Rising socially after the fall of Apartheid : the pursuit of social mobility for young professionals in post-Apartheid Cape Town

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Master’s Thesis for Social and Cultural Anthropology

Rising socially after the fall of Apartheid

The pursuit of social mobility for young professionals in post-Apartheid Cape Town

Camila da Costa Gil 11271728 Amsterdam, December 28th of 2017 Word count: 27.039 Supervisor: Rachel Spronk Second Readers: Lieve de Coninck and Milena Veenis

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Plagiarism Declaration

I hereby declare that this thesis meets the rules and regulations for fraud and

plagiarism as set out by the Examination Committee of the MSc Cultural and

Social Anthropology at the University of Amsterdam. This thesis is entirely my

own original work, and all sources have been properly acknowledged.

Camila da Costa Gil

28/12/2017

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Abstract

Since its emancipation from Apartheid in 1994, conspicuous consumption has been a

controversial topic in South Africa’s public debate. The social landscape of post-Apartheid was marked by a fast growth of the black elite and black middle classes, followed by an explicitly display of conspicuous wealth. After the end of the regime, these unprivileged citizens, who were moving up the social ladder and were consequently improving economic access to consumption, started being judged by their affluent lifestyle. Their moral values were put into check, because their luxurious lifestyle did not represent all the struggle and effort put into the 1994 political liberation.

The study of conspicuous consumption post-Apartheid is relevant to understand the reasons why people who moved to upper social classes started to treat material consumption and their lifestyle in a conspicuous way, especially right after the fall of a regime filled with social, political, and economic restrictions. With the aim of understanding what these lifestyles mean to the people whom I have talked to, I intend to clarify the question of what the meaning of

conspicuous consumption is for young professionals in post-Apartheid Cape Town by looking at middle class as a cultural practice, as well as considering consumption as more than just its materiality, within a cross racial group of people with a special interest to look at it from an angle of agency rather than a structural perspective.

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Acknowledgements

I would like to thank those who have participated in this research, spending their time in long conversations and having the patience to share their life experiences with me.

Without the help of Carol, Roy, Nobomi, Edgard, and their acquaintances in Cape Town, this thesis would not have been possible.

I would also like to express my immense gratitude to those who guided me through every stage of this research, specially Rachel Spronk. Her supervision and comments encouraged me until the last minute of this process. She made me believe in myself even when there was no more energy left to do so.

I am also greatly thankful for my partner’s positive words and support throughout this whole academic year. Philip was always by my side motivating me to go beyond than what I believed I could have gone. Finally, a great appreciation to my classmates, friends, and family members, specially my father and my mother. Their steady support and encouragement were crucial for me to finish this piece of work which I am very proud of.

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Still I Rise

You may write me down in history With your bitter, twisted lies, You may trod me in the very dirt But still, like dust, I'll rise…. Just like moons and like suns, With the certainty of tides, Just like hopes springing high, Still I'll rise…. Did you want to see me broken? Bowed head and lowered eyes? Shoulders falling down like teardrops, Weakened by my soulful cries?.... You may shoot me with your words, You may cut me with your eyes, You may kill me with your hatefulness, But still, like air, I’ll rise. Leaving behind nights of terror and fear I rise Into a daybreak that’s wondrously clear I rise Bringing the gifts that my ancestors gave, I am the dream and the hope of the slave. I rise I rise I rise

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Introduction

On a rainy Sunday morning, I left home to meet Ottavio for a late brunch. The venue was a fancy restaurant located in an affluent area on the further outskirts of Cape Town, 45 kilometers away from the cosmopolitan hub of the city. When I arrived there, it was impossible not to notice the beautiful surroundings. Even on a cloudy day, I was able to see both uninterrupted sides of the beach coastlines and the Atlantic Ocean in its backdrop. We then sat down and started our pleasant meal. After a three-hour conversation, he invited me to meet his family at his house. I accepted the invitation, and we left in his white BMW parked right across the restaurant’s street.

After five minutes, we arrived at his gated community residential area. Ottavio waved at a security guard, and so he let us pass. Driving towards his house, I started seeing many well-designed contemporary big houses with nicely cut lawns, as well as expensive and good-looking cars parked in front of them, and an 18-hole golf course right in the middle of it all. Ottavio then parked his BMW in his 4-car garage, where there was also a convertible black Mazda.

We both walked into his well-decorated dining room. His wife and some family members greeted us. They all invited me to join and take a seat in this long brown leathered sofa. Ottavio offered me a glass of Cabernet Sauvignon from his private collection stored in a custom-made Liebherr wine fridge. While making myself comfortable in his lavish living room, something called my attention. These two arm chairs covered with a fabric of Great Britain’s flag design, they looked very opulent.

After some time, they asked me if I wanted to stay for dinner, and once again I accepted the invitation. We gathered around the kitchen marble counter, and served ourselves some Cape Malay food nicely put in a Le Creuset set of pans and trays. After saying grace, with food on our plates, we then sat on this 12-seat table. We ate, we chatted, we made jokes; I had an unexpected but enjoyable evening with Ottavio and his family. The night was coming to an end, and I had to leave home. Inside the cab, I turned back, and one more time waved goodbye to Ottavio. He stood there in front of his mansion, the 18-hole golf course by his backyard, and the Table Mountain behind them all.

Ottavio is a black South African in his early 40s who was born and raised in a township during the Apartheid regime. He used to live with his single mother, and his two brothers in a community located 35 kilometers away from Johannesburg. As noticed, he obviously climbed the social ladder and now enjoys a lavish life, which enables him to have access to expensive

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commodities and an opulent lifestyle. I remembered asking him a short and punctual question toward the end of our brunch: “So Ottavio, tell me what luxury means to you nowadays?”. He, with no hesitation, responded with a grin on his face: “Luxury is my life!”.

This vignette describes a relevant moment in the beginning of my fieldwork in which I had the opportunity to face the original puzzle of my research. During our conversation, Ottavio claimed he does not live a flashy lifestyle. This is not exactly what I noticed when I was invited to his house. I perceived a sense of opulence from the moment I encountered him in that fancy restaurant until I left his home.

Due to many enriching experiences in the field, I wanted to work with the central idea of what means to live a more privileged lifestyle in a post-conflict political system. My intention was to listen to everyday life stories from people of any race, but mainly who were either children or teenagers during the regime. Citizens who belonged to the generation that went through the political transition and were the pioneers of a more integrated country. Therefore, the research question that guided me through this study is the following: what is the meaning of conspicuous consumption for young professionals in post-Apartheid Cape Town? In the next sections, I will briefly point out key events of the public debate, the setting, the informants, and the methodology of the research.

