Faking it or making it: the politics of consumption and the precariousness of social mobility in South Africa
Abstract
enThis article critically explores the complex and contradictory meanings attached to conspicuous consumption in an informal settlement on the outskirts of Johannesburg. It examines why un(der)employed young people, especially young Black men, view the trappings of wealth in their midst and dismiss them as ‘fake’. The article shows how the widespread concern with ‘faking it’ indexes the unstable links between consumption, status, and class differentiation in a time of generalized economic insecurity. Accordingly, it maintains that the accusation of ‘fakery’ is not only about jealousy and the dangers of being seen to accumulate money without redistributing it, but also a product of the precariousness that characterizes young people's lives. Ultimately, the article shows how consumption affords a unique window into the values, aspirations, and anxieties of young un(der)employed Black men in a context where ‘proper’ pathways to social mobility are, for most, completely out of reach.
Abstrait
frFaux-semblants ou réussite : politique de la consommation et précarité de la mobilité sociale en Afrique du Sud
Résumé
Cet article explore de manière critique les significations complexes et contradictoires attachées à la consommation ostentatoire dans un quartier informel de la banlieue de Johannesbourg. L'autrice examine les raisons pour lesquelles les jeunes sous-employés et sans emploi, en particulier les jeunes hommes noirs, voient les signes extérieurs de richesse en leur sein et les rejettent comme étant « faux ». L'article montre comment l'inquiétude généralisée concernant les « faux-semblants » indique les liens instables entre la consommation, le statut et la différenciation des classes dans une période d'insécurité économique généralisée. En conséquence, l'accusation de « faux » n'est pas seulement liée à la jalousie et aux dangers d’être vu comme accumulant de l'argent sans le redistribuer, mais est également un produit de la précarité caractérisant la vie des jeunes. Enfin, l'article montre comment la consommation offre une vue unique sur les valeurs, les aspirations et les angoisses des jeunes hommes noirs sous-employés et sans emploi dans un contexte où les voies « appropriées » de la mobilité sociale sont, pour la plupart, complètement hors de portée.
‘If you're driving a car, it shows you are improving’, Oscar told me as we sat on overturned beer crates under the torn shade cloth opposite his car wash venture. ‘But’, he continued, looking at the Mercedes-Benz parked opposite the car wash, ‘for most of us driving a car is a false dream of impressing people’. I heard this expression, almost verbatim, several times during my fieldwork in Zandspruit informal settlement on the outskirts of Johannesburg. There was a widespread perception that many of the people who drove expensive cars or engaged in other forms of conspicuous consumption were ‘faking it’ or ‘living a false dream’. To accuse someone of ‘faking it’ is to judge a performance of wealth – and the status it implies – as something other than reality.
In contemporary South Africa, as with many other parts of the world, conspicuous consumption is one of the primary ways through which accomplishment, status, and citizenship are pursued. In a country that for decades denied the Black1 majority's claim to citizenship, and restricted what they could consume, conspicuous consumption is more than a signal of wealth or status. It symbolizes belonging and freedom from apartheid (Posel 2010). But while conspicuous consumption is a common proxy for wealth and, according to Thorstein Veblen's (1899) classic definition, a critical avenue to establish or increase one's social status, these performances of wealth are always subject to interpretation, and can be judged as more or less authentic or legitimate.
This article examines what is entailed or implied when un(der)employed young people view the trappings of wealth in their midst and dismiss them as ‘fake’. I do so by drawing on one year of participant observation fieldwork and interviews from 2015-16 with young people (young men especially) in Zandspruit. I show that young people's widespread concern with ‘faking it’ not only reveals the unstable links between consumption, status, and class differentiation, but also gives expression to the overriding sense many Black young men have of having few, if any, prospects of really ‘making it’. Put differently, the ‘faking it’ narrative provides a register for marginalized young men to make sense of the precariousness of their lives and those around them. Ultimately, the article shows how the complex and contradictory meanings that surround conspicuous consumption afford a unique window into the values, aspirations, and anxieties of un(der)employed young men in a time of economic insecurity.
The aspiration to ‘afford’
The new South Africa was born in 1994 amid great expectation that political inclusion entitled one to material advancement and economic prosperity. The election promise of a ‘better life for all’ incarnated the way in which South Africans came to understand democracy and what it entitled one to. Democracy was imagined not only in terms of equal recognition or abstract rights, but also in terms of access to material goods and accelerated social mobility, something that is expressed, in part, in the capacity to consume (Iqani & Kenny 2015; Posel 2010).
Despite South Africa being governed by a party committed to, and with a clear political interest in, improving the lives of the Black majority, there is little to celebrate. While there have been noticeable gains in the provision of basic services since the end of apartheid, and social grants have made progress in reducing absolute poverty, the Black majority are condemned to a life of unemployment and destitution. The statistics are stark: South Africa has an unemployment rate of nearly 40 per cent (StatsSA 2020). And of those lucky enough to have work, about 54 per cent of full-time employees earn below the working-poverty line of R4,125 a month (Finn 2015). Poor Black youth (the so-called ‘born frees’ who were born after the transition to democracy) are the worst off with an unemployment rate of over 59 per cent (StatsSA 2020). South Africa is also one of the world's most unequal countries, both in income and in wealth or asset inequality (Orthofer 2016; World Bank 2020), and has some of the world's lowest levels of social mobility (Houle 2019). According to the latest figures from the World Inequality Database, the top 1 per cent of South African earners take home almost 20 per cent of all income in the country, while the top 10 per cent take home 65 per cent. The remaining 90 per cent of South African earners get only 35 per cent of total income (World Bank 2021).
