fear of
tribalist atavism in the naive sense—than it did as a fear that the ANC had
succumbed to obsessions it once rejected precisely because it knew what
ethnicity was: a creature of the politics of colonialism.
Translated into academic register, that argument has also, of course,
been a cornerstone for the analysis of ethnicity in recent times. In postco-
lonial studies in particular, the appearance of the politics of identity in post-
colonial public life is most often understood as being a re-appearance of
categories and affective schemes that used to be the vectors of a colonial
rule of difference (Chatterjee 1993, 2006; Stoler 2002, 2008). Applied to the
African continent, and particularly to South Africa, Mahmood Mamdani’s
corpus during the last two decades gives us one of the most compelling
and elegant iterations of this argument. In Mamdani’s analysis, African
ethnicity is a construct of colonial rule itself, particularly from the late 19th
century on. Precolonial African societies were marked, he says, by mul-
tiple, overlapping forms of association, each of which contained its own
distinctive potentialities for the structure of political authority (Mamdani
2009). In the place of this complexity, the colonial state institutionalized
the singular authority of chiefs as local despots joining the functions of
the colonial state to populations mapped in terms of rigid ethnic attach-
ment (1996:22-23). Even as the colonized sought avenues for freedom
from the burdens of this alien rule, they did so in a political landscape
already shaped by decades of colonial state construction. Continuity in
the form of state itself is thus how the legacy of ethnic attachment and
ethnic right was relayed from the era of late colonialism to the politics of
the postcolony (1996:288).
Clearly, there is much to recommend this claim. Taking recent South
African trends as a case in point, the resort to local authorities as agents
of social development (Hart 2007) provides a striking parallel with obser-
vations Mamdani (2009) makes of Uganda in the 1970s, where rural local
government was charged with functions the central state itself dispersed
to a range of separate ministries. Both situations demonstrate continuities
with the structure of colonial state formation. Both would seem to facili-
tate what Chatterjee (2006) calls “the politics of the governed”: a politics
403
where people relate to the state not as its individual citizens but rather
as competing subpopulations, constituted by demographic markers such
as ethnicity, which thus provide the terms in which political action itself is
framed (see Anderson 1998). If this is indeed the backdrop to the ethnic
turn in the lead-up to the South African elections in 2009, it would seem to
provide compelling grounds for taking Zuma’s invocations of Zuluness as
an instance of “political identity” (Mamdani 2009). Not as a politicized iden-
tity, that is, but rather as one founded in the political order, rather than in
distinctions of culture or class. And if the political order is the form of state
inherited from the colonial age, then the salience of ethnic identity would
indeed appear to repeat the order of things constructed under colonialism.
Nonetheless, it is just this understanding that I want to contest. First, let
me point very briefly to a pair of conceptual flaws in Mamdani’s reason-
ing. The first concerns the relationship between history and explanation.
Mamdani (1996) himself insists that he should not be read as deducing
ethnic politics from the “original sin” of colonialism. Rather, he says, he
wants to attend to a whole array of subsequent actors who picked up and
ran with forms that they inherited from the organization of late colonial
rule (2009). Nonetheless, the emphasis falls overwhelmingly on the formal
continuity he sees between these moments. That institutes an a priori bias
towards reproduction rather than change. And since the forms in question
were laid down, he says, in the process of colonial state formation, it is
hard to see in what way this is not an account of the “origins” of identity
in colonialism.3 The second problem concerns his claim that ethnicity is
an autonomously “political identity,” as opposed to one that originates
either in cultural or in economic distinctions. I concur that both econo-
mistic and culturalist accounts fall short of the task of explaining ethnic-
ity. But it seems to me that in offering the political as the only conceptual
alternative, Mamdani leaves out a vast terrain of what are best described
as neither economic nor cultural but as social forms.4 As varying forms of
structured interdependence, that is, out of which, and in recursive relation
to which, the stakes and values of politics are constituted pragmatically.
When such interactions are mediated by capital, they do indeed assume
the shapes of “economic” phenomena, like money and work.5 But that is
hardly the same thing as the reductionist economism Mamdani (1996:23)
sees in accounts that seek to ground collective identifications in terms of
political economy. As a consequence of erasing sociality from his triptych
of the economic, the cultural, and the political, each of these three vectors
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or domains of interaction necessarily seems to assert a transhistorically

