Draft – Please Do Not Circulate Without Author’S Permission 1 Being Isixhosa, and They Largely Moved from Adjacent Majority Black Townships Into Colored Territory

Becoming a Population: Seeing the State, Being Seen by the State, and the Politics of Eviction in Cape Town Zachary Levenson University of North Carolina, Greensboro Abstract: States may “see” their populations, but this does not mean that populations are ready- to-hand. Instead, this paper contends that a group’s “population-ness” is the outcome of political struggles over representation, or who speaks for whom. How they resolve questions of representation is in turn impacted by how residents “see” the state. Drawing on extended ethnographic fieldwork and interviews conducted between 2011 and 2019 in Cape Town, South Africa, this paper compares the fate of two large land occupations in which thousands of residents erected shacks on land to which they had no legal claim. In one case, residents were evicted after a judge upheld the municipal government’s claim that the occupiers were on the land illegally; in the other, they won the right to stay put, and the settlement continues to grow even today. This paper argues that these outcomes had little to do with a local state simply ordering evictions from on high, implementing them onto populations below. Instead, based on divergent understandings of what the state wanted from them, participants in each occupation comported themselves quite differently. Where residents thought the municipal government desired individual homeowners, they were read as factionalized opportunists and evicted from the land. But where they envisioned the state as wanting a governable community, they organized the occupation under an elected leadership that functioned as an informal government of sorts. In this latter case, they were perceived as a deserving population that was intelligible to the state as such, and they were ultimately tolerated. Keywords: eviction · housing · urban informality · representation · recognition · states · collective action · post-apartheid South Africa Introduction In 2011, thousands of South Africans in need of a home occupied two stretches of land on Cape Town’s periphery, just before that city’s municipal elections. In one of these occupations, Rivenland, a thousand residents converged on a publicly owned field adjacent to the final stop on a commuter railway. None of the shacks that were erected interfered with the train’s functioning. This was the poorest section of the township, and there were no middle-class homeowners nearby who were worried about property value. Every single participant identified as “Colored,” an apartheid-era racial category distinct from “African,” and this occupation took place in a neighborhood that was itself nearly entirely Colored. Colored people in this township overwhelmingly vote for the city’s governing party, the Democratic Alliance (DA), and so there was no reason for DA-affiliated officials to suspect that the occupation was a political ploy to bring supporters of their chief rivals, the African National Congress (ANC), into DA territory. Meanwhile, a couple of kilometers down the road in the same township, a few hundred squatters set up shop on a plot of land called Holfield that was split between two absentee landlords: the one a demolition company, the other a property holding concern. Despite initially being smaller than the first occupation, it quickly grew until within a few months, there were 2600 shacks on the field. The majority of the occupiers were black “African,” their first language Draft – Please do not circulate without author’s permission 1 being isiXhosa, and they largely moved from adjacent majority black townships into Colored territory. In both of these nearby townships, residents overwhelmingly vote for the ANC, and so it would not have been a stretch to read this occupation as an attempt to dilute DA support in this ward. Moreover, the occupation was quite visible. If Rivenland was located in a far-flung cul-de- sac in the poorest part of the township, Holfield abutted the main thoroughfare along its wealthiest section. And whereas no neighbors challenged the Rivenland squatters, middle-class residents across the street consistently mobilized against the Holfield occupation, demanding that the city oversee their eviction. Within a year, Rivenland’s shacks were cleared, every one of its residents evicted and left to fend for themselves. But Holfield was a different story: a judge ruled that they could not be legally evicted, and they were granted the right to stay put. Despite their best efforts, no such ruling was forthcoming for Rivenland. How can we make sense of this counterintuitive outcome? This paper argues that this situation is only paradoxical from the perspective of an omniscient state that devises policies and implements them at will, targeting specific populations. Adapting Schmitt’s (1985) term, this is what I call the decisionist state: one in which the local state’s authority has its foundation in its own will. This state is presumed to gaze out from a privileged vantage point over a range of populations, each of these taken as an empirical fact on the ground. In this telling, the state is imagined as active and civil society passive, as if James Scott’s (1998:4-5) “high modernist” state were taken to be representative of states more generally. It remains a calculating state, one that attempts to optimize surplus extraction while minimizing resistance (Scott 2009:40). The state’s twin aims, in other words, are to facilitate capitalist accumulation, whether through supporting investment in key sectors of the economy or else boosting real estate value; and to reproduce its legitimacy by rewarding supporters and marginalizing those who it deems to be threats (cf. Offe 1984). Read in an urban context, this means that state-led modes of displacement, from land grabs through gentrification, are imagined to originate in a government office from which officials weigh their options in accordance with any number of variables: real estate value, visibility of the occupation, residents’ “fit” into the surrounding area, potential for disruption, and so forth. But the outcomes considered here have little to do with a local state selecting a few key areas for eviction and implementing these onto populations below. Instead, this paper contends, they had everything to do with how residents collectively comported themselves. They may have been “seen” by the state to be members of populations, but this was not an inherent form of group identity. How they were seen had everything to do with how they themselves envisioned the state and therefore, how they imagined that the state would see them. Where residents anticipated that the municipal government desired individualized homeowners, they were read as factionalized opportunists and evicted from the land. This is what happened in Rivenland. But where they envisioned the state as wanting a governable community, they organized the occupation under an elected leadership that functioned as an informal government of sorts. This was their experience at Holfield. In this latter case, they were perceived as a deserving population that was intelligible to the state as such, and they were ultimately tolerated. This suggests that their collective action does not qualify them as a social movement, insofar as they were not organized around a sustained campaign of claims making on the state (McAdam, Tarrow, and Tilly 2001; Tilly 2004; Tilly and Tarrow 2007). If anything, they were closer to what Asef Bayat (2013) calls a social nonmovement: they lacked a guiding program, directly appropriated land rather than demanding it, and participated in these actions as Draft – Please do not circulate without author’s permission 2 an extension of their everyday practices. Most of the squatters in these occupations did not take land to make a political statement but because they needed a place to live. As members of nonmovements, participants attempted to evade the gaze of the state rather than engage it. They did not mobilize collectively in an attempt to pressure the state, but to exert moral force: they conceived of the state as desiring a certain type of subject, and they comported themselves accordingly. This is the sense in which their seeing the state impacted the way they were seen by the state. Residents’ representations of the state, how they imagined this state and what it wanted from them, determined their organizational form. They were not naturally constituted as populations laying in waiting to be seen by the state; they had to constitute themselves as such. The first section of this paper considers the prevailing sociological literature on evictions, arguing that it lacks attention to this formative process of self-organization. This is not a problem because of some nebulous moral imperative that requires researchers to consider voices “from below”; it remains a problem because, as we have already seen, the decisionist model of the state cannot account for eviction outcomes. The second section draws on Partha Chatterjee’s (2004, 2011) attempt to bypass this decisionism by turning to the relationship between populations and the state, though he treats populations as natural features of the political landscape. As an alternative, I explain how struggles on the terrain of everyday life – what I call struggles over representation, or who speaks for whom – are inextricable from vertical struggles for recognition, or how residents collectively project themselves to the state. The third and fourth sections then work through the two empirical cases, the first on Rivenland and

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