Africa after Apartheid

Richard A. Schroeder

Description

Winner, 2012 Association of American Geographers Meridian Book Award

Tracing the expansion of South African business into other areas of Africa in the years after apartheid, Richard A. Schroeder explores why South Africans have not always made themselves welcome guests abroad. By looking at investments in Tanzania, a frontline state in the fight for liberation, Schroeder focuses on the encounter between white South Africans and Tanzanians and the cultural, social, and economic controversies that have emerged as South African firms assume control of local assets. Africa after Apartheid affords a penetrating look at the unexpected results of the expansion of African business opportunities following the demise of apartheid.

Preface
Acknowledgments
List of Acronyms

Introduction
1. Frontline Memories
2. Invasion
3. Fault Lines
4. Tanzanite for Tanzanians
5. Bye, the Beloved Country
6. White Spots
Conclusion

Notes
Bibliography
Index

Sujets

• Sustainable Development
• Social Science
• Sociologie, société et politique
• Afrikáner
• Sudáfrica
• África
• Sustainability
• South Africa
• International business
• Frontline States
• East Africa
• Emigration
• General officer
• Tanzania
• Development
• General
• Afrikaner
• Africa
• International
• Julius Nyerere
• Tanganyika
• Migration
• Discrimination
• Immigration
• Afrique du Sud

Informations

• Publié par: Indiana University Press
• Date de parution: 03 septembre 2012
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9780253008503
• Langue: English

Extrait

AFRICA after APARTHEID
South Africa, Race, and Nation in Tanzania
RICHARD A. SCHROEDER
INDIANA UNIVERSITY PRESS Bloomington and Indianapolis
This book is a publication of
Indiana University Press 601 North Morton Street Bloomington, Indiana 47404-3797 USA
iupress.indiana.edu
Telephone orders 800-842-6796 Fax orders 812-855-7931
© 2012 by Richard Schroeder All rights reserved
No part of this book may be reproduced or utilized in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying and recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher. The Association of American University Presses' Resolution on Permissions constitutes the only exception to this prohibition.
The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of the American National Standard for Information Sciences—Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI Z39.48-1992.
Manufactured in the United States of America
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Schroeder, Richard A.
Africa after apartheid : South Africa, race, and nation in Tanzania / Richard A. Schroeder.       p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-0-253-00599-1 (cloth : alk. paper) — ISBN 978-0-253-00600-4 (pbk. : alk. paper) — ISBN 978-0-253-00850-3 (e-book) 1. South Africans—Tanzania. 2. Whites—Tanzania. 3. Tanzania—Race relations. 4. Tanzania—Social conditions. I. Title.
DT443.3.S77S36 2012
305.8968—dc23
                                                                                                  2012008657
1 2 3 4 5   17 16 15 14 13 12
Dedicated to the memory of Toby Schroeder
(2001–2005)
Contents
Preface
Acknowledgments
List of Acronyms
 
Introduction
1. Frontline Memories
2. Invasion
3. Fault Lines
4. Tanzanite for Tanzanians
5. Bye, the Beloved Country
6. White Spots
Conclusion
 
