The Perception of a Crisis Revisited

On the evening before I left Venda to return to London, my host, Zwiakonda, joined me in my hut for one last late-night chat. He had come to present me with a gift: a painstakingly prepared map of the village with family names on each plot of land written in colour-coordinated code that represented the number of people who had recently died in each homestead. He had worked on this in secret, at night, for months. Such a project – even if it was for an outsider's research – would surely raise suspicion that he was up to no good. The map demonstrated that, by his count, one in four of the homesteads in Fondwe had lost at least one life in the past three years: most of them were people under the age of thirty. ‘I don't know what is worse’, he said after presenting me with my farewell gift, ‘that people are becoming rich funeral directors, or that directing funerals seems to be the only secure job to have these days’. Driving down the N1 highway from Venda towards Johannesburg airport the following morning, Zwiakonda's parting words were in my head. The reverse side of the billboards that had welcomed me to ‘Africa's Eden’ were now urging my swift return, but I could not help wondering – with his graphic representation of the death toll as memento and harbinger – how many of the people I had befriended would be there to welcome me back again.

Zwiakonda's concerns articulate two of the most pertinent apprehensions in post-apartheid Venda. Unprecedented numbers of young people are dying, whilst those who evade ‘sickness’ struggle to find secure employment. To enunciate this lament by evoking the spectre of funeral directors – parasitic and unwelcome, but nonetheless indispensable – seemed to embody the profound contradictions that map out the lived experience of contemporary post-apartheid rural South Africa. His comments represent the widespread perception that contemporary African affairs, in Venda and beyond, are caught up in a crisis of social and sexual reproduction that has been so prominent in the ethnographic encounters presented in this book: a crisis that has exacerbated social cleavages along gendered and generational divides, and that threatens to deliver a stillborn future (Comaroff and Comaroff 2004: 336).