Tenacity and welfare on the road to elsewhere: one woman's efforts to make stable life from Marikana informal settlement, Potchefstroom, South Africa

Abstract

Post-apartheid liberation promised South Africans economic, spatial and social inclusion. Current everyday South African realities, however, show that the historical inequalities have not disappeared; instead, they persist and, in many cases, have deepened. This dissertation chronicles the life and everyday efforts of one woman, who I call "Ouma", as she crafts stable life from a post-apartheid informal settlement and from the outskirts of the city and the economy. I use Ouma's concept of lang moete (durable courages) - which she describes as the practice necessary for withstanding the instability of everyday life in the post-apartheid informal settlement of Marikana, in Potchefstroom, South Africa - and develop it as an analytical tool and a political claim to meaningful life. I illustrate that everyday life in Marikana is incoherent and episodic, and lang moete, therefore, relates not to sustained perseverance but multiple events of courage. Based on eighteen months of participant observation (and multiple return visits), I argue that mobility, navigating welfare as a system of social capital and tactical exchange, and learning to cultivate viable aspirations all capacitate the existence of lang moete. I provide a metaphorical geography of lang moete wherein I argue that the above-mentioned conditions all held together enough substance for lang moete to therefore exist a) on the move, b) from making an alienating welfare system work on one's own terms and c) in the possibility for multiple and mobile futures. Throughout the accounts in this dissertation, Ouma becomes a figure through which the continuities and discontinuities from apartheid to post-apartheid South Africa are portrayed. Instead of economic, spatial or social inclusion, post-apartheid liberation has placed Ouma in-between spaces and in-between personhood and non-personhood, and it was in learning to occupy these liminal spaces that Ouma has maintained stable life.