Going up or getting out? Professional insecurity and austerity in the South African health sector

Neoliberal ideologies have not only transformed the Namibian economy but also reconfigured some of the most intimate domains of everyday life. In the course of the last forty years, marriage in Namibia has changed from a widespread and affordable life transition to a costly celebration of middle-classness. To be married today is a sign of middle-class achievement, lifestyle and prosperity. The downside of these accomplishments is the middle classes’ fear of failing, especially through divorce. Although Namibian divorce rates are low, most middle-class couples interviewed in 2015–16 in Windhoek were anxious about such an end to marriage. In order to prevent divorce and the loss of a middle-class lifestyle, middle-class couples neoliberalized their marriages. With often cruel determination, many worked as hard as they could to optimize themselves, their marriages and their kin relations. They trimmed their bodies, enhanced their communications skills and supported their kin. As it remained unclear, however, how much optimizing would indeed be enough, their attempts at self-formation had a Sisyphus-like quality. This article builds on the growing literature on the lived experiences of the African middle classes, focusing on how the neoliberalization of Namibian marriages is shaping a new ethics of personhood.

Section: Optimizing Kin Relations: Never Enoughmentioning

confidence: 85%

Section: Neoliberalizing Namibiamentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Never enough: neoliberalizing Namibian middle-class marriages

Pauli¹

2022

“…Students of middle-class formation in Africa often focus on how those with means ‘enclave’ or protect wealth from demanding kin (Ferguson 2015; Meyer 1995; cf. Hull 2020); middle classes are expected to focus on personal development and guard boundaries of class and of nuclear family. In Botswana in 2014–17, people did invest heavily in their own children, especially in increasingly differentiated education, and did work to protect much of their wealth from wide circles of kin, even as they also often came to their aid when truly needed.…”

Section: Moralities Of Materialism In Botswanamentioning

confidence: 99%

Morality in the middle: choosing cars or houses in Botswana

Durham¹

2020

Batswana contrast owning cars with owning houses: the first signals self-centred accomplishment and possibly deceptive status claims, and the second an investment in sociality. The tensions between individual accomplishment and social connectivity are long-standing in Botswana, and a close examination of cars and houses finds that each is tied up with both dimensions of self-making. The new materiality that envelopes Botswana, however, with rising incomes for some and a flood of consumer options, raises the stakes for both sides of this tension, yet also allows them to be resolved in social and emotional practice.

“…Ngcobo cited formal certificated education as being ‘90 per cent’ of middle-classness 7 . The salience and fruits of education and their links to norms of middle-class worthiness and respectability, or ‘the virtues of professionalism’, among the black middle class in South Africa are also stressed by Elizabeth Hull (2020).…”

Section: How Ngcobo and Khumalo Self-categorizementioning

confidence: 99%

Shuttling between the suburbs and the township: the new black middle class(es) negotiating class and post-apartheid blackness in South Africa

Ndlovu¹

2020

A generation of South Africa's new black middle class shuttles between the suburbs and the townships. This has become the focus of some South African humorous essayists, among them Ndumiso Ngcobo and Fred Khumalo, on whose works this article is based. The article argues that studying the new black middle class should extend to these literary sources and approaches. The humorous essays by these two authors consistently reference metaphors of mobility and the vexed intersection of black middle-classness, consumption, racialized residential zoning and compromised status. Through the mode of humour, the essays evince the psychological burdens borne by those with township roots but who live in the suburbs, as they negotiate status inconsistency in a post-apartheid search for human dignity. Constant visits to the township and the retreat to the suburbs constitute negotiations of spatial, financial and psychic concerns imbricated in the legacies of apartheid's racialized politics of distinction.