On a hot and humid afternoon in September 2011, I sit with Sizwe and his neighbour Lucas on the street corner at the main pedestrian entrance to Zandspruit. ‘It’s hard to find yourself a nice life,’ Sizwe tells me, describing how young people like him ‘have talent’ but do not know the ‘right people’ to get ahead. ‘If the government doesn’t make sure that people get enough employment,’ he continues, ‘nothing is going to work out.’ Unemployment, he implies, is ‘why people end up in jail − getting years for nothing’. Sizwe is 27 and spends most of his time on this street corner where he meets with a group of friends in their mid-twenties and early thirties. On a typical day, the men gather to gamble, drink, discuss politics, and endlessly scheme ways to make money. ‘I won’t say if I’m working or not,’ Sizwe tells me when I ask about his employment status, ‘but I’m always busy doing lots of activities.’

Sizwe has held two jobs in the formal labour market: he worked weekends at a nearby garden nursery before dropping out of school and as a private security guard for a luxury housing estate a few years later. He left both jobs within six months. Working as a security guard confirmed Sizwe’s suspicion that most of the jobs available to him not only pay little but offer few, if any, pathways to the life he wants. Sizwe does not spend his time looking for wage employment in the surrounding factories, office parks, and shopping malls that attract large numbers of migrants into the area; nor does his livelihood revolve around any one specific activity. Instead, he pursues multiple strategies simultaneously and fosters a wide web of social relations.

I quickly discover that asking whether someone is employed or working is not a useful question for understanding how people sustain themselves. ‘In reality, you cannot just sit and do nothing,’ Lucas tells me, describing how ‘everyone is running around doing their thing’. ‘Some are playing dice [an informal gambling game] and living out of that’, and others are ‘working at night’ – a term that refers to those who make their money through criminal activity. Still others are ‘working in politics’, and some, he continues, ‘rely on their girlfriends or family ’cause they’re working’.

As I write this chapter, South Africans are mourning three performing artists and musicians, who were all brutally murdered. In the early hours of Sunday morning, 20 November 2022, DJ Sumbody (Oupa John Sefoka) was killed in a hail of bullets on the way to a gig at a nightclub in Pretoria. Again, in the early hours of Monday morning, 30 January 2023, Vusi Ma R5 (Itumeleng Mosoeu) met his untimely death after being shot and killed in Soshanguve. Most recently – and arguably, the death that received the most widespread attention locally and all over the world – AKA (Kiernan Forbes) was murdered shortly after having dinner at a restaurant in Durban on Friday evening, 10 February 2023.

These deaths and their hypervisibility, with people expressing utter disbelief at their brutality, should be contextualised not only from the interstices of history’s precarious relationship with Black death and survival,but also in relation to the South African government’s fundamental decline at governance, leading to rampant lawlessness.

In the context of these reports of brutal deaths, while simultaneously reeling from and reconciling with the unprecedented deaths of the Covid-19 pandemic, I remember witnessing Mthuthuzeli Zimba’s exploration of the idea of the burial tribute that specifically borrowed from a repertoire of performance arts and cultures in South African townships. Zimba’s performance – which formed part of the Institute for Creative Arts (ICA) 2019 Infecting the City (ITC) programme – titled Habashwe! / Let Them Die! / Anything Goes! – interrogated the burial rituals from many townships, including the social practices of wie sien ons.In fact, Zimba’s performance reminds me of Vusi Ma R5’s funeral proceedings in Mabopane that were documented in a series of viral videos depicting a frenzied atmosphere of young Black people taking over the streets in processions: dancing, singing, playing Bacardi music,with half-nude young women directing traffic and attracting enormous attention from passers-by and local media outlets.

I want to start by thinking about the everyday practices of performance cultures stimulated in the streets of South African townships, particularly where cultural production intertwines with the dehiscence of Black death and survival. Performance cultures in South African townships are often quotidian and they tend to fall outside of the wholly disciplinary frameworks of the performing arts.