grounded claim not just to ontological primacy but also to analytical sin-
gularity. In Mamdani’s case, political determinism takes us to a scene in
which the state itself is the ground of all becoming, including struggles
against it. He urges us not to read this as a “conspiracy theory” according
to which “custom was always defined ‘from above’” (1996:22), but it is
unclear how at least the second part of that caricature is not an inevitable
predicate of his argument.
How could one look at this differently? Is it possible to approach the
historicity of identity in a way that is less quick to force continuity between
the past and the present, and that suffers less from analytical statism?
Recall my reference above to Wolpe’s (1972) argument for the existence
of important discontinuities between the era of pre-War segregation and
the post-War turn to apartheid proper. Wolpe’s claim is that the collapse
of agrarian production in reserve households by the mid-20th century also
threatened the basis for a system of very low wages on which the growth
of settler capital depended. Capital had relied, he says, on the partial
self-sufficiency of households migrants left behind when they came to
labor at farms, mines, and industrial zones in legally “white” South Africa.
The link was that domestic self-sufficiency allowed a situation where the
cost of labor could fall below the cost of its reproduction. The collapse of
that enabling condition during the 1930s and 1940s spurred a crisis for
African families—resulting in much greater trends towards African urban-
ization—and thus also for the system of segregation. For Wolpe, this was
the backdrop to the much more systematic post-War elaboration of laws
concerning African mobility and settlement. Such laws applied not just to
workers but also to their kin, most notably by excluding workers’ families
from urban residence and imposing a system of tightly policed oscillation
between locations of work and family life. The effect in the rural periphery
was that family life itself came to be restructured around the rhythms of
migrant labor, the latter being an activity now on which households de-
pended internally (Murray 1980). As Noelle Molé shows (this issue), the
structuring of patriarchal family relations on work and wage was intrin-
sic to the imagination of Fordist sociality in Italy. Seen in this light, South
Africa’s mid-century moment accords much more with core global trends
than an emphasis on its political specificities might suggest.
For the state, it was to supposed to be in the ethnic homelands that
wages were turned into kinship and domestic reproduction. But this
405
intertwining of work, home, and ethnicity was not just a matter of top-
down state construction alone. Take KwaZulu-Natal, the province where
my ethnographic accounts here are located. Both in the former bantu-
stan KwaZulu and in cities such as Durban, migrant workers made up the
core constituency for Zulu nationalist sentiments in the second half of the
century. The main political form those sentiments took at the time was
loyalty to the organization Inkatha, founded in the 1970s by the aforemen-
tioned Mangosuthu Buthelezi, then chief minister of the Zulu bantustan
government. When Inkatha and the ANC clashed violently in the 1980s
and 1990s, migrant workers living in urban hostels were the most reli-
able militants on the side of Zulu nationalism. But as many ethnographic
studies have demonstrated, the cultural, aesthetic, and affective lives of
these migrant workers were structured by the goal of positing tight con-
nections between a life of labor and the act of “building a home” in the
bantustan countryside (Erlmann 1995, Hunter 2010, White 2004). In post-
Fordist Japan, as Anne Allison argues (this issue), a nostalgic mourning
of vanished “my homeism” has become a veritable national obsession. In
South Africa, the images of Zuluness that found expression under Inkatha
militancy (Waetjen 2004) were organized precisely by nostalgia for the fig-
ure—already fantasy—of a masculine power rooted in apparently autono-
mous forms of familial life secured as ethnic difference (White 2010).
If this articulation of ethnicity, work, and family life was dominant in the
decades after the middle of the last century, it has subsequently been
dissolved by the steady collapse of migrant labor, and indeed of waged
employment itself, from the 1970s on to the present. This period, which is
South Africa’s post-Fordist era, has thus seen the disassembling of tem-
poral links between the rhythms of labor and the rhythms of domestic and
personal life in the parts of the country that have historically depended
on labor migrancy. Witnessing a similar process at work in the industrial
North, Richard Sennet (1998) has written of the “corrosion” of the forms
of “character” formerly made possible by the hitching of life to the time
of a steady career.6 One should be wary here of nostalgia for a regime
of labor discipline which was punishing even in the Fordist heartlands of
the industrial democracies, let alone in peripheries like South Africa. But
Sennet’s complaint is echoed across South Africa by people who say that
freedom of a political sort has been compromised by states of arrested
development in personal life, occasioned above all by joblessness. The
resulting forms of personal insecurity are the backdrop, I shall argue here,
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for the potent mix of authoritarian sentiment and ethnic attachment that
drove support for Zuma’s campaigns in Zululand.
Elections and Authorities

In February 2009, I visited long-time acquaintances in a settlement in the
interior of northern KwaZulu-Natal where I had lived in various households
for a total of almost two of the last 15 years. This settlement lies in the
highlands between Nkandla, which is Zuma’s home, and Ulundi, which is
Inkatha’s base and was formerly the capital of KwaZulu. Both Buthelezi
and Zuma cast long shadows here, but Inkatha had until recently kept a
very tight grip on public affiliations, albeit less so on private convictions.
So when I arrived I was stunned to see what a change had come over lo-
cal political culture since my last visit several years before, and certainly
by comparison with the 1990s. In the taxi from the nearest town, several
people wore ANC t-shirts adorned with Zuma’s face. I knew that my friend
Gugu, who had come to fetch me, had moved towards the ANC in the
time since she first went to work in Durban, the province’s major city.7
But a decade ago, few people would have dared to wear an ANC t-shirt
so openly here, so I commented how striking I found this. “Yes!” she said,
then gestured as if she were swinging an automatic rifle, to chuckles and
nods from the rest of the taxi: “We’re coming for Inkatha. They have spears
but we have guns. If they fight with us we’ll shoot them with our AKs.”
The AK-47 was of course a signature emblem of the ANC’s armed
struggle against apartheid, and Zuma’s exile career in the party was based
in its military wing. In his subsequent struggle for leadership, he had often
rallied supporters with a famous song from that period, in which a guerilla
calls for his gun to be brought to him. Gunner (2009) has shown how the
resonance of this song in Zuma’s campaigns came from a very up-to-date
alchemy of post-liberation anxieties and electronic media. My argument
below will make it clear that I find that framing in terms of present-day
affect compelling, but in public discussions about the song at the time,
critics and enthusiasts alike dwelt on the connections it drew between the
present moment and the militancy of the (anti-apartheid) past. That sec-
ond sense of things struck me very forcefully as I watched people move
from home to home in Gugu’s community canvasing votes for Zuma in
the coming national elections scheduled for April, two months hence. The
next afternoon I was sitting with another acquaintance when one of his
407
neighbors came to join us and started drawing an image of an under-

