The Laziness Myth

Narratives of Work and the Good Life in South Africa

Christine Jeske

• Editorial: ILR Press
• Año: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781501752520
• Categoría: Politics & International Relations
• Categoría: Labour & Industrial Relations

When people cannot find good work, can they still find good lives? By investigating this question in the context of South Africa, where only 43 percent of adults are employed, Christine Jeske invites readers to examine their own assumptions about how work and the good life do or do not coincide. The Laziness Myth challenges the widespread premise that hard work determines success by tracing the titular "laziness myth, " a persistent narrative that disguises the systems and structures that produce inequalities while blaming unemployment and other social ills on the so-called laziness of particular class, racial, and ethnic groups.

Jeske offers evidence of the laziness myth's harsh consequences, as well as insights into how to challenge it with other South African narratives of a good life. In contexts as diverse as rapping in a library, manufacturing leather shoes, weed-whacking neighbors' yards, negotiating marriage plans, and sharing water taps, the people described in this book will stimulate discussion on creative possibilities for seeking the good life in and out of employment, in South Africa and elsewhere.

1

“They don’t want to work”

The Laziness Myth

“My mom stayed home while we were growing up, and my dad has never, ever worked in his life.” Jabu, the woman sitting on the couch across from me, was telling me about her childhood. “And they were able to put us through the best school in this area. So I really respect my dad for that.”

Little buzzers went off in my head. How could their family have found the money for tuition when her parents were not working? Jabu, like Bullet, was one of only a handful of people from Mpophomeni in their late twenties who had attended Howick schools. How had they paid the roughly $1,000 in tuition fees per year charged at the formerly all-white school? Plus they would have needed either a vehicle, a good friend with a vehicle, or money for taxis (minibuses) to get to the school, which had no free busing option.¹ Jabu had told me earlier that her mom had not worked either while she was growing up, so how did two nonworking parents find that kind of money?

Besides, Jabu had gone so far as to tell me she respected her dad for not working. What was that about? She seemed to have just confirmed the stereotypes that people had been telling me about since my early days in South Africa working with the microfinance organization. I had often heard blanket statements accusing Zulu people of being lazy and aspiring not to work. I found these accusations troubling, and I came looking for deeper explanations. But here was this confident, well-educated young woman seeming to exemplify the laziness narrative people kept talking about: she was actually telling me that she respected her dad for not working. I made a mental note to go back through my recording and make sure I had understood her correctly. In the moment, I nodded, and she went on talking. Here’s the transcript of what she said next.

My dad is a taxi owner, but his business only started becoming something just after we had left school. And it was a matter of people would come bring their cars in because my dad is a good mechanic and he would do their cars and get paid and that’s how we lived. From the day I was born, I remember there was a time at home when my mom was like, “Okay, now things are really tough.” We’ve got a garden, there by the garage and my dad’s got three guys working for him. I remember when they started their garden. I remember there was one day, I think I was eight or nine, and there was going to be a market day [as a fundraiser at the school] and my dad came with potatoes from the garden to sell. You know how we felt embarrassed? We were like, “Dad why don’t you bake something at least!” And my dad was like, “This is who I am.” We left that market day with all those potatoes gone. All of them gone. He even had orders from other guys, saying, “You know what? We love your potatoes. We want your potatoes.” So it’s like little things that you don’t notice growing up. You don’t know how hard your parents are working. Up until you actually stay at home with them. My dad’s a real hard worker.

As I listened through the recording later, I marveled at what had happened in the space of this paragraph. She went from telling me that her dad had never worked to telling me—with a tone of real pride—that her dad was “a real hard worker.” Along the way, she had mentioned activities that seemed to me to qualify as work. He raised and sold vegetables with three employees, and he fixed people’s cars as a mechanic. Later in the conversation, she offhandedly mentioned other ways her dad made money—transporting other kids to school for a fee, and eventually buying multiple minibuses and hiring drivers to run taxi routes. It seemed he had hired multiple employees and run at least four separate businesses. Why, then, did she start describing her father as having “never, ever worked in his life”? And why did she say that she respected him for it?

When Jabu said that her dad had never worked, she was drawing on a piece of a narrative that has been told about black people for centuries. It is a narrative that has always had definite uses. It has kept certain people in positions of power while oppressing others—benefiting some people at the expense of others.

