This open access book offers a compelling account of everyday life, livelihoods, and governance in post-apartheid South Africa among the urban poor and marginalized, anchored in and through a critique of the concept of informality, or living outside of the state, its laws, services, and protection. Using a case study of the zama-zama, loosely translated from the isiZulu as to hustle, or to strive and colloquially used to refer to those working as informal artisanal miners on Johannesburgs numerous disused and abandoned gold mines, the book documents an ethnography of this communitys everyday lives, struggles, and hope. It provides an intimate account of a community, its social relations, and its political relationship to the state. In the book, these narratives are used to raise broader questions about precarity, belonging, and governance in post-apartheid South Africa. The everyday stories of poverty and inequality, xenophobia, and confrontation with the state are placed within a complex web of living on the fringes of society, in legal, material, and physical ways, rooted in the countrys historical exclusion, and a product of its contemporary socioeconomic inequalities.
Chapter 1: Beneath the Surface.
Chapter 2: Meeting the miners .-
Chapter 3: Digging deep.
Chapter 4: Outside the state: Informal systems of
governance (6000 words).
Chapter 5: The Hustle.
Zaheera Jinnah is Assistant Professor in the School of Social Work, University of Victoria, Canada, and a research associate at the African Centre for Migration and Society, University of the Witwatersrand, South Africa. Her research, teaching and community work over the last 12 years centres on migration and African studies. She has published widely in the academic and popular press, including the co-edited book Gender and Mobility in Africa (with K. Hiralal, Palgrave Macmillan, 2018).