ground party cell structure from the struggle days in the sand at his feet.
“This is how we should do it,” he said: “Each one recruits three people,
and each of those recruits three more, and so...”
I cannot overemphasize what a break this was, even from the recent
dynamics of public life here. In 1994, Inkatha had transferred its former
hegemony in KwaZulu into dominance in the first democratic provincial
government. Even when they lost the provincial legislature to the ANC in
1999, their base in the northern countryside seemed impenetrable. As late
as 2009, the national press was still debating what kinds of inroads Zuma
could hope to make here by being Zulu. But from the ground, it was clear
that Inkatha would struggle to survive these elections at all, and indeed,
at the polls that April, it took home just over half of the vote it had won five
years before. Reduced to only a fifth of the total provincial vote, it could
no longer claim contender status even in KwaZulu-Natal, let alone on a
national stage. On the other hand, ANC support in the province went from
under half to almost two-thirds—a victory on a scale that offset losses
in other provinces after a schism based on Zuma’s rise in the party. The
province thus proved decisive in Zuma’s triumph, and this let a simple but
powerful story take hold about what must have happened here. Zuma,
it seemed, had captured the old Zulu nationalist vote which was once
Inkatha’s constituency. By appealing to his Zuluness so publicly during his
struggles, he had outflanked Buthelezi on the well-marked terrain of Zulu
ethnic attachment.
The assertion is not unfounded. In every part of Zululand I visited in
2009, people made a lot of how Zuma ate the same food as they did.
They spoke of him as “a person from our home.” But this is not to say
that he had risen on a tide pulled by much older forces of Zulu ethnic
nationalism. First of all, as I noted from the highlands, the ANC presented
itself not as drawing support to Zuma from an established base but as
overthrowing the old regime in the region. His supporters pitched their
task as a frontal attack on the agents and the convictions of the 20th
century Zulu nationalist project. Let me shift attention to an area on the
coast where I was living when I made that trip in February. The chief of
this second community had been an Inkatha stalwart for decades, and
people told me of how his regime had attacked emerging support for the
ANC among local youth in the early 1990s. Several years of bloodshed
ensued, in which scores of people were killed and hundreds displaced.
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Wars of this kind possessed political life in many areas of the province
through the 1980s and early 1990s, of course. My friend Gugu’s reference
to Inkatha’s “spears” invoked a fearsome image from this time of war: an
image of nationalist militants armed with “traditional weapons” (a term
Inkatha used in insisting its members had an ethnic right to carry spears
and axes to public gatherings). Those conflicts ebbed after 1994, but
Inkatha had sustained an almost exclusive hold on public life in the area
where I was living, dominating offices from the elected municipal council-
lor down to the chief’s own izinduna or traditional ward authorities (sing.
induna). But a sea-change was as obviously in progress here as it was in
surrounding places. For the first time ever, the ANC held a pre-election
rally at the community hall right next to the chief’s home. Speakers men-
tioned Inkatha’s violent past and told party luminaries that here it was as
if the ANC were still in exile, rather than in government. To speak that way
in 2009, when years had passed since any major violence, was to repre-
sent Inkatha as an anachronism. And indeed, in this area held by Inkatha
officials, the ANC took three-quarters of the vote in the local electoral
district in April. The only polling station where the result was even close
was at the chief’s own Traditional Authority office. As the ANC squeaked
to a victory there, the municipal councillor fled the hall as ANC supporters
started singing songs about upcoming votes for local posts.
Indeed, what struck me most throughout the election campaign was
the level of open contempt that people—young people in particular—had
started to show not just for Inkatha as such but for the whole apparatus
of offices and emblems that had previously afforded public representation
to Zuluness. Recall again the spear and the AK. A contrast between “tra-
ditional weapons” and guns kept cropping up in several parts of the prov-
ince during conversations I had about the local workings of law. Like peo-
ple almost everywhere in South Africa, residents of the chiefdom where I
was living had a sense of being under siege from crime (see Comaroff and
Comaroff 2006). Zuma’s call for a national conversation on reintroducing
the death penalty was a popular theme for people who supported him
here. So was a call, voiced especially by youth, for the state to build a po-
lice station in the community. Like many parts of KwaZulu-Natal, this area
had historically seen little of the police, the chief and his authorities being
tasked instead with law and order. To call for a police station, then, was to
call for a very different kind of relationship with the state, and that is what
I want to explore here. Take the following incident. One morning in March
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2009, a group of young men gathered to track down a neighbor accused

of taking a cell phone from a schoolboy. Not only did they not tell the local
induna that they were organizing an armed search in his ward. When they
had successfully trapped their target in a house, they called the police in
the nearest town to take him away instead. A young man called Bongani
who had been among them put it to me like this:
We want to be ruled by police. Not these izinduna. The police are

faster than izinduna, so we tried to make sure this thief was appre-
hended by the police, since maybe they would know how to get that
phone from him. Criminals aren’t afraid of izinduna. They don’t have
any problem with izinduna...Here among the Nguni, what I want to
point out is that our izinduna have no sense of dignity. They don’t
lead us well.
I return to that use of “Nguni” instead of “Zulu” below. It is telling. But let
me forestall immediately the idea that Bongani took issue just with his own
induna, rather than with the office as such. As another man who was part
of the same conversation went on to put it:
Another thing, [izinduna] don’t have guns. Let’s say Bongani here is
causing trouble. Maybe he’s in a house. Bongani has an AK. Now
you’ve seen for yourself how the izinduna here rule with sticks. Now,
you’ll never convince a person with an AK to obey you if you’re car-
rying a stick. So that’s why we report straight to the police.
Let us not be literal. Many izinduna have guns, and as it happens, these
same young men had armed themselves with rough-hewn spears before
they went on their mission. I knew about the incident precisely because
they had come to sharpen these weapons with an ax owned by the family
that was hosting me. So the point is a rhetorical one, but no less important
for that. It suggests that emblems of chiefship itself are being made into
objects of ridicule. The significance of the spear in the imagination of Zulu
nationalist militancy, in the 1980s and 1990s, was premised on the link it
drew to much older signs of sovereign power, stretching back at least to
the wars of Zulu kingship. And Inkatha has presented itself for decades as
a voice for the prerogatives of chieftaincy, especially in response to what
it claims is an ANC aim to undermine the institution. Since 1994 the ANC
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has in fact been controversial, if anything, for the kinds of accommoda-

tions it has made with traditional leaders. On the other hand, the situations
where chiefs and kings are clearly more than figureheads are those where
they are either also CEOs of ethnic corporations (Comaroff and Comaroff
2009) or the bearers of positions in provincial and central government.
It is precisely as local authorities that chiefs have lost most legitimacy
in post-apartheid politics. That is what Bongani and his companions, at
least, were saying about izinduna: that in situations marked by extreme
insecurity, traditional leaders had no real capacities. They had to make
way for the state. And that, I think, was the real force behind the scorn of
the spear I met in conversations I had all over the region in 2009. For those
who engaged in this mockery, it was not just Inkatha, but rather the whole
regime of indirect ethnic rule that had to be pushed aside.
But if this is true, how does it square with the role of Zuma’s appeals to
his Zulu roots in securing his success in these elections? The answer, of
course, is that Zuluness itself no longer meant to his constituency what it
had in the age of bantustans and before that in the system of colonial tribal
authorities. Before we examine what it had come to mean instead, let us
consider for whom. An analysis of the nation-wide election results (Kimmie
et al. 2009) confirms what was in evidence in KwaZulu-Natal: that sup-
port for Zuma’s campaign was strongest in districts with the highest rates
of poverty as well as the highest concentrations of young and first-time
voters. This is reason already to be skeptical that a Zulu nationalist base
which had supported Inkatha until 2004 had switched to Zuma five years
later. South Africa has until recently had an increasingly young population,
a trend exacerbated by AIDS-related mortality in adults. The electorate
itself had changed substantially even between these two elections. Many
people voting in 2009 had not done so before, or only once, and Zuma
drew his strongest support precisely from these constituents. So what do
we know about the lives of these younger, poorer adults? Striking statistics
proliferate, including that less than half of 18- to 25-year-olds are studying
or working. In the following sections, I offer a few accounts drawn from
the lives of individuals of this generation, in order to make some sense of
the links between their situations and the emerging dispositions towards
authority and ethnicity that drove support for Zuma.
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Territory, Authority, Security

