Fractured communities and the elusive state: a study of state/society relations in Duncan Village

Abstract

The thesis explores the shifting dynamics of state/society relations in South Africa. Focusing on the case of Duncan Village township and the Buffalo City Metropolitan Municipality (BCMM) in East London, I map the continuities and discontinuities of practices of the state in its everyday encounter with citizens. The thesis rests on the argument that the state has a multifaceted and multidimensional character. Understanding state/society relations therefore requires a multidimensional and multifaceted approach that makes a relational analysis of the actions and experiences of the actors within the state and communities. I argue that when we explore everyday state practices from above, the idea and the image of the state becomes an elusive puzzle that keeps on shifting when individuals and communities attempt to reach out to it to hold it accountable for its responsibilities, real or assumed. However, when the study of the state embraces a bottom-up approach, i.e. understanding it from the margins of society, the elusive puzzle is demystified and reconfigured as communities reject the imposed and traditional understanding of the state and choose to engage it in ways that are meaningful to their everyday experiences. This understanding of the state by communities making everyday claims on the state also facilitates the mutation of these communities into hybrid entities that defy and challenge nationalistic notions of citizenship and belonging. A close reading of the everyday interactions between state representatives and communities also suggests a continuation of the struggle for inkululeko (freedom), an objective which Duncan Village residents claim was never achieved notwithstanding the end of apartheid. Thus democracy that was achieved –a result that Duncan Village residents claim they did not fight for –presents itself as a ‘new’ battlefield on which struggles for the realisation of inkululeko continue to be fought. The thesis draws from an eighteen-month ethnographic mapping of Duncan Village and Buffalo City Metropolitan Municipality in South Africa. To understand how everyday encounters between the state and communities de-reify the state and interrupt linear understanding of identities that constitute a community, the study brings together analyses of thirty life histories of local historians, fifty-two interviews/conversations, seven focus group discussions, archival work and participant observation, and employs the extended case method, intersectional feminism(s), fragmented narrative and sociology of rumour as the main methodologies