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Public Debate

Since its emancipation from Apartheid in 1994, conspicuous consumption has been a

controversial topic in South Africa’s public debate. Authors Seekings and Nattrass described this period as “Perhaps the most dramatic shift in the social landscape of post-apartheid South Africa” (2005: 308). It was a time marked by a fast growth of the black elite and black middle classes, followed by an explicitly positive acceptance and display of conspicuous wealth, in other words living an opulent and flashy lifestyle (Posel 2010: 159). Some scholarly studies have revealed there was and still has been a significant rise of non-white middle class in the post-Apartheid period, due to a more democratic political system, and as a consequence better job opportunities offered to the disadvantaged individuals of that time. However, after the end of the regime, these unprivileged citizens, who were moving up the social ladder and were consequently improving economic access to consumption, started being judged by their affluent lifestyle. Their moral values were put into check, because their luxurious lifestyle did not represent all the struggle and effort made for the 1994 political liberation. At the time, their consumption behavior was judged by many as unethical and immoral to the principles of the country’s society and the struggle they had to go through to gain social freedom. Therefore, the topic on conspicuous consumption began to be discussed frequently and seen as a problematic question in South Africa’s public debate; a phenomenon that was possibly putting the ethical image of the country in danger.

For instance, in 2007, exactly thirteen years past the first democratic elections of the country, Smuts Ngonnyama, responsible for the communications department of the South African Presidency, made a statement that shocked millions of South African citizens. He proudly asserted the following: “I didn’t join the struggle to be poor”; a statement with a financial meaning, but also loaded with political and social connotation. Ngonnyama’s belief certainly marked a new era for the unprivileged individuals during Apartheid and were now doing better financially. His statement was heavily criticized, a representation of what had gone “…wrong in the new democratic South Africa: a marker of distortion, a moral perversion, born of a crass and shallow materialism” (Posel 2010: 157 &158).

Not long before that political storm caused by Ngonyama’s bold declaration, Thabo Mbeki, the President at the time, criticized the free nation, especially the black majority for losing their morality right after the struggle. Mbeki released a note showing the total opposite of what Ngonnyama stated, which says the following:

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“It is perfectly obvious that many in our society, having absorbed the value system of the capitalist market, have come to the conclusion that for them, personal success and fulfilment meant personal enrichment at all costs, and the most theatrical and striking public display of that wealth… The meaning of freedom has come to be defined, not by the seemingly ethereal and therefore intangible gift of liberty, but by the designer labels on the clothes we wear, the cars we drive, the spaciousness of our houses and our yards…” (Mbeki 2006).

Mbeki morally judged the non-white South Africans who were then able to live life glamorously for their empty and shallow lifestyle. Apparently, the heart of the matter was that conspicuous consumption was described as a type of betrayal to the real cause of the struggle. In other words, people were choosing the luxurious material lifestyles rather than the larger cause which was the fight for the liberation of South Africa, a post-racial free society. Another sensitive aspect was the obvious inequalities between wealthy people and lower income individuals within the black community, a matter that raised questions in regard to why some black people remained poor and others were living life conspicuously.

The study of conspicuous consumption post-Apartheid is relevant to understand the reasons why people who moved to upper social classes started to treat material consumption and their lifestyle in a conspicuous way, especially right after a regime filled with social, political, and economic restrictions. Posel (2010: 173) studied black consumers whom were in the process of upward social mobility in post-Apartheid, and she noticed that “the conspicuous display of their aspirations and acquisitions were strongly related not only to social distinction but also political effect”. By that the author attempts to indicate an intertwined relationship between political emancipation and conspicuous consumption regarding the history of a racialized society. There is a deeper meaning between the relation of race and consumption in the post-Apartheid era. This connection between race and consumption in South Africa can be translated into “a way of regulating people’s aspirations, interests and powers as consumers. The desire and power to consume was racialized, at the same time as it was fundamental in the very making of race” (Posel 2010: 160). With the aim of understanding what these lifestyles mean to the people whom I have talked to, I intend to clarify my research question by looking at middle class as a cultural practice, considering consumption as more than just its materiality, within a cross racial group of people with an interest to look at it from an angle of agency rather than a structural perspective.

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Cape Town’s professional market

Cape Town is a mid-sized city considered as the second biggest economic hub in South Africa after Johannesburg, and ranked as the third largest financial center for the entire continent of Africa. During its colonial period, the agriculture and manufacturing sectors were the major contributors for the city’s GDP. However, industries such as finance, business services, hospitality, transport and logistics have taken over the local economy in comparison to other industries. Besides those mentioned above, real state and construction markets are also booming economic areas, especially after the 2010 World Cup, which put Cape Town in the global spotlight (Western Cape Government – S.A.: 2016).

The mother city, Cape Town’s affectionate nickname, has been responsible for employing the majority of the Western Cape’s labor force for the past 10 years, which totals up to nearly 64% of laborers in the region. In regard to the city’s workforce, 25% operates within the informal sector. Numerically speaking, there are about 250 thousand low skilled employers, a little over half a million semi-skilled professionals, and as for the skilled sector, it has employed nearly 350 thousand workers and it still has a growth rate of almost 1% over the period of the past 5 years. The province has been affected by job losses, which the majority has mainly been originated from the semi and unskilled sectors, especially in the Agricultural and Manufacturing industries. On the other hand, there is a higher demand for skilled employment over the unskilled category, which means Cape Town job market is transitioning to a more professionalized type of city which requires people with a more solid academic and job experience background (Western Cape Government – S.A.: 2016).

Famously known as South Africa’s largest port city as well, Cape Town’s economy appears to be on a different trajectory to the rest of the country. For the past 10 years, the city is popularly called as Africa’s Silicon Valley, because it has become an attractive region for entrepreneurs and technology start-ups. Consequently, Cape Town’s professional center was recently voted as the most entrepreneurial in South Africa. Capetonians open up their own business three times more than the rest of the country. Between the age of “18 and 64 years old, people are 190% more likely to pursue a new business, whereas in Johannesburg, the same age group was only 60% more likely than the national average to pursue a new business” (Coetzee 2015).

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Cape Town is a city which attracts and generates wealth due to its diversified professional market. Also considered as the cultural heart of South Africa where natural beauty and an

outdoorsy lifestyle draw many expats and South Africans to reside there, it is a city that offers a first-class way of living for professionals who make a reasonable living standard salary. It is the third most expensive town of South Africa after Johannesburg and Pretoria. For that reason, driving a good-looking car, owning an apartment, going to wineries or fancy restaurants, or being always esthetically presentable can certainly be expensive, a lifestyle for just a few people.