While overall levels of inequality have changed very little, with most Black people in the bottom income deciles and most Whites at the top, the democratic era has seen the standard of living increase for a small Black elite and a growing Black middle class.2 The proportion of Black households in ‘the upper classes’ – households with substantial income from wealth or business and/or a breadwinner in executive or professional employment – has grown dramatically over the last twenty years (Seekings & Nattrass 2005: 201; 2015: 115). The expansion of the Black elite and middle classes was made possible by the repeal of racial restrictions on occupational, income, and residential mobility. This process was bolstered by affirmative action in employment, especially in the public sector, and Black Economic Empowerment, which entailed a substantial transfer of wealth to the Black elite (Seekings & Nattrass 2015: 119; Southall 2016).3
The rise of a Black elite and middle class became synonymous with certain forms of consumption, such as car ownership, living in the suburbs, eating in high-end restaurants, going on holiday, and shopping in South Africa's booming malls. The state and media's celebration of individual Black consumption as a sign of ‘national prosperity’ (Kruger 2010: 76) has reinforced consumer capacity and choice as the marker of social inclusion and position. Consumption is not only an index of individual accomplishment and class affiliation, but also a sign of racial emancipation and ‘freedom’ (Iqani & Kenny 2015; Posel 2010). That consumption has become intimately tied to the idea of ‘freedom’ is not surprising given the racial restrictions on people's consumer desires under apartheid (Posel 2010). The media have played a significant role in not only making Black consumption conspicuous, but also packaging it in a rhetoric of success to encourage the ‘have-not majority to identity with fictions of aspiration towards the bounty of the new elite’ despite a wealth gap that makes this aspiration impossible (Kruger 2010: 76). In a context where consumption is closely tied up with status and class aspiration, the inability to consume becomes a marker of marginalization and exclusion (Iqani & Kenny 2015; O'Neill 2014).
Young people in Zandspruit spoke explicitly about wanting to change ‘the status’ of their lives. Oscar (age 29) had left a low-end job to co-run a car wash venture with Khenzo (age 27), a widespread form of informal business in informal settlements. When he talked about his aspirations, he spoke of wanting ‘to afford’ or, as Khenzo put it, ‘have a nice thing and a nice living’. These men did not want to be washing cars for the rest of their lives, nor did they want to stay in Zandspruit. They dreamed of having enough money to move into a nearby suburb with a nice house and car – a change that has long represented movement into the middle class.
My interlocutors frequently compared their lives (and their inability ‘to afford’) to those of the upwardly mobile who spend time at Motswako Pot – a popular chisa nyama (a venue selling grilled meat) in the heart of Zandspruit.4 Young people in Zandspruit use the discourse of ‘affordability’ in ways that are nearly identical to the Soweto residents in Peter Alexander et al.’s (2013) study Class in Soweto (see also Iqani 2015). For instance, when I asked Setsumi (age 31), who was unemployed at the time, what distinguished a person who was middle class, he told me that they ‘can afford things that other people cannot afford’ that will allow them to ‘take a step forward’. The aspiration ‘to afford’ is not only about a desire to escape the daily struggle to make ends meet, but also about a desire for a wholly different life(style). The aspiration to ‘afford’ is not only about greater comfort or an ability to pursue enjoyment and leisure, but also about the ability to project oneself into the ‘near future’ (Guyer 2007) and having the resources to build a home and take care of one's family and children.
But while consumption is one of the primary vehicles through which social mobility and status are imagined and pursued, consumption is saturated with a host of moral anxieties about rising indebtedness, crime, and the erosion of long-held cultural norms where ‘selfhood was embedded in sociality, and “wealth in people” was valued more than wealth in things’ (Durham 2020: 490). Motswako Pot, where the consumption of alcohol and display of expensive cars are hyper-visible, was often spoken about as a proxy for a wider consumer impulse and all its associated moral hazards, social pressures, and anxieties.
Zandspruit
Zandspruit is a post-apartheid informal settlement on the outskirts of Johannesburg's northern suburbs (Fig. 1). It started as a small squatting community on private agricultural land in 1994 but grew exponentially in the following decade, resulting in massive overcrowding and inadequate access to clean water, sewerage, and refuse removal. Zandspruit's population is now over 30,000, almost entirely Black African, and particularly youthful – 55 per cent of Zandspruit residents are classified as youth (age 15 to 34). The continual influx of people into the settlement reflects its relative proximity to jobs in the surrounding suburbs, shopping malls, and industrial areas.
Zandspruit has been the site of recurring protest action since the mid-2000s that echoes service delivery protests in townships and informal settlements around the country (Dawson 2014a; 2014b; Von Holdt et al. 2011). While these protests have often been consumed by struggles for state patronage, they are driven by a yearning for a different form of democracy that is more substantive in terms of socioeconomic benefits, including houses, basic services, and decent jobs. Young people's feeling of being excluded from democracy's promise of material advancement is accentuated by the juxtaposition of Zandspruit with nearby upmarket golf estates, townhouse complexes, and Cosmo City (a large government mixed-income housing development). While the residents of the luxury golf estates and gated communities remain overwhelmingly White (Duca 2015), the construction of Cosmo City and tens of thousands of ‘affordable’ townhouse units has brought discrepancies in wealth and income amongst Black people closer to home (Chipkin 2012).
