Ethnographies of mining in Africa have established an enduring portrait of the iconic ‘company town’ such as Welkom, Kleinzee or Kitwe – under the control of a single company, responsible for everything from railways to hospitals (see Carstens Reference Carstens2001; Ferguson Reference Ferguson1999). However, booming mineral extraction in the new millennium appears to resemble more a scramble for resources by diverse actors than a landscape of company towns relentlessly dominated by a monolithic mining bureaucracy, where the company's paternalism sat as twin to the brutal rigours of corporate colonialism (see Southall and Melber Reference Southall and Melber2010; Ferguson Reference Ferguson2005). Nowhere is this more striking than in Rustenburg, the urban hub of South Africa's platinum mining belt, a town now made famous by football's World Cup 2010. Over the past two decades, the explosion of production on the platinum mines in South Africa's North West Province has earned the town a new name: ‘Platinum City’. In 2005 the South African Broadcasting Corporation (SABC) news declared Rustenburg second only to Cairo as the fastest-growing urban entity in Africa.Footnote 1
Here, the rich mineral deposits of the Bushveld Complex's western limb are subject to the operations of five major mining corporations: Impala Platinum, Lonmin, Xstrata, Aquarius Platinum and Anglo Platinum, the oldest and largest of the mining concerns in the area. The division of spoils beneath the ground has translated into an awkward urban geography and social landscape above ground, making the Rustenburg Local Municipality a patchwork of industrial zones and urban sprawl that fall in the domain of one or other of the companies that mine the rich seams of the reef below. The visible mark of competing mining houses is legible beyond the towering mine shafts and refineries encircled by high fences and barbed wire. It is displayed on billboards, signposts and newspaper advertisements proclaiming the social investment of these companies in many of the town's clinics, community organizations and schools – testaments to corporate–community partnership and civic virtue.
As Fumanti has shown, the performance of civic virtue is crucial to the distribution and assertion of social and political authority within the structure of post-apartheid towns (Fumanti Reference Fumanti and Melber2007). In Rustenburg civic virtue has been all but subsumed within the discourse of corporate social responsibility (CSR), and translated into the competitive performance of corporate virtue. This is not only key to understanding how old corporate structures have established and maintained their economic hegemony and social authority within the post-apartheid town, despite increasing local fragmentation. It is also crucial to understanding how people within the town and on its borders access, or fail to access, scarce social benefits and welfare provision; or, according to the language of the new South Africa, how they realize opportunities for ‘self-empowerment’.
Within this marketplace of corporate social investment, development is recast within a model of grassroots capitalism according to which opportunity has become synonymous with the market, and enterprise the source of empowerment: South Africa's corporate giants offering a helping hand to those who are willing and able to help themselves to a piece of the local market expanding on the back of the platinum boom. It is here, in this evangelical project of empowerment through enterprise, that we hear the battle-cry of a capitalism that presents itself as liberator of the oppressed and marginalized; a capitalism which, as Comaroff and Comaroff put it, offers itself up as a ‘gospel of salvation’ (2000: 292; see also Dolan and Scott Reference Dolan and Scott2009). This celebration of grassroots capitalism is not new, nor is it unique to South Africa (see, for example, Blim Reference Blim, Smart and Smart2005). What is of particular interest and importance is that here it is the Goliath of corporate capitalism that, we are told, will deliver the ‘South African dream’ to the Davids of petty enterprise and local entrepreneurship in urban centres across South Africa, and beyond.
Yet, as the mining boom drew increasing numbers of people to the mines in search of work in the expanding formal and informal economy, large informal settlements, bearing names suggestive of a very different reality – Edenvale, Mayfair and Park HeightsFootnote 2 – have developed on the margins of the town. Here, in the borderland (metaphorically and geographically) between the mines and the town's formally recognized community, inhabitants strive to fashion themselves as ideal targets of ‘empowerment’ – to be selected as participants in an enterprise training course or a new start-up venture – embracing the entrepreneurial spirit that this inclusive vision of corporate-driven development commands.
Much has been written about the persistence of economic apartheid inscribed in the geography of South Africa's cities (see, for example, Harrison Reference Harrison2006; Pieterse Reference Pieterse2009; Parnell et al. Reference Parnell, Pieterse, Simon and Simone2010; Robinson Reference Robinson2006). The failure of the post-apartheid state to deliver ‘urban justice’ (Pieterse Reference Pieterse2009: 1) has intensified fragmentation, producing spatial configurations that simultaneously recall the old order of segregation and embody the particular inequities and divisions of the new neo-liberal order (Turok Reference Turok2001; Harrison Reference Harrison2006). In particular, analysts have emphasized the incapacity of local urban planning to live up the lofty ideals of participatory development. Crucially, as Jennifer Robinson argues, this has resulted in new exclusionary processes of citizenship that are contiguous with spatial inequalities in post-apartheid urban spaces (Robinson Reference Robinson1997) and produce, as she noted more recently, ‘strongly bifurcated job opportunities’ (Robinson Reference Robinson2008: 75). This second point is particularly important as it alerts us to the fact that the making of citizenship is not confined to the dialectic between state and subject, but is, as the ethnographic account of Rustenburg presented here reveals, increasingly contingent on control of civic space by non-state actors and, in particular, by big business. Through the progressive mechanisms of corporate social responsibility in Rustenburg, we see a much older process at work: the enduring capacity of capital, as Fred Cooper described it, ‘to create a stark dichotomy between job and no job’ (Cooper Reference Cooper1987: 181). This persistent dichotomy helps to determine access to both the material and the symbolic benefits of citizenship.
