Soon there will be nothing more for me to do apart from those things in whose doing i can (almost) say: “this is what i would wish that i am”) . Soon.

With this in mind, and to keep a promise to myself, I’m going to the archive.

The plan is to spend half a day, 3 times a week, burrowing through this city’s archives. I’m starting at Wits. The questions i am asking are scatted across this blog, and so i figured i use this space to collect some of the more interesting things that i find [1].

Starting slow i figured i would begin by making my way through one of the smaller collections housed at the Wits Archive.  I started with the Helen Suzman’s papers, essentially her archive spanning much of the period that she was a member of parliament under apartheid. To be honest, i didn’t realise how much fun it would be going through her papers, which include her press clipping, a good deal of her official and political correspondence, as well as lots of stuff about the more mundane aspects of government policy, often marked up, or including her attached notes.

Among the dozens of documents that i copied (related to stuff i am thinking about), there is a letter from the Transvaal Chamber of Industries, the Johannesburg Chamber of Commerce, and the Johannesburg Afrikaanse Sakerkamer, to the then Minister of Finance and the Minister of Co-operation and Development (essentially one of the departments responsible for the social development of African townships under apartheid), dated June 1981. No doubt the representatives of capital cc’ed the letter to Helen Suzman so that she would follow up on it in parliament (this is a common aspect of much of her correspondence, and she was after all the representative for Houghton). At any rate, the letter is something of polite warning around the issues of services in soweto. In this respect however it very different from much of the liberal interventions made “on behalf of” Africans, since its real concern is ’security’, or rather securitisation.

It begins by outlining the dire financial situation of black township councils, which it attributes to the fact that their main sources of income was service charges and rentals that were “for years held below cost”. However, while the letter makes a case for cost recovery, its real aim is warn against the danger of shifting to such a paradigm too quickly. In fact it is difficult to miss the letter’s ironic critique of the governments failure to charge “fully economic site rentals” which, it is said, created the present mess (the letter of course doesn’t mention that the deeper cause of the problem was that soweto was cut of from Johannesburg’s tax base, and forced to raise revenue for development initiatives from within this extremely poor community).  It concern that the deficits of the black local councils might lead to increases in rental and services charges stems from the fact that, for capital, depoliticizing the circuits of basic services delivery was the primary governmental imperative that, they believed, should dictate the pace of movement towards “fully economic” charges.

Telling it holds out the following scenarios:

The first possibility is that the community councils vote the necessary increases in charges to meet the deficit. In this case houses could either:

(i) Households pay these increases without protests [although it is clear the letter moves from the premise that this is unlikely to happen]

(ii) Even a substantial minority of households (or even of persons who do not have houses) create disturbances: this could seriously effect the credibility of the community councils and if the disturbances are serious the damage to not only Soweto but to the economy of South Africa could be enormous. The physical damage done inside Soweto in 1976 was only a small fraction of the economic, social and political damage done to the country as a whole.

The second possibility is that the community councils refuse to vote the increases (lest they become the target of the community’s anger)

(i) The Government also refuses to provide the funds. The consequence would be total breakdown of services: no water, no electricity, no sewage, no social services for control. Clearly that is unthinkable and it cannot be allowed to happen.

(ii) The minister uses his power to impose the rent increases: thereby the credibility of the community councils system is destroyed and the issue becomes even more politicised than before, with strong physical confrontation probable and escalation of conflict likely: and the Government probably having to provide funds not only to keep services going but also to maintain order in a state of emergency

The third option, which the letter champions, is that “increases should be phased in, with far less likelihood of conflict”.

the letter ends on the following note:

Our Chambers and our members are committed to do everything possible to increase the skills and productivity of their black employees so that thereby their wages can be increased to enable them to bear the costs of financing their own local authorities and the services which individual households receive. However, householders will require some assistance in making the transition from a totally controlled township economy to a free market system.

In 1986, when the rent boycotts exploded in Soweto, i can almost imagine the bosses in their Chambers saying: ” I told you so”.

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[1] This blog has been dead for some time - occupying space that could be used for something else. However, sometimes i do remember i have a blog. At times this provokes a resolution to blog more, but mostly its a reminder of things left unfinished… and so, as with all things that remind me of something I’ve left unfinished, i try to put-it-out-of-mind (unlike the unfinished TV cabinet in the middle of the lounge, putting the blog out of mind is easy). A somewhat benign (as in easy to talk about) example in this respect is the url. A year and half since i uploaded the blog to this server, i still haven’t gotten round to registering dionysusstoned.org so i can shift off the development url. Tsk.

Pushed for space on my server, however, i was forced to confront the question of what to do with the blog: either use it, or archive it on local a hard drive. At any rate it makes no sense to leave the reminder in the world to be ’stumbled’ upon. The convergence of this resolve with me return to self-selected-intellectual-work (as opposed to the shit i get paid to do) - and no doubt also my reluctance to give up (on) the blog - means i am starting up again.

Now this, was never meant to be an “academic” blog. But at a certain point some of the stuff that i had always related to somewhat pretentiously seemed to becoming a real occupation. And blogging about what i was discovering (and often misunderstanding) in the stuff i was reading for my ma, and allowing the prentention of being something like an intellectual to in fact produce ideas that could be passed onto the blog, came easy - and was often fun. And thus this became an “academic” blog.

The problem is of course is that ‘theory’ and the production of ideas should belong to the academy as an exclusive possession - the only way of doing ‘this kind of thought’ (and seemingly also the ultimate motivation for doing it). The one or two posts that lose the pretentiousness of this “academic blog”, however, are those that perhaps prefigure another way of doing ‘this kind of thought’. So,  whatever we do here, on this my “academic blog”, stands to redeem that intellectual audaciousness (grown in my 17th floor ‘basement laboratory’), as a glimpse of what I hope “it” is becoming. A reason to start up again.

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