Let me start with Zama. In her 20s in 2009, Zama is one of Gugu’s neigh-
bors in that settlement in the highlands I described above. She was born
there after her mother had divorced her older siblings’ father and moved
back home. Over the years, her mother built a substantial household,
supported from the proceeds of an informal trade in home-brewed beer
and bottled liquor. The money meant that Zama and her siblings grew
up in moderate comfort, but at the cost of a home that was always full of
raucous drunks. They have also had to deal with the loss of four of her
brothers and sisters to AIDS, and a fifth to a road accident. Every single
year of the decade leading to 2009 had demanded either a funeral or the
unveiling of a tombstone. Zama and a younger brother still in school are
now her mother’s only surviving children from a house of seven she raised
into adulthood. But between them they take care of 11 grandchildren left
behind, as well as several indigent neighbors and relatives. Together with
Zama’s mother’s disability pension, the grandchildren bring them several
thousand rands a month in welfare grants from the state, and this is by
far the greater part of their income. No one brings in wages from formal
employment. But another source of income is a pick-up truck her mother
bought a few years ago with a life insurance policy that one of her children
left her. After this purchase, Zama went for driving lessons, becoming the
first and still the only woman from her community to join the guild of taxi
drivers that operate in the district. She spends her days on the road or at
the taxi rank in the nearest town, which puts her at the very center of cir-
culation and social life in the area.
Also of political life. I am not sure how it began, but by early 2009 Zama
was not just a supporter of the ANC but an organizer and activist. When
I stayed at her home in February, she told me how she had been a pro-
vincial delegate to the meeting in 2008 where the party’s Youth League
chose the controversial figure of Julius Malema as its next leader. Malema
went on to be a major militant for Zuma’s campaign, and so did Zama.
Every time I visited in the next few months she was wearing not just Zuma
shirts but ANC pants, scarves, and caps. She also had an array of tiny
laminated photographs of Zuma on her keychain: pictures that the party
had distributed as part of its national branding campaign. She kept these
not for herself but to distribute to others, and every day I was with her she
would twist them off her keychain till she ran out and replace them at the
party office in town. As soon she had given them away, recipients pulled
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out their own keys chains and attached them. The choice of photos was
interesting. Some showed Zuma dancing in skins at his second wedding
(an image that the national press judged embarrassing). Others had him
posed with his wives. But the medium was very much the message here.
As a taxi driver, Zama had a car-key to go on her keychain. Like most
South Africans, most of her neighbors did not. Most, after all, were her
passengers. Their keys were for their houses in their family compounds;
for individual bedrooms in these houses; and inside these rooms, for cup-
boards, chests, and suitcases, all with their own locks. Think of this scene
reiterated across great swathes of the country. Zuma’s ethnic body was
being made the guardian emblem of a vast apparatus of privacy. The gov-
erning sign on innumerable keys protecting tiny private spaces and the
things, hopes, and fantasies locked up in them.
As much as the course of Zama’s life itself, this apparatus of locked
spaces speaks to quite fundamental turns in the organization of life in
Zululand in the last few decades. The demarcation of personal space in-
side a home is nothing new, but at least in the 20th century it tended
towards a specifically gendered aspect. Listen to a diviner called Mkhize,
speaking during an interview in 2009. I had mentioned an elderly woman
I once knew in another village, a widow who had gone back home to re-
peat her wedding ceremonies from decades before because her father
had sent her off the first time without giving her a wedding chest, a con-
ventional component of a trousseau. Mkhize said:
A chest is where a woman locks her secrets. If it isn’t there, the dead
turn their backs. It means this woman has no secrets, because she
has nowhere to [put] them...When we were still growing up, we [knew
that] money stayed where? In the chest. If a man goes wandering off
and leaves his wife at home remembering him...she goes to a herbal-
ist to get medicine for this. Her secret. [It] brings her husband home
and then she takes it and—where does it end up? In the chest.
Mkhize points to a setup wherein not just chests but houses themselves
are marked as women’s spaces, harboring productive secrets like money
and love magic. In that same arrangement, marriage is what then brings
houses to fall within and build up homes associated by name with men
(White 2010). For much of the modern period, this setup turned on men’s
having access to waged employment as migrant workers, allowing them
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to convert their wages to bridewealth and to build up rural homes of mar-

riage and fatherhood (Hunter 2010). When Inkatha grew in the 1970s, that
process of domestic reproduction was already on the brink of decline, but
it still defined the disposition of value for a great many people. Buthelezi’s
Inkatha saw its role as being to defend the territorial arrangements that
supported migrant workers in securing these conversions of value: a ter-
ritorial setup based on one end in the migrants’ hostels that gave men
urban perches away from home, and at the other in the chiefdoms wherein
customary law administered the terms of domestic relationships. Already
this was a contrast, recall, to the earlier part of the century, when the ap-
paratus of ethnically organized indirect rule was aimed at keeping rural
homesteads partly self-sufficient, in order to draw labor out of them while
subsidizing wages with a semi-autonomous sphere of peasant produc-
tion. By the second half of the century, wages were the substance of rural
household life, not a supplement to it. By that time the function of ethnic
rule was not to draw flows of labor from the countryside but rather to force
wages back to it—to prevent a future of African urbanity and the kinds of
political sentiments that went with that. In the later part of the century, in
other words, Inkatha’s ethnic nationalism was a disciplinary element in
a system where the consumption of wages was normatively and politi-
cally structured to reproduce a particular kind of migrant labor-power. It
worked by way of an apparatus of hostels, chiefs, and embodied custom
to make workers think of their homesteads when they were paid. By the
early 21st century, though, South Africa had shifted into a situation of very
high unemployment. Rural areas such as northern KwaZulu-Natal are es-
pecially badly afflicted, and young men and women of Zama’s age face
the bleakest prospects of all on the national labor market. Only a few can
do more than dream about “building a home” of their own. Most are stuck
in spaces of constriction and exasperated fantasy, their dignity confined
in narrow spaces such as bedrooms, even wardrobes. This is quite un-
like the gendered allocation of secrecy Mkhize described in speaking of
chests. Here, it is all kinds of people who lock things up, and they do so
not because their goods are elements in marital exchanges, but precisely
because they are out of circulation.
The territory that Zuma’s ethnic body policed on all those chains of
keys looked very different, then, from that on which the 20th century Zulu
nationalist project had been framed. So what sorts of dispositions towards
ethnicity and authority were actually emerging on this terrain? Let me turn
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for a moment to a story about one of Zama’s neighbors, a young man