The failure of urban integration, I argue, maps onto the failure of the promise of market inclusion. In intermediate towns such as Rustenburg the opportunities of ‘empowerment through enterprise’ are seen, or believed to be, even more attainable than in large cities. Here the extended supply chains of the mining industry and the expanding secondary economy appear to offer limitless possibilities to share in the boons of the platinum boom. Yet, as the account below shows, the disjuncture (and friction) between corporate authority and local government has given rise to increasing fragmentation and exclusion: only a very few are able to grasp the long-anticipated rewards of the new South African dream.
PLATINUM CITY
The current Rustenburg Local Municipality (RLM) was established in 1999, as part of the local government demarcation process initiated by the post-apartheid transition, which expanded the area of the old Rustenburg Municipality to include the ‘tribal areas’ of the Royal Bafokeng Nation and the Bakwena Tribe. These areas previously fell within Bophuthatswana, the ‘tribal homeland’ or ‘bantustan’ carved out by the apartheid government in line with its policy of ‘separate development’ (see Bozzoli Reference Bozzoli and Nkotsoe1991). The Royal Bafokeng Administration (RBA) has a quasi-governmental role – it is recognized by Article 12 of the new South African constitution as a ‘Traditional Authority’ – but falls under the legislative jurisdiction of the Rustenburg municipal government.Footnote 3 A great deal of the land mined in the Rustenburg area is owned by the Bafokeng Nation, who not only receive substantial royalties from the companies who mine platinum on Bafokeng land but, through their privately owned company Royal Bafokeng Holdings, have engaged in joint ventures with them. As a result of the enormous revenues from platinum, the Bafokeng have become known colloquially as ‘the richest tribe in Africa’ (Manson and Mbenga Reference Manson and Mbenga2003). The disparity of wealth and infrastructure development between the areas under the Royal Bafokeng Administration (in particular the city of Phokeng) and other areas of the RLM, combined with the RBA's (unofficial) policy of providing educational bursaries, jobs and development support exclusively to Bafokeng citizens, has created additional tensions to which I shall return later.
On first entering Rustenburg, the groundswell below the quietened surface becomes evident. Almost as if the mines are physically pushing up through the ground, the pressure from their expansion and the resultant commercial boom is stretching Rustenburg at its seams. This is a landscape scarred by imposing mine shafts and mine dumps, smelters and refineries. It is here that almost half of the world's platinum is produced: blasted from the rock, transported to the surface, crushed, refined and flown to the coast. From there it makes its way across the globe to be moulded into auto-catalysts for cars or jewellery for those who can afford it.
The extent to which the area is dependent on mining is clear. According to Rustenburg's Integrated Development Plan for 2005/6, mining contributes around 77 per cent of the Gross Geographic Product of the RLM and accounts for 50 per cent of formal employment in the greater Rustenburg area (RLM 2005: 23).Footnote 4 In 2005, planned expansions to mining operations were expected to produce 10,000 new jobs in the coming years (ibid.). The city has grown ‘unrecognizably’ (according to most long-term inhabitants) as a result of the upsurge in platinum mining over the past three decades, growth that is evident in every dimension of urban life. During the five years of the most intense expansion, in the second half of the 1990s, the population of Rustenburg grew by 33 per cent (Hamann Reference Hamann2004: 208). It was recorded in the last census (2001) as 387,123 (RLM 2005). Today it is estimated to be closer to half a million or more. And, according to the mayor's 2005 ‘State of the City’ address, ‘all indications are that our city may double in size in the next 15 years’ (Mabe Reference Mabe2005: 2).
The effects of the platinum boom on Rustenburg are equally manifest in the visible disparity of wealth that defines the city. The expansion of mining has generated a rapid growth in service and consumer industries in the town. The extensive Waterfall Shopping Mall doubled in size while I was living in Rustenburg, filled with shops bearing names such as ‘Platinum Interiors’ and ‘Platinum Reef Hunting’. The streets of the city centre are lined with car showrooms selling top-end BMWs and SUVs. The increasing population of senior and middle managers employed at the mines, and the success of small enterprises prospering as a result of the rapid growth of Rustenburg's middle class, has created a severe shortage of housing. Property prices have risen by a few hundred per cent over the past five years (according to the manager of Anglo Group Properties in Rustenburg) and property developers have secured every available piece of land on which to build new suburbs.
With increasing numbers of people drawn to the mines in search of work, local authorities have found it difficult to meet this growth with an adequate provision of housing, services and infrastructure development. According to Rustenburg's mayor, ‘the infrastructure cannot relax because growth is faster than development’. In 2001 a report by a local planning consultancy estimated the annual growth rate of informal settlements as 24.2 per cent (Plan Associates Reference Associates2001: 1), and the census carried out in the same year recorded 48,212 households in the informal settlements, out of 116,592 recorded in the whole of the RLM (RLM 2005: 21). According to Rustenburg's 2005 Integrated Development Plan, ‘This is a stark reality, in that the municipality now continues to see an influx of migrant and seasonal workers, imported crime activities, overburdening of existing resources, shrinking land availability, widening gap between “haves” and “have nots”’ (ibid.: 4).