This article draws upon long-term participant observation and informal conversations on street corners, at car wash ventures, at a local youth-run NGO, and at Motswako, the bar and restaurant described above, alongside in-depth interviews with thirty-seven young people, each of whom I interviewed between two and four times. Although I briefly discuss one woman, young men are the focus of this article. This research evolved out of an earlier period of research in 2011 and was assisted by the relationships I established then and maintained over the intervening years. I spent a significant amount of time at Motswako over the course of field research between 2015 and 2016. It provided one of the few quiet spaces – during the week at least – in which to conduct interviews, with the added draw of an ice-cold coke or beer. My trips to Motswako over the weekend were more social and usually at the invitation of someone else. I spent even more time hanging out at the informal car wash stand run by Oscar and Khenzo opposite Motswako, which was enveloped into these wider displays of wealth over the weekend.
The car wash stand, like many of the street corners in Zandspruit, is a hyper-masculine space where young men (most of whom make a living informally) can gather to socialize, pass time, and engage in lively debates, invariably about money, politics, and women. As a site of male sociality, the car wash stand is not that different to the barbershops that Brad Weiss (2002) describes in Arusha, Tanzania, and the conversational groups known as fadas that Adeline Masquelier (2013) observes in Niger. On Fridays and Saturdays, it was common for Oscar and Khenzo (and anyone else helping them out) to wash a handful of cars together and use the money they made to buy a crate of beers to share. Drinking alcohol is an integral part of these relationships and the main leisure activity. Buying and sharing alcohol provided an important way for men to cement friendships and – similar to the young men Daniel Mains (2013) describes in Ethiopia – practise reciprocity.
Most of the young men I met at the car wash were not forthcoming about how they earned their money. The majority had given up looking for low-end jobs in the formal economy and got by through various informal money-making ventures and by leveraging distributional claims on others both inside and outside of their households (Dawson 2021). Thatho (age 21), for instance, made money from wiring informal electricity connections and gambling. Neo (age 33) worked sporadically as a broker at the closest licensing department. He received a cut of the bribes people paid to speed up the process of getting their driver's licence. While Neo sometimes ‘got lucky’ and made a quick buck brokering a deal, he did not have ‘guaranteed work’, as he put it, or, like Khenzo, a durable source of income in the informal economy. Likewise, Tebogo (age 32) made a living selling counterfeit-labelled clothes and shoes out of a rucksack and haggling residents for money.
My positionality as a White, relatively wealthy woman in my thirties studying young, relatively poor Black men merits mention – not only because South Africa is a highly racialized society, but also because racist ideologies have long shaped moral attitudes towards consumption (Posel 2010; 2014). In Deborah Posel's words, ‘[I]f Whiteness has long implied an entitlement to prosperity, being classified Black was tantamount to being judged unworthy of certain modes of consumption’ (2014: 48). Although I have attempted to engage with the racialized undercurrents of the accusation of, and concern with, ‘faking it’, I recognize that the ‘situated knowledges’ (Haraway 1988) I draw upon here are not absolved of these racialized histories or the disproportionate public scrutiny and moral disdain that have long been attached to Black consumerism.
Motswako: a space of aspirational consumption
Motswako has established itself as a sought-after restaurant for the upwardly mobile in the north of Johannesburg. It is one of the few spaces in Zandspruit where the worlds of the affluent and less affluent collide. The Black middle classes come to Motswako to socialize and enjoy the atmosphere and, of course, the grilled meat and chakalaka (a spicy tomato relish) for which the venue is famous. But, as Thabiseni Ndlovu (2020) notes, the regular movement of some sections of the Black middle class between the suburbs and the townships is not simply about social ties and a yearning for a distinct mode of interacting and socializing, but also reflects a sense of being out of place in (White) suburbia.
Motswako opened in 2008. The restaurant operates out of a converted government subsidy house (commonly known as RDP houses) opposite the taxi rank in the more suburban section of the settlement. On Saturdays and Sundays, it is packed. People spill into the streets lined with BMWs, Volkswagen Golf GTis, and Mercedes-Benzes (Fig. 2). Popular House and R&B music blares into the air. Groups of friends gather around car boots and cooler boxes filled with booze. Motswako opens into the street on both sides, making it perhaps the most public of spaces in Zandspruit – a stage for the display of wealth and social status.
Young people in Zandspruit often referred to Motswako as the ‘expensive place’ to drink and contrasted it with the majority of ‘cheap’ drinking spots in the settlement. Compared to the small (often one-room) shebeens and taverns in most neighbourhoods, where people either stand or sit on upturned beer crates, Motswako is noticeably upmarket. It has large wooden tables covered in plastic tablecloths and branded umbrellas outside. It also sells more expensive brands of alcohol that are a prominent marker of social class in the community. ‘If you are consistently drinking [at Motswako]’, one of my interlocutors told me, ‘it means you are affording’ (a term commonly used to index a person of a higher economic status, emphasis added).
