Dr Thozamile Botha has powered the need for regional science in exploring and resolving South Africa’s stubborn problems in the chapters of an invaluable development practitioner’s handbook.
While he might not be a student of statistics specialising in geographically weighted regression analysis, he has in this book The Housing Question: Race, Class and Space in Johannesburg 1994—2017 livened up cultural economic geography by writing “The road to cultural autonomy has to be paved with social cohesion and economic freedom” as the introductory chapter.
There he first explains underlying obstacles to the successful implementation of racial/ethnic and class inclusivity in integrated human settlements in African societies. Second, the book examines the role played by racial and ethnic conflicts in obstructing social cohesion and economic stability in communities within a state. To this end the book is a good template and handbook for a government of national unity and its legislature.
The composition and contestations that often flare up away from and in consultation with US President Donald Trump reflect the role played by primarily racial divisions as exponents of deep underlying economic divisions. The report of the statistician-general of 2023 on income and expenditure shows that whites monopolise the fifth quintile, with 73% of them occupying this position. On the other hand blacks are only 13.7% of this income quintile. The ratio of 73% to 13.7% is so closely correlated with the 1913 Land Act. So the book like an apple does not fall far from the tree — not enough to unfold away from the 1913 Land Act that apportioned 87% of land to whites and 13% to blacks , a ratio that bears major similarities to this income distribution though this time within a population group.
The book examines the role played by racial and ethnic conflicts in obstructing social cohesion and economic stability in communities within a state. To this end, the study draws lessons from South Africa and other sub-Saharan African countries to demonstrate that some of the issues are not unique to South Africa and are not bound by geography.
A poignant challenge at the onset of democracy in 1994 in South Africa among many others was and remains the racialised space economy of South Africa.
Jointly, professors Hermanus Geyer of Potchefstroom, Akiiki Kahimbaara and I confronted this phenomenon in the delimitation of the Transitional Local Councils of North West. Under the direction of then director-general of North West Prof Job Mokgoro, we visited seven of the nine provinces of South Africa to share our North West experiences. Botha was the director-general of the Eastern Cape and we visited his province. I am thrilled by his book as it invokes memories of 30 years ago.
Botha’s book is an expedition into South Africa’s cultural economic geography, a subject rarely explored systematically through regional science. His is an epic contribution to policy design that has been remarkably free of cultural economic geography in the post-apartheid era. The book has a provocative interdisciplinary effect and unravels the gaping deficits in South Africa’s delusional pilgrimage to a notion of an illusive developmental state.
To illustrate how profound Botha’s contribution is, it provides details of what could have provoked Andrés Rodrigues-Pose to say this regarding deficits intellectual, theoretical and practical in our global edifice:
“Over the last five to six decades economics, regional science and geography have made crucial theoretical, methodological and empirical advances in the path to understanding what determines the changing economic fortunes of regions and cities. We undoubtedly have better theories, more sophisticated methods and clearly more extensive and detailed data than one or two generations ago.
“Yet, despite better theories, methods and data, we are still far away from understanding why some places perform better than others. The residuals in growth regressions have been growing, implying that economic development and growth analyses have been missing something from the growth equation. That something is precisely the role of institutions, in general, and institutional quality, in particular, on the economic fortunes of territories.”
What the book invokes is summarised in Botha’s reference to what Flip Buys said about the making of the Afrikaners that “they did not only glue their eyes to the rear view mirror, they also focused on the windscreen, looking forward to building a prosperous future for their children. But this does not seem to be the main focus of the post-apartheid state.” The question of who should own the future is central to Botha’s book as he explores the race complex.
This makes me reflect on Mahlathini and the Mahotella Queens, a South African musical group founded in 1963, and one of the longest surviving on earth with its founding member, Semona Tloubatla, the matriarch and epicentre of this cultural geography that Botha explores. Mahlathini and the Mahotella Queens, through song, address the question of who should own the future. In their song Awuthule Kancane (“Be momentarily silent, my child”), they describe Africa as a country whose unifying feature is “when a child is born in Africa we all feel happy because children are the future”. However, they also warn us that “Africa is a country of misery.” How then do we answer the paradox that the songbirds pose to us of happiness bearing our future into misery? This is what Botha explores in the evolution of Afrikaner hegemony and what it means for post-apartheid South Africa.
The 1994 settlement for South Africa was a major breakthrough, yet the gains of this settlement have, at best, been ignorantly corroded and reversed.
When faced with existential threats and long tiring conflict and stalemates, some nations come together to secure a settlement for their futures. Such a settlement usually focuses on nation building, a social compact, so to speak. Then addressing what caused the conflict begins on the basis of the determinants of that social compact. The 1994 settlement for South Africa was a major breakthrough, yet the gains of this settlement have, at best, been ignorantly corroded and reversed and have, at best, been intentionally and glaringly destroyed through what Lenin in 1920 called the “three enemies to the Bolshevik revolution, namely, Communist conceit, illiteracy and bribery”.
Botha’s interdisciplinary expose elegantly introduces a unifying lens of regional science into the discourse as he skilfully elevates the notion of race and space as a central feature to the cultural economic geography that was central to Afrikaner hegemony. Botha’s book immensely contributes to the much-discussed district development model through the contours of cultural economic geography and exposes the glaring deficits in the nexus of the economic recovery and reconstruction plan and the district development model. He does this by unashamedly pulling deep lessons from five out of the 10 defining strategies in the rise and sustained dominance of the Afrikaners in both the apartheid and the post-apartheid South Africa.
Drawing on lessons that anchored this Afrikaner hegemony, but sadly absent or gravely illusive in post-apartheid interventions littered more by the century-long observations Lenin talked about with regard to the Bolsheviks, the book can expand spaces for regional science discipline and catapult horizons of tools to implement the Sustainable Development Goals agenda.
In the specific agenda for South Africa, this book introduces operational tools to resolve the vexed hitherto nexus of the economic recovery and reconstruction plan and the district development model. In that regard, the book has significant currency. To this end, Botha attests and adds to the correctness of Rodríguez-Pose in the papers in Evolutionary Economic Geography when he says: “Because institutions shape regional and urban development, understanding them is important. Their role has revealed immense gaps which if observed and responded to with appropriate tools ‘can resolve some of the stubborn consequences of economic policies that, with the best of intentions, often lead to territorial divergence’.”
Rodríguez-Pose adds: “The dominant development policies are proving less than capable of providing answers to these challenges. Strategies based on a mix of physical and human capital and technology have not succeeded in dealing with growing territorial inequality and its treacherous economic, social and political consequences.”
Throughout the book, Botha brings his personal contribution as a practitioner in housing. His own human agency demonstrates how to digest the immensely complex historical headache of the continued project of marginalisation of the majority and the expansion of black poverty by immersing it in the current discourse of the nexus of the economic recovery plan and district development model through the power of cultural economic geography.
My input is dedicated in part to Geyer, who passed on three weeks ago and with whom we established The Centre for Regional and Urban Innovation and Statistical Exploration at the University of Stellenbosch. Botha’s case approach in this book should be a welcome addition for students of regional science where they can explore geographically weighted regression to understand deeper the problems Botha has been explicit about. May Geyer’s spirit rest in peace.
• Dr Pali Lehohla is the former statistician-general of South Africa, director of Economic Modelling Academy, professor of practice at University of Johannesburg and research associate at Oxford University
For opinion and analysis consideration, email opinions@timeslive.co.za
Would you like to comment on this article?
Sign up (it's quick and free) or sign in now.
Please read our Comment Policy before commenting.