It was suggested in Part 1 that craft unionism depends upon the capacity of the union to restrict entry into the job. In Chapter 3 it was shown how, under the pressure of technical change, the craft skill of the moulder was diluted and the union was forced to open its membership to non-craftsmen. Further undermining of their privileged position forced the moulders to redefine themselves in racial terms by introducing de facto job reservation in the 1968 Industrial Council agreement. However, faced by a systematic onslaught from employers to open up ‘skilled jobs’ to Africans, and being unable to provide them with union members, the unions were forced to allow non-union (i.e. black) workers to take the new positions. Yet opening union jobs to non-union members could only make the registered unions even less representative of a semi-skilled work force which threatened to lower the standards of the skilled men. As had happened sixty years earlier in the United Kingdom, the opening of the ‘closed unions’ became an imperative for survival. ‘Since the general conditions of effective closed unionism are an occupational stability on the part of the workers it organizes and a system of restricting entry to their jobs’, observes Turner, ‘the most obvious cause of such a transformation in a closed union’s character is a technical change which undermines the permanence or blurs the identity of its members’ occupation.’ He concludes that ‘whether the union will in fact then modify itself depends largely on the pace of the technical revolution with which it is confronted’.

Yet the victory of the imperatives of technical change is not guaranteed, at least not in the short term. It has been shown that privileged workers were able to retain their ‘standard’ through transforming the closed shop into de facto job reservation. Two unions, the Y & S and to a lesser extent the AEU, have continued this racial strategy, refusing to open their unions to blacks. This chapter is concerned with three of the craft-diluted engineering unions which, faced by a crisis in craft control, and taking advantage of the change in state strategy, opened up their membership to Africans. The lever employers used to persuade the craft unions to open was the threat of a skill shortage. However this threat concealed an attempt to increase the productivity of labour. All three unions, in opening their ranks, have attempted to retain control by the established unions — either through parallel unions, as in the case of the South African Electrical Workers’ Association (SAEWA), or by restructuring one union into separate racial branches, as has happened in SABS and the IMS. But whereas SABS attempted to transform itself into an industrial union, the IMS showed little interest in expansion, concerned simply to retain its restricted entry and content to survive as a small union. Whether SABS is likely to achieve its expansionary objectives or the IMS its restrictive objectives will be assessed in Part III. Significantly, the IMS is able to contemplate restricted survival because it is able to limit entry into the job through a double closed shop.

The foundations for an analysis of the transformation of the labour process were laid over a century ago by Marx in Volume I of Capital. It is thus appropriate to begin with an exposition of that forbidding, unavoidable book. This chapter is not, however, an exercise in social theory so much as an attempt to provide the non-specialist reader with an understanding of the concepts which constitute the theoretical ground of this study.

Capitalism exists when the process of production is organized in terms of a market on which commodities, including labour itself, are bought and sold according to standards of monetary exchange. Such a process emerges when a class of men and women who do not own the means of production are forced to sell their labour power. In terms of the normal contract of employment the worker does not agree to do an exact amount of work; he surrenders his capacity to work and it is the task of management, through its hierarchy of control, to transform his capacity into actual productive activity. It is this process of transforming labour power into productive activity that is central to capitalism, and yet it is at the same time hidden. Let us therefore ‘leave this noisy sphere of the market’ and examine ‘the hidden abode of production’.

Let us begin ‘by stating the first premise of all human existence, and therefore of all history; the premise, namely, that men must be in a position to live in order to be able to make history. But life involves before anything else, eating and drinking, a habitation, clothing and many other things. The first historical act is thus the production of the means to satisfy these needs, the production of material life itself.’ The process of producing the material means to satisfy these needs — ‘purposeful activity aimed at the production of use values’ — Marx calls ‘the labour process’. The labour process is a universal condition of human existence and is not in itself peculiar to capitalism.

Early craft production in the foundry was monopolized by European immigrants who had learnt the technique of union protection in the period of intense struggle against deskilling in their home countries. These craft moulders were to become a privileged stratum of the foundry labour force — a labour aristocracy. Blacks, on the other hand, had been subordinated in the late nineteenth century through colonial conquest and were now entering wage labour on a weak and unorganized basis. They were to enter the foundry as unskilled migrant labourers whose prolonged absence from their rural homes was to lead to the progressive deterioration of the productive capacity of these areas, creating a growing reserve army of labour dependent on wage labour. The division of labour that was to emerge in the early foundries was thus shaped by the differential proletarianization of black and white workers rooted in the colonial origins of South African society. The colour of craft was white and those who performed the subordinate labouring jobs were black. However, the beginnings of mass production were to transform the labour process, breach craft control, and open up job opportunities for ‘coloured’ machine operators. The central focus of Part I is on the response of the labour aristocracy of the foundry to these changes; in Parts II and III attention shifts to black workers increasingly at the centre of a transformed labour process.

