Repugnant outcomes of a caste system
Intergenerational legacies of socioeconomic exclusion have locked millions of South Africans into social castes, not classes
Like most societies, South Africa is built on a complex matrix of power, privilege and access to social mobility. Similar to many other countries, power and privilege in this country are shaped by the power-holders, who have historically been white and male.
It is they who have shaped the particularly toxic and entrenched patterns of access and opportunity to social, educational and economic progression and stratification in this country. The social stratification exists beyond deliberately race-based structures of power and opportunity. I contend that mobility is now so difficult that it has become a social caste from which most people cannot emerge.
South Africa is not alone in creating rigid social enclaves. Japan had four samurai classes, Korea had hereditary exclusion in the form of baekjeong (untouchable). The Ibos in parts of Nigeria define an Osu caste from which it is difficult to transition. And across Spain, France and Portugal social “untouchablity” prevented shared water fonts, separate places of worship and segregated doors well into the 19th century.
The sociologist Harry Hiller writes: “A class system is an open system of rating levels. If a hierarchy becomes closed against vertical mobility, it ceases to be a class system and becomes a caste system.”
Class mobility is elastic, with the possibility of social mobility. In theory, a person is able to work their way to an alternative economic lifestyle through enterprise and talent.
But, when the mitigating factors against upward movement are determined by not only a person’s current circumstances but by generations of factors such as health, education, income and family assets, this movement is almost impossible.
South Africa’s double plague of intergenerational poverty and unearned privilege present a compelling case for redefining the vocabulary of our class stratifications. The “bootstraps” argument can hardly be useful when there are no shoes from which to pull them.
At the beginning of our democratic dispensation, South Africa was ranked among the most unequal societies in the world, as a result of the differentiated distribution of state provisions, such as health and education, and legislated physical mobility that limited African people’s access to greater opportunity.
Troublingly, over the past 23 years of this dispensation, South Africa’s levels of inequality have exceeded and surpassed those before 1994 — notwithstanding the anticipation that democratisation of political power would also lead to democratisation of social and economic mobility and distribution of assets.
The indigent African majority was promised a better life and that the violence of the colonial apartheid regime would be redressed, eventually reversed and rebuilt.
In many respects, the various stakeholders, including the incoming government, did not adequately understand the complexities of reconfiguring many generations of economic feudalism.
The asset deficit for African people, who could not accumulate wealth during the colonial apartheid era, remains embedded in their social and economic capacities. This mediates choices about education, where to live, where to shop, whether to seek private healthcare or to use state health provisions.
The pathway of opportunity available to youth and children offers one gauge of social mobility. These measures include intangible assets, such as whether households have or have ever had a high school graduate, as well as material assets, including whether a household has a car.
A comparison of the opportunities available to young children and youth from privileged and disadvantaged backgrounds is useful because it illustrates that they have limited opportunity to distinguish themselves based on effort and hard work. The privileged glean their status more through the serendipity of being born into it rather than their own efforts. In the same vein the indigent and largely African working and underclass is so positioned not because of a lack of effort or talent but because of the circumstances that they are born into.
False meritocracy that insists that working hard is the only determinant to social mobility is thus dishonest and unhelpful. The differences in opportunities between privileged and socioeconomically dispossessed youth are largely attributable to the intergenerational legacies that define the circumstances into which they were born. These are marked by South Africa’s economic and political development trajectory and the confluence between the two.
The apartheid colonial government created patterns similar to other settler states, such as Australia, New Zealand and the United States. South Africa intentionally con- structed an economy that required a pool of African labour that was the engine for its sustainability.
These were bolstered by a menu of policies and institutions that were extraordinarily coercive, accompanied by unapologetically discriminatory policies and intent.
The creation of labour market institutions was primarily to ensure the protection of white workers’ incomes. This was further bolstered by a fairly advanced welfare state that was again primarily extended to white workers.
Labour market institutions were designed to depress the wages paid to unskilled African workers, depressing their social mobility and aspirations.
These policies and institutions created the ongoing architecture of acute race-based inequality in relation to short-term dividends, and also shaped a future of inequality and social caste. The design of the economic growth path was so embedded that the inequality has self-perpetuated long after its initial proponents passed on.
Colonial South Africa’s other potent model was to destroy the African peasantry, including sharecroppers and landowners, by seizing community- and family-held lands. This forced Africans to migrate in two ways. The first was to seek work in better-paid urban areas despite the prohibitive sanctions on movement. The second, and possibly even more brutal, was to migrate our social aspirations steeply downward.
Class and caste are the product of the imaginations of the most powerful and privileged. This is illustrated by the rigidity of the feudal and caste systems that predetermined the untouchables merely to ensure a pool of labour to do the least desirable work.
Imagining or aspiring one’s way