called Sifiso. Here I am going back by more than a decade. Sifiso was
one of the very first people I met after I had arrived here in the mid-1990s,
when the mother of the family that was hosting me had taken me up the
road to the home where her sister-in-law had married Sifiso’s father. That
home was called Tholinhlanhla, which translates as “finding luck” or, as
my host put it somewhat more pithily, “getting a fortune.” And a fortune is
exactly what Sifiso seemed to have found by his arrival at this home just
three years previously. He had grown up in Durban, living with an uncle
while his mother held a job as a domestic worker. During the 1980s, he
had followed his generation’s political heart to the streets for the ANC,
but this had led him out of school and into a life where the lines between
political and criminal violence were often indistinct. By the time he turned
18, he judged he had made so many mistakes that it was no longer wise
to remain in Durban. For the first time in his life, he went in search of the
home in the countryside where his father had retired after working as a po-
liceman in the city. He had not seen his father—a difficult man—in years.
But his stepmother, who was childless, welcomed him warmly. He got a
second chance at finishing high school, and the prospect of eventually
inheriting his father’s home and a small herd of cattle. Indeed, a fortune for
a young man in this part of the world.
Mandela was in office by then, and Sifiso was full of optimism. He had
already decided to train as an electronics repairman. With the ANC in
power, he thought that it could not be long before the electricity grid was
extended to poor communities. He wanted to be the man his neighbors
needed when their appliances defeated them. In the following years he did
finish school, but like so many people his age he could not find a single
day’s employment afterwards, let alone that training. When I saw him for
the last time in 2003, he had sunk into an alcoholic depression. Later that
year he hanged himself in his bedroom. But I think that if he had lived to
see the day, Sifiso would have proven one of Zuma’s greatest enthusiasts.
Among his prized possessions was a photostat of Buthelezi’s face pasted
onto an ad that showed a white baby having its bottom powdered. Every
time he had a few drinks he would take it out and chuckle at it. He knew
that most of his neighbors were Inkatha folk and he scorned them for it,
even if he dared not do so publicly. Under his breath he regularly called
them “mafuthinyongo,” a term that roughly means “gall-bladder puffers”:
a pungent ANC insult taking aim at ethnic nationalists’ pride in practices
415
of animal sacrifice. That is not to say Sifiso himself had a simple relation-
ship with issues of cultural practice. On sacrifice itself, for one, he was
torn between a sense that giving wealth to the dead was a waste of scarce
resources, and his worry that the dead took vengeance on people who
neglected them. The posture he conveyed was of a calculating, minimal
observance of cultural mandates, moved above all by personal security.
Nor was this a domestic matter alone for him. He surprised me one day
by telling me he was nervous about some herbs he had bought from a
sidewalk seller in town for his chest. The woman who had sold them to
him was a stranger. Now he was worried that maybe she had been men-
struating when cutting them, in which case they were polluted and would
weaken him. In fact, he said, this was the problem with going to town at all.
Women who bought and sold things there were strangers. Nothing bound
them to keep away from men when they were bleeding. This much I was
not surprised to hear from him. It spoke to a very general sense of para-
noid masculinity in all South African circles. What took me aback came
next. If the government really cared for us, he thumped his chair with his
hand and said, they would institute a rule in town where men and women
only walked on opposite sides of the street.
Recall that only a few years had passed since the fall of apartheid, a
state form aimed precisely at the segregated sorting of people in space.
On top of being simply silly, Sifiso’s outburst seemed so at odds with ev-
erything I knew about his political dispositions that I never gave it more
than laughing thought. Only in 2009 did it strike me that in his own, some-
what grandiose and paranoid way, he had given very early voice to a feel-
ing that by now was very common: the feeling that the work of the state
was to reach in every corner of life and there to guarantee the private
security of its subjects.
As Steinmetz (2003) has argued, the turn towards the security state in
the West after 9/11 may well turn out to be the political form post-Fordism
takes on a global scale. Certainly there is a match between the demand for
more policing of collective life and the general sense of personal insecurity
that emerges from the regime of flexible labor-time and the high rates of
unemployment it has produced in zones of deindustrialization such as
South Africa. Perhaps it is a folly of Fordist nostalgia, as Barchiesi (2011)
insists, to think that such insecurity can ever be resolved by the creation
of jobs and thus by the reinstitution of a social life that is centered on
rhythms of work. In the absence of a viable alternative, though, it is likely
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that the quest for such resolution will assume authoritarian forms instead.
In South Africa, strong evidence for this authoritarian trend is that social
protest has increasingly taken the form of actions directed at the state to
demand it govern both its people and its territory more effectively. Calls for
the state to provide a post-Fordist version of the social wage (in the form
of housing, plumbing, electricity, and other such private domestic goods
and services) are frequently accompanied by attacks on immigrants said
to have exploited the country’s weakly policed territorial integrity. Both
kinds of actions demand that the state intensify its grasp on the realm
(Steinberg n.d.). Both are calls for the state to structure interdependence
itself in the absence of work.
A Post-Fordist Ethnicity
So what about the place of ethnic attachment in this politics of personal
insecurity? To what extent can we understand contemporary Zuluness
as a form in which the contents of a post-Fordist sociality appear? In an
essay on depictions of precarious life in Europe at the end of the 20th
century, Berlant (2007) diagnoses a distinctive structure of feeling in the
acts of young people struggling at the bottom of the regime of flexible
labor-time. One aspect of this structure is an impulse towards normativity
in personal life. These insecure young adults desire roles and relation-
ships, particularly domestic ones, that even their working-class parents
seldom accomplished. The precarity of a life without secure employment
undercuts the material conditions, of course, for the slow-and-steady pro-
duction of a normal self, at home at last in the adult world. But instead of
giving up on their normative aspirations, Berlant’s young Europeans adopt
a characteristic posture or scheme of practice. They throw themselves
impulsively into scenes where the appearance of belonging hovers round
them like a mirage, immaterial but still in reach of their senses for a mo-
ment or two. They briefly come to rest within these fantasies, in states
of equable sympathy with their own projected selves. But of course the
unreality of the feeling soon reasserts itself, driving ever-more aggressive
efforts to re-inhabit it over again.
Zululand is by no means Europe. Even precarious labor is beyond the
reach of many young people here. Attitudes towards the state are also
more embracing than Berlant depicts in telling of a young woman’s choice
to reject state support because it serves as a measure of personal failure
417
(2007:274). South Africans can certainly be ambivalent about welfare. A