When I started to plan my research, I had three words in my mind: race, consumption, and Africa. Cape Town was then chosen for the fact that it is a city which was strongly affected by one of the most rigid racial segregation systems such as the Apartheid, a place where I could still probably see and feel the reminiscence of a regime that ended 23 years ago. Moreover, I was also interested to observe and study how young professionals, who were either children or teenagers, are living their lives after the end of the regime was established. For that reason, I chose to observe and talk to a diversified group of professionals, men and women, who are between their late twenties and early forties, and doing economically well. In the following section, I would like to briefly introduce each one of the informants and how I met them.

Informants

Before landing in Cape Town, I had already made contacts with friends who currently live in Cape Town and could possibly help me increase my informants’ network. A close friend of mine was one of the main gatekeepers whom introduced me to Edgard and Nobomi. Edgard is in his early 40s, born in a colored community, and nowadays is the head of the marketing department for an Italian multinational. Nobomi is in her late 30s, born in Malawi, but has been living in South Africa since she was 12 years old. She is the head of the Human Resources department at the same company. They both helped me to get acquainted with the city, introduced me to their friends, they also became my informants and close friends during my stay in Cape Town. Edgard then introduced me to Ottavio, whom I have already mentioned in the beginning of the thesis.

Nobomi opened many doors to me as well. She introduced me to Max, a 40-year old doctor born and raised in a colored community locates in the Eastern Cape; as well as Mbali, a 36-year old, also doctor who was raise in a black township until she was 12 in the surrounding

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Sandra, Shawn, and Lily. The three of them are Indian South Africans and they are all in their mid-30s. Sandra was born in Johannesburg, and has been living in Cape Town since her college years. She is now an investment manager and works for one of the biggest South African banks. As for Shawn, he was raised in an Indian community in the province of Kwazulu Natal, moved to Cape Town for a job offer and never left. He is a civil engineer and works for the city’s

government office. Lily just came back from a year abroad in Ireland. She is a doctor who has a passion for travelling, and getting to know other cultures. Nobomi also introduced me to Roger, one her best friends from high school. Roger was born and raised in Cape Town, and lived for many years in a colored township during his childhood. He is now 38 and is the head of the visual merchandising department for a South African fashion male company.

Another gatekeeper was Roy, my workmate at a research multinational company based in Cape Town. Roy introduced me to Quinn, who is in his early 40s, born in the province of

Kwazulu-Natal and raised in a low-income white area of Johannesburg. He is now the head of the sales department at the same research company where Roy and I work for. Roy also introduced me to Wayne, who is originally from Namibia but moved to South Africa when he was a child. He was brought up in a colored town, and moved to Cape Town to get his university degree when was 18 years old. Now, he is in his early 30s and works as a sales manager. There is also Dianna who is 30 years old, and works as a project manager at the same office as Roy, Quinn and Wayne do. She was raised in an affluent Afrikaans area close to Johannesburg, but moved to Cape Town due to a job offer and better quality of life.

Dianna introduced me to her boot camp gym friends. The first one I met was Tina who just turned 30 and is also an Afrikaans. Right now, she works as a housekeeping manager at a Porsche Retailer shop. She says she is a foodie, and enjoys great meals paired with high quality wine. Chloe, also friends with Dianna and Tina, was born and raised in a farm located in a predominantly Afrikaans region of the country, her father owned a piece of land. She became a lawyer and gained working experience in the beginning of her career in Johannesburg. She is now 35 years old and moved to Cape Town a few years ago to have a better quality of life, so she could enjoy the Nature more.

Talking about Nature, I met Paul, also an informant, during a hike in the Lion’s Head mountain, located right at the heart of Cape Town. He is 48 years old born in Cape Town and works as a History Teacher at the International School of Cape Town. During our conversation, he mentioned he still goes back to the black township, in which he was brought up and where his

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family still lives. Lastly, there is Buhle, an originally Xhosa 28-year old young woman who was born in a rural village called Pedi in the Eastern Cape. She was my flat mate for the first half of the period I was in the field. When she was 7, her mom became a diplomat and she has lived may years abroad. She went back to South Africa in her mid-20s with high level academic degrees, and lots of working experience. She said going back to South Africa wasn’t easy, but she loves her country, especially its food. She is now investing in her career a chef de cuisine.

As noticed above, I was fortunate enough to encounter and interview people of all races (white, black, colored, and Indian), who have distinct academic and professional backgrounds. This proves that South Africa is not only black and white. In fact, it is a complex society that has distinct nuances and layers. Next, I will introduce the methods I made use while in the field, so that I could get to know more about my informants’ lifestyles and their professional careers.

Methodology

The focus of this study is on a group of young professionals, their pursuit of social mobility, their lifestyles and consumption behavior post-Apartheid. I conducted 18 semi-structured interviews which lasted from ninety minutes to nearly 3 hours with distinct professionals, such as engineer, lawyer, corporate executives, doctors, chef de cuisine and so forth. Their age ranges from late 20s to early 40s, with the exception of Paul who is 48 years old. The majority was not born and raised in Cape Town, only two of them are originally from the city. The rest of the participants come from different areas of South Africa, such as Johannesburg, Port Elizabeth, and Durban.

Moreover, two of the participants are not originally South Africans, one was born in Namibia and another in Malawi. It is interesting to note that I have talked to 8 men and 8 women, but what makes this research even more enriching is the fact that I interviewed people of all racial backgrounds: white Afrikaans, Indians, coloreds, and blacks.

Their daily life and occupational narratives are considered the most effective and main source of data giving me access to different aspects of how they live and how they make

decisions on a daily basis. The idea was to start every conversation asking open-ended questions so the interviewees had more flexibility to answer according to their life experience. I used to begin the conversation asking about where they were born, if they could describe the

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as childhood, adolescence, and adulthood. I was careful to not lose focus on subjects regarding material culture, consumption behavior, and lifestyle in general. Since I interviewed people who were either children or teenagers during the Apartheid regime, their social context always had to do with their racial background, as well as the languages spoken within their families, in their communities and other socials environments.

On a frequent basis, I also held informal conversations with whom I had regular contact. All the interviews were recorded with a phone, whereas for the informal conversations, I would make notes of only key instances as soon as I arrived at home. Other than these notes, I also kept a daily diary, a compilation of news from important national media sources (articles about race, consumption in South Africa), and notes on participant observations.

Talking about participant observations, they were quite superficial in the beginning due to the fact that I was still making myself acquainted in the field. As I started going out more and getting to know more people on a personal level, the observation content became deeper and more useful. These notes certainly helped me to give more color and details to my thesis, however they are not the main or the richest source of data of my research. In terms of events or venues where I did observations, I took part in quite a few of them such as cooking events, birthday parties, dinners at friends’ houses, barbecues, restaurants, cafeterias, and bars. In those places, I was able to pay attention to the people who attended those events, what type of

conversation topics were discussed amongst the attendees, how they dressed, how they mingled in terms of racial backgrounds or languages, how they behaved with one another.

