Pathologies of representation: Lungisile Ntsebeza on the political misrepresentation of rural South Africans

Abstract

Lungisile Ntsebeza’s empirical work on rule and resistance in South Africa’s countryside has a subterranean philosophical seam. Implicit in both his historical studies and his contemporary fieldwork-based studies of rural conflict is a philosophical question: what constitutes adequate political representation? Ntsebeza’s work, exemplifying engaged scholarship, is rich in evaluative insights. But the conception of democracy which is his explicit evaluative yardstick is both too narrow and too indeterminate. It leaves no space for the crucial work of representation carried out by unelected non-governmental organisations and local organisations; and we are given no concrete detail about how participatory and representative democracy are to be integrated, as Ntsebeza insists they should be. Showing that his writings can be brought into conversation with approaches to political representation in contemporary political philosophy, this article argues that Ntsebeza’s evaluative work is most helpfully understood as identifying and diagnosing several pathologies of representation. Normative theory is often most constructive when it articulates distinctive types of system failure, rather than simply stating ideals. Each of the pathologies of representation recoverable from Ntsebeza’s analytical work is a recurring way in which rural South Africans have been politically misrepresented or otherwise inadequately represented – a type of flaw which all systems of representation must guard against.