Zulu term for child support grants is “money of the back” (imali yeqo-
lo), a phrasing that in part connotes the act of sexual intercourse (see
Hunter 2011). Another favorite theme is that young women spend their
grants on clothes and hairstyles aimed at enticing sugar daddies, thus
positing a whole immoral economy that cycles sex into money and back
without passing through the mediation of work. But nothing of the kind
is said about state support for the elderly or the disabled, even though
these grants are several multiples of child support. Clearly, it is not welfare
as such that warrants scorn or reproach. The paypoint lines for monthly
grants start forming long before daybreak, in fact, and people dress in
their finest clothes to spend the day in the company of their neighbors at
the marketplaces that spring up around the vans dispensing cash. The
moments when the state delivers money to its people, then, are moments
not of humiliation but rather of community and festival. And as we have
seen already on the question of policing, the call is for the state to be—if
anything—not less but even more involved in the daily lives of its subjects.
Nonetheless, the “scene of belonging” Berlant describes as a space of
post-Fordist affect has quite definite equivalents here, in private life and
public too. In fact, this is exactly the structure of ethnic attachment itself
in post-Fordist South Africa. To describe this new disposition towards in-
habiting ethnicity, let me tell the story of Bheki, a man in his early 30s and a
neighbor of Bongani in the chiefdom on the coast where the ANC defeated
the local Inkatha establishment in 2009.
Bheki was born quite well. In the 1970s, his father was a businessman
and the owner of a van, an even rarer commodity then than now in black
communities. The chief, himself much younger then, was a family friend
and often called on Bheki’s father to drive him to events. But a streak of re-
bellion clearly ran quite deep in this family. In 2009, Bheki told me how his
father’s father, converting to Christianity several decades before, had of-
fered up an animal to the family dead to tell them that they would no longer
be recipients of such sacrifices. “Can you imagine?” he shook his head
and whistled. “Not just to stop, but to say to them, ‘That’s it!’” In the next
generation, despite or perhaps because of being born to such a strictly
Christian household, Bheki’s father rebelled in reverse. He abandoned the
church, and married for a second time when he started doing well. To make
matters even more complicated, his second wife, who was Bheki’s moth-
er, became a devoted Lutheran. Whenever things went wrong at home she
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said it was because Bheki’s father went behind her back to consult divin-
ers and to bring their occult substances into the house. She also feared
her elder co-wife was jealously bewitching her house. When her husband
passed away suddenly in the 1980s, she took her children and went to live
at her brother’s home in another part of the region. Bheki was away from
his father’s community, then, when the violence hit in the early 1990s. He
suffered through a parallel war instead, however. The second time I met
him, he pulled up the edge of his shorts to show me a knotted scar on his
thigh. One day, two trucks of Inkatha militants carrying spears had pulled
into his high school because they suspected the students of ANC loyal-
ties. His desk-mate was killed right next to him, but he got away with this
wound and an abiding hatred of all things Inkatha. His older brother felt the
same and became an ANC organizer, picking up the task of building local
support for the party when the family relocated back to their old home on
the coast. This meant the end of their once-congenial ties to the chief, and
Bheki’s brother eventually moved to a neighborhood on the edges of the
chiefdom, swearing that between witchcraft and Inkatha he would meet
his death if he stayed home longer. Within a few years, Bheki’s mother had
died, his sister moved in with her boyfriend, and his one remaining brother
got a job at a game park—leaving him the last at his family home.
Unusually for a man of his age, Bheki thus had a lot of private space,
and freedom from the incursions of his relatives. But without a job or
chance of marriage, this left him unfulfilled. He struggled to stay afloat
with small sums of cash he begged or borrowed from his friends or from
his siblings when they visited. He also worried constantly whenever he
was more than a few yards from home. With no one there to watch the
place he suspected that his neighbors might rob him. There was also the
unresolved charge that his father’s other wife, and maybe now her chil-
dren too, bore ill intent towards his branch of the family. Whenever he left
he locked all the doors and closed all the windows and carefully tucked
in plank upon plank at the gate, checking all of these barriers very care-
fully when he got back for marks of tampering. Quite often, though, he
simply spent whole days alone in the house in case someone came. One
source of comfort he took against this solitude was the radio. Another was
a quest that he had begun to re-establish conversation with his ancestors.
The two were closely linked in fact, since program after program that he
was listening to on a radio station from Durban featured talk about the re-
vival of African culture. Aimed as much at urban audiences as rural ones,
419
such calls to return to African ways have become a prominent feature of