Part II suggested that the contradictions generated by capitalist development, in particular the transition to monopoly capitalism, created a crisis of control in work relations. This crisis operated on two levels. On one level capital’s need to increase the productivity of labour was limited by the success of the diluted craft unions in maintaining a monopoly over certain jobs. The increasing dilution of these jobs, previously held by whites, made the opening of the ‘closed’ unions a necessity for the protection of jobs. The withdrawal of state support for the racial exclusion of blacks from the Industrial Council system provided the opportunity for the IMS to open its membership to blacks.

The more significant crisis of control over work relations in the foundry arose from the racially despotic nature of management’s control over black labour. As reliance on the white supervisor and his induna gave way to more sophisticated control through management-initiated liaison committees, growing resistance was encountered from organized black metal workers. Responding to the presence of a growing number of semi-skilled black workers in the industry, black unions emerged in the early 1970s. Yet management’s strategy of preempting the union through the liaison committee, facilitated by the tactics of ‘fear and smear’, inhibited the transition of black metal workers from phase two (the struggle for recognition) to phase three (negotiating and maintaining an agreement). It was, ultimately, the popular struggle in the townships in 1976 that widened the nature of the crisis, forcing capital and the state to search for new forms of social control in the workplace.

Most of the men I get to know who make money in Zandspruit’s local economy are not untouched by wage labour. They had worked in various, often unrelated, low-wage jobs: as private security guards, cashiers, golf caddies, or petrol attendants. Khenzo first worked on and off as a petrol attendant and then for a fast-food business before turning to the car-wash business full-time. Xolani, who is working as a taxi driver when we meet at the car-wash stand, had a job on a large construction site that became an upmarket housing estate when he first arrived in Johannesburg; later he worked as a golf caddie. Eric, who operates an IT business from his mother’s house and DJs on the side, had worked as a petrol attendant, as a cashier at a bottle store, and at a nearby factory. All of these jobs were almost always held for short periods, usually under a year, and in a surprising number of cases they came to an end because men abandoned them, despite having no guarantee of another job.

The focus of this chapter is on understanding why, when there are jobs, albeit low-paying ones, men voluntarily exit them or even refuse to take them up. It begins with a snapshot of a few of my interlocutors’ work histories to illustrate the type of irregular and precarious jobs that are readily available in the surrounding shopping malls, industrial complexes, and suburbs. It then unpacks the complex web of reasons that lead some young men to withdraw from or turn down low-wage jobs. I show that young men’s disdain for low-wage jobs is never simply a matter of insufficient pay or bad working conditions. It has to do with the impossibility of meaningful progress in these jobs, the experience of racial inequality in the workplace, and the social demands that come with having wage income. In the final section I draw attention to a long pedigree of urban young men rejecting the wage relation in favour of an alternative livelihood. I argue that rejecting low-wage jobs not only is a protest against insecure and precarious employment but also reflects an aspiration and political demand to live and not just survive.

It has been shown — in Chapter 7 — that the engineering craft unions opened their membership to blacks, a development that will now be considered further. Meanwhile, how have the other trade unions which are party to the National Industrial Council (NIC) responded to the tentative attempts at deracializing the industrial relations system in the period of the Wiehahn Commission and after?

The first response from a union within the NIC — Yster en Staal — expressed a keen sense of betrayal. ‘To my mind’, said Wessels Borman, general secretary of the Y & S:

Although the Y & S was supportive of the National Party in the early apartheid period, after the 1960s it placed less faith in the state as the guardian of its position. Some members of the Y & S had shifted their support from the National Party to the Herstigte Nasionale Party (HNP). When statutory job reservation failed, as in the engineering industry of the early 1960s, they were forced to accept the necessity of ‘African advancement’, and sought to control the pace of change by demanding that white workers were either retrained or promoted to supervisory positions. This phase culminated in the 1978 Agreement which, it was suggested in Chapter 7, increasingly relocated white workers to supervisory positions.

I first visit Zandspruit in July 2011, a week after a string of protests that shake the community. The protestors’ main gripe is the lack of service delivery and the inaction of their local ward councillor, whom they hold responsible for their deplorable living conditions and the missing basic services. On this July morning, I park my car at the petrol station opposite the settlement and phone Lawrence, who has agreed to meet me. Lawrence is a community development worker, a public servant deployed in communities ostensibly to help residents access government services. But Lawrence is stuck in a meeting and cannot meet me as planned. ‘Sello is coming,’ he says over the phone. ‘He knows everything around here.’ The phone cuts. Five minutes later, a short, broad-shouldered man sporting white Superga trainers, a Nike shirt, and a large diamond earring in his left ear approaches me. This is Sello.

