Political Change and the Black Middle Class in Democratic South Africa

Not marrying in South Africa: consumption, aspiration and the new middle class

“…Amongst those who aspire to middle-class status, the effects of competition to consume, pressures to invest, the sharply increasing costs of marriage, the intensification of disagreements over income, and intensifying claims by the broader family on household resources are considerable. For those public sector employees like Abigail and Geoff, however dependent their income is on the state (Schlemmer 2005;Southall 2004), such demands may be manageable, but can nevertheless lead to decisive disconnections from, and repudiations of, the claims of a partner or spouse and of in-laws. Those lower down the ladder handle conflicting obligations in other ways.…”

Middle class construction: domestic architecture, aesthetics and anxieties in Tanzania

“…Published scholarship on contemporary Africa offers surprisingly few resources with which to analyse this changing social landscape, and the middle classes have been notably absent from recent published scholarship on Africa outside of South Africa (Posel 2010, Seekings and Nattrass 2005, Southall 2004cf Spronk 2012). The class debates which dominated African Studies in the 1960s and 1970s were preoccupied by analyses of a political economic landscape polarised between two classes, the peasantry and the bourgeoisie, who were constituted by their relations to the means of production (Bernstein 1977;Sklar 1979).…”

“Deeper into a Hole?”

“…In such a setting, debt has complex meanings. For those better off and more aspirational than Richard Madihlaba, among them the new swathe of civil servants and state employees who constitute South Africa's "new middle class" (Southall 2004), the obligation to invest in social and conjugal relations brought with it proportional expenditure as well as further commitments entailed in novel visions of value. Expectations and hopes, of higher education for children, and of support for less well-off relatives (Stauffer 2010), have increased, exponentially and out of proportion to the incomes that are supposed to underpin them.…”

“…Ambiguities that have dogged attempts to characterize, pigeonhole, and analyze the "black middle class" are too extensive to cover here in detail; see James (2014) for a longer discussion. For accounts of how the black middle class consolidated within the public sector in the 1990s, see Crankshaw (2005Crankshaw ( , 2008, Southall (2004Southall ( :533, 2012, and Seekings and Nattrass (2005:312). which envision, even if they have not yet achieved, a single high-tech system to be used for identification, cashing in social grants, buying, and banking (Breckenridge 2005:272-273).…”

“…Indeed, by 2008 it became clear that white consumers owed more than black ones. 4 But those whose "reckless borrowing" has been of most concern-not surprisingly, because its members have also had the greatest electoral and political influence since the advent of democracy-are the black recipients of state salaries (nurses, teachers, policemen) in the "new" black middle class where public-sector employment predominates (Crankshaw 2005;Schlemmer 2005;Southall 2004), middle-to low-wage black employees in state-owned enterprises, and a larger category, subjected to more "precarious" circumstances since democracy (Barchiesi 2011), that 3. The Zulu word mashonisa relates to the verb stems (endings) -shona (to sink, become poor, die) and -shonisa (to impoverish, cause to become poor; Dent and Nyembezi 1969:481).…”