I also registered myself in a gym located in the heart of the Business District of Cape Town, and a hot yoga studio towards the end of my fieldwork. About 70% of the gym’s clients were corporate professionals who mostly go there to work out before they start working either early in the morning, during lunch hours, or at the end of their working day. I went at least twice a week either during lunchtime or end of the day. I could do some participant observations in there as well. It was an interesting way to see how people dressed up for work, whether they intended to show any sort of conspicuous behavior through their clothing items.

Moreover, on my way to the gym, I passed by the busiest venues where professionals would buy their coffees, or their lunches. In those places, I also saw how people interacted with one another, what languages they spoke, or what they were talking about. All of these events, venues, activities were enriching during my fieldwork, so I could learn the dynamics of how people live in Cape Town.

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Important to note that I kept the anonymity of my informants throughout the thesis by using pseudonyms, and made sure not to reveal biographical information that would compromise their reputation. Finally, to answer my research question, I will have in the first chapter a

description of Apartheid, South Africa’s context, as well as the theoretical framework based on race, middle class, and consumption. In the following chapter I will demonstrate, through the stories of informants, the feeling of discomfort for being the first generation who had access to a more integrated society after the demise of the regime. Afterwards, in the third chapter I will argue what consumption means using two relevant examples of consumables for my informants: food and cars. Finally, I will show how the process of social mobility is on one hand economic beneficial, but also creates emotions, such as anger, anxiety, and confusion in social mobile individuals who are changing from one social class to another in post-Apartheid era. In the end, I will complete this work with an over-all conclusion.

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Chapter 1

a. Context of South Africa

Apartheid

One of the strictest political systems that ever ruled a nation was known as Apartheid and officially lasted for a total period of 43 years. Four enduring decades separated whites from non-whites, a time that they were not allowed to live in an integrated society. In 1948, Apartheid started in South Africa, which literally meant apartness; it was a racial, political, and

economically segregation system in which the white minority controlled the vast non-white majority of the country. An institution grown out of Afrikaner nationalism and established by white politicians of the National Party, which then governed the country until 1994. At the time, the government’s main objective was to assure that whites, 20% of the entire South African population, would continue to dominate the country by imposing policies to “ensure the survival of the white race and to keep the different races separate on every level of society and in every aspect of life” (Neame 1962: 12).

An important aspect of Apartheid was called the Group Areas Act, which was stated in 1950 with the purpose to divide “Union into urban racial areas” (Barkon 1961: 105). This specific act officially declared that certain areas close to the center of urban cities would be for white people only. For instance, 70 thousand black South Africans including native landowners were removed from Sophiatown to an area called Meadowlands, a location further out from Johannesburg city center. Sophiatown was then established as a white area only. Along with the removal, black South Africans were not allowed to own lands, so the houses where they were relocated to were owned by the government in which the residents had to pay a monthly rental fee to the State (idem).

The townships were communities located far away from the so called “white city”. It was difficult for those individuals who lived in townships to arrive at work, which most of the times it implied long hours and expensive transportation fees to get to their job location. Not only

transportation was very limited, but also commercial centers where individuals used to do their grocery shopping. They were forced to buy their commodities in a distant white-owned or

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Indian-owned center, and basic consumables were normally more expensive than what they could afford. Leisure was also very restricted. There were legal beer halls in government buildings where drinking was allowed for non-white citizens, and pieces of lands where dirt was deposited were turned into soccer fields for the township residents. Churches located in townships served as a cultural facility, a place where they generally developed a sense of community and belonging. Those are just a few examples, even though townships were strictly controlled environments, informal spaces were created there as a matter of survival or political act. For instance, illegal bars famously known as shebeens were established in those matchbox houses, which became a social and political location for township residents. There were also the spaza shops which were established at people’s houses and functioned as small convenience stores where residents could purchase their basic grocery items. Large shopping facilities with a more diversified portfolio of consumables were strictly prohibited in townships (Findley & Ogbu 2011).

The problem faced until the end of Apartheid was that “the country tended to reflect the shopping needs and aspirations of the minority white segment of the population, therefore shopping developments were located in white suburban” areas or town centers (Lowrey 2008: 201). Non-white citizens’ necessities during the regime in South Africa were totally ignored by the official retailers, and for that reason people of color, especially the ones who resided in townships, lived in a society where their social and material desires were highly being repressed by the formal structures of Apartheid.

Current Context

Over two decades have already gone by after the official end of Apartheid and many South Africans agree on the fact that the country has advanced a long way to get where it is right now since the African National Congress (ANC) party won the first democratic elections. Millions of South Africans have now access to the basics, such as running water and electricity, services that were denied to them for not being part of the government system. The year of 1994 has definitely marked the beginning of “a journey to reverse the legacy of statutory discrimination and to construct a new country based on democratic principles” (Munusay 2013).

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of the famously known township Soweto, Maponya Mall attracted large crowds, bigger than the ANC political meetings held in a nearby location. A strong sign that showed the residents’ desire to have access to a proper venue where they could purchase not only basic groceries, but also commodities that fulfilled their aspirations. Richard Maponya was the founder of Maponya Mall, a businessman who decided to start with small, township-style grocery shops, whom eventually succeeded economically after the fall of Apartheid. He had an initial plan to open a shopping mall in the townships during the regime, exactly twenty years before 2007; but he was not allowed to. Therefore, when the grand opening of Maponya’s Mall happened, the media reported the event as being a real “struggle” regarding his accomplished goal. Maponya considered it as a moment of liberation in which he described as the following: “…while politicians fought for the liberation of the country, I was fighting for the liberation of our economy” (Bryceson 2007 in Posel 2010: 169).

Since the grand opening of Maponya Mall, ten years have already passed by. However, the prevalence of hopelessness and lack of leadership in South Africa are distorting the

perception about whether South Africans were in a better place in 1994 than now. The political corruption scandals continue stronger than ever before. The political disorder threatens the 23 years of ANC’s power and the economy is very unstable as well. President Zuma defends himself by saying the country’s economic adversities are related to global problems. Therefore, South Africa’s economy is “under duress” and the forecast is that it will grow only half a percentage point this year (Cotterill 2017).

