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Poverty and production in a rural microcosm: Hanover, Cape1

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  07 December 2011

Sean Archer
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Extract

In the popular consciousness, South African poverty is a phenomenon of the homeland or urban township and ghetto, more rarely of rural areas in the core economy. Such a perspective is determined largely by the higher visibility of the poor in the former localities in the recent past, for reasons of geography and political sensitivity. This study aimed to redress the balance, starting from two broad premises: first, that the technical and organisational changes in production and the growth of surplus labour observable in Hanover on a microscale are representative of secular trends in commercialised agriculture in the Karoo region as a whole; and, second, that the causes of poverty generation in that region cannot be satisfactorily examined in isolation from the wider political and economic processes within which they are embedded.

Résumé

Pauvreté et production dans un microcosme rural: Hanover, Province du Cap

Le district rural de Hanover connaît des changements économiques et démographiques de nature structurelle qui poseront de sérieux obstacles à l'élaboration de toute politique nouvelle en Afrique du Sud visant à augmenter le bien-être matériel et à réduire la pauvreté. Des travaux de recherche sur le terrain ainsi que les résultats d'un recensement mettent en évidence une tendance allant vers une organisation de la production et une concentration des droits fonciers, caractéristiques d'une région vaste dont l'économie repose essentiellement sur l'agriculture et sur des subventions de l'état. La majorité de la population de Hanover ne dispose d'aucune terre. Les habitants n'ont qu'un faible niveau d'éducation et n'ont que rarement l'occasion d'apprendre par la pratique ou par une production informelle; et surtout, ils sont incapables de faire évoluer ces conditions.

Type
Analysing divided economies
Information
Africa , Volume 60 , Issue 4 , October 1990 , pp. 471 - 496
Copyright
Copyright © International African Institute 1990

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