Today, estimates of the population of the settlements range between 50,000 and 150,000, accounting for somewhere between 15 and 30 per cent of the total population of the municipality. With the exception of a small corner of Edenvale, the informal settlements have neither access to water nor services for sewage removal and rubbish collection. A single mobile clinic provided by the Department of Health services a limited area of the informal settlements. According to a union shop steward at the mines who lives in Edenvale, ‘We have a mobile clinic which comes to the place I live in – one mobile clinic for 20,000 people – and Anglo built sewage and supply water to the bit of the camp I live in, but that's the only one I know. That's it.’ There are no schools in Edenvale (the nearest school is over three kilometres away) and only one tarred road, which goes from the edge of the settlement to the Anglo Platinum mining compound. Rows of semi-permanent homes built from any available material (mostly corrugated iron, cardboard and plastic) are separated by narrow pathways. Most of the settlements are directly adjacent to mining operations. Edenvale, one of the largest of the informal settlements and home to an estimated 20,000–40,000 people, lies next to Anglo Platinum's Rustenburg operation, separated only by the high fence of the hostel compounds and the railroad track which runs through Rustenburg and carries the products of mining away from the city.
A JOINT RESPONSIBILITY?
The informal settlements have come to be categorized as a problem on their own, isolated from the list of core development issues identified in planning processes: education, healthcare services, water provision, small and medium-sized enterprise development – and informal settlements. In formal documentation, both the Rustenburg Local Municipality and the mining house stress their commitment to working in public–private partnership to meet the urgent development challenges of these areas. According to the discourse of partnership, this is to be achieved through the ‘Integrated Development Process’, a strategy for multi-stakeholder partnership to which all parties claim to subscribe. CSR managers within the mining companies commonly referred to Rustenburg's Integrated Development Plan (IDP) as ‘the motherboard’, ‘template’ or even ‘bible’ guiding the company's socio-economic development activities, and stated their commitment not only to working with local government, but also to being guided by them on CSR planning: ‘you know, it has become a bible to many of the people because these are the real needs of the community identified in here’ (corporate social investment officer, Rustenburg).
The national government requires that all municipalities in the country produce a comprehensive IDP every five years, and review the Plan annually, in consultation with all local stakeholders from representatives of the corporate sector to local ward councillors. The IDP aims to provide a participatory mechanism for needs assessment and a forum for multi-stakeholder collaboration through which to respond to them. In Rustenburg, a central focus of the Plan is diversifying the economy away from a reliance on mining. Thus the elevation of community–public–private partnership is coupled with the imperative to embed ‘sustainability’ into the town, and guard against the ever-present threat of decline into a ‘ghost town’ when the mines close or cease to churn out profit. Anglo American's socio-economic assessment manual for example, instructs frontline CSR operatives to consider whether the town ‘is viable or unviable post-Anglo’ (Anglo American 2003: 116). Central to this agenda is the promotion of small and medium-sized enterprise and entrepreneurship development through a combined focus on training, business start-up support, and preferential procurement tenders for black economic empowerment (BEE) companies through the supply chains of the various mining houses.
The support which mining companies provide to this collaborative pursuit of the IDP goals is not simply financial. Company personnel spoke of ‘donating’ the company's ‘expertise’ and ‘technical know-how’ in areas such as environmental management, urban planning and water delivery, in order to help ‘build capacity’ in local government. During the time I was in Rustenburg Anglo Platinum had seconded two technical advisers to the municipal offices for a period of two years. The first, an environmental manager, was involved in designing the new environmental plan for the RLM. The second, a housing officer, had been seconded to the Council's planning department, ostensibly to help deal with the acute shortage of housing in the area, and the rapid growth of informal settlements.
But, while the inhabitants of the informal settlements are often the subjects of formal discussions, they are rarely participants in the conversations. With the exception of a small area of Edenvale and Mayfair, another settlement which surrounds the Xstrata Chrome mining areas, the informal settlements remain outside the existing structures aimed at recruiting stakeholder participation such as the Integrated Development Process. As the largest of the informal settlements, Edenvale has some level of formal recognition, but was only granted the formal status of a ‘ward’ of the RLM in 2005, and, as such, is represented by elected ward councillors, who attend the annual IDP review. However, the formal discourse of the IDP continues to distinguish between ‘formal stakeholders’, defined as ‘permanent residents’ of the RLM, and ‘informal stakeholders’ (RLM 2005: 25). In the 2005 IDP, the ward that represents Edenvale was formally categorized as ‘Edenvale squatters’ (ibid.: 54). This classification explicitly emphasizes not only the spatial liminality of the informal settlements, but also imposes a temporal liminality on them. This distinction is replicated in documentation relating to Anglo Platinum's local socio-economic development (SED) activities and in the discourse of the company's frontline SED officers, which commonly categorizes informal settlers not only as informal stakeholders, but as illegal squatters or invaders.
As a result, social responsibility for the informal settlements was displaced between the development planning mechanisms of the RLM and the ‘community’ of beneficiaries as it is constructed through the patronage and clientelism generated by CSR, so revealing the disjuncture between state provision and corporate responsibility. This tension was further compounded by the volatile relationship between the municipality, Anglo Platinum and the Royal Bafokeng Administration – which owns a significant amount of the land leased by the mining companies and has developmental (though not legal) jurisdiction over the territory under its domain.Footnote 5 Displaced within this institutional triad of authority, the informal settlements have become the subject of competing attempts to deny rather than assert social responsibility. As an ex-community affairs manager for Anglo Platinum remarked, ‘the informal settlements are just a disaster – not that I was personally responsible for that … but those are the areas that no one wants to take responsibility for’.