Standing next to my car, I explain to Sello that I am here to understand what motivates young people’s involvement in the protests that are becoming a frequent occurrence in townships and informal settlements across South Africa. Sello, not particularly enthusiastic but without hesitation, agrees to show me around. ‘Let’s go to my place first,’ he says, remarking that I will soon comprehend why people are on the streets. We cross the main road and walk along a sidewalk dotted with car repair shops, makeshift hair salons, and a variety of small stalls peddling everything from cellphone chargers to cigarettes and brightly coloured fruit stacked in plastic bowls. We pass by the local primary school, the clinic, and a massive dumpsite with waste piled three metres high. At a T-junction we veer right up a dirt path. Sello’s shack sits at the fork of two more footpaths that lead into a maze of narrow alleys between densely packed shacks in the settlement’s most crowded and under-serviced area. His shack is painted red with Vodacom signage on one side and pictures of various hairstyles on the other. It is divided into the living space he shares with his girlfriend and the area where he runs a barbershop.

On that day, and in the weeks and months that follow, I spend time with Sello and the mix of friends, neighbours, and occasional customers who gather at the barbershop to exchange gossip and discuss local politics. Sello never readily divulges how he makes his money. On some occasions, he refers to himself as unemployed; on others, he claims he is ‘hustling’ or ‘working in politics’. It is only after observing the ebb and flow of people at his shack – often a site of lengthy negotiations and disputes over payments – that I start to grasp the various sources of Sello’s income and understand why almost everyone I meet in Zandspruit knows him. Sello operates as a local mashonisa (unregistered loan shark) and plays a prominent role in the informal governance structures that patrol the streets at night. I later learn that he played a significant role in orchestrating the recent protests, something I was unaware of when we initially met. Sello’s barbershop is not primarily a commercial enterprise. It serves as a nexus for social networks and a legitimate income source, shielding him from potential allegations of corruption from his political adversaries. He makes money through various means, including managing informal land transactions, mediating disputes between landlords and tenants, and lending money to local residents at a hefty 50 per cent interest rate, regardless of the loan size. ‘There is a lot of money revolving around here,’ he tells me, ‘but it requires a sharp mind to see it and to take advantage of it.’

In 2013, events organised by the City of Cape Town, the Visual Arts Network of South Africa, the Africa Centre and the Infecting the City public arts festival coalesced around a project titled ‘2013 Ways to Do Public Art’. The project involved an exhibition at the City Hall, a series of policy engagements and artful experiments in public space that were focused on exploring the role of different kinds of public art in South Africa, paying attention to politics, publics and power dynamics. One of the performative interactions was entitled Food for Thought, the purpose of which was to engage in conversations about colonial monuments over food cooked and served in public spaces.

The provocation was conceptualised by Durban-based artist-architect doung jahangeer, who has conducted similar forms of public dialogue around urban issues in other parts of South Africa, as well as internationally. jahangeer is co-founder and director of an arts-architecture organisation based in Durban called dala, which uses artful tactics as a starting point for dialogue and considers how this dialogue can produce knowledge and action towards more just spaces. As Paolo Freire asserts: ‘Knowledge emerges only through invention and re-invention, through the restless, impatient, continuing, hopeful inquiry human beings pursue in the world, with the world, and with each other.’

Food for Thought was a public art piece in three parts. Part one started with a process of asking for permission. Acts of public art are subject to permitting processes within the City of Cape Town and this iteration of Food for Thought was to involve setting up a shisa nyama stall next to colonial monuments depicting Edward VII and Jan Smuts.Lighting fires in the city centre is not ordinarily permitted under public space by-laws and cooking food on open flames is heavily regulated, if allowed at all. Acquiring permission was, therefore, the starting point for dialogue between the project organisers and the City of Cape Town and the cause of much anxiety. jahangeer notes: ‘I didn’t see this as an artwork, but rather as a provocation to start a conversation around the very issues that we were confronted with, to devise or set up a platform where dialogue would happen and to understand what the public is and means.’

A recent paper applied labour market theory to South Africa, formulating a model of racial dualism. Cassim postulates

The racial dualism of the South African labour market is illustrated, he argues, by an examination of the occupational distribution of different race groups.