In the same sentence, though, Jabu was revealing one way in which she and others resist this narrative, refusing to conform to the moralities it expects and maintaining dignity within the dehumanizing systems it upholds. As Jabu talked through what she saw of her dad’s life, she was describing a reality that gets hidden by the dominant narrative: her dad was not staying at home avoiding work because he or people who resembled him are lazy; he was refusing certain indignities endemic to white spaces, and sculpting a life of respect in his own community. But as Jabu herself noticed, “up until you stay at home” with someone paying attention to their life, it’s hard to see past the narrative that says they’re just not working.

Narratives with Power

In the previous chapter, I introduced the dilemma Bullet faced in choosing between pursuing a law degree or producing music. To some, it might seem that making the most of his educational opportunities would be the right path to the good life, but for Bullet something about that path didn’t seem right. Was becoming a lawyer his dream, or somebody else’s? Would working hard to become a lawyer really pay off for him, or would the prejudices he had experienced in predominantly white spaces elsewhere play out again in law school or a career? His life decisions put him at odds with the narrative that many South Africans believed should and would lead to the good life.

Notice in that previous sentence I just used the phrases the narrative and the good life. That’s the way many people have learned to see it—as if there were no good reason anyone would use any other narrative. This was the narrative, the one and only, applicable for any person in any situation. To make choices that didn’t fit the narrative would be wrong, irrational, or inconceivable.

Scholars use a word to describe a narrative like that: hegemony.² Hegemony is a way of seeing the world that has become so pervasive that people have a difficult time even seeing it as one of any number of possibilities—it becomes the only possibility. Hegemony is a set of ideas that are invisible and unnoticed, ideas so taken for granted that people do not bother to question them, like the idea that flowers and trees grow upward toward the sun. In everyday conversation, up is toward the sky, down is toward the earth, and there is no reason to spend much time thinking about why we think this way.

Many of our habitual ways of thinking about the world are built on unquestioned assumptions like the location of up, down, earth, and sky. These assumptions, while not fully accurate, are widely held because they offer certain conveniences. We do not have to bother to explain what we mean by “up” and we do not have to consider whether we are correct. We simply use a word and move on. And much of the time, assumptions like these probably have little influence over who gains power and resources in a society. What sets hegemony apart from any other assumption is that hegemonic assumptions are not neutral in their results across society. They produce winners and losers. Hegemonic narratives are ways of understanding the world that have become so prevalent that people do not consider questioning them, and the fact that they linger beyond refute confers advantages to some people over others. Hegemonic ideas are the silent, unexamined messages telling us who gets to be up and who gets pushed down.

One of the most influential thinkers when it comes to hegemony was Antonio Gramsci, an Italian who did much of his writing in the 1920s and 1930s while starving in a prison on charges of organizing resistance to the Italian Fascist regime. Gramsci noticed that people in dominant political and economic groups, like the political leaders in his own country, did not maintain dominance through force alone. Instead, they perpetuated ways of thinking that became so normal that subordinate people accepted their own subordination, often without protest, no longer even considering that life could be otherwise. Gramsci wrote that “the great masses of the population” offer “spontaneous consent … to the general direction imposed on social life by the dominant fundamental group.”³ This spontaneous consent comes about because powerful people in society gradually create and promote whole systems of symbols, values, beliefs, and sentiments that are woven through the very fabric of culture. These ideas spread and reproduce in all the ways culture spreads—workplaces, state-run institutions, religious groups, schools, arts, media, parenting, and everyday conversations. Over time, these ideas come to be equated with common sense, rationality, morality, and reality. The most insidious aspect of this way of reinforcing power inequalities is that people in subservient groups come to not just accept their subordination but to actually play a part in reinforcing their inferiority by embracing and spreading hegemonic views to others.⁴

The antidote to the venomous power of hegemony, then, is to question it. Hegemonies are broken when people talk about possibilities for making life otherwise. By definition, hegemonies do not accurately describe the shape of the world and human existence. There is a hopefulness inherent in that very inconsistency between hegemony and reality. As the anthropologist Marco Di Nunzio wrote, “Authoritarian regimes can be successful in enforcing compliance, but have been less so in making their ideas of society, order, and progress coincide with the desires of the general population.”⁵ While hegemony, by definition, is that which is not being contested, it can be contested and nearly inevitably will be. Jean and John Comaroff, who have written at length on hegemony in South Africa, write: “Hegemony is … always threatened by the vitality that remains in the forms of life it thwarts.”⁶ Hegemony is never absolute or stable. One could envision hegemony as the end of a spectrum that compares the ease with which an idea can be contested in society. Hegemonic narratives have the power to shape society because they are invisible and uncontested.⁷ As they become increasingly visible and contested, they move along the spectrum toward something else: openly debatable ideas.

