Changes in rural social relations during Covid-19 a key driver of political populism

30 Jun 2024

In rural areas there has been a shift towards cultural sentiment or populism post-Covid — a return to customary practices and cultural identities has been a key feature of local-level strategies of recovery, coping and repair.

In the 2024 general election in South Africa, the ruling African National Congress (ANC) lost its overall majority as the country fractured along regional and ethno-national political lines. The poor election performance by the ruling party was not unexpected as it came on the back of several social, economic and infrastructural crises, including rolling power outages, a hunger crisis and the fallout from the Covid-19 pandemic.

In rural areas there has been a shift towards cultural sentiment or populism post-Covid. A return to customary practices and cultural identities has been a key feature of local-level strategies of recovery, coping and repair. The populist shift seems to have been particularly evident in the rural areas with the urban constituency voting in ways more directly aligned with their economic interests.

The rise in support for the Cape Coloured Congress and the Patriotic Alliance in the rural Western Cape, and especially the massive swing away from the ANC to the uMkhonto Wesizwe (MK) party of Jacob Zuma, which claimed 14% of the national vote, indicate this trend. Many Zuma supporters were based in Zulu-speaking rural areas in KwaZulu-Natal.

At the same time, the more radical Economic Freedom Fighters (EFF) only increased their share of the vote from 9% to 10% between 2019 and 2024.

After 30 years of democracy, there has been a re-emergence of ethnic nationalism in South Africa. The media has tended to explain the shift from above by focusing on the charismatic attributes of the leadership –their appeal to cultural sentiment and their recourse to the language of apartheid population categories and xenophobia to win votes.

However, there are also important factors that contributed to the cultural turn in voter behaviour, especially in the former homelands, that have less to do with charismatic leadership than with the consequences of Covid-19 and rural state formation in South Africa over the past few years.

Here, it is vital to appreciate the importance of “state effects”, what the state claimed to be in 2020 during the Covid outbreak and what it is now. State formation occurs through the everyday practices of governance, service delivery and power brokering at the local level rather than through constitutional imperatives and policy papers. State-making is an ever-changing set of local practices that are neither static nor enshrined.

The state strives to impose its version of modernisation or change through classification, control and service delivery. Citizens review and respond, producing “state effects”. Over the past few years, the state has been attempting to tighten control and effect new classifications on the rural poor.

State formation and custom

In 2020, there was a surge of political interest by the state in the rural poor. In former Bantustans or ethnic homelands, the “war on Covid” expressed deep concern that customary practices, including large rural funerals, might drive Covid infection. To contain the threat of customary practice, the state sent the police and army into these areas to shut down family rituals and close initiation schools.

In rural areas, the police were required to attend all family funerals, the mortuaries were also instructed to wrap all bodies in plastic and the funeral parlours to deposit in open graves at rural homesteads on the day of burial. In rural homesteads, bodies no longer arrived the day before the funeral to be washed, dressed and consoled to prepare them for their journeys to the afterlife. Instead, they were unceremoniously dumped in the ground. This invoked anger at the violence of state practice against the dignity of their custom and culture.

Many wondered why the state seemed to blame the pandemic on their customs. Meanwhile, the state insisted that eliminating Covid required fundamental changes in established customs and behaviour. With the arrival of the Covid vaccine, state repression in the rural areas was replaced by a desire for convivial engagement. Suddenly, doctors, nurses, forgotten NGOs and volunteers flooded into villages offering care and service, together with T-shirts and shopping vouchers for those prepared to be vaccinated.

By the end of 2021, with vaccine funds depleted and a saturation point reached at around 40% vaccination in rural areas, the pop-up clinics and extended services disappeared. State formation was now again defined more by absence rather than presence.

The government did not offer effective in-person post-pandemic support for rebuilding and recovery. Instead, it opted for targeted grants which were delivered remotely to the poor. This support was available through online portals rather than face-to-face interaction or local awareness campaigns.

After Covid-19, public funds that had previously been invested in vehicles, rural roads and in-person service delivery are increasingly diverted to cover the rising cost of remote welfare assistance. Every cent that can be saved from provincial departments is re-invested in the ballooning central welfare budget.

Social fracture and division

These shifts in spending priorities have caused resentment. Those who are left out target those who receive benefits. A generational shift in state support has taken place in recent years away from pension and disability grants to child support and special Covid-19 grants that empower the youth. This has contested established assumptions about the need for grant money to end up in the hands of the head of the household.

Older men and women feel that returning to customary practice could help to discipline and redirect the “loose” grant money that fell into the hands of the youth (young mothers and unemployed youth).

The rise of rural crime is also a matter of great concern. With the police and army presence in rural areas to enforce the Covid-19 regulations, families have higher expectations of better policing thereafter. But spiralling rural crime has become a matter for the people rather than the police. Vigilante formations abound and are often dominated by traditional leaders and influential families, ensuring that certain sections of the population are better protected than others.

There are also concerns in rural areas that a free market is emerging in land in the communal areas where land distribution is supposed to be governed by customary practices and allocated to the benefit of local families.

But many chiefs and headmen are now selling off plots of land in communal areas to the highest bidder. Although locals feel entitled to free land, the chiefs and headmen often favour applicants from outside the area because they will pay a higher price. This results in the perception that the state is allowing local elites to distort “proper” customary practice for personal gain.

To address the death, hunger and material insecurity associated with the pandemic, many families in the rural Eastern Cape have also called incimbis (family rituals) to consult their ancestors and ask for guidance in these troubled times. Some even believe that the great wave of death associated with Covid-19 was caused by the wrath of their ancestors, whom they had been neglecting. Many of these ceremonies focus on reconnecting with their family values and customary practices.

Populism from below

The dominant view of the populist turn in South African politics focuses on the way charismatic political and cultural leaders, such as Jacob Zuma, have manipulated the populace by highlighting the opposition between corrupt elites and the virtuous poor, the (ethnic) people. Above, I have suggested that the appeal of populist politics with an ethnic flavour has emerged as a response to changes in state practice, or what I call “state effects”.

Rural communities have re-engaged in discourses of ethnicity, belonging and identity as a response to what they regard as the bewildering actions of the state, firstly to nullify their customs during the pandemic and then to reclassify social grant beneficiaries in a way that unsettles the “proper” flow of resource flows in households and communities. DM

Leslie Bank is a professor of anthropology at Walter Sisulu University and the principal investigator on an IDRC-funded Women RISE project on post-pandemic recovery and rebuilding in rural South Africa. He is the co-author of Covid and Custom in Rural South Africa (UKZN Press, 2023).

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State formation and custom

Social fracture and division