The biggest problem is directly linked with job cuts across all sectors of the economy, which originates a joblessness youth, a burden that increases the inequality gap and poverty, two outcomes that still infest the country nearly 25 years after political liberation. “The problem of inequality — where the richest tenth of households, which are predominantly white, control about nine-tenths of the wealth, means that policies are continually contested” says Neva Makgetla, an economist at the Pretoria Trade & Industrial Policy Strategies think-tank. Magda Wierzycka, a fund manager based in Cape Town, complements the previous thought by stating that “The inequality gap, providing free quality education — these are debates we should be having…but right now, political discourse is all about corruption” (Cotterill 2017).

The feeling of the past few years is that the hope which had moved South Africans forward in 1994 has almost disappeared or it is no longer there anymore. It is important to admit that in many aspects the country is doing much better socially, and economically if compared to

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the years of Apartheid. However, the feeling of the inevitable hopelessness, which was also mentioned by some of my informants during our conversations, might be installed in the

perception of South Africans, which can be a complex hurdle for the overall development of the nation’s individuals.

Cape Town: a paradoxical city

Arriving in Cape Town by plane on a clear and sunny day was a remarkable and impressive experience, the dramatic scenery is undeniably beautiful. With all its high peaked mountains, extensive blue ocean bay, well-structured wineries and the Table Mountain as the main “actor”, Cape Town attracts visitors from all around the world. However, when leaving the airport on a wide highway into downtown, it is impossible not to notice a long stretch of land filled with millions of matchbox houses, an informal housing area built further away from the city center. A total disruption from the natural beauty and wealthy neighborhoods of Cape Town, two different realities mostly divided by golf courses, gigantic walls, or highways.

Cape Town is no different than any other South African city that has suffered with Apartheid. Even though democracy has been established for 23 years, the city remains largely segregated. For instance, on the eastern edge of Cape Town, there is a township named Khayelitsha, which was built under the principle of racial segregation in the beginning of the Apartheid regime. Due to its numerous population, it is considered one of the biggest black townships in South Africa along with Soweto in Johannesburg. It grew so rapidly, that by the year of 1995 the township was filled with half a million of people living in a piece of land far away from downtown (Writer 2016).

On the other hand, only a 5-minute drive away from Cape Town city center, it is located an extension of nine out of the ten most expensive residential areas in the entire country of South Africa. In a recent study, a neighborhood named Clifton is the area that tops the housing list and offers houses of an average selling price of R23 million, which is the equivalent of nearly 1.5 million euros (The Moneyweb, 27 June 2017). The neighborhood is located right in front of the beach and its backdrop is the well-known Lion’s Head mountain, where residents frequently go there for a hike as well as to admire its breathtaking views.

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Under the regime of Apartheid black and colored people were forcedly removed to the worst areas of town, located miles and miles away from where whites would reside as well as from where they used to work. Nowadays, people of any racial background are free to choose anywhere they want to live. However, the majority of the non-white people still cannot afford to either rent or buy a house in the so-called white areas. Not only the space is limited in Cape Town, but also the housing prices are extremely high. The individuals from lower income classes, which the majority is blacks and coloreds, have to travel long distances to get to work and spend an average of 40% of their income on the transport (The Economist, 12 April 2017).

Edgar Pieterse, director of the African Centre for Cities at the University of Cape Town once said the following: “The social engineering of apartheid came down to a very successful model of spatial engineering,” he continues by pointing out at a map of the city to explain that “Cape Town was conceived with a white-only center, surrounded by contained settlements for the black and colored labor forces to the east, each hemmed in by highways and rail lines, rivers and valleys, and separated from the affluent white suburbs by protective buffer zones of

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b. Theoretical Framework

Race

Anthropology is an area which has being strongly connected with the study of race. In the beginning of the twenty-first century, the concept of race was seen as problematic by

Anthropologists due to its fixed definition based on solely the phenotypic traits of human beings (Harrison 2008). Since then, race has come to be seen as a social construct. It has been a complex and multidimensional theme that has played a crucial role in the global arena and has drawn anthropologists’ attention in the process of understanding its implications in society. Scholars finally decided that the term race is a social idea constructed with the objective to be used as a tool to manage power, privilege, and wealth within populations, and not so much with the purpose of biophysically distinguish one another within a social environment (Smedley 1999: 699). Scholars conceptualized race not only as a social distinction tool to classify humans, but also as an ideology, which means that race is used in a society as “a way of thinking about, speaking about, and organizing relationships among human groups” (MacEachern 2011: 36). In his study about mapping racial ideologies in post-Apartheid South Africa, Ansell describes that racial ideology is not a simple random attitude of racial prejudice in people’s mind; instead, it is also a “framework of beliefs or worldview expressed by differentially positioned racialized social groups that mobilizes meaning in the service of defending and justifying (dominant race) or challenging (subordinate race or races) relations of racial dominance and inequality” (2004: 23).

Within the context of South Africa, which is a society deeply marked by its racialized past, race is still strongly perceived as a part of people’s identity, as well as deeply embedded within the social structure of post-Apartheid South Africa. Historically speaking, Posel (2001:59) describes that the heart of Apartheid’s racial project held a combination of the concept race as both cultural and biological markers, making each aspect as a comparison reference for the other, which strengthened the practice of racial differentiation on people’s daily life. The term

bioculturalist mix used in Posel’s work, was once defined by Gilroy (2000: 22) as an alignment between “the readings of bodily difference closely with differences of class, lifestyle and general repute” (2000: 22). It is a useful term to comprehend the remains of such a rigid and violent racial segregation system as the Apartheid was (idem).

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Even though the regime has officially ended 23 years ago, and improvements have been done to diminish the gap of white and non-white conditions, the ideas of race and racial

differentiation are still very much ingrained in how people see one another in South Africa (Posel 2001: 75). People identify others by the race, their daily discourse is deeply loaded with how people’s similarities or differences are according to their racial background, there is a strong element of otherness connected to people’s skin color aligned with other social factors, such as economic position and class. In a study with black and white university students transitioning to post-Apartheid South Africa, Walker (2005: 133) indicatedthat race identities generate “real effects for actors, what it means to be black or white”. Race identification also stimulates a “desire for affiliation and recognition”. Therefore, identification is also an important aspect of belonging to a group of people in which “we distinguish ourselves from others and with others in relationship to our world across time and space”

(idem).

Another aspect of Apartheid’s powerful legacies lies within the racialized structure the regime has left for the country. A large dominance of the previous system residues in the norms of everyday thought and experiences still produce cumulative, durable, and race-based

inequalities (Posel 2001: 76). When race is put at the core of a structure, a socio-economically unequal society is then constructed, and so race constantly “articulates with social class to produce valued or marginalized identities” (Dolby 2001 in Walker 2005: 133). Up to these days, South Africa has a large piece of the Apartheid structural order in place. On one hand, the majority of non-white people remains socially unprivileged and economically excluded. On the other hand, the majority of white people are still “confined within Apartheid borders of thought and experience” (Posel 2001: 76).