Many of the young men I spent time with appreciated that Motswako brought people into Zandspruit who might otherwise not set foot in the area. This was seen to contest the reification of Zandspruit as an undifferentiated place of deprivation and its residents as equally poor and disenfranchised. One young man by the name of Prince (age 32) described Motswako to me as a ‘place that integrates people [from Zandspruit]’ with those who ‘have done well for themselves’. He noted that spending time at Motswako with people who own BMWs made you feel as if you are ‘in the same [social] class with them’. As Prince makes clear, local youth valued the opportunity provided by Motswako for them to participate (albeit partially and momentarily) in the kinds of consumption practices that have become increasingly important markers of social status in post-apartheid South Africa. Yet young men's aspirational admiration of the upwardly mobile who come to Motswako at the weekends was laden with suspicions about the veracity of their wealth and the irresponsibility of their spending.
The number of local residents at the restaurant spiked at the end of the month in celebration of payday. Most of the young people I met in Zandspruit (including the men at the car wash stand) could not afford to go to Motswako with any regularity. Their trips were sporadic and contingent upon their access to money. Some young men chose to stay away from the restaurant due to a lack of money and to avoid the humiliation of being unable to demonstrate their masculinity through consumptive performances. Others, however, reserved funds especially for trips to Motswako. Being seen to spend money there was one of the most effective ways for young men to demonstrate financial success and, like the bluffeurs Sasha Newell (2012) describes in Côte d'Ivoire, assert a successful masculine identity. Yet, unlike Newell's study, where his interlocutors are the primary contestants in the displays of excessive consumption, my interlocutors, bar the odd exception, are best conceived as observers of the kinds of consumption spectacles at Motswako and only rarely, if at all, as participants.
The young men I got to know at the car wash opposite Motswako rarely stepped inside the restaurant, but constantly subjected those who did to a great deal of moral scrutiny. They admired (and even envied) the elevated status of the Motswako patrons who drove expensive cars and spent large sums of money on alcohol, while also begrudging them for rubbing their superior status in the face of poorer Black South Africans. This turned some, though not all, young men's admiration into hostility. Joel (age 25), who had moved to Zandspruit in search of work, highlighted his resentment when he told me that the relatively wealthy come and park their BMWs in Zandspruit to ‘feel more powerful’ because they know most people in the settlement ‘walk each day’. The criticisms of local young men went beyond a concern about the display of wealth amongst poverty. There was also widespread speculation that many of those engaged in consumptive performances at Motswako were ‘living a fake life’. The accusation of ‘faking it’ implied a deceptive status claim and a mismatch between external appearances and reality.
The preoccupation with discerning the ‘real’ from the ‘fake’ manifested in endless speculation and gossip about who the legitimate owners of an expensive car were, if the car was loaned or bought, and, if bought, how the money was obtained. On several occasions, I was told that many of the expensive cars that line the streets on Saturday and Sunday were bought ‘on credit’, emphasizing the link between growing indebtedness and the lifestyles of the Black middle class (James 2015; Makhulu 2017). One day during a conversation at the car wash stand, Setsumi, pointing at a blue BMW parked on the opposite side of the road, proclaimed that ‘the car is actually owned by the bank’, insisting that one should not be fooled into thinking that a person driving an expensive car owns it. ‘They [are] living a false dream of impressing people’, he said, implying that a car bought ‘on credit’ was an unreliable marker of social mobility. To accuse someone of living a ‘false dream’ not only calls into question the authenticity of their wealth or elevated status. It also infers a misguided preoccupation with the pursuit of individual status (‘impressing people’) or, as another interlocutor put it, ‘chasing the luxury life’.
That urban youth draw a link between the conspicuous consumption on display at Motswako and growing indebtedness, especially amongst the Black middle class, is not that surprising (James 2015; Makhulu 2017). South Africa is one of the most indebted countries in the world. In 2017, there were 24.31 million credit consumers – more than 8 million more people than the total number of employed people in South Africa (Ferreira 2017). The media's portrayal of the Black middle class has also been saturated with discourses of conspicuous consumption and concern with rising indebtedness (Krige 2011: 294-311). What is perhaps more surprising however, and what struck me, was how young men linked indebtedness to the potential for, and a concern with, ‘faking it’.
If the ‘fake’ is understood to be the inverse of everything that is labelled ‘authentic’ or ‘trustworthy’ (Lindholm 2013), to label the observable wealth of Motswako patrons as ‘fake’ is to judge it as being at odds with their ‘real’ or ‘true’ economic circumstances. Normativity is thus built into the idiom of ‘faking it’. But, as anthropologists studying the ‘fake’ around the world show – regardless of whether it is ‘fake’ fashion (Crăciun 2012), ‘fraudulent’ pastors (Shipley 2009), or ‘pseudo’ medicines (Kingori & Gerrets 2019) – the line between the ‘real’ and the ‘fake’ is not only blurred but also contested (Kingori 2021). If the act of ‘fakery’ is rarely, if ever, inherently fake or fraudulent, what matters, as Beek, Killan, and Krings (2019) note, is that some forms of presentation come to be seen as ‘fake’ either by the actors themselves, or by people raising suspicions.
