Responses to Scarcity and Bifurcated Fandom in South Africa
/Stelios to Nyasha:
(a) Could you provide a short paragraph on how the "decimalization" argument applies to football fandom?
(b) Could you define "forensic apartheid studies"? More specifically, as I read (https://apartheidstudies.wordpress.com/2019/09/05/towards-apartheid-studies/ ), I am interested to know more about whether "forensic" is a metaphor from criminal justice to emphasize that apartheid studies is a form of criminal investigation into history (the crime being apartheid and the task being to prove that harm has been done and that there is a guilty offender) or does "forensic" apply in the common sense, i.e., investigating cases where specific apartheid-motivated crimes have been committed (or both).
Nyasha pasting some text from some early email responses for additional context [we have already seen this - am just creating a thread for the record. Dora had asked about “good neighbourliness”: “I wanted to make sure I understand the concept of "good neighborliness." Is a central/defining component of that concept that the one-tenth and the nine-tenths need each other? The term itself--"good neighborliness"--seems to suggest a spatial organization of that inequality. Would you say that it is intended to describe, for example, how wealth and poverty exist side by side in cities in (South) Africa (so, for example, extremely wealthy neighborhoods existing and maintaining good relations with extremely poor neighbors right outside their borders)?”]:
“Good neighbourliness” is the definition of apartheid advanced by the so-called father or architect of apartheid, HF Verwoerd. In 1961, Verwoerd, in a broadcast, defined apartheid as "a policy of good neighbourliness" (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vPCln9czoys). He was, of course, trying to euphemise and airbrush apartheid. In my work, I turn this definition against itself, because I see that apartheid is indeed a policy of good neighbourliness, but just not in the sense Verwoerd meant to euphemise it. Rather I show in the emerging framework of apartheid studies (AS) that apartheid has two forms, a primitive one and an advanced one (just like a butterfly). Primitive apartheid is what we typically know and recognise as apartheid (1948-1994 in South Africa). It is easy to mobilise against, as proven at Sharpeville (1960) and Soweto (1976), and so on. It is primitive because it is merely the first draft of apartheid, a rehearsal or caterpillar stage of the butterfly. But the more data apartheid gathers, the better it gets at what does it. It becomes more "normal" and "beautiful". In other words, we notice it less and less, and it becomes a part of the furniture. We begin to live our everyday lives according to the very structures that we used to recognise as alien impositions, but have now become less urgent as targets of our disquiet. We now have other more urgent things to focus on, such as paying bills and catering for household expenditure. When we no longer notice apartheid, even if it is still there, we become "good neighbours". This is the butterfly stage of apartheid that apartheid has always been aiming for - the highest stage o apartheid. We struggle to see the caterpillar in the butterfly - or even if we do, we do not have the energy for it anymore. Thus life goes on as best as it can, or as best as it knows how.
So good neighbourliness explains why, despite oppression having such a pedigree (hundreds of years of persistence) within global modernity, there has yet to be a truly successful revolution against it (i.e., one that abolishes oppression and injustice). The reason seems to be that the oppressed, with time, find ways to live in harm's way (the way we are expected to eventually learn to "live with" Covid, for instance). So "living with" is a central concept of good neighbourliness. I use the notion of decimalisation as one of the means to illustrate how good neighbourliness takes place. So if you put a decimal point between 00, which is one number, you immediately transform the number to 0.0, with the two zeroes no longer equal. It is still one number, but now with a central transformation. The zeroes are still located next to each other in the string (like "good neighbours", or the same citizens, or the same Europeans, or the same human beings etc.), but now with vastly different and unequal outcomes. To the right of the decimal point is where slums and poverty occur. To the left is where wealth, leafy suburbs and affluence are found. There is no passage between the two. So, in fact, I invert the normative political "left"/"right" distinction.
In my view, butterfly apartheid is truly global. You find it in every society in the world where the oppressed live in harm's way (and are unable to get out) and "live with harm". You find it in Brazil, Bulgaria, Germany, the US (see New York, for instance), Kenya, Zimbabwe, India, Cyprus, South Africa etc.
Consider, for instance, the deaths of Cristina and Violetta Djeordsevic (or Ebrehmovich), the two Italian Roma sisters aged 13 and 11, who drowned in the sea at the public beach at Torregaveta, in Naples, Italy (https://observers.france24.com/en/20080723-holidaymakers-drowned-roma-girls-naples). That is good neighbourliness. Look at how life goes on. There is no apocalypse.
