PART II: UNEQUAL, TRANSITIONAL CONTEXT
4. Introduction: Rendering trans-generational and lifespan inequality visible
4.2 Contextual background: Inequality and transition in South Africa
103 I used secondary sources to examine instances of social injustice over time which allowed the inclusion of some examples that were not necessarily intended as an injustice, but that were unjust in its consequences, particularly during early transition. This helped to
answer part of the research question related to the ‘unequal, transitional society’. I traced the intergenerational and compounded nature of ascribed inequality and privilege, and some of its consequences over time, so that contemporary restorative justice responses to crime are contextualised. Specifically I looked for examples of cultural violence which legitimised and justified structural violence and gave rise to manifestations of direct violence such as inequality of wealth, power, social standing, opportunities and conditions; armed repressive violence and counter-violence, as well as infringements, abuses and violations of human rights.
4.2 Contextual background: Inequality and transition in South Africa
104 crime/social harm. The notion of historical trauma is discussed in chapter 9 and referred to in chapter 10 with regard to further research.
4.2.1 Trends in historical writing
Crais raises some pertinent points about historical writing, which he argues:
[G]enerally followed trends set elsewhere: European, especially British, labor history; the new economic anthropology and world systems analysis.
A corpus of work privileged the study of capital and class, part of a later social turn in the interpretive social sciences. Beginning in late 1980s and accelerating in the next decade, the history of political economy generally began fading from view. The 1990s saw a wave of studies in which culture and language, colonial encounter and discourses, moved toward the center of research and writing. (Crais, 2011:7).
With regard to South African history, Crais (2011) states that some historians questioned the ’telos of historical models whereby Africans inevitably became wage labourers or city dwellers’. He argues that they offered unorthodox ways of ‘thinking about the political imagination unfettered by the narrative of official nationalism or resistance to the state’.
He poses the question, ‘[H]ow have models of explanation obscured or suppressed engagement with other ways of understanding the past, other ways of being in the world (p.7)?
My research question and overall research approach resonates with Crais’ central
concerns. In his historical writing he seeks to understand the bare conditions of existence by focusing on ’two processes at the center of modern imperialism and the contemporary world: the prosecution of violence and the creation of new patterns of systemic poverty and inequality’ (p.8). He queries how the story of rural poverty might unfold if violence was at the centre of the analysis, and poses the question – ‘[T]o what extent was violence both destructive and formative or constitutive of new and durable social and economic patterns? (p.8). Having established this resonance with Crais’ key questions, my concern was laid to rest because I sought to understand if there is a plausible interaction between past and present violence(s); and individual propensity that result in social harms in the present.
I chose a random selection of expert voices to get an overall idea of South Africa’s broader historical transition, and the continuity of patterns of inequality as a significant
105 constitutive element of structural violence. This was done to provide a broad view of the macro context within which social structural, political and criminal violence intersected over time, and into which restorative justice is injected at a micro level. I include many perspectives that are marginal to mainstream scholarship throughout this thesis, as I believe that these voices help to bring the bigger picture into focus by highlighting aspects that are routinely ignored. I begin the section with the voice of a female
Khoekhoe descendant, to signal that I understand South African history to be contested.
Even the choice and spelling of the names of the first peoples of South Africa and their historical experience, from their own perspective, remain in the blindspot of the new South Africa.
4.2.2 History and positional inequality
For example, Abrahams (2007:422) a Khoekhoe descendant and historian, who wrote the historiography of Sarah Baartman from a subjugated position, suggests that history is about identity. According to her, the identities of historians appear to interact with their studies in peculiar ways. Her research on Sarah Baartman’s life and the conversations she had with people about her was for Abrahams, a process of learning. She describes a key lesson as: ‘I would remain a Brown woman, no matter how many strings of degrees I trailed behind my name’ (p.422). This statement provides a glimpse into the deeply entrenched and intersectional nature of inequality in the form of race, class and gendered internalised superiority and internalised inferiority in South Africa. Abrahams chronicled her struggle in a journal which gives an idea of research on an aspect of South Africa’s history, from a subjugated position:
This diary is about my inability to be a disembodied academic
dispassionately analysing some objectified specimen. My race and my gender follow me, even into my academic work. There is not, in the Sarah Baartman historiography which has been written by white males, any symbolic role model where Black = good, woman = righteousness, or Brown = beauty. (Abrahams, 2007:422).
Here Abrahams alludes to the fact that she had to do a lot of ‘[r]estoring, re-
contextualising and rebutting’ to re-work the Khoekhoe history written from a white, mainly male perspective; and to replace this with an exploration of the triple intersection of the identity African/native/slave (p.436).
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