the national media landscape since the end of apartheid. Whatever de-
bates they spark, in Zululand they come across as nothing like Inkatha’s
older discourse about traditional authority. Instead of being about chiefs
or about submission to customary law, they focus on the most up-to-date
components of the structure of feeling: self-discovery, self-forgiveness,
self-respect, the power of positive thinking. On the spectrum of South
African public culture in 2009 this was much closer to the Oprah show
and its local variations than it was to anything Buthelezi had ever said.
Listening to these smart, urbane psychologists of cultural pride, Bheki
started to wonder if his mother may have been wrong about his father’s
life. Maybe all the family problems he felt he had inherited came not from
his father’s use of diviners but rather from his grandfather’s singular act of
interrupting interaction with the dead. In January 2009, he had talked this
over at length with a cousin, and after that he started burning herbs every
night for his ancestors in his bedroom just before he went to sleep. At first
he was very self-conscious about this. Within a few weeks it was easier.
It was just like talking, he told me later. You kneel there and talk to them.
Bheki nonetheless refused the implication that by taking these steps
he was turning back to his Zuluness. Driven by his bitterness at Inkatha,
in fact, he renounced the label utterly. “I’m not a Zulu,” I heard him reason
on several occasions, to others’ intrigue and often their assent. “I live in
KwaZulu, I speak isiZulu, but I’m not a Zulu: I’m a Gumede,” he spoke his
clan name with pride. Here, he was referring to an increasingly popular
rewrite of the mythos that the Zulu nation originated in wars conducted by
Shaka of the Zulu clan to unite the other Nguni clans of the region under
his rule. Remember Bongani’s use of the word Nguni to refer to his com-
munity. Contemporary uses of that term often serve to relativize the place
of Zulu kingship in a wider terrain comprised of many clanships. The aim,
of course, is to rethink the 20th century as much as the Shakan age. Just
as Inkatha celebrated Shaka’s wars of sovereignty—drawing a line from
warriordom to modern Zulu nationalism—this new imagination links the
Shakan terror with Inkatha’s attacks on the ANC in the 1980s and early
1990s. Both campaigns did terrible violence, the new story goes, to a
constellation of plural local identities (see Carton et al. 2009). Bheki spoke
in perfectly Lockean terms about this deep precolonial past:
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My belief is that because there are all these clan names...there were
men who lived here, and they didn’t live in the bush, they built homes
[imizi yakhile]...And all those people had their own wealth, like cattle
and farmland and everything that was wealth at that time. People
were rich...and if someone in the family...didn’t have power to pay
bridewealth and get married, they...boosted him...so that he could
also get married and be a man and build his own home. So there was
a way for homes to increase... But then those Zulu people, you see?
At that time there was no law that said if I take your thing that is an of-
fense, or if I murder I should be locked up. There was just the law that
here at [each] home, here is the law we follow...So in that life...if they
[the Zulu clan] saw that there were desirable cattle and beautiful girls
and wives at someone’s home, they came out and killed...and they
took...everything valuable which they found there, all the inheritance
which they found there.
Not all iterations of this story are as vehemently put as Bheki’s refusal
of Zuluness. But they all suggest a radically new composition of ethnic
attachment (see Comaroff and Comaroff 2009). Here we have a mode
of identification centered not on institutions of traditional authority—the
latter appears as capricious violence here, not as law—but instead on a
plurality of parallel private spheres of right. Recall, then, Zuma’s appeal to
his ethnicity at his rape trial. His reported words were that it was not in “my
Zulu culture” to leave a woman sexually unsatisfied. The “culture” part of
that phrasing was what got him all the trouble, but the “my” part of it is, if
anything, more telling. It is not the sort of phrase one can imagine easily
uttered by a patrician Zulu nationalist of Buthelezi’s kind.
In returning to his own private ethnicity, Bheki hoped the dead would
bring him the sovereign happiness they themselves had once possessed
before the Zulu conquest. It is not too hard to hear echoes, of course, be-
tween his account of their ancient dispossession and the way that many
people of his generation were feeling about their own hopes of regenerat-
ing family lives in the early 21st century. But here I want to emphasize how
he sought to join with them practically in scenes of belonging. His private
communications with his ancestors, in his bedroom at night, are strik-
ing for their lack of institutional mediation. No resort to special ancestral
houses, nor to the conventional authority of family elders in ritual matters
(see White 2004, 2010). This is not to say such things had no place in
421
his life. But his nightly prayers suggested an effort to will himself more
intimately into situations of personal co-presence with these powerful fig-
ures, whose gifts could bring him security and normalcy.
As it happened, Bheki’s dead did well by him when he turned to them,
and so did the Zuma campaign. Two days after the ANC took three-quar-
ters of his community’s vote, a victory due in great part to efforts his broth-
er had made as an organizer, Bheki received a call from the closest branch
of a major parastatal corporation. An apprenticeship was waiting for him
the following month, with the chance of a unionized post in the public sec-
tor if he completed his training well. This would propel him from unemploy-
ment into one of the most dependable kinds of jobs available. He bought a
goat for the dead, and he took himself to church for the first time in years.
He made an extra offering at collection time, to buy some candles. His
mother, he thought, would have liked that. The preacher welcomed him
back and made a point of announcing his offering, which pleased him
greatly because a former girlfriend was there. She had left him when his
life was on hold, but maybe now she would think about him differently.
In fact, he was confident that she would, just as he was sure that life in
general would change now that Zuma had made it. Perhaps, the scene of
normalcy had materialized for real here.
A week after that, we took a trip together up to the highlands. Impatient
as we were waiting on the highway for a taxi, Bheki flagged down a logging
truck and we climbed up in the cab alongside the driver and his girlfriend.
Inevitably, the conversation turned to the election results and the driver
started spinning a gloomy story. No way things would change, he said.
The world would never let a truly black man rule unhindered. He had heard
it on the radio. If Zuma kept his promises, moneyed people would leave
the country. Companies would disinvest. The government would collapse.
Bheki sank into silence. “People can’t start talking about how Zuma’s go-
ing to fail,” he told me, after we had made our excuses and disembarked.
“It depresses my spirit. It makes me very angry.”
Conclusion
How Zuma would address the expectations of his supporters is beyond
the scope of this essay. Suffice it to say that during the next few years
his popularity would fall at times as dramatically as it had risen, particu-
larly with the young. And this should already caution us against the idea
422
Hylton White
that support for his campaign was based on longstanding forms of eth-
nic identification. So let us think instead about the structure of feeling
that gathered round his person at the moment of his triumph. Writing
in the South African press just days after Zuma’s inauguration, Jonny
Steinberg (2009) described the “enormous warmth” with which young
people responded to the president’s use of a frank, vernacular register
for discussing his sexuality. This reminded me of a conversation with one
of Bheki’s neighbors, during which I had noted, somewhat lamely, that
“people seem to love Zuma.” “What do you mean, ‘people’?” he scoffed:
“We love Zuma. I love Zuma.”
Zumania indeed. Even Mandela has generally not been regarded quite
the same way. Where the latter is revered as an exceptional man, Zuma
has been loved as a much more flawed, familiar person. As another young
man put it to me in 2009, Zuma was insulted to the core but he had sur-
vived and come back stronger. It was easy to imagine him as “a person
from our home.” Of course, his supporters were pinning their hopes on
what he would do with his power. But their path to that was specifically
through the projection of an intimate connection with him. This intimacy
had everything to do with how unashamedly he embraced “my Zulu cul-
ture,” but if culture itself was embedded in a new affective structure here,
then so was the kind of ethnic identification it facilitated. If culture was no
longer a marker for groups under ethnic governance, if culture was instead
a yearned-for scene of personal normalcy in an insecure world, then the
way that people identified with Zuma through his Zuluness was also nec-
essarily different. The compelling thing was not so much being Zulu per se
as the way he embraced “his” Zuluness as a source of personal strength,
as a mandate for the normative making of self.8 If Bheki’s life is any indica-
tion, Zuma’s young supporters wished intensely for that scene of embrace
with normalcy as well. To project themselves into intimate relationship with
Zuma was one way they could imagine feeling at home in the adult world
at last, supported by his gifts.
Gifts that would be dispensed, of course, by exercising power through
the state. And that is where the chain of affective links and identifications
that we have traced here comes to an end, of sorts. In loving Zuma, his
young supporters were hoping for a state that loved its people. Enough,
at least, to give them a boost like that which Bheki says his ancestors
once gave their poorer relatives who lacked the means to enter normal
adulthood. Most South Africans had come to regard Mbeki, Zuma’s
423
predecessor, not just as an elitist in his personal life but also as a leader
who had shut the door on the distribution of wealth to those who needed
it most desperately. For people like Bheki, these attributes were insepa-
rable. A leader who was of the people would surely be for them too. In his
references to “his” culture in a sexual scene, Zuma had shown the same
deeply normative impulses in his personal and family life that had chan-
neled the strongest yearnings of his supporters. Surely such a man would
use his presidential power to create a measure of personal security and
normalcy for those who needed it most. In Zumania, the love of the self
and the love of the state were intimately joined.
Two implications follow. The first is that this structure of political sen-
timent holds within it profoundly authoritarian possibilities. Across the
world the experience of the early 21st century portends, indeed, a fu-
ture where post-Fordism and the politics of security are ever more con-
joined. Many observers regard this as a matter of increasing regulation
from above (Steinmetz 2003). The stories I have told suggest that life at
the lower ends of the system of flexible labor-time creates an authoritar-
ian strain of popular affect too. The second implication follows directly
from the embedding of this affect in its broad historical period. If Zumania
was very much a creature of the early 21st century, so was the appeal to
Zuma’s Zuluness that helped make his campaign at once so vivid and so
deeply controversial. There is indeed a very long history to ethnic attach-
ments in politics. So much so that one could say the concept of a cultural
identity is rooted in the deepest forms of modern social life (see Sartori
2008). But its mediation into particular modes of identification is a process
that cannot be read off precedents such as its use in colonial governance
or in other aspects of politics under colonialism. Zuma’s supporters ut-
terly rejected the concatenation of cultural identity, ethnic community, and
rule through “decentralized despotism” (Mamdani 1996). It was Zuma’s
own identification with Zuluness in his personal life that made him into
an intimate, of the very most up-to-date kind. Through that identification
they desired an unmediated relationship with the power of the state—not
as an ethnically classified population, but as individuals living in a scene
of embrace with ethnically grounded normalcy and security in spaces of
private existence. n
424
Hylton White
Acknowledgments:
Versions of this paper were presented at the University of Toronto Center for Ethnography, the Wits
Anthropology Seminar, and the Haverford Anthropology Colloquium. For very helpful comments I am
indebted to Andrea Muehlebach, Nitzan Shoshan, Mark Hunter, Michael Lambek, Mateo Taussig-Rubbo,
Jonny Steinberg, Jean and John Comaroff, Julia Hornberger, and especially Andrew Sartori.
Endnotes:
1See,for instance, Naki (2008). Another popular usage for the seemingly unstoppable force of his victory
was “Zunami,” after coverage of the strength of the 2004 tsunami in the Indian Ocean.
2South Africa has notoriously disappointed those who hoped that ethnic definitions of collective life would
become a thing of the country’s apartheid past. From the growth of ethnic commerce (Comaroff and
Comaroff 2009) to a rising tide of nostalgia for cultural intimacies apartheid once accommodated in seg-
regated spaces (Blom Hansen 2005, Dlamini 2010), ethnicity has if anything become an even more salient
feature of public life post-apartheid than at any other time in the last two centuries.
3Here, we have an irony in the way Foucauldian method is received by certain strands of postcolonial
theory. For Foucault, of course, genealogy is exactly that which allows one to avoid telling origin stories.
Sartori (n.d.) offers a broader critique of contradictions in Foucault’s own use of genealogical method.
4I write in full awareness of post-structuralist critiques of social analysis. See Postone (1998) for one rebut-
tal. Such positions are 1) unable to account for their own historical emergence as responses to mid-20th
century European managerialism, and therefore 2) repeat an anti-Fordist celebration of concreteness and
contingency, against systemic integration, even when the context where that celebration made sense is
itself long gone.
5More precisely, one could argue that the abstract structures of interaction which ground the concept
of “social” life in the modern sense are themselves predicated historically by the organization of human
interaction through forms of capital (see Postone 1993).
6See the discussion of time and labor in the introduction to this collection.
7All of the names in the following have been changed, along with a few other details, to protect anonymity.
8If this were not the case, it would be very hard to explain why appeals to his ethnicity were also very popu-
lar among non-Zulu South Africans, as they seem to have been. But that is beyond the scope of this essay.
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Foreign language translations:

Keywords: Post-Fordism, ethnicity, youth, South Africa, Zulu
后福特时代的族群意识 : 论南非之不安定性 , 权威与身份认同
关键词 : 后福特主义 , 族群 , 青年 , 南非 , 祖鲁
Постфордистская этничность: Опасность, власть и идентичность в Южной Африке
Ключевые слова: постфордизм, этничность, молодежь, Южная Африка, зулу
Uma Etnicidade Pos Fordista: Insegurança, Autoridade e Identidade na Africa do Sul
Palavras chaves: Pos-Fordismo, etnicidade, juventude, Africa do Sul, Zulu
‫ والهوية يف إفريقيا الجنوبية‬،‫ السلطة‬،‫ فقدان الطأمنينة‬:‫العرقية البرشية ملا بعد فورست‬
‫ قبائل الزولو‬،‫ إفريقيا الجنوبية‬،‫ الشباب‬،‫ العرق البرشي‬،‫ ما بعد فوردست‬:‫الكلامت الجامعة‬
427

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A Post-Fordist Ethnicity: Insecurity, Authority, and

Identity in South Africa

Anthropological Quarterly, Volume 85, Number 2, Spring 2012, pp. 397-427

Published by George Washington University Institute for Ethnographic Research

For additional information about this article

I n August 2009, South African humorist Fred Khumalo devoted a news-

The very fact that we are debating ethnicity is a disgrace. Is this

around him in the run-up to his election to the presidency. It overlooks

higher wages to higher productivity (Gramsci 1971). South Africa, by con-

a colonial variant on Fordism at work in the increasingly tight regulation

appeal to ethnicity as an organizing principle of legitimacy and belonging

or domains of interaction necessarily seems to assert a transhistorically

Elections and Authorities

neighbors came to join us and started drawing an image of an under-

2009, a group of young men gathered to track down a neighbor accused

We want to be ruled by police. Not these izinduna. The police are

has in fact been controversial, if anything, for the kinds of accommoda-

Territory, Authority, Security

to convert their wages to bridewealth and to build up rural homes of mar-

for a moment to a story about one of Zama’s neighbors, a young man

(2007:274). South Africans can certainly be ambivalent about welfare. A

such calls to return to African ways have become a prominent feature of

Foreign language translations:

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