In order to comprehend South Africa’s history and how it still affects its citizens lives, race is a concept that cannot be left aside. Since race is strongly ingrained in people’s mind, it will be sensible to make use of this concept in this thesis so that the informants’ discourses can be more easily deciphered. The fact that these participants frequently referred to how race played an important role in their everyday life when growing up, and nuanced in their narratives how race is used as a form of identification of themselves and others; it is crucial to include race as a

conceptual tool in order to comprehend some of the socio-economic political scenario of the country as well as my informants’ lifestyle.

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Middle Class

The majority of South Africa’s population remains poor. In fact, a recent study pointed out that over 30 million citizens live on less than a $1.25 dollars per day (Statistics South Africa, 22 August 2017). However, with the fall of Apartheid, South Africa’s middle class started to become bigger due to an increase of better job opportunities offered to its citizens regardless of race. An African Development Bank study (AFDB) done in 2011 stated that Africa’s middle class is defined by anyone who spends a daily amount between US$2 and US$20 dollars. This definition is considered problematic for being too simplistic to be used as a tool to analyze people’s values and lifestyles. The concept middle class has become relevant, and it is more than just a numerical definition because of “the way people in African countries think and speak about their own position in society” (Lentz 2015:1). In fact, middle class is a difficult concept to be defined because it is not a fixed social category; therefore, to better understand this term, the classical economic definition is not enough. The reason why is because there is more to class than just status and income, and so a numerical measurement is very limited to analyze people’s motivations, aspirations, and fulfillments.

A useful way of looking at this concept is to consider that class can be understood as an array of social practices which may include a wide variety of social and economic situations and lifestyles (Lentz 2015: 41). Lentz asserts that “middle class is not a mere abstraction, a discourse, a metaphor, a rhetorical device”, but indeed a “social formation”. She also states it is a social concept that has been changing throughout the years, as well as “a material experience, a political project, and a cultural practice” which needs to be carefully used regarding the spatial context and its historical past (Ricardo López 2012: 20−1 in Lentz 2015: 26).

Similarly, Spronk (2014) in her work about young professionals in Kenya, suggests that an effective way to look at the definition of middle class is to stop “…considering class as a fixed category” and start “exploring it through the lens of cultural practice”. Middle class is not an economic phenomenon; it goes beyond the analysis of some numerical figures, “class operates as a cultural middle ground where the local and the global are brought together in a cultural

process” (Spronk 2014: 95). It is a type of practice which results from the combination of multiple factors, and I will consider three of those factors with the aim to understand the relevance of upward mobility for the participants of this study. These are: high level education,

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In the Global South, education is considered one of the most important strategies to move to higher social positions in society. Lentz wrote in her study about middle-class in Ghana that citizens made it very clear that “true education” is not only about “holding a school degree, but also of living up to certain standards of courtesy and respectfulness”; moreover, they consider education as the “universal remedy for poverty and marginalization” (Lentz 1994: 154, 158−9). On a similar note, Spronk (2014: 97) asserts that success of young professionals was linked to factors such as a differential access to formal education (idem). In addition, Obbo (1986)

indicates formal education as a key strategy for social mobility and concluded that it doesn’t only give access to a better job, but also “…becomes a prime criterion for measuring one’s place in society, linked to wealth, power, and honor as markers of social ranking” (Obbo 1986 in Spronk 2014). As for South Africa, Bhorat (2004: 951) found that employment is positively and

exponentially related to educational level. Therefore, there is a strong link between educational achievement and standard of living in the country, which has been well documented by some scholars (Louw, Van der Berg and Yu 2007: 549; Seekings and Nattrass 2005: 265).

Work is also seen as a symbol of dignity and self-worthiness for middle-class individuals. Banerjee and E. Duflo (2008) affirm that “…nothing seems more middle class than the fact of having a steady well-paying job”, in a comparative study they have done in plenty of African, Asian, and Latin American countries (Lentz 2015). Moreover, what is important for middle class members is the feeling of having control over their future based on the fact that they are assured there will be “an income every month – and not just the income itself” (Lentz 2008: 26 in Lentz 2015). Having a steady income make them feel hopeful for a future that enables them to build a dignified career (idem). Another interesting aspect is that upward mobility is supported by the combination of work in different sectors, along with income originated from distinct forms of activities, which then allows us to see beyond individual careers at different households (Lentz 2015: 30).

The third factor is the consumption practice among middle-class members. The practice of acquiring material objects is considered important for middle class people whose “consumer items operate as … signifiers of social standing and achievement” (Pinches 1999: 32 in Lentz 2015). Donner and Neve (2011: 1-5) also argue that consumption has great relevance in the lives of individuals who just went through the process of upward mobility. Consumption is seen as facilitator for empowering both individual and collective identity expression, as well as fulfilling pleasures related to material objects in environments where people were repressed or strictly

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regulated because of either their race, class, or gender (McCracken 1990; Miller, 1997, 1998 in Iqani 2012: 6). In South Africa, Deborah James (2012; 2014) points out that upwardly mobile and fast-growing black middle class spend most of their income not only on flashy and branded goods, but also in higher education, marriage and bride wealth, and funerals (James 2012: 20 in Lentz 2015).

Education, diligent work and consumption are considered important strategies for social mobility to occur (Lentz 2015). Krige makes a pertinent comparison using a vital characteristic in the process of pursuing social mobility within a society. He says that “the process ‘growing up’, a phenomenon that transpires between birth and death, is shown to inform and to legitimize another social process – that of ‘moving up’ or social mobility” (2015: 107). In regard to the South

African context, Krige claims that “mobility has become a metaphor for a range of

transformations a younger generation of Africans have experienced” (Chipkin 2012 in Krige 2015). The author completes his thought by saying that the willingness and energy put towards mobility by young Africans is unsurprising “…given how Apartheid sought to restrict physical movement, and how it limited physical mobility and cultural crossings” (idem).

Since the socio-economic development of African countries started to increase, the study of middle class has gained more importance in the process of understanding how middleclassness lifestyles take shape. It is a crucial theoretical lens for my study, so that I can understand not only my informants’ way of living, but also the choices they made and still make concerning their personal and professional life.

