WHAT is happening to this country’s rural towns? Recently two academics from the University of the Free State, Danie Toerien and Maitland Seaman, asked this question in the May/June edition of the South African Journal of Science.
Their conclusions were that economic “spaces” must be opened up for local enterprise and more money spent in order to save them. (http://www.sajs.co.za/index.php/SAJS/article/view/588)
Is this enough?
In important ways small, scattered towns (known by that wonderful South African word, dorpies) were once the sinews that held this vast, sprawling country together. This was a time when agriculture was South Africa’s economic mainstay. It was a halcyon time in the country’s economic history with prices guaranteed by membership of the Commonwealth.
In each rural district farmers and workers were enmeshed in a series of quasi- markets, controlled by co-ops which set and controlled prices. They supported both the town and the countryside, but were certainly highly inefficient. This, a form of crude commerce, was supported by the proverbial butcher, baker and candlestick-maker.
These gradually provided a financial base for the local townsfolk: business was local and not, as today, based on the franchise model, which directs the proceeds of local spending to banks that no longer have branches in these small towns.
It was local commerce, in turn, which drew to the hinterland professional services: medical, legal, postal. Shopping and schooling followed and, on these, municipal government drew closer a cycle of taxation and tariff.
Then there were the churches: mostly in the reform tradition. These have left a unique – near European-like – imprint on the country’s townscapes. Each dorp claimed its place in South Africa with an NG Kerk – even though, in several cases, their architecture left much to be desired. It was around these places, of course, that the symbolic power of Nationalist authority first took hold in the 1950s.
For decades the economic health of these places was decided by the rain that fell or, especially in the Eastern Cape, by the wool-clip.
As they were disempowered, dislodged and plain cheated of their possessions and land, blacks gathered at the edges of the dorp. Their lives – caught between town and farm – were to be determined by colonial geography, apartheid architecture and the dualism upon which all forms of capitalism thrive. So the possession and dispossession – or white wealth, black poverty – upon which this country’s history has been built was experienced in its furthest formal corners.
My own interest in small towns was ignited first by a happy childhood in Polokwane, which, alas, is no longer small. It’s a city now with all the trappings of greed and grey sameness of cities (and the malls they seem to endlessly breed) throughout the country – indeed, throughout the world.
But it was my friend and one-time colleague at Rhodes University, Bill Davies, now a resident of Kidd’s Beach, who sparked a deeper interest in small towns, especially those in the Eastern Cape. He had spent years thinking about them, first from a lecturing post in Port Elizabeth and later with the Urban Foundation.
The latter was the attempt by South African capital, late in apartheid, to make life tolerable for all South Africans. This was the mission that had taken Davies deep into to the hinterland where he has visited places great and small. As a result, he was (and remains) a fountain of stories from far-off places like Stutterheim, Steyterville and Sterkstroom.
These thoughts, and this history, were very much with me in a recent journey “home” to the Eastern Cape on one of its back roads: Venterstad, Steynsberg, Hofmeyr and onwards to Cradock, Bedford and Grahamstown. This road, a veritable, alleyway of South African surnames, is always beautiful – its vistas reaching to the furthest horizons.
This year the landscape is wearing its winter coat particularly well. But some of these small places, which have been battered by four decades of an economic system which no longer tolerates subsidies and nearly two decades of post-apartheid administration, seemed to be on shaky ground. Emptied of citizenry and starved of cash, they seem to be waiting for the inevitable.
As the political wheel turned in this country, dorpies seem to have become more neglected than they once were. Once remembered, thriving communities everywhere have become little more than smudges on a map. In far too many places, corruption and incompetent municipal government has been given as the reason for their decline: undoubtedly, there is something in this, as Toerien and Seaman suggest in their study.
Under apartheid, any hope of development was corroded by nepotism and inter-personal violence – which is why, incidentally, it was thought necessary to establish the Urban Foundation: new times have plainly produced new social pathologies.
But thinking about what has happened to rural communities is not only historically bound: that all-too-easy divide between apartheid and post-apartheid. No, the growing urban-rural divide is an international phenomenon. In Australia, an interesting new field of research, called “outback studies”, has emerged.
This is interested in understanding what has happened to communities in the rural parts of that country. Strategies for coping with these are also being explored and studied in Australia. While in Canada, South African-trained doctors tend the sick in the deep rural Alberta and elsewhere, local medics, it seems, do not want to work in the rural areas. And even in England, postal and other services to rural areas are reportedly in decline, which is why the quality of country living is said to be in decline.
In South Africa a particular configuration seems to be taking place, however. This is the result of the interaction between apartheid’s unique geography and service-delivery efforts, however weak these may be on the ground. Slowly, even imperceptibly, the “townships” which have been tied to small towns since their very founding now seem bigger and more established, more solid entities than the towns that they once served.
Put in a metaphor, the tail of the township now seems to be wagging the dog of the rural town.
- Peter Vale is professor of humanities at the University of Johannesburg
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Article source: http://www.dispatch.co.za/news/article/3698