E-grāmata: Informal Livelihoods and Governance in South Africa: The Hustle

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 Johannesburg’s numerous disused and abandoned gold mines, the book documents an ethnography of this community’s 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 country’s historical exclusion, and a product of its contemporary socioeconomic inequalities.