Reworking Citizenship: Kinship, Race, and Political Belonging in South Africa

In scenes reminiscent of the apartheid era, 2021 saw South Africa’s streets filled with mass protests. While the country is lauded for its peaceful transition to democracy with citizenship for all, those previously disenfranchised, particularly women, remain outraged by their continued poverty and marginalization. As one black woman protester told a reporter, reflecting on the end of apartheid: ＂We didn’t get freedom. We only got democracy.＂ What obligations do states have to support their citizens? What meaning does citizenship itself hold?

Blending archival and ethnographic methods, Brady G’sell tracks how historic resistance to racial and gendered marginalization in South Africa animate present-day contentions that regardless of voting rights, without jobs to support their families, the poor majority remain excluded from the nation. Through long-term fieldwork with impoverished black African, Indian, and coloured (mixed race) women living in the city of Durban, she reveals women’s everyday efforts to rework political institutions that exclude them. Informed by her interlocutors, G’sell retheorizes citizenship as not solely tied to individual rights, but dependent on the security of social (often kinship) relations. She forwards the concept of relational citizenship as a means to reimagine political belonging amidst a world of declining wage labor and eroding state-citizen covenants.

Brady G’Sell is Assistant Professor of Anthropology and Gender, Women’s & Sexuality Studies at the University of Iowa.