While Anglo Platinum's CSR officers stressed that the IDP was their ‘motherboard’ or ‘template’ guiding the company's social investment activities, a very different picture emerged from the annual IDP representative forum meeting at the Rustenburg Civic Centre in May 2005. The hall was packed with over 300 ward councillors from each of Rustenburg's 35 wards and any other people who wanted to attend the open meeting. No representatives from any of the five mining companies were present. As Odette Kambalame, the manager of Rustenburg's IDP, told me,
They sit on the advisory panel of the IDP and meet to tell us their needs and plans, but when that meeting happens is up to them – sometimes it doesn't, or … instead most companies send a junior manager with no power to the meetings. They send the ‘photocopy boy’ who knows nothing and can't make any decisions. If they followed the IDP, as they say they do, they would come to us to ask, where is the need that we have identified through our community consultation process? But with them, people just manoeuvre their way in and then the mine just hands them the money. There is no identification of need. I have never seen them at an IDP representative forum.
At the forum ‘The Informal Settlements’ was listed as an item on the agenda, a separate category in its own right. The Rustenburg mayor opened the meeting with a brief obituary for a ward councillor, P. J. Xhosa, who had died the previous Sunday. The mayor spoke of P. J. Xhosa's work ‘at the forefront of negotiating for those people in Edenvale to be relocated to a more formal township’: ‘The big problem in the squatter camp is that this is a big camp and there is no water there because the squatter camp land belongs to the mines and there was a view that mining would happen in that area.’
After the plenary session was formally concluded with a roll-call of all the ward councillors present, a prayer in Setswana and token budget approval, the assembly broke into eight separate working groups to address the priorities listed on the agenda: education, infrastructure, health, tourism, small business, sports and leisure facilities, roads, and the ‘Informal Settlements Commission’.
However, in the ‘Commission’, discussion was constrained by the absence of a critical group of actors – the mining companies. This made debate on the whole range of urgent issues listed (including water provision and sanitation) fruitless, and resolution impossible. The first point for discussion was water. The issue of relocation, which had been raised by the mayor in his obituary, was the subject of heated yet brief discussion that ended in frustration:
R. P. Nkosi, ward councillor (Park Heights): I want to know how this consultation works, because they have never consulted with us. We did not have the consultation of the budget and it was not presented to the community.
Facilitator (from the RLM Council): It is very important when we report back that we can say consultation was done and on what day it was held.
R. P. Nkosi, ward councillor (Park Heights): Okay, but now I see on the budget that in Protea Park Extension Four they are requesting a swimming pool. We have no toilets. They cannot have a swimming pool when we have no waste removal, no sewage system.
Celia Kabene, ward councillor (Edenvale): It's premature to talk about waste removal now, we can't talk about waste removal when people don't even have water.
Gladys Mogwaza, ward councillor (Edenvale): The people who don't have water to drink will come and take water from the swimming pool!
Facilitator: I don't want to talk about swimming pools, let's leave swimming pools where they are and move on.
Gladys Mogwaza, ward councillor (Edenvale): We are not talking about a nice-to-have, we must focus on the priorities. When are they going to put the water in?
Facilitator: They cannot put in full water systems … because some of the informal settlements are going to be moved for the mine. … So we've all agreed on water tanks in all the informal settlements. OK, water's done, let's move on to clinics.
Celia Kabene: I want to know the timeframe for people being moved because we have no water or sanitation but I don't have the information as to when we are being moved.
Facilitator: The RLM is working with the mining company. Their plans are to put in water and sanitation in the new place so that when people move there it is fully developed. Because people are going to be relocated, they obviously aren't going to pump in lots of money to the place which will be moved for the mine. So they'll first put in a few tanks of water. Now, let's move on, the tar road. …
Soon after, the facilitator stopped the discussion and instructed us to return to the plenary. Celia Kabene never got an answer as to when the residents of her ward would be relocated. Indeed, when I spoke to both the planning office in the Council and the company's socio-economic development office, neither could or would tell me what clear plans had been made either for the relocation of the informal settlement or for the sinking of new mine shafts in the area it currently occupied. In the meantime, neither the mine nor the local government were making moves to provide full water and sanitation systems to Edenvale.
BEYOND THE ‘COMMUNITY’
The liminality of the informal settlements, as spaces of exclusion from service provision, reveals the fissure between CSR and state responsibility. They expose the failure of partnership, of which corporate empowerment programmes and processes such as the IDP were intended to be shining examples. Local government officers responsible for the IDP represented this as a failure on the part of the mining companies to acknowledge their responsibility in both creating and providing for the informal settlements:
They won't accept responsibility for the informal settlements. The mineworkers want to be with their wives. So their wives are coming to be with them and are living in the informal settlements. That is who is living in the informal settlements – it's the families of their employees. (Odette Kambalame, IDP Manager, Rustenburg)
Yet Anglo Platinum employees, from hostel managers to SED officers, stressed that the true obstacles to delivering development to the informal settlements were, on the one hand, the incapacity of local government, and, on the other, the Royal Bafokeng Administration's prohibition on the formalization of ‘illegal settlements’. Thus, Nox Ndovulu, Anglo Platinum's regional socio-economic development coordinator for the North West Province, explained:
I must tell you, you try and coordinate with local government to come up with a joint venture between the company and local government, but because of lack of capacity there are no decision makers, people don't turn up to meetings, they're not committed.
Nox's assessment of the failure of local government officers to ‘turn up to meetings’ or take decisions thus echoed almost completely Odette Kambalame's converse account of the way in which the Integrated Development Process was undermined by the mining companies, who either sent ‘the photocopy boy’ to meetings or were absent altogether.
At the same time, Anglo personnel explained that any attempt at social investment in infrastructure, or development more broadly, would be greeted by the Royal Bafokeng Administration as an act of formalizing a settlement of illegal squatters on Bafokeng land. Thus Kobus, manager of Hostel A, pointing to the informal settlement outside the hostel fences, remarked,
You see the squatter camp over there. We'd like to do something for them, give them water or sanitation, but the Bafokeng Administration would accuse us of formalizing an illegal settlement on their land. They are squatting illegally on the land – it is Bafokeng tribal land. … The mine is not allowed to give anything. So they get nothing from them and nothing from us.