Across history, ideas about race have moved in and out of hegemony. During the height of the slave trade, the idea that African people could be rightfully sold as slaves while people from Europe could not was, in some circles, a scarcely debatable idea. While slavery continues today in various forms, a neutral stance on slavery is no longer hegemonic. Why? Because most people question it, if not abhor it. Someone who states that “black people make better slaves,” will likely get questioned, if not fired from a job or punched. Slavery was always contested and resisted in various ways, but the more that resistance gathered influence, the further the ideas upholding slavery moved away from hegemony, making the whole social and economic structure of slavery harder to uphold. Through lifetimes of intentional efforts, people dragged the idea of racially determined chattel slavery away from the hegemony end of the spectrum, building the conceptual and support base for resistance. There is no set moment when an idea escapes hegemony. Over time, ideas can swing away from hegemony and back. An idea that is hegemonic among one group of people might become questioned in another group.

With questioning, new space for resistance opens up. Other racist and antiblack ideas, as well as plenty of other oppressive ideas, remain deeply entrenched, but the struggle against racism and antiblackness will always involve challenging hegemonic ideas. Taking ideas from invisible to debatable takes no small effort. The change often involves a great wave of scholars, protestors, media, education, and everyday efforts of ordinary people talking about a topic. To give more recent examples, social media has offered a valuable tool for unveiling hegemonic ideas, as in the #BlackLivesMatter and #MeToo movements that questioned the racial inequalities in police violence and the prevalent silence surrounding sexual assault.

Throughout the history of anthropology and sociology, much theoretical debate has considered the question, How does society change? Does change happen primarily through changing social structures, like the economic, governmental, and institutional systems that seem in many ways to steer the course of our lives? Or does change happen primarily through changing culture—the ideas, habits, beliefs, language, and spirituality that seems in other ways to guide our lives? Since the late 1970s, a number of theorists who were eventually dubbed “practice theorists” (including Sherry Ortner, Philippe Bourdieu, and Anthony Giddens, among others), articulated a position that says social change happens when both structures and culture interact with individual human agency. The contestation of hegemonic narratives is one form of cultural change, and it goes hand in hand with structural change—neither produces lasting results without the other. Taking an idea out of hegemonic invisibility does not mean that changes in structures will necessarily occur. People will not necessarily agree about the changes that should happen, and resources will not necessarily be distributed any more evenly. But people who begin to talk about a hegemonic idea are changing society. They invent hashtags, they make protest signs, they make documentaries, they write the issue into college courses, and they create think tanks and lobbying groups. Movements such as the #MeToo and American civil rights movements entailed structural change that went hand in hand with cultural change, and it would be impossible to disentangle the two.

In more recent vocabulary, hegemony is a matter of how “woke” the general population is about a given issue. The contesting of hegemony is the domain of much political activism and creative energies. As Jean and John Comaroff eloquently write, movements to awaken consciousness are “the realm from which emanate the poetics of history, the innovative impulses … the poetic imagination, the creative, the innovative.”⁸ The very acts of writing, speaking, and thinking, then, can play a part in moving ideas away from hegemony, and thereby a role in changing society. That writing and thinking includes books like the one you are now reading. My writing and your reading are not just informative processes of gathering descriptions; they are, in the Comaroffs’ words, “the most critical domain.”⁹ When you read and learn about a narrative which has been hegemonic, you become not just an observer of an inert story. You become an actor in the process of resistance, innovation, and creativity that moves the narratives that move societies.

A Hegemonic Narrative: The Laziness Myth

When Jabu stated that her dad had never worked a day in his life, she described him in a way that fit the events of his life into a narrative that lingers mostly in the realm of hegemony. This narrative practically jumped out at me when I started tabulating the words that I had heard repeated in conversations in South Africa, and yet it took me four years of living in South Africa before I put a name to it and started writing about it as a cohesive narrative.¹⁰

I call this hegemonic narrative the laziness myth.¹¹ South Africans very often used the word “laziness” with a sort of apologetic hesitancy, as if they wished they knew some other way to talk about what they be...