#BookClub Empowering Minorities: The Politics of Segmental Incorporation in South Africa

My new book, Privileged Minorities: A History of Wealth Concentration in South Africa, grapples with a fundamental question: how has severe economic inequality persisted across political ruptures caused by nationalist movements committed to downward distributions of wealth? I address this question in ways that move beyond typical analyses premised on race and class.

Prolonged clashes between these two schools of thought sparked heated controversies during the apartheid era but are now considered stale. More recent attempts to explain inequality by fusing a focus on racial discrimination with one rooted in Marxian discourses on class formation indicate that these two extremes can illustrate important nuances when alloyed into composite theories.

While scholars generally place more emphasis on one element than the other, there is a broad consensus that racial solidarities tempered intra-white frictions in the early twentieth century, only for corporate interests to temper racial discrimination during South Africa’s late-twentieth century democratic transition. Class replaced race as the primary marker of inequality when black nationalists entered white corporate boardrooms.

Nevertheless, such concepts pay insufficient attention to elite pacts and pathways to material accumulation over time. My book is also a metanarrative. Yet, it focuses on specific political and economic factions, from various races and classes, that obtained access to exclusive advantages which enabled them to accumulate or defend wealth across shifting socio-political contexts.

My text charts the reinforcement of path dependency across critical junctures. Douglass C. North theorized path dependency as a historical process in which past developments prevent breaks with established trajectories. Breaks from path dependence are possible during critical junctures, typically defined as acute political crises, such as revolutions or civil wars, when countries are presented with finite opportunities to take different developmental tracks.

South Africa encountered three major critical junctures in its modern history: imperially imposed unification, and its troubled aftermath, from approximately 1900 to 1924, the transition to black majority rule from roughly 1984 to 1994, and the end of African National Congress (ANC) majority rule in 2024.

Each juncture presented genuine opportunities for inclusive development and mass socio-economic uplift. Instead, incumbent elites managed these transitions in ways that incorporated small segments of rival political movements into established power structures to limit downward wealth distribution. Co-optation did not fully demobilize subaltern social protests, but it did lessen their impact on wealth concentration. Select groups obtained substantial privileges and achieved affluence while large majorities remained stuck in systemic poverty.

Iterations of segmental incorporation did not, however, result in identical outcomes. After South Africa’s Anglophone mineral oligarchy yielded to white working-class empowerment and allowed a select number of Afrikaner capitalists to take their place atop the industrial economy’s commanding heights, the white population’s two segments gradually integrated. Language and culture remained distinct while material conditions and professional status became indistinguishable.

This did not occur after the ANC entered government in 1994. Rather, South Africa’s power elites assumed a more composite character as white corporate oligarchs relied on the political power of black nationalist leaders to indefinitely defer threats of asset nationalization. To guarantee black politicians remained on side, a select number were given company shares and lucrative sinecures in the private sector.

Key political players, like Cyril Ramaphosa and Tokyo Sexwale, obtained great wealth and utilized their privileges to construct their own holding companies; although, they remained dependent on white corporate favor to accrue further assets. Empowered African leaders were not so much corporate cronies as political oligarchs extracting rents from white corporations in exchange for protection from expropriation.

Ostensibly more radical ANC members, like Jacob Zuma, relied primarily, if never entirely, on Indian capitalists. However destructive Zuma’s state capture project may have been, one reason incumbent corporate interests turned against it was that rival business networks led by his Gupta family financiers began encroaching heavily on their market shares. Zuma’s removal exacerbated elite fragmentation and precipitated the formation of an ethno-populist Umkhonto we Sizwe Party (MKP) in 2023. The ANC’s slow haemorrhaging of political support turned into a torrent when the MKP tore out a large chunk of its Zulu-speaking voter base in 2024’s general election. This defeat compelled ANC policymakers to form a Government of National Unity that brought an end to thirty years of single-party dominance.

Nevertheless, South Africa’s coalition government assumed a peculiar structure. It consisted of a bipartisan core, made up of a rump ANC and the white-led neoliberal Democratic Alliance, attached to a multiparty periphery composed of various small middle-class parties seeking access to public sector posts. Each segment of this composite governing group strove to either secure or obtain exclusive privileges for their leaders and immediate supporters. Possibilities for inclusive uplift will remain limited until public policies are architected in ways that benefit the general populace.

At root, Privileged Minorities contends that different pathways to minority empowerment have reinforced an underlying structure of majority exclusion. To understand how inequality persists, we must focus on critical junctures where possibilities for inclusive reform emerged but were repeatedly undermined by the segmental incorporation of select individuals and interest groups into colonial and apartheid-era mechanisms of minority privilege. Oligarchy building was just as important as class formation. By examining exactly who benefited and how, South Africanists will gain a better understanding of nationalism’s limits and how it fostered cultures of entitlement that empowered only a few.    

Mesrob Vartavarian has published extensively on the formation and evolution of power elites in the Global South. He has held research fellowships and teaching positions at Cornell University, Harvard University, and the University of California San Diego. He is currently a consultant at the Global Initiative Against Transnational Organized Crime.