Notes
Bibliography
Index
Preface
During my first trip to northern Tanzania in December 1995, my wife and I were invited to a dinner party at the home of some friends. The day of the party was crystal clear, the majestic peaks of Mount Meru and Mount Kilimanjaro emerging from the clouds to provide a spectacular backdrop. We arrived early and sat outside in a small circle of chairs, drinking beer and enjoying the pleasant weather. Meal preparations went on around us, and several neighbors dropped by to exchange greetings. Most of the guests were, like us, white expatriates, but they included at least one mixed European/Tanzanian couple. It was a lazy, laid-back affair.
After an hour or so, a white South African who worked for a safari company based in the nearby city of Arusha dropped in uninvited and joined us for a drink. The subject of the ensuing conversation escapes me now, but I do remember how this man repeatedly and unselfconsciously used the racial slur “kaffir” in reference to Tanzanians. 1 While this term was widely used in South Africa to refer to blacks during the apartheid years, I was shocked to hear it used in Arusha. This was not because this particular individual used it—he fit my stereotype of a racist South African white, so his use of racial slurs was somehow to be expected—but because he seemed to feel so comfortable using it in Tanzania , a country that was one of the staunchest opponents to apartheid. The implication was that in polite, white expatriate gatherings in northern Tanzania, calling locals “kaffirs” was an acceptable form of speech.
Since I was new to the area, I wondered how widespread this practice was. Was I correct in thinking that it was out of place in Tanzania? Were others at the party similarly offended by this man? What would Tanzanians make of this situation? I was aware that this safari operator was one of thousands of white South Africans who relocated to Tanzania and other parts of the continent in pursuit of new business opportunities after the democratic elections that brought Nelson Mandela to power in Pretoria in 1994, but I was unclear whether his behavior was an exception or the rule. The historic post-apartheid encounter between South Africans and the rest of the continent certainly bore watching.
As it turns out, I may have gotten my story about the dinner party wrong: my wife also vividly recalls the conversation I described above, but she places it at the home of another couple entirely; I may have conflated the memories of two different parties in my reconstruction of the event. This disparity might not be worth mentioning, except that it led me, years later, to ask both couples if they could identify the South African in question. While none of the four hosts specifically remembered the conversation that day, each couple readily named an individual who they thought might have been responsible for the racist comments. This was striking in its own right. Another long-time resident of northern Tanzania reinforced the notion that South Africans had brought about a change in social mores in Tanzania when I showed her a draft of this preface during a brief visit to Arusha in 2011. After reading the first few paragraphs, she turned to me and said, “This is not about my house, is it?” When I assured her that it was not, she continued, “Because it could be. We all know someone like that. The only question, I suppose, is whether we are all talking about the same person.” Clearly the dinner party guest's behavior in 1995 was not an isolated event. The social landscape in northern Tanzania had undergone a troubling transformation.
A second footnote to this story was added in an exchange I had with one of my students. I frequently use the dinner party anecdote to explain how I got involved in the research that led to this book. After repeating the boorish dinner guest's comments, I describe how I exchanged looks of incredulity with my wife and then, on impulse, made myself as unobtrusive as possible to better observe the ensuing social interactions. My academic colleagues recognize this well-worn tactic of participant observation. One of my undergraduate research assistants, however, responded in a very different way. Engrossed in my story, she impatiently asked, “So what did you do?” When I answered that instead of challenging the speaker or walking out on him I watched and listened to see what I could learn, I could tell that my student thought this was not a satisfactory reply, so I tried to explain myself further.
I pointed out that ethnography often requires a careful negotiation between the desire to directly confront objectionable behavior and the need to maintain a sometimes uncomfortable silence in order to effectively observe, record, and ultimately understand it. 2 I explained how, as the project took shape and I gained the confidence of research subjects, I often found myself in positions where I observed insensitive behavior or overheard offensive speech. As an example, I told her how I once saw a South African gemstone dealer pull out a taser gun and playfully threaten a Tanzanian subordinate with it (see chapter 5 ), and suggested that I would never have been in a position to witness this insensitive display if I had been more confrontational in my approach to South African research subjects from the beginning.
I was nonetheless forced to acknowledge that my failure to directly confront the rude dinner guest left me at least somewhat complicit in his behavior (cf. Sanders 2002). The issue of complicity is one that my South African research subjects understood all too well: in the eyes of the world, the enactment of apartheid attached a powerful stigma to South African national identity. Nelson Mandela himself invoked this fact in his inaugural speech when he noted that South Africa under apartheid had become “the skunk of the world” (Mandela 1994). In one way or another, all of the South Africans who settled in Tanzania after 1994 were forced to contend with this national stereotype as both they and the rest of the continent struggled to parse the meaning of apartheid for subsequent generations.
Africa after Apartheid
As a research problem, the notion of studying “Africa after apartheid” implies the use of a particular sort of cognitive map. The goal of tracing apartheid's legacy in “Africa” begins with the premise of South African exceptionalism. Drawing on popular imaginaries that circulate widely in South Africa, it constructs a boundary between South Africa and the rest of the region, locating “Africa” somewhere beyond South Africa's national borders. Historically, this way of seeing, and being, on the continent directly informed the apartheid government's creation of fictive “homelands” to house its unwanted “African” populations (Butler et al. 1977). It is also discernible in the recurrent notion that South Africa is a “first world” island surrounded by a sea of black African poverty. This idea featured prominently in the ration