Twenty years after the fall of apartheid, it has become increasingly pressing to identify to what degree black South Africans are better off than they were under apartheid. The (perhaps unfinished) project of racial emancipation demands that democratic rule be something more than just the empty," formal" gesture that Anthony O'Brien once worried it had become (5). To be truly transformative, the transition from apartheid to democratic rule cannot only have been about the right to vote or the color of politicians' skins. It also needs to have heralded greater socioeconomic equality for black South Africans: higher wages, steady employment, improved living conditions, and an increased say in how the state allocates its resources. These are the visceral, felt realities that shape how people define their quality of life, as against the more impersonal and abstract categories of legal equality and parliamentarian representation. They are, in other words, the material indicators that would at the very least allow us to frame the question: Are black South Africans in fact better off than they were twenty years ago? Most often, debates over this issue have been framed as assessments of the postapartheid state's effectiveness in extending infrastructure to formerly disenfranchised communities. Among the