To label the elevated status of the upwardly mobile at Motswako ‘fake’ is to question not only the authenticity of their wealth or status but also its durability, such that, for consumptive performances to be considered ‘real’ – and thus conducive to attaining the status of upward mobility – they need to be considered more than momentary indulgences or displays of success. In short, the authentic is that which consists in being more than an immediate appearance in a specific moment. Yet, as I will explore in more detail in the following sections, evaluations of wealth as ‘real’ or ‘fake’ are made more complicated by the fact that different types of consumption are associated with different temporal and moral projects.
‘Short cut’ to a good life
The upwardly mobile at Motswako were not the only ones to have their visible wealth dismissed as ‘fake’. The accusation of ‘fakery’ targeted middle-class patrons and local residents alike. Young men in their twenties and thirties who acquire and display desirable goods – from clothes and cell phones to cars – were the subjects of regular and ongoing suspicion about the veracity of their wealth and status.
The Khumalo brothers were a case in point. I first met the brothers – Andile (age 35) and Lucky (age 28) – at the car wash. Andile drove a diamond black Polo VW GTi with racing ‘mags’ (i.e. alloy wheels) which he parked a stone's throw from the car wash. He spent most afternoons standing around the boot of his car with two or three other men. Andile's younger brother, Lucky, whom I saw less often, drove a Mini Cooper. The brothers lived together in a double-storey shack in the oldest section of the settlement with a yard big enough to park both cars inside. This was itself a testament to their relative wealth. Most residents’ fill every inch of space they have with back-yard shacks to generate rental income.
Andile and Lucky were a regular talking point at the car wash. They embodied a mode of success forged through ‘short cuts’ – a term local youth used to refer to money-making activities outside established or socially accepted routes. Andile made money selling drugs and counterfeit branded trainers from his car boot. Vague rumours linked Lucky with more serious criminal activities, but while widespread, such rumours never got beyond whispers and hints. While ‘short cuts’ most commonly referred to criminal or illicit activities, the term indexed a wide array of money-making activities, not all of which were extra-legal. A person engaged in ‘short cuts’ included someone who made money via wiring illegal electricity connections for a fee, street-side gambling, dealing in stolen goods, as well as informal lending and rental arrangements. ‘Short cuts’ were contrasted with the idea of a ‘proper job’ (or, less frequently, a ‘proper business’) in the formal economy. A ‘proper job’ implies not only a mode of accumulation that occurs at a more measured and predictable pace but also one that enables a more linear, ideally cumulative, form of progression (Ferguson & Li 2018). The phrase ‘short cuts’ bears a striking resemblance to the term ‘fast business’ in Tanzania (Weiss 2017) and ‘zigzagging’ in Zimbabwe (J.L. Jones 2010). All of these terms describe a mode of economic life where ‘proper’ economic transactions are no longer possible.
People who do crime, stealing cars and stuff … their way of doing money is so quick. They can get it in two-day or three-day money. So they don't mind spending it on whatever. But somebody who worked for that money for a month, to get just R5,000, he can't just spend it on booze or a R2,500 t-shirt.
This is an astute observation and one to which scholars such as Viviana Zelizer (1989; 1994; 2010) and Jonathan Parry and Maurice Bloch (1989) have devoted careful attention. Many studies around the world show that how money is acquired, and in what form, strongly affects how people use it (Parry & Bloch 1989; Zelizer 1989; 2010). For most young men I spoke to, talk of ‘short cuts’ seemed to justify forms of conspicuous consumption that were deemed less permissible when money was earned via wages. By spending money on expensive clothes or drinking, a life of ‘short cuts’ was seen to boost a person's status in the short term or, in the case of the Khumalo brothers, allow them to momentarily assimilate into the symbolic economy of Motswako, but fail to offer a viable route to the urban middle-class lives young men yearn for. Sizwe (age 25), who made a living in the street economy from gambling and selling drugs among other things, put it like this: ‘Some people get rich like that [via house break-ins] … [but] they get rich for one day’.
Young men at the car wash were quick to draw attention to the fact that while Andile drove a top-end car like some of the ‘guys from the suburbs’, he still lived in a shack with his brother. Tebogo, who spent a great deal of his time at the car wash, had this to say about Andile: ‘You driving a nice car but you living in a shack with nothing [i.e. no furniture] inside’. Another interlocutor described him as ‘living broke to look expensive’. Comments like this were common. They sought to highlight the incongruity between the image of success Andile and Lucky projected and their failure to establish their own (patrilineal) household and move out of the settlement to a more comfortable life in the suburbs.
The situation and dilemma of young men like Andile and Khumalo are not unique to this setting. For instance, young men in a sapphire-mining town in northern Madagascar who earn what some call ‘hot money’ are known for their extravagant forms of social consumption, such as drinking, smoking pot, and gambling together, which are, as Andrew Walsh (2003) shows, strikingly at odds with what many Malagasy people expect of them. In a similar vein, the Khumalo brothers’ decision to spend their money on cars and alcohol rather than on a house implied an orientation to the present similar to the people who ‘live for the moment’ represented in Lilies of the field, the edited collection by Sophie Day, Evthymios Papataxiarchis, and Michael Stewart (1999).
