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Browsing Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences by Subject ""Politics of the Belly""

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    "Use Me!" Enterprise development, nature conservation and patronage in northern KwaZulu-Natal
    (Stellenbosch : Stellenbosch University, 2020-12) Duncan, Michelle; Van Wyk, Ilana; Stellenbosch University. Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences. Dept. of Sociology and Social Anthropology.
    ENGLISH ABSTRACT: Simangaliso Wetland Park (iWP) was South Africa’s first World Heritage Site and in 2019 it became South Africa’s second largest protected area.The Park consolidated 16 nature reserves that were created during apartheid, largely through the forced removal of black South Africans. With the dawn of democracy, the new government instituted a landclaims process through which local people who were forcefully relocated could claim back such land. At the sametime, the government identified nature conservation and ecotourism as prime social and economic drivers in the severely underdeveloped and impoverished region within which iWP existed.This emphasis prohibited land claimants from moving back on to conservation land, but mandated iWP to sign co-management agreements with successful claimants that promised them access to social and economic benefits from ecotourism.This thesis focuses on one iWP initiative to do just that. In a context of severe socio-economic deprivation on its borders, iWP hired Raizcorp ,a “business incubator”, to run the Rural Enterprise Accelerator Programme (REAP). Raizcorp’s business development philosophy explained successful entrepreneurship in terms of individual characteristics such as self-motivation and attempted to instil these qualities in REAP participants. This focus on the individual de-politicised the causes of local structural poverty and ignored local limits to the building of independent businesses. Indeed, at the completion of the course, REAP distributed sub-grants, which quietly acknowledged the limited capacity participants had to self-start a business. Furthermore, despite their enthusiasm about the value of REAP’s bookkeeping lessons, few participants kept books for their businesses because the technology did not lend itself to the multiple, intersecting businesses and social responsibilities that participants used to create economic security in this precarious context. REAP’s envisaged independent business owners also started to make claims of dependency on iWP in which they framed themselves as clients to a patron. In this thesis, I explain why these claims were made and argue that they revealed a larger social logic in the area. On the one hand, REAP participants used the intimacy established during the Programme to make patronage claims and access iWP’s resources. On the other hand, I argued that iWP needed to legitimise their continued existence on claimed land in a context where other local “patrons” supported alternative land uses such as mining. While iWP hoped that by fulfilling its mandate to provide social and economic development projects would do this legitimising work’, their “clients” agitated for the authority to engage more fully and more conspicuously in the “politics of the belly”(Bayart2010).