Consumption

In the beginning of 1980s, anthropologists started to be contested about the reasons for not acknowledging the importance of studying consumption in Anthropology. Miller (1987) is one of the first anthropologists who began writing quite extensively about the subject. He first defined consumption as “an action that translates the object from an alienable to an inalienable

condition”. In other words, Miller meant that the object is not perceived anymore as a “symbol of estrangement and price value”, but becomes an object which has acquired “inseparable

connotations” (Miller 1987:190 in Graeber 2011). Miller’s focus is on consumption as “cultural practice”, which highlights that the meaning of a product could be transformed by the context and

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Consumption could also be defined as a motivating drive that strongly influences people’s behavior in the process of gaining social prestige and status (Goldsmith, Flynn and Eastman 1996: 309). “Archaeologists and anthropologists have shown that in all societies, people’s relationships to things have been symbolically dense” (Posel 2010: 161). A decade later from one of his first works, Miller (1997 and 1998) also declares that consumption is a tool that facilitates empowerment in terms of both individual and collective identity expression, and in terms of materially marking access to pleasures disallowed or regulated by class, race or gender boundaries. This view is applied in a context of non-western societies with histories of

colonialism such as South Africa, where consumption can be considered empowering to individuals and groups who have been historically and systematically excluded from the economy.

To better understand the role of consumption in post-Apartheid regime, the term empowerment is very relevant for being a conduct of economic freedom. The fall of the

Apartheid regime gave the chance for South African citizens to exert “economic empowerment as a form of participation in the free market economy” (Iqani 2012:7).

The discrepancy between what whites and non-whites could access materially was huge. The majority of white South Africans throughout the regime of Apartheid had full access not only to political rights, but also to the perks of capitalism, such as malls, consumer goods, international travels, and so forth. On the other hand, non-white South Africans were restricted from having both political rights and economic agency. However, the revolutionary movement led by the African National Congress (ANC), which officially eliminated Apartheid, brought freedom and the beginning of a system that allowed access to a “better life” which included consumption of materials that could not be purchased during the regime. As post-Apartheid started to unfold, and non-white citizens began to climb the social ladder, aspiration for a better material life is not a desire anymore, but a reality (Iqani 2012:3). The type of consumption brought into place in post-Apartheid was criticized, which Veblen (1899 & 1915) famously labeled it as conspicuous consumption.

Veblen (1899 & 1915: 96–97) claims that the regulation of conspicuous consumption is a way of creating and maintaining social distinctions; for instance, the higher social classes have shown extensive signs of historically indulgence of unproductive consumption, whereas pressuring the lower classes a type of consumption regime limited to basic necessities (Kistner 2015). Veblen assumes that “the consumption of necessities does not generate any notion of

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merit or prestige, except in contradistinction to those occupying the lowest ranks of the social order, whose subsistence is precarious” (1899 & 1915: 96–97). Veblen also mentions that individuals have a necessity to compare to one another based on what they have achieved

financially, and he highlights that these comparisons are crucial so that individuals recognize one another, calling it as social recognition (Veblen 1899 & 1915 in Kaus, 2013: 63-73).

Posel (2010: 173) asserts that in the workings of race and consumption there is “… a close relationship between political emancipation and conspicuous consumption to the history of racially based regulation of consumption in Apartheid South Africa…”. The racial practices implemented during Apartheid were embedded in the racial dynamics of consumption were strongly linked with the mission of civilizing people in South Africa which happened in the transitional trajectories of economic development, class formation, and regimes of what Bourdieu (1984) calls distinction (Posel 2010: 173). An approach which is essentially based on the idea of how distinct a group of people is in terms of having access to material, social, and cultural capital (idem). Therefore, consumption is not a mindless leisure but a way an individual expresses agency. In other words, through consumption individuals feel they can control their lives through making their own choices in regard to what they want to purchase, use, and exhibit to others. It is a practice that empowers people and sets individuals’ socio-economic and political position apart in a society, which in turn makes them feel a sense of self-realization, self-confidence, and satisfaction.

With the theoretical framework presented above based on the concepts of race, middle class and consumption, I aim to look at the following ethnographic data from an angle of agency with the intention of answering that conspicuous consumption means more than the material aspect of objects, or a way to display wealth. There is a deeper layer that I would like to uncover, making it possible to answer the main question of this research.

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Chapter 2

Discomfort

From the very beginning of my fieldwork until almost the end of it, I encountered several

instances where the term culture shock was mentioned by my informants. After some reflection, I realized that the main reason could be due to the fact that I interviewed individuals who were the pioneers of a changing political system. Hence, my informants strongly felt the transition of two completely distinct political regimes: Apartheid and post-Apartheid. They were the first ones to be accepted at white-only universities, or white-only work environments, or even commercial venues where non-whites were not allowed to attend during Apartheid. When normal transitional movements happen, such as going from high school to college, or moving from a rural village to an urban center, or even from your country of origin to a foreign country, individuals generally feel a strong sense of the unknown for having left the familiar environment behind for a new one. However, if such transitional movements happen in an environment filled with social and racial tensions, individuals encounter the feeling of discomfort.

I have realized that culture shock was an expression my informants used to illustrate the feeling of discomfort, and uneasiness when not only them were going through a transition, but also their country political system. Their desire was to express their feeling about how

uncomfortable it was when entering an unknown environment, a place where they had never been allowed to make use of due to the strict laws of the former political regime. Once they were legally permitted to attend those venues, discomfort was felt by them; however, some participants described it as culture shock.

Discomfort is a noun that refers for the lack of comfort. People normally feel uneasy when they find themselves in an environment where the familiar does not exist; in other words, individuals do not encounter something recognizable based on their previous life experiences, therefore uneasiness and discomfort can be felt by those facing new realities. In a study done in a social context of discomfort at a historically privileged university in Cape Town post-Apartheid, Macdonald highlights that feelings described as ‘lost’, ‘confused’, ‘angered’, ‘ashamed’,

‘doubtful’, ‘fearful’, ‘blown away’ and ‘blown apart’ are common when people see themselves in the initial stages of recognition of a new environment (Macdonald 2013: 676).

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Through the lens of discomfort, I intend to comprehend some of the situations described by my informants in transitioning to a new political system, when they were also physically moving to a new town, or new school, or university and all within the process of pursuing better resources to then achieve upward social mobility. This chapter discusses the moment when some of the participants as well as their nation were going through an important transition. Through their transitional movements, I describe their process of social mobility within a racialized society that was about to be emancipated from a rigid political system. When entering a new environment, this perspective of embodied experience, which I call discomfort in this chapter, “explores physical aspects of emotional experience, in particular the perceptual process of bodily sensation and interpretation, and the interaction of bodies in a social space” (Csordas 1994; Lyon 1995 in Svašek 2010: 869). Svašek continues to explain that in any social context where settled groups and newcomers confront each other, relations of dominance and subordination might be performed by the practice of emotions, “justifying or challenging social, economic and political disparity” (2010: 876).

Consequently, with the embodied feeling of discomfort, came a sense of exclusion, rejection, inferiority which was sensed by some of the participants and demonstrated in their narratives. In the following session, I will display interview extracts of participants whom felt discomfort in transitional periods of their lives, and how the concept of discomfort is useful to understand their experiences within the context of my fieldwork.