As noted earlier, part of what undergirds the dismissal of wealth as ‘fake’ is a distinction between, on the one hand, more conspicuous forms of consumption that are ephemeral by nature and orientated towards individual status and, on the other, more durable forms of consumption such as investing money towards building a house or a business. If the former offers immediate enjoyment, the latter is seen to lead to more permanent and socially orientated investments in the future. It is the Khumalos’ emphasis on acquiring status in the present that is judged as irresponsible or improper by some in the community. For example, Walter (age 33), who invested the money he made selling cars on the black market into property he now rents out, frequently distinguished himself from the Khumalo brothers, who, in his view, spend their money on booze and expensive clothes ‘to impress’ instead of focusing on ‘where they're going’. In 2015, Walter made close to R20,000 ($1,400) a month from rent. His success had fuelled his aspirations to buy up government-subsidized houses in Zandspruit and neighbouring Cosmo City to profit from the increasing demand for accommodation in the area. His ultimate aim was to save enough money to buy a house (or build his own) in a nice suburb and retire at age 45. While Walter associated social mobility with increased consumption and leisure, he drew a stark distinction between immediate and what he deemed aimless forms of consumption (i.e. spending money on alcohol) and more durable and goal-directed consumption (i.e. buying a house). Deborah Durham (2020) captures this tension in her recent work in Botswana, where she shows how long-standing tensions between ‘selfish’ forms of consumption and more ‘socially orientated’ investments manifest in the decision to spend money on a car or a house.
It is vital to stress that while many of my interlocutors criticized the Khumalos for engaging in conspicuous forms of consumption, they were nuanced in their assessments of the brothers’ choice of livelihood and their decision to stay in Zandspruit, not least because many of them recognized the appeal of ‘short cuts’. In fact, a number of the young men who spent time at the car wash had themselves been engaged in various kinds of criminal activities and fraudulent deals in the past, and, in a few cases, admitted that this might be one of the only mechanisms for them to fulfil certain aspirations. Yet many of these same young men criticized the Khumalo brothers for embracing a life of ‘short cuts’ that implied an abandonment of the future and an indifference to building a home and supporting a family – social goals that have long been associated with respectable manhood and ‘proper adulthood’ (Hunter 2010; White 2012). Local youth were not naïve about the socioeconomic impediments that make it unlikely for them to leave the settlement. Nor did they think it was always sensible to move out, given the impossibility of sustaining a middle-class life in the suburbs without a regular salaried job. Mandla (age 33), who has known the Khumalo brothers since they were teenagers, explained to me that what keeps the two brothers in Zandspruit is the recognition that they cannot maintain their ‘lifestyle’ outside of the settlement. He told me that if Lucky went to live in Cosmo City, it would ‘take away the credit [status] he has here’. Mandla understood that consumptive enactments, even if fleeting, offer one of the only ways for young men without ‘proper jobs’ to feel and demonstrate accomplishment.
‘Living under credit’
Local residents who were suspected of acquiring status goods ‘on credit’ were also viewed with a great deal of ambivalence and subjected to accusations of ‘fakery’. My interlocutors did not see rising indebtedness as the preserve of the suburban classes who come to Motswako at the weekends. It was often pointed out to me that many people in Zandspruit have to borrow money from local mashonisas (unregistered loan sharks) just to survive. The word mashonisa means ‘to sink’ in IsiZulu, and suggests that these unscrupulous lenders impoverish (‘sink’) the people who borrow money from them. Loan shark businesses are rapidly and illegally growing in South Africa (De Waal 2012; James, Neves & Torkelson 2020). Advertisements luring people struggling financially to take out cash loans can be seen in local newspapers and on street poles. And when people cannot get loans through a legal route, they go to the mashonisa. A number of my interlocutors had found themselves stuck with store-card debt from buying clothes at nearby shopping malls and been forced to take out a loan from a mashonisa to make ends meet at one time or another. One local resident told me that the reason mashonisas did so well in Zandspruit was because ‘people drink more than what they can earn in a month’.
Local youth recognized the different aspects of indebtedness: the sheer demand for money to get by that triggers borrowing; overspending due to wages being insufficient to meet basic needs and social obligations; and the desire to partake in consumption-based activities that are a primary marker of social inclusion and distinction. Their views about debt varied, often quite significantly, depending on what the debt was being used for. A similar idea underlines the work of Clara Han (2012) and Deborah James (2015), who highlight how everyday debts are embedded in specific social, cultural, and moral orders. Taking on debt to buy groceries or pay for school or university fees, for example, was looked upon more favourably than a situation where debt was used for what were seen as more self-indulgent forms of consumption that included drinking at Motswako ‘to impress people’. Here again we see the folk distinction between more conspicuous forms of consumption that are seen to provide a temporary moment of enjoyment and more durable forms that are deemed more conducive to acquiring the status of upward mobility and respectable manhood.
A story Senosi (age 23), who was unemployed at the time, told during an afternoon I spent with him and a group of his unemployed friends at the offices of a youth-run NGO gives a sense of the ambiguity that surrounds the debt-consumption nexus. Zandspruit Youth Forum (ZYF) operated from an off-white prefab container situated behind the clinic. It was started by a group of young people in Zandspruit to positively contribute to the development of the community with a focus on widening access to educational and economic opportunities for local youth. They aimed to prevent youth from what the founders saw as the two alternatives: staying at home ‘doing nothing’ or getting engaged in ‘short cuts’ in the street economy. Most of the young people who frequented the office during the week were, unlike those at the car wash, recent school leavers and often first-time job seekers. The office provided these young men and women with a structured environment within which to pass time, hang out, build friendships, and get information about work and funding opportunities.
