SOUTH AFRICAN RURAL IMAGINATIONS

Imagining the Rural in Contemporary South African Culture

This subproject focuses on South Africa. Including an African country in this project is essential because SubSaharan Africa is dominantly associated with rural lifestyles and constitutes another of globalization’s “forgotten fronts” (Nyamnjoh 2003). South Africa is particularly interesting because its rural imagination is stratified into racialized perspectives tied to specific communal identities. This stratification pervades the public debate and complicates the resolution of the prominent post-apartheid political issues of rural poverty (De Jongh 2002; O’Laughlin et al. 2013) and land redistribution (James 2007; Hall 2012).

Afrikaans identity – as forged in the Boer Wars and the Apartheid era – is grounded in the rural (Giliomee 1987). In contrast, black South African identity is linked to a history of rural-urban migration, as portrayed in the classic 1949 film Jim Comes to Joburg and in many literary texts, leading prominent South African author Njabulo Ndebele to complain, in 1991, that “the city appears to have taken tyrannical hold on the imagination of the average African writer” (Ndebele 1994: 26). In contemporary South African cultural imaginations, however, the battle or negotiation between different communities’ rights and responsibilities is waged particularly strongly in rural settings. Across literature, film and television, multiple distinct rural imaginations can be distinguished.

First, a “black African rural” that involves, besides stories of migration to the urban, a strong invocation of the ancestral (tribal) village as the true home to which one is supposed to return–as enacted, for example, in Nelson Mandela’s Xhosa burial in Qunu. Second, a “white Afrikaans rural,” which centers on the idea of the plaas (farm) and the fear of losing the sense of rootedness it offers. This imagination of the rural is dominantly linked to the plaasroman, a type of regional novel that used to be associated with a pastoral or utopian mode (A. Coetzee 1996; J.M. Coetzee 1986), but has recently acquired an anti-pastoral or dystopian inflection (Postel 2006; Wenzel 2000). This new plaasroman also explicitly engages with globalization processes (Neervoort 2011). A “white English rural,” originating in Olive Schreiner’s classic The Story of an African Farm (1883), can also be distinguished, often focused on asserting its dissent from the values espoused by the Afrikaans rural – as in J.M. Coetzee’s rural childhood memoir Boyhood. Thirdly, a “colored rural” needs to be brought into stronger focus than has been the case up to now (De Jongh 2002; Sylvain 2002; Brynard 2016).

This subproject explores to what extent the tensions between these different imagined rurals and their effects on rural policy discussions become visible in prominent 21st-century South African rural imaginations, and what politics these imaginations support, using the theoretical framework outlined above, rural studies research on South Africa (Carter and May 1999; Neves and Toit 2013; Ntsebeza 2005; Ntsebeza and Hall 2007; Sartorius et al. 2013) and studies of South African rural imaginations in literature, film and television (Graham 2009; Maingard 2007; Meyer 2012; Prinsloo and Visagie 2009; Steenkamp 2016).

References:
Brynard, Karin. Tuisland. London: Penguin, 2016.
Carter, Michael R., and Julian May. “Poverty, Livelihood and Class in Rural South Africa.” World Development 27.1 (1999): 1-20.
Coetzee, Ampie. “My Birthright Gives Me a Servitude on this Land: The Farm Novel within the Discourse on Land.” Journal of Literary Studies 12.1-2 (1996): 124-44.
Coetzee, J. M. “Farm Novel and ‘Plaasroman’ in South Africa.” English in Africa (1986): 1-19.
De Jongh, Michael. “No Fixed Abode: The Poorest of the Poor and Elusive Identities in Rural South Africa.” Journal of Southern African Studies 28.2 (2002): 441-60.
Giliomee, Hermann. “Western Cape Farmers and the Beginnings of Afrikaner Nationalism, 1870–1915.” Journal of Southern African Studies 14.1 (1987): 38-63.
Graham, Shane. South African Literature after the Truth Commission: Mapping Loss. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009.
Hall, Ruth. “The Next Great Trek? South African Commercial Farmers Move North.” Journal of Peasant Studies 39.3-4 (2012): 823-43.
James, Deborah. Gaining Ground? Rights and Property in South African Land Reform. London: Routledge, 2007.
Maingard, Jacqueline. South African National Cinema. Abingdon: Routledge, 2007.
Meyer, Susan. “Stemme van agter die plaas se hek:die mens-natuur-‘gesprek’ in Dwaalpoort van Alexander Strachan /Voices from behind the farm gate: the people-nature-‘conversation’ in Dwaalpoort by Alexander Strachan.” Tydskrif vir Geesteswetenskappe 52.2 (2012):290-306.
Ndebele, Njabulo S. South African Literature and Culture: Rediscovery of the Ordinary. 1991. Manchester: Manchester UP, 1994.
Neervoort, Hans. “Het hemd is nader: De streekroman als natuurlijk, nationalistisch fenomeen.” Stilet: Tydskrif van die Afrikaanse Letterkundevereniging 23.2 (2011): 48-60.
Neves, David, and Andries Toit. “Rural Livelihoods in South Africa: Complexity, Vulnerability and Differentiation.” Journal of Agrarian Change 13.1 (2013): 93-115.
Ntsebeza, Lungisile. Democracy Compromised: Chiefs and the Politics of the Land in South Africa. Brill, Leiden, 2005.
Ntsebeza, Lungisile, and Ruth Hall. The Land Question in South Africa: The Challenge of Transformation and Redistribution. Cape Town: HSRC press, 2007.
Nyamnjoh, Francis B. “Globalization, Boundaries, and Livelihoods: Perspectives on Africa.” Philosophia Africana 6.2 (2003): 1-18.
O’Laughlin, Bridget, et al. “Introduction: Agrarian Change, Rural Poverty and Land Reform in South Africa since 1994.” Journal of Agrarian Change 13.1 (2013): 1-15.
Postel, Gitte. Unheimlich moederland: (Anti-)pastorale letteren in Zuid-Afrika. Amsterdam: Amsterdam UP, 2006.
Prinsloo, Loraine, and Andries Visagie. “Grondbesit in’n postkoloniale plaasroman: Marlene van Niekerk se Agaat.” JLS/TLW 25.3 (2009): 72-89.
Sartorius, Kurt, et al. “Rural Poverty Dynamics and Refugee Communities in South Africa: A Spatial– temporal Model.” Population, Space and Place 19.1 (2013): 103-123.
Steenkamp, Hilke. “A Marriage Made in Heaven: The Functioning of Patriarchy and Nostalgia in Boer soek’n vrou.” Communicatio 42.3 (2016): 313-337
Sylvain, Renee. “‘Land, Water, and Truth’: San Identity and Global Indigenism.” American Anthropologist 104 (4): 1074-1085.
Wenzel, Jennifer. “The Pastoral Promise and the Political Imperative: The Plaasroman Tradition in an Era of Land Reform.” MFS Modern Fiction Studies 46.1 (2000): 90-113.

Background image: screenshot from Five Fingers for Marseilles (dir. M. Matthews, 2017)