ENVISIONING GOVERNANCE: EXPECTATIONS AND ESTRANGEMENTS OF TRANSFORMED RULE IN GLENDALE, SOUTH AFRICA

Abstract

ABSTRACTThis article explores how, in the village of Glendale in KwaZulu-Natal, residents and local government officials – including councillors and municipal technicians – ‘see’ the post-apartheid state. I show how residents of the village regard the government – despite extensive state intervention – as inadequate, complaining especially of their ‘invisible’ and ‘impersonal’ character. Indeed, for them, democracy has brought anything but ‘direct rule’. And yet, while chiefly rule is sometimes invoked as a favoured alternative, I argue that people's estrangement from democratic government is not the desire to return to ‘culture’ but rather an expression of structural difficulties central to South Africa's increasingly tenuous experiment with participatory democracy. I suggest that these difficulties are also not reducible to state failure or corruption but point towards contradictions in contemporary citizenship.