From a village to Pretoria

Buhle, a 28-year old Xhosan descendent, was born and raised in a small rural village named Pedi located in the Eastern Cape, where there were mostly black people who spoke Xhosa, a language famously known for its clicky sounds. During most of her childhood, her grandparents were responsible for Buhle’s upbringing, since her father and mother were working in a bigger city so that they could financially support their families back in the community. Buhle lived not only with her “mama” and “dada”, as she used to call her grandparents, but also with her aunt and 6 other cousins in a small unfinished mortar-brick house. Life was simple as Buhle described her it as the following:

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“…living in the village was very organic, very natural, small settings, nothing very lavish or contemporary…please close your eyes and picture the epitome of a village where lots of cattle run loosely around, people pick up their organic vegetables and fruit right off the land, there is no electricity, only paraffin lamps to romantically lit up the house, and fetching water miles away in a river was a daily activity…Camila, I couldn’t have asked for a better childhood, a moment where I lived freely with most of my loved ones around me” (Buhle).

Meanwhile, Buhle’s mother was working as an office executive in bigger town close by, which offered better job opportunities. During the same time, her mother attended Forte university and Vista university, predominantly black academic institutions when Apartheid system was still in its epic moments. Buhle’s mother was very dedicated to her studies and work. With two

academic degrees, and working at a company where she could grow as a professional, the sky was the limit for her. When Buhle was about five years old, her mother was offered a better job opportunity at the government’s foreign affairs department in Pretoria. She then thought it was an appropriate time to take Buhle with her and start a new life in a promising city. It was 1994, a year when South Africa was going through one of the most dramatic political changes. Nelson Mandela was released a couple of years back, and was about to become the first black president in a democratic system. Life was definitely not going to be the same for Buhle; not only because she was moving from a village to an urban center, but also because she was going to encounter an unknown environment primarily based on a racialized society.

The liveliness, the sound of children playing outside on the dirt, and the smell of greenness of Pedi stayed behind, and a new chapter in Buhle’s life was about to start. She detailed the transitional moment as follows:

“A very different experience for me, it felt very quite. I felt isolated, though I was in a big city, I felt very lost and confused, and nothing was familiar. The only time, even the school that I attended, no one looked like me. It was all white kids, no one talked like me, or sounded like me or anything, so it was a completely foreign concept...”. She continues with a sadness in her voice: “…now I am in this predominantly white society, because Pretoria was then very white and I remember we walked and people looked at you strange. We lived in this block of apartments and there were probably only two other black people living in this entire block. I felt strange seeing so many white people. Like it is one thing to see one white person, and then all of them white...completely shifted my reality…completely, completely!” (Buhle).

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Buhle was entering an unknown world making her also feel discomfort, and uneasiness in

relation to the familiar environment which she had left behind. However, the impact became even stronger for Buhle because the majority of people she encountered in that new environment physically looked and acted completely different from her.

In a study about the feeling of discomfort across the boundaries of academic institutions, discipline, language, race and class conducted in a university located in Western Cape, South Africa, it was found that a person becomes more aware of their “ethnicity, race or any sort of difference when minority or marginalized groups find themselves amongst members of the dominant or majority group” (Leibowitz et al. 2010: 89). As a black South African, Buhle was constantly being reminded of her racial inferiority and felt discomfort. She moved from a rural village where people looked and behaved the same way she did to a predominantly white urban city, where Apartheid’s laws were still being extensively applied. This phase where Buhle found herself in was a way of readjusting her world view and reevaluating her life in this new reality, which consequently provoked feelings of anger, grief, disappointment, and resistance, all those described by Boler and Zembylas, when they developed a framework based on discomfort for understanding differences (2003: 111). Furthermore, learning about one’s self in a different environment can be seen as a “troublesome space”; that is, the individuals find themselves feeling sensitive and emotional especially in the beginning of a new experience (Clouder 2005: 7). It can also be described as a painful process where discomfort and uneasiness become stronger when the individual starts to exchange with this new environment and its people, that’s why “it

involves letting go of a familiar situation and a stable, clear reality towards a dreadful, unfamiliar reality” until everything in this new place settles in (Halabi 2004: 8).

Buhle moved with her mother from a rural village, where everyone had racial similarities and acted the same, to an urban center where racial segregation was still very much ingrained in a society where a political transition of two complete different regimes was taking place. Buhle’s mother wanted the best for her; the family was in the beginning of the process for pursuing social mobility. In a total different environment, she resisted in accepting the new. Therefore, she felt discomfort, and uneasiness. This physical burden may be seen as unavoidable in the process of physical and social mobility, especially in a post conflict political system; however, discomfort can be also considered as necessary for the embodiment of the change.

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From Pretoria to the world

Emigrating to a foreign country involves a lot of emotional efforts in someone’s life and can definitely cause discomfort in the beginning of one’s settlement in a new and strange

environment. Factors such as different languages or accents, distinct food, different school or work environment contribute in making someone standing out and feeling uneasy in this particular unknown space. The immediate post-Apartheid period was marked by an exodus of skilled, white South Africans concerned with their safety and the fear of losing their privileged status. In 2008, the South African Institute of Race Relations estimated that 800,000 or more white people had emigrated overseas since 1995, out of the approximately 4 million white people who lived in South Africa when Apartheid formally ended in 1994 (The Economist, 25

September 2008).

In Buhle’s family case, there was a chance to emigrate right after Mandela took charge of the country’s presidency, but it was not because they were concerned about losing social status. They were in fact pursuing better opportunities to climb the social ladder. Buhle’s mother excelled in her job during that year in Pretoria, and so she got an offer to be promoted and move once again. Buhle described the experience about moving overseas in awe when she first received the message:

“Yeah, mom tells us one day that we are moving…we moving? Moving where? And I was like: Austria? And they were like: ‘No, Australia!’ …So I didn’t know how to deal with this… I even remember my mom explaining it to my grandparents, and they reacted in surprise: ‘Australia? Flying over oceans, is this safe?’” (Buhle).

So off they went, Buhle and her parents left South Arica and their beloved ones behind for a new environment again. Her mother had just been appointed to be a diplomat and represent the country’s duties in Australia. Their final destination was Canberra, the capital and seat of Australia’s government. When they arrived there, interestingly enough Buhle had the same feeling as she did when she first arrived in Pretoria, however there was a slightly different factor about arriving in a new country:

Rising socially after the fall of Apartheid : the pursuit of social mobility for young professionals in post-Apartheid Cape Town

Master’s Thesis for Social and Cultural Anthropology