[Then Dora asked about race: “...to what extent the "nine-tenthification" follows racial lines. I wasn't sure if this bifurcation of economic inequality between one-tenth and nine-tenth also follows racial lines with the one-tenth being white and the nine-tenth being BIPOC. I am assuming that some version of that is the case, but I would love to know more about it. ”]
(T)he way I see it, apartheid uses race optimally only in its primitive phase. But the more apartheid learns from its mistakes and gathers newer data about how the oppressed behave, the less it depends on race as the organising principle. Instead, it seeks to hide in plain sight. So we can speak of phases of ninetenthification, one phase occurring within primitive apartheid, and so clearly race-bound, and the other phase occurring in the present and since 1994, and able to easily transcend race.
In any case, once a decimal point is placed amongst the ranks of the oppressed, it separates the one-tenth from the nine-tenth, and the one-tenth starts to belong to the left side of the decimal point where whites historically were located as citizens and full humans.
In the emerging apartheid studies framework, race is important only secondarily. Apartheid, being a domain of an interface, uses anything that it finds handy, race included. Apartheid can use any interface, beyond just race. It also relies less and less on race.
Stelios Stylianou's Reply to Nyasha Mboti's Opening Statement
In the course of this forum, we have presented opening statements to set a ground for exchanging ideas. I have been thinking about these opening statements as points of departure rather than mature texts to be evaluated for completeness or correctness. With this in mind, I have read your opening statement, dear Nyasha, as a brief introduction to apartheid studies, which includes some connections to fandom. In replying, my intention is to present an opportunity for elaboration on some issues in an open and creative way.
(1) Your text presents the grand concept of apartheid, introduces a whole new field of study, apartheid studies, and is, at the same time, an academic manifesto. It is broadly about inequality, one of the central axes of sociological thinking. Your conceptualization falls within the conflict paradigm, whereby society is a field of conflicting interests, political, economic, and symbolic, with the conflicting parties mobilizing every means available to sustain and promote their power. You place the theoretical subject in the broader area of the study of social change as well, by distinguishing between the "caterpillar" and the "butterfly" versions of apartheid. This corresponds to structural dimensions such as those defined around gender, race, ethnicity, citizenship, and so on, where theoretical analyses and normative debates have existed for many decades. I see, in your conceptualization, a clear way to understand (and explain to my students—thank you!) the difference between overt (or old-fashioned) and institutionalized discrimination. These are narrower concepts to be fair, but they are of the same analytic nature. Indeed, your "life goes on" concept is an excellent way to represent the consolidation of oppression, where inequality has been legitimized and normalized. Could you please comment on these thoughts.
(2) In this respect, although not necessarily related to fandom—but you may make the connection—I am particularly interested to see a more elaborate definition of forensic apartheid studies. As a criminologist by training, I am interested to know more about how forensic science is used in comparative-historical sociological analysis and in cultural studies, particularly in the context of apartheid studies. Can we say that apartheid studies is a form of criminal investigation into history; the crime being apartheid and the task being to prove that harm has been done and that there is a guilty offender?
(3) Turing to fandom, I think that you are making some connections which are worthwhile and I would like to see some elaboration. I would be interested to read your thoughts about how fandom is defined in a society with stark inequalities and discrete social classes, a dual peripheral economy, if I may use the concept form World Systems Theory. Whether we analytically stay within one African society or take Africa as the society of reference, we seem to be talking about two separate worlds, the elite and the rest; hence, your decimalization thesis. There seems to be no middle class, in any case not a visible, let alone powerful enough, middle class, and this makes the fandom landscape uniquely interesting to start with. Could you please tell us a little bit more about the fandom aspect of decimalization; and, if space permits, a little bit about football fandom in particular? Can we juxtapose this fandom landscape with, say contemporary Western European Societies, where a large and mature middle class exists?
(4) Finally, my observations on the masculinist discourse in my own studies, seem to echo your comment on continuity and change ("the more things change the more they remain the same") in 21st century Africa. The shift from hegemonic toward more inclusive masculinities and from rigid to more relaxed patriarchal structures that has been happening in the Global North at surface level does not seem to have effectively reached deeper cultural tiers. So, could you please briefly comment on the role of gender and masculinity with respect to fandom in decimalized societies?