Our conversation that afternoon had been prompted by a comment Arnold made about the youth subculture I'khotane, which had been the subject of much debate in the office a few days before. I'khotane is primarily known for its performances of ‘destructive consumption’ that involve poor, predominantly male, township youth burning designer clothes and shoes worth thousands of rands (M. Jones 2013). These performances are paradoxical in that they raise the status of those engaged in them while also critiquing the culture of consumption that surrounds them (M. Jones 2013; Vincent 2011). Senosi joined the conversation by telling us about his neighbour, Tumi, who had recently bought a VW Polo GTi ‘on instalment’. Tumi was 28, had a job at a call centre for one of the major retail banks, and lived with his mother in an RDP house in Zandspruit. Senosi explained that Tumi had bought the car to ‘show off’ and ‘keep up with his [older] brother’, who drove a BMW and lived in one of the larger bonded houses in Cosmo City.
Senosi's views on Tumi's decision to purchase a car ‘on credit’ were not straightforward. ‘His story proves that we Black people tend to go for things we cannot afford to show off’, he told me. ‘We say this guy is driving a rented car’, he said with a smirk on his face. ‘That's what it's called until it's yours [because] at any point it can be taken [repossessed]’. Senosi depicted Tumi in both a critical and sympathetic light. Although Senosi questioned the latter's decision to purchase a car he could not really afford, and noted his unease about Tumi residing with (and depending upon) his mother instead of the other way around, he also sympathized a great deal with his neighbour, describing how driving a car gives you the feeling ‘you've made it’.
Senosi recognized that what propels many young people into debt is the social pressure and competition to wear expensive clothes or drive a car to increase one's social status (not least to impress and attract women). At no point did he suggest he would do any differently if he had the means (or access to credit) to buy a car. Intriguingly, my interlocutors saw having access to ‘formal’ credit as one of the primary benefits (and dangers) of having a ‘proper job’. This is corroborated by other research that shows the most indebted are not the unemployed but the salaried in the ‘new middle classes’ (James 2015: 2). The young people I got to know saw debt as offering possibilities to acquire desirable goods while at the same time creating dangers and vulnerabilities. These ranged from getting blacklisted for an impaired debt record to being accused of absconding social obligations.
Owning a car increased Tumi's social status but it also made him vulnerable to accusations of being preoccupied with the temporary thrill of ‘enjoying’ himself rather than taking care of his social responsibilities. I heard this concern expressed most clearly in the phrase that someone was ‘forgetting where they come from’. The phrase was most commonly directed at someone who was seen to have acquired wealth without ‘taking responsibility’ for others and thus criticized for prioritizing their individual status over their families. Christine Jeske (2016: 492) made a similar observation in her research in Kwa-Zulu Natal. She posits that ‘car owners, and the people inevitably involved in bestowing status upon them, are caught between a moral system in which status is closely tied to redistribution and social cohesion versus a new system wherein status resides in an individual's ability to make purchases’ (Jeske 2016: 486). However, as Deborah Durham (2020) rightly points out, the distinction between ‘self’ and ‘society’, often fixed on cars and houses respectively, is not so clear-cut. Cars are never just about individual displays of accomplishment. Cars are shared. They come with demands by friends and family to be driven places. They are a source of income for car wash ventures that, amongst other things, facilitate drinking sessions that are profoundly social events.
I want to now return to Senosi's assertion that Tumi was driving a ‘rented car’ because it was bought on credit. This claim can read as an attempt to question the legitimacy of his elevated status in much the same way young men doubted the veracity of the Khumalo brothers’ displays of wealth. This is not to say Senosi was not jealous of Tumi's relative success. He was. Deborah James has paid close attention to the use of the word ‘jealous’ in Black communities, which, she argues, is ‘commonly used to characterize both those who feel slighted by – and desirous to imitate – such status display’ (2015: 47). My point is that Senosi's disquiet about his neighbour's acquisition of a status symbol is not only an expression of jealousy but also an expression of the unstable links between consumption, status, and social class in South Africa.
The rhetoric of ‘faking it’ not only gives un(der)employed Black men a way to express their doubt and mistrust around consumption as a marker of social mobility. It also offers them a register in which to express the profound provisionality that characterizes their lives and the tensions and moral dilemmas this creates. The concept of precariousness has come to name a broadly generalizable feeling of being stuck in a condition of permanent ‘temporariness’ (Goldstone & Obarrio 2017; Guyer 2007; Han 2012; Mbembe 2017; Millar 2018). This shared predicament leaves many young men in a dilemma. Wearing designer clothes or buying expensive drinks at Motswako is one of the only avenues available to young men in Zandspruit to fulfil, albeit temporarily, the aspiration to ‘afford’, which for the most part remains out of reach. Yet, while offering opportunities to acquire a sense of agency and status in the present, consumptive performances rarely add up to the futures young men want, and, worse, make them vulnerable to accusations of being obsessed with ‘impressing people’ rather than, as Walter put it, focusing on ‘where they're going’.