Daniel Enele, a development officer for Anglo Platinum, similarly described his relationship with the ‘squatters’ of Robega, an informal settlement that falls within the territory of the Royal Bafokeng Administration, stressing their status as illegal land invaders:
Fortunately I have only this Robega in my territory, unlike Jerry Mosenyi who is in charge of the areas around Waterval. He has many areas like this, many squatters in his area. Here, they played a very clever game. A few came in and then they advised many others to invade the land and fill it up with people and shacks because they know that the government couldn't tell them to leave. They are the only outsiders who live in Bafokeng territory.
Enele's comments also exemplified the conventional representation of informal settlements, not only as illegal land invasions, but as the common locus of crime, violence and social corruption:
These ones in Robega are not so bad as other squatter camps, though, they are not so violent. At first, they were demanding and threatening, always demanding – they came to a meeting carrying guns. Now the chairman of the informal settlement and myself – we're the best of friends. … When I need to see him because they are squatting on the land where we want to sink a ventilation shaft, I go out of the office. … I go to his place and I take a loaf of bread and I sit and have tea with him in his shack. … People say, ‘What are you doing going from the office to the shack?’ But I go anyway.
This dual construction of the informal settlements as both illegal and the source of illegality was pervasive. During our discussion of the development challenges in the Bojanala Platinum District (which incorporates those areas under the jurisdiction of the Royal Bafokeng Administration), the Bafokeng Queen Mother, S. B. Motlegi, explained:
The major challenge is poverty and then poverty brings a lot of underlying things – you get prostitution and drug abuse. People are flocking to this area – with this free movement from one place to another you get all these things.
This resonated with the account given by Annie du Toit, a housing coordinator for Anglo Platinum Rustenburg. Despite commenting earlier that a large number of Anglo Platinum mineworkers were living in the informal settlements, she explicitly placed them outside the zone of the company's responsibility, while categorizing them as the source of ‘theft, noise and pollution’:
The informal settlements aren't really a problem for us. Unless they are adjacent to our housing suburbs – then there can be problems with theft, noise and pollution. … It is a concern to think that people live in shacks – but that will be addressed by the IDP I'm sure.
Thus the failure to accept developmental responsibility for the informal settlements appears at first to reveal the institutional fissures and fragmentation that lie beneath the claims to community partnership and tri-sector collaboration that are encapsulated in the commitment to ‘integrated development’ and the 2003 Memorandum of Understanding between the Rustenburg Local Municipality and Royal Bafokeng Administration. Yet, as each party attempts to distance itself from this responsibility, the tension between them serves collectively to reinforce the construction of the informal settlements as outside the welfare ‘community’ and mainstream society in general. While each party shifted the burden of responsibility to the other, all drew on a common discourse that sought to undermine the legitimate status of informal settlers as citizens, and therefore deny their claims to developmental benefits or social welfare – whether provided by the mining companies, the municipal government or the Bafokeng Administration. Local government officers and company CSR personnel alike constantly emphasized that the informal settlements are ‘very new, they are migrants’, or, as Gilbert Mogapi put it, ‘for most people in the squatter camps – this is not their permanent address’. Equally Carol Flynn, a CSR consultant hired by Anglo Platinum to carry out a socio-economic impact assessment in Rustenburg in 2004, commented: ‘They're all migrants in the squatter camps, these aren't local guys and if the company puts infrastructure in, it'll be making them permanent and they don't want that.’ Explaining her own frustration with the apparently intractable situation she added, ‘the trick is to do something, but not too much’.
The persistent categorization of their status as ‘migrants’ serves a dual purpose. First, as the IDP statement exemplifies, it provides a narrative which serves both the Municipality and the mining companies, according to which Rustenburg's ‘social tensions’ can be attributed to the moral and social degradation ‘imported’ by an ‘influx of migrant(s)’ (RLM 2005: 4). Thus the IDP lists one of the priorities for Rustenburg as ‘rebuilding the moral fabric of society’ (ibid.: 53). Viewed as a threat to the physical and moral integrity of the workplace, a source of corruption and contagion, the informal settlements are categorized as such within the development discourses that dominate discussions around planning and social improvement in Rustenburg. Second, this classification underpins the representation of the informal settlements as transitory, impermanent, and usually illegal, and in so doing rejects claims to entitlement by casting their inhabitants – many of whom have lived in the area for a number of years – as, in effect, ‘non-stakeholders’. Thus the disjuncture between the mechanisms of corporate social investment and the Integrated Development Process serve constantly to reinforce the representation of the informal settlements as transient, to excise those who live in them from the institutional map of stakeholders, and by casting them as ‘informal’ or ‘illegitimate’ stakeholders to deny any claims to entitlement.
‘EMPOWERMENT THROUGH ENTERPRISE’
‘I've come here today, to see what they have to offer,’ Diwe said to me. ‘They don't come to us, so we must come to them.’ Diwe, whose partner had been a temporary contractor at the Rustenburg Mine, had lived in Edenvale for three years and was attending Anglo Platinum's annual ‘Community Participation Day’ on 4 June 2005. ‘At heart, I am a business woman,’ she said. Diwe embodied the model of entrepreneurialism, the kind of convert the company strove to produce through its inclusive vision of a new corporate-driven development, bringing the opportunities of the market to empower the margins. Diwe was one of many thousands who inhabit excluded margins such as Edenvale, hopeful entrepreneurs in search of opportunities; one among a generation of ‘disadvantaged young people from post-revolutionary societies, from inner cities and from other terrors incognita … [seeking] to make good on the promises of the free market’ (Comaroff and Comaroff Reference Comaroff and Comaroff2000: 308). Like many others she had embraced the entrepreneurial spirit that ‘empowerment through enterprise’ exhorts, in which freedom means freedom to do business alongside all others.
