The Fate of the Eastern Cape; History, Politics and Social Policy ed. by Greg Ruiters (review)

This book, as the title suggests, attempts to analyze the condition of the Eastern Cape Province in order to predict its future. Since the plethora of South African books analyzing the “State of the Nation” are superficial at best, Ruiters’s effort is notably valuable. South Africa is an immensely complex entity, whereas the anticipated audience for any such book—generally speaking, either the government or the white ruling class—usually expects simplistic analysis confirming its prejudices. Analyzing a province offers much more scope for detail, while (generally speaking) the demands on the writers to provide prepackaged critiques are likely to be less extreme when the subject is the Eastern Cape—which everyone agrees is in a problematic state.

Unfortunately, Ruiters’s project is performed “unevenly”—rather like the “uneven development” from which the province undeniably suffers. Of twenty-one contributors, nine, including Ruiters himself, come from the affluent colonial enclave of Rhodes University while two come from Grahamstown-based NGOs linked with Rhodes. Three come from other affluent South African universities and just two from the historically disadvantaged Fort Hare University. Only four out of the twenty-one are Africans. Evidently uneven development applies, in the Eastern Cape, to academia as to everything else.

Ruiters’s project also seems intended to attack the provincial system and the 1994 settlement, which he sees as the source of most of the under-development in the Eastern Cape. His introduction, his chapter on economic issues in the Eastern Cape, and his conclusion all argue for his point, but the reader may remain unconvinced. Several of the articles contradict this argument, and others that support it seem to lack substance and force. (For instance, Van Niekerk’s argument for the centralization of economic administration ignores the post-2000 situation almost entirely, thus failing to address the long-term consequences of early decisions.) Edwards’s analysis of Eastern Cape economic policy supports provincial control of such policy, suggesting that centralized planning could disregard local interests. Nel’s chapter on local economic development, and Palmer and Hamer’s chapter on a Wild Coast land redistribution project, both argue for greater policy decentralization—although from very different political perspectives.

All this suggests a lack of intellectual cohesion. This is not problematic in some of the pieces, such as Peires’s lucidly simple account of the socioeconomic conflicts between the various settler centers in the Eastern Cape during the colonial period and how this shaped the apartheid-era and post-colonial province, or De Nobrega’s chapter problematizing the provision of social housing in the Peddie area. These chapters offer useful information for anyone wishing to understand the dynamics of the province, and the book is thus worth buying for these alone.

Many of the chapters, however, seem far too brief for their subject matter—like Mkhize’s article on the Social Grants provision crisis and Hendricks’s article on education issues, which only scratch the surface of these vital matters. In addition, while some of the chapters smell strongly of the academic essay, others were decidedly propagandistic: Bond’s environmentalist denunciation of the Coega harbor project; Hesjedal’s seemingly rose-tinted report on NGO performance in the province; or Desai’s passionate support for an attempt by some Port Elizabeth Trotskyites to undermine the National Union of Metal Workers at the Volkswagen plant there. Those lacking specialist knowledge of the issues involved would have difficulty in judging these authors’ claims. Other chapters, like Hoeane’s attempt to assess the ANC’s role in Eastern Cape politics, seem conventional and dependent on stereotypical analyses.

The book is worth reading, both for its own sake and because it endeavors to provide a more usable political analysis than is usually provided by comparable books dealing with South Africa, southern Africa, or even the entire African continent. Ruiters would have been wiser, however, to...