The tensions and anxieties young people have about their futures and prospects for social mobility became especially clear to me during a conversation with Mashudu, a 19-year-old woman who volunteered at the youth NGO where I spent time. We were sitting on the couch at the back of the office. Mashudu had a great sense of style and took much pride in looking ‘top class’ without spending money on expensive brands. She linked her desire to always look ‘top class’ to the aspiration to ‘escape poverty’. She summed it up like this: ‘I think everyone wants to look good. Everyone wants to own that thing. We all want to fit in. That's because we are so ashamed of being poor’. Later in our discussion, Mashudu explained that when she goes to a nearby shopping mall at the weekends people do not think she is ‘struggling’. She admitted to trying on designer clothes she could not afford and taking selfies she posts on social media. Her point was that at the shopping mall no one could tell if she lived in a shack or not, and this, she insisted, offered her the possibility to pull off (at least momentarily) the appearance of success. She recognized the possibilities consumption offered her for ‘self-stylization’ (Nuttall 2004) and saw her trips to the shopping mall (even if she didn't buy anything) as a welcome interruption from the everyday struggle of getting by. The (structural) limits of this inclusivity did not elude her. ‘We want to be told we are doing well’, she told me, ‘even though we know we are not’. ‘We want society to recognize that we can achieve certain things, even though we know in the bottom of our hearts it is a much bigger struggle that we are fighting’.
Conclusion
Efforts to invalidate the status displays of those with relative wealth are not surprising in a country with such extreme inequalities. These moral judgements are taking place in a context where aspiration and consumer choice are valorized even when the avenues for prosperity have been drastically undercut (Comaroff & Comaroff 1999; 2002). The conflicts and anxieties that surround proximate inequality in Africa have often been read through discourses of jealousy (James 2015: 47; Krige 2011: 292), witchcraft (Ashforth 2005; Geschiere 1997), and occult cosmologies (Comaroff & Comaroff 1999; 2002; West & Sanders 2003). I want to suggest that when placed in economic and cultural context, the accusation of proximate wealth as ‘fake’ is about more than ‘jealousy’ and the moral dangers of accumulating money without redistributing. I argue here that it indexes a host of anxieties about the precarious nature of social mobility and status as well as contestations around the meaning of success and progress in a context of economic insecurity.
The accusation of ‘fakery’ centres on discerning the authentic from the fake and the durable from the fleeting. What undergirds the dismissal of status displays as ‘fake’ is the recognition that social status acquired through conspicuous consumption rarely adds up to the linear, or cumulative, idea of advancement young people yearn for that aligns with a model of ‘proper’ adulthood. For consumptive performances to be ‘real’ – and thus conducive to attaining the status of upward mobility – they need to be considered more than momentary indulgences or displays of success. What is perhaps most striking is the un-realness of my interlocutors’ vision of ‘real’ or ‘proper’ mobility where ‘proper jobs’ enable middle-class lives and fantasies of family life. Wage work is not only increasingly unavailable but has also arguably never provided economic security, let alone class mobility, for the majority of Black workers in South Africa (Bolt & Rajak 2016; Dawson 2022; Scully 2016).
But while young men recognize that conspicuous consumption is often an unreliable marker of upward mobility, they also have to contend with the fact that this might be the only currency available to them, however incomplete or fleeting, to acquire certain aspirations. The prominence of the ‘faking it’ discourse reveals the increasingly unstable links between consumption, status, and class differentiation and the difficulty of discerning the ‘real’ from the ‘fake’. It also exposes long-standing tensions between ‘self’ and ‘society’ exacerbated by economic uncertainty and growing inequality.
My aim is not to dismiss the agency of those engaged in consumptive displays or disregard the ways in which consumption provides an alternative avenue for young Black men to assert their masculine identity and negate their exclusion, as argued by scholars in many parts of the world (Arthur 2006; Matlon 2016; Ratele 2016; Weiss 2002). Rather, my intent has been to highlight the structural and cultural reasons that imbue consumptive performances with significant uncertainty and ambiguity. The dismissal of proximate wealth as ‘fake’ expresses the disjuncture between the temporal and moral logics of doing things ‘properly’ – of acquiring ‘proper’ jobs and becoming ‘proper’ adults – and the structural inequalities that make the expected or ‘proper’ pathways to upward mobility unattainable for the majority of Black young people.
Most young men want to acquire economic success ‘legitimately’, but the ‘proper job’ that still undergirds the idea of a respectful life is not only in short supply but also increasingly unreliable as a pathway to class mobility. The rhetoric of ‘faking it’ provides a register for men without stable jobs to make sense of the precariousness of their lives. As such, the concern with ‘fakery’ is an index not only of the profound changes in the economy (especially the decline of wage work and growing inequality), but also of the feeling many young people have of life being profoundly provisional with few, if any, prospects of really ‘making it’.
Acknowledgements
For comments on drafts of this article, the author thanks Liz Fouksman, Rogers Orock, David Pratten, Jonny Steinberg, Karl Von Holdt, and the participants at the Anthropology seminar at the University of the Witwatersrand, where this article was first presented. Three anonymous reviewers at the JRAI offered invaluable suggestions. I also wish to thank the National Research Foundation of South Africa (grant number 116768), who supported the research and writing of the broader project from which this article is drawn. Finally, a special thanks go to my interlocutors who allowed me into their lives, were generous with their time, and tolerated my endless questions. Pseudonyms have been used to protect their identities.
NOTES
Biography
Hannah J. Dawson is a Senior Researcher at the Southern Centre for Inequality Studies at the University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg. Her current research focuses on the social, economic, and political effects of growing un(der)employment and the way the future of work is being imagined – and transformed – with a focus on South Africa.