Implicit within this model of empowerment through enterprise, then, is the creation of a new class of empowered, entrepreneurial and self-sufficient citizens who are not only the ideal beneficiaries of CSR but embody the core values of the new South Africa – citizenship, enterprise and transformation – thus claiming the convergence of business values with those of the town, and indeed the nation.Footnote 6 This was visually captured in an Anglo Platinum advert that ran in Business Day newspaper in 2005 (2 May), pledging to empower a ‘platinum generation in the waiting’ under the bold title, ‘Leaders grow Leaders’. The iconography of the advert is striking: a mother elephant proudly leads a pack of baby elephants through the bushveld. Here Anglo Platinum metaphorically takes on the mantle of delivering the new South African dream to a generation of aspiring entrepreneurs previously disenfranchised from doing business in a ‘free market’. From loans and advice services for small enterprise, to locally based entrepreneurship training programmes such as The Business Footnote 7 (an intensive six-month business training course run at the Rustenburg Mines), the company projects its commitment to teaming up with the community in pursuit of ‘empowerment through enterprise’ (Anglo American 2005: 14). A community development officer at the Rustenburg mines explained, ‘We are trying to bring the idea to the people that even if you are HIV-positive, you can still start a business and stand on your own.’
The doctrine of CSR thus solicits the participation of people in attempts to re-make themselves into ideal-type market actors (Cruikshank Reference Cruikshank1999: 86), while promoting the creative entrepreneurship of the town's citizenry in pursuit of a sustainable local economy diversified beyond the mining boom. The commitment to ‘empowerment through enterprise’ strives to convert ‘beneficiaries’ to the values and virtues of market capitalism with an injunction to ‘help oneself’ to a piece of ‘the market’ and grab the opportunities and freedoms that it offers – or, as Anglo's empowerment arm Anglo ZimeleFootnote 8 frames it, to ‘stand on their own two feet’. This was potently expressed in an article advertising The Business, entitled ‘The Ultimate Entrepreneur’, in the mine newsletter:
Surely we are the generation to bring liberty to our children from the disaster that befell our ancestors. … I believe that in the next generation in South Africa, we will see the rise of a new breed of entrepreneur, a society not dominated by counterproductive bureaucrats and paper pushers! A society where parents will teach their kids, ‘Dream yourself a radical new business idea, develop it into a financially successful enterprise and retire before you are 40’.
‘It is time,’ the article implores its readers, ‘to develop an entrepreneurial mindset and [learn] to become your own boss’ (Zwennis Reference Zwennis2003: 16). From this standpoint, participation in the market comes to stand for the promise of individual autonomy denied black South Africans under apartheid, while freedom becomes synonymous with freedom to enter the market. According to this logic, individuals are freed from the constraints of the past by liberating the market player that resides within them to pursue the ‘new’ South African dream: as a Rustenburg resident put it, ‘In the new South Africa, everyone can be a businessman.’
As an evangelical project, ‘empowerment through enterprise’ claims to spread market discipline as the source of social mobility. This didactic promise to ‘uplift and empower’, encapsulated in Zwennis's fervour, lies less in the tangible material benefits delivered through corporate social investment programmes, and more in the intangibles of empowerment through infusion of the entrepreneurial spirit. In order to attain the emancipatory and transformative power of the market, a conversion is thus required. This process of proselytism, we are told, will equip beneficiaries with the necessary values and virtues of maximization and individualism for market enterprise. The director of The Business described the process that those selected for The Business must undergo: ‘It's a mammoth task – transforming someone into a different animal … we call it “the army”, not training, because it's really toughening up. … People who go through it can say “I am the master of my own destiny”.’ According to the brochure, those selected for The Business undergo ‘six months of tough entrepreneurial army training’, following a model developed by the American Foundation for Teaching Entrepreneurship, and tried and tested on ‘youth at risk’ in the Bronx. This process of individual transformation promises to ‘break the poverty culture of unemployed people; extinguish bad traits (those behavioural patterns of South Africans that perpetuate poverty cycles) and foster entrepreneurial qualities’ and ‘turn job-seekers into job-creators’ (The Business promotional brochure).
Thus, it was not only the tangible material benefits that Diwe sought from the company, though of course these are much in demand, but also to be ‘seen’, as it were, as a suitable target for the ‘empowerment’ that the company extended to the ‘community’. In quest of recognition as ‘stakeholders’, and the possible benefits this brings, there are many like Diwe who aspire to be selected as a potential small business contractor, or future Anglo bursary holder. As Deborah James has written of rural squatters, the prospect of success is ‘tantalizing’: ‘Although people like Amos Mathibela with his entrepreneurial and leadership skills are out-numbered by the multitude … with fewer prospects of upward mobility, the promise is there: one to be realized (or thought to be realized)’ (James Reference James2011: 334). The power of this ‘new’ South African dream to recruit followers to the ideology of empowerment through enterprise lies, as it does with the American dream, in the aspiration rather than the fulfilment of that illusory yet persistent promise.
