Working Papers

Permanent URI for this collection

https://hdl.handle.net/10566/21

Browse

Browsing by Author "Du Toit, Andries"

Now showing 1 - 3 of 3
  • Thumbnail Image
    Item
    The Land and Its People: the land question and the South African political order
    (Institute for Poverty Land and Agrarian Studies (PLAAS), 2023-03) Du Toit, Andries
    This paper examines the disjuncture between the discourses of policy deliberation and contentious politics in debates about ‘the land question’ in South Africa. It argues that the South African land debate as it unfolds in the public realm is best understood as a displaced discourse indirectly addressing the terms of political belonging and the nature of the post-apartheid political order. Far from being a distraction, this is a challenge that urgently needs to be confronted in its own terms. Confronting the crisis of the post-apartheid political order requires a re-thinking of the terms in which national identity is conceived. The paper explores the possibilities of a politics of belonging centred on the Constitutional invocation of a political order ‘for all who live in it’ and what this might imply for a more constructive and productive engagement with land struggles in urban and rural South Africa.
  • Thumbnail Image
    Item
    What price cheap goods? Survivalists, informalists and competition in the township retail grocery trade
    (PLAAS, 2019-08-31) Petersen, Leif; Thorogood, Camilla; Charman, Andrew; Du Toit, Andries
    About 54% of South Africa’s township microenterprises trade in food or drink. More than two-thirds of these are grocery retail businesses in the form of spaza shops and smaller ‘house shops’. These are the predominant businesses within the ‘township economy’ and play an important role in food security, self-employment and community cohesion. In the last decade, the business of spaza shops (dedicated, signposted businesses with a range of foodstuffs and open five days per week or more) has undergone extensive change towards a new class of entrepreneurial traders – mostly foreign nationals. This change has meant that the sector has become increasingly controversial and associated with chauvinistic and xenophobic discourses targeting immigrants. While the nature, causes and extent of change in informal grocery retail markets have been noted by various authors over the past decade, there is as yet no comprehensive account of the changing nature of business dynamics and competitiveness in the sector.
  • Thumbnail Image
    Item
    Whose Land Question? Policy deliberation and populist reason in the South African land debate
    (PLAAS, 2019-11) Du Toit, Andries
    On 4 and 5 February 2019, the Institute for Poverty, Land and Agrarian Studies (PLAAS), along with colleagues from the Universities of Fort Hare and of Rhodes, hosted a national conference entitled Resolving the Land Question: Land redistribution for equitable access to land in South Africa. This paper considers this conference as a case study of ‘policy sense-making’—an attempt to frame contentious issues in a way that renders them amenable to governmental resolution. It explores the contrasting conceptions of the political rationality of land reform put forward at the conference, and the different conceptions of the nature of democracy and government that informed competing policy visions. The paper also considers the disjuncture between the world of technical land reform policy deliberation on the one hand, the way the notion of land is used in contentious and popular politics in the public sphere on the other. In the end, the paper argues, much more is at stake in South African land debates than land itself. Beyond the question of who should own the land, how it should be used, and how it could be shared are deep and intractable questions about the nature of South African democracy and of the political community on which it depends.