Just as the systems of patronage generated by the practice of CSR create categories of ‘beneficiaries’ or ‘recipients’, so where there are beneficiaries or recipients there are also those who are excluded from the educational, medical or infrastructural benefits provided by CSR initiatives. The discursive construction of a ‘community’, demarcated through the practices of CSR as they are pitched at particular groups and target zones within Rustenburg, is itself a moral project mediated through the technologies of social investment and the mechanisms of ‘stakeholder engagement’. Here the discursive capacity of CSR works to define the territory under the company's purview, and to render the informal settlements as external to the company's social responsibility as they disrupt the picture of upliftment it strives to portray.
As CSR generates webs of patronage and clientelism in the so-called ‘community of Rustenburg’, company personnel saw themselves as empowerers of a hand-picked bunch of beneficiaries and expressed resentment at the expectation of handouts from others. The corporate discourse of ‘self-empowerment’ implicitly rejects any claims of entitlement. Anglo Platinum's entrepreneurial development initiative, The Business, describes its goal as ‘unleashing the unlimited socio-economic potential of disadvantaged job seekers surrounding the mine’. But aspiring participants must heed the warning on the front of the brochure, in a speech bubble next to the photograph of a newly empowered graduate of the programme: ‘I used to expect the mine and the government to give me everything to make me happy. I can't believe how I now see life differently.’ A profile of another success story of the company's empowerment initiatives has a similar message: ‘Since Bennet attended [The Business] he became so motivated he started finding opportunities for business everywhere!’ The injunction to ‘help oneself’ and ‘exploit the opportunities given’ acts to reinforce the denial of obligation. Anyone who does not respond to the moral injunction to help themselves has, it seems, only themselves to blame: ‘Everyone in Rustenburg is always looking to the mines for … their own failure … they should start looking to themselves … because when the mines close, we'll all be gone’ (Refinery Manager, Rustenburg).
Implicit within the construction of the ideal subject of empowerment – one with the ability and motivation to ‘help oneself’ – is the rejection of those who cannot or do not follow this model: those who, as one CSR officer put it, ‘squander the opportunities provided by the mine and sit waiting for handouts’. The inclusive vision of economic empowerment, whereby the goals of transformation and development are asserted to embrace all through the emancipatory power of market opportunities, gives way to exclusive practices of patronage, delivered by the company to those who, so we are told, ‘can help themselves’ and do not, as a CSR officer said, ‘think the mine owes them’. The celebration of a new era of entrepreneurialism thus rebukes those who ‘squander’ or fail to seize the opportunities of the market, facilitated through CSR, eschewing claims to entitlement, particularly from those who fall outside the demarcated zone of social responsibility.
When claims to compensation or entitlement were made on the company, CSR officers dismissed these as illegitimate or driven by ‘ulterior motives’. To illustrate this, let me return to the public participation day (4 June), when a decision was made to cancel the ‘open discussion forum’ that had been planned. Nox, socio-economic development manager at Rustenburg Section, and her colleague Grace explained the company's decision to cancel the discussion forum as necessary to avoid the ‘fiasco’ of a previous stakeholder event held earlier in the year, which, according to Grace, had been ‘invaded’ by a group of people who ‘came only to make demands, and make trouble’:
Grace: If we have an open day, people come and say ‘Oh, our home has cracks in it because of the blasting in the mines’, or “Our children are sick because of the pollution’. At the last meeting Nox was completely mobbed by people making these claims, weren't you?
Nox: Yes, people were coming with all sorts of claims, about what the mine had done to them. But you know, what people really want is jobs … . They complain, ‘You give jobs to migrant workers from Guateng or Eastern Cape, but not to locals.’ But they are not from Rustenburg themselves.
Grace: You know, I really felt for you – it was like going into the lion's den. … But what they want is jobs. They have all these expectations that the mine will just provide.
Since the event recounted by Nox and Grace, Anglo Platinum public participation meetings had been a little short on both drama and participation. The 4 June open day was the third in a series of ‘stakeholder consultations’ held by Anglo Platinum in Rustenburg between March and June that year. Writing about stakeholder participation in England, Elizabeth Harrison describes how participants are expected to conform to a model of the ‘good citizen’, demonstrating their worthiness for social assistance. Conversely, those who refuse or fail to conform are perceived as ‘subversive’ as they ‘disrupt or negate the intended processes or outcomes of public policy’ (Barnes and Prior Reference Barnes and Prior2009, quoted in Harrison Reference Harrison2012). In the community participation processes at the Rustenburg mines, those who are seen to ‘make demands’ on the company risk being categorized as ‘troublemakers’. Earlier, Grace had referred to the presence of these apparently unwelcome guests at the stakeholder forum as an ‘invasion’. By making ‘claims’ on the company – whether in relation to health, housing or jobs – they transgress the unwritten rules of engagement. For in doing so they are perceived to have given voice to an illegitimate sense of entitlement, rather than demonstrating that they are willing and able to be empowered ‘to help themselves’.
Diwe went away empty-handed from the 4 June stakeholder event. The scheduled interactive question and answer session for the afternoon had been cancelled after the ‘fiasco’ of the last meeting; in its place was a clipboard on which ‘local stakeholders’ could sign up and leave comments or complaints. I asked Diwe what had gone before in the way of community projects led by any of the mining companies. She said a couple of years previously a mining company had initiated a recycling and waste collection project in the area of Edenvale in which she lived: ‘One of the companies came, Impala I think maybe, and they said we could do a business with collecting waste, some recycling too. … We made a business plan … but I don't know what happened, I never saw it again.’ She added, ‘I'm very interested in the BEE procurement, so I come to all the stakeholder workshops to find a project … but it's very difficult to start something in Edenvale.’
CONCLUSION
In the context of the global economic downturn, and a drop in the price of platinum from a record US$2,300 per ounce at the start of 2008 to US$800 just six months later (Anglo Platinum Reference Platinum2008: 4), the Platinum City that was bursting at the seams just three years ago looks very different today. Boomtime has given way to recession and, with it, declining demand for metals, waning profits for mining companies, and fears of mineshafts closing as operations contract. This time the town earned itself a brief reprieve from the full effects of this economic collapse, its economy buoyed up by the preparations for World Cup 2010, during which Rustenburg was one of the central hubs. Here, England played the USA in their first match of the tournament, bringing a mass influx of tourists and providing employment for some of the thousands of mineworkers retrenched from the platinum industry, for a while (Khumalo Reference Khumalo2009). Anglo American (South Africa's biggest mining house and Africa's largest private sector employer) backed the bid to host the World Cup in South Africa, and was, according to some, instrumental in its success. But with the World Cup over, Rustenburg remains subject to the volatile platinum market and diminishing mineral reserves.
The ghost towns left behind in the wake of industries in temporary or permanent retreat provide an enduring image of the post-closure effects of mining well known worldwide; a counter-balance to the portrait of corporate social investment at the height of its influence in the febrile growth of a town, epitomized by Rustenburg in 2005. Yet even then, despite the seemingly unstoppable momentum of the platinum boom in Rustenburg, the mine closures of 1957 and 1971 when platinum prices plummeted and the town went into decline remained strong in the collective memory, warning of the threat to come when the mines eventually close for good.
In the meantime, as the appeal to the concept of responsibility authenticates the role of Anglo Platinum as a dominant institution of governance in Rustenburg, the relationship between the company's CSR operatives and the beneficiaries they seek to empower embodies broader tensions surrounding the position of big business in the post-apartheid town. The company asserts its role as a key player in local development. At the same time, the discourse of CSR serves to reject claims of entitlement and obligation. Thus, while the company projects itself as a vehicle of ‘empowerment through the market’, CSR serves to reinscribe (rather than transform) old social hierarchies of power and dependence within Rustenburg. As Pieterse has pointed out, ‘the immunity of private investment’ to social priorities in urban planning and infrastructure remains a key obstacle to social integration and spatial coherence in South African towns and cities (2009: 2), as was exemplified in the impasse recounted above over installing water systems in areas of Edenvale earmarked for possible mineshafts.
The practices of CSR thus serve to exclude large sections of society while demarcating a select target zone of responsibility (the ‘community’) which is bound into relations of corporate patronage and clientelism. The effect of this process of constructing a community of recipients is twofold. First, the town provides a canvas onto which companies project the competing moral claims of ‘social upliftment’ and ‘empowerment’. Second, the practices of corporate social investment and the performance of corporate virtue create geographies of inclusion and exclusion, epitomized in the liminal position of the informal settlements, which disrupt the vision of social improvement as they fall outside the company's ‘community’ of social responsibility.
The morally compelling concept of corporate–community partnership serves as a political resource with which the company's influence and authority over local development planning and practice is authenticated. While this programme of corporate-driven development has undeniably delivered various tangible social benefits to some Rustenburg residents, it is the intangible prospect of empowerment through enterprise that has proved so alluring. On this promise of inclusion into the emancipatory project of ‘the market’, CSR has established itself as the development orthodoxy of the new millennium. But its mechanisms have served to enhance economic disparities which define life around the mines, between mine employee and unemployed, between stakeholder and squatter, making the achievement of this goal unattainable for most. As an elite-sponsored programme of social improvement, the project of CSR brings new inequalities and new forms of exclusion, even as it projects an inclusive vision of empowerment through the supposedly limitless opportunities of enterprise.
So what happens to those who are outside these webs of corporate gifting; those who sit beyond the ‘community’ of beneficiaries and selected targets of empowerment? This brings us back to Diwe, striving to be recognized as a ‘stakeholder’, to be selected as a target of the company's empowerment initiatives. Over twenty years ago, Fred Cooper wrote that ‘the city is inhabited by those still waiting to win as well as those who have won’ (Cooper Reference Cooper1987: 181). This is even more true today than it was then, despite the emancipatory promise of the market, extended by the giants of corporate capitalism to aspiring entrepreneurs at the margins. If winners in contemporary capitalism are defined by their capacity to claim benefits from those with the power or resources to deliver them (in this case a mining company), then the odds are certainly stacked against Diwe and others like her who, presumed lacking in these marketable assets, skills, or simply potential, are further marginalized by the exclusionary processes of empowerment (Ong Reference Ong2006).
In Edenvale, as in Mayfair, Park Heights and Rustenburg's other informal settlements, those who are not considered to be members of the ‘host community’, or, in the rhetoric of CSR, ‘legitimate stakeholders’ in the town, have no claim or entitlement to services, benefits or social goods provided through the mechanisms of corporate social investment. This unsettles the inclusive vision of empowerment and its claim to bring the peripheries into the emancipatory embrace of ‘the market’. For those such as Diwe, who experience CSR as exclusion rather than empowerment, corporate benevolence serves not only to deny them the patronage extended to beneficiaries, but to dismiss their credentials for membership on account of their apparent failure to ‘help themselves’. Still, as Diwe showed us, spurred on by the enticing yet elusive promise of the South African dream, the hope remains that ‘in the new South Africa, everyone can be a businessman’.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
This article is based on research funded by the ESRC. I am grateful to Catherine Dolan, Mattia Fumanti and the three anonymous referees commissioned by this journal for their advice in the writing of this article.
