In this piece, Gumani Tshimomola draws attention to the reality of unemployment which continues to place South Africa’s black population between precarity and exclusion, a condition which sustains the economic power relations and capitalist endeavours for the benefit of the white minority. This represents a historical continuity from the apartheid era.
Ah, the problem of unemployment. The high levels of both young and old people, languishing on the periphery of the South African economy, trapped in the long shadows, forced to beg for jobs at entrances of affluent suburban shopping complexes and mega hardware shops. They look for any form of menial job just to make ends meet.
We, in South Africa, know this challenge very well and have become accustomed to it. We hear about it a lot in the news, at social gatherings and for many who are directly affected by it, this is an unfortunate reality that threatens not only their lives but their sense of being in the world. In the case of most South African black families, this is more the norm than the exception, as unemployment is likely to affect one personally. In most Black households you are most likely to have a cousin, brother, sister, uncle or aunt who has been unemployed for an extensive period and in extreme cases, years. Unknown to many—perhaps deliberately ignored—there are even adults who have never been employed formally in their lives.
As I page through Abdul R. JanMohamed’s book, “The Death-Bound-Subject: Richard Wright’s Archaeology of Death”, reliving the terror and fear experienced by black slaves in America’s South in the late 1800s and early 1900s, I cannot help but feel the need to question the nature of phenomena such as death by lynching. In what appears to be a less extreme form, ‘unemployment’ is nonetheless a key question to South Africa today. I will later argue that unemployment is as significant as death, as it brings out similar fears equivalent to the fear of death itself. In the context of the asymmetric distribution of power and resources between powerless black people and powerful whites, the very fear is then weaponised against the powerless to maintain such unequal power relations. This is not the fear of the unknown but the fear of the known. And it is this known known that has been used to maintain these power imbalances in order to sustain the status quo of the rich getting richer and poor getting poorer.
I must admit, the first time I tried to read the JanMohamed’s book seven years ago, I could not bring myself to continue because of the fear of opening myself up to such traumatic scenes of the racist, hateful, and evil practice of lynching black men, women, and sometimes even young boys and girls to death. This was done simply to maintain socio-political power relations that favoured whites.
Looking at South Africa todya, with the resurgence of Afrikaner nationalism and the outright white racist attitudes, things are likely to get worse for black people unless something is done. Racism and Afrikaner nationalism are not simply ends in themselves but a means to an end, which is about maintaining economic power and control of the minority whites over the majority blacks. Black people in South Africa are just a numerical majority but are still a minority culturally. This is because the dominant culture that dictates the terms of reference in how we navigate through the systems of power are very much Euro-Western in nature.
What we are seeing for example with the Basic Education Laws Amendment Act (BELA)—an attempt to bring some sense of equality to access to education, particularly in the previously ‘whites-only’ areas—is a situation wherein state-funded schools with relatively better infrastructure continue to operate as enclaves for whites, thereby reproducing this racist economy in the world’s most unequal country.
Let’s return to JanMohamed’s book just for a moment to establish some basis for this rather unusual analysis and attempt to bring a different interpretation to the function of high levels of unemployment in South Africa’s economy today: the obscure relationship between a racist economy, black people, and unemployment or the fear of unemployment. Drawing insights from psychoanalytic theory, we can consider how deeply entrenched economic inequalities are perpetuated not only by external systems of oppression but also by internalised fears and anxieties, which serve to reinforce these dynamics. This analysis aligns with broader philosophical studies of the binaries of ‘self’ and ‘other’, where identity and power are continuously shaped through domination and subjugation.
JanMohamed and many others who have written on the lynchings argue, and even empirically illustrate, that death or the threat of death by lynching served a specific function in the relationship between the slave and master: total submission. If you knew that you could be publicly lynched to death simply for not saying “Sir” when addressing white men, including young boys of your age or younger, you would submit.
From a psychoanalytic perspective, this dynamic can also be underscored as a psychological mechanism of control, where the constant threat of death shapes both individual and collective consciousness. The unpredictability of punishment functions as a tool for creating a state of perpetual anxiety, undermining the subject’s capacity for resistance. This internalised fear, rooted in the psyche, mirrors broader philosophical ideas about how power is sustained through domination, with the oppressed becoming trapped in an imposed sense of inferiority and vulnerability.
In this unequal relationship between the oppressor and the oppressed, the oppressor finds himself/herself/themselves being relegated to what Frantz Omar Fanon calls, the “zone of non-being”, a place of nothingness where black bodies become objects of derision. It is the direct experience that unfolds in this lacuna of non-existence of black people in the eyes of a white supremacist establishment that JanMohamed’s book brings to our attention.
More so, when things that you could be lynched for were not clearly defined or trivial, this unpredictability introduced an element of unimaginable terror. Whites would regularly kill black people, hang them for public display, and even sometimes hang an animal, particularly a dog, just for control and as a symbol of the worthlessness of a black person’s life, a life of no consequence, equal to an animal, so to speak. And this is the fate that black people were made to endure as a race in America. It is this lynching of blacks that prompted Billie Holiday to sing about “Strange Fruit” hanging from the Southern trees in 1959 referring to blacks whose lifeless bodies were hung from trees to instil fear.
In South Africa, black people have faced similar fears across history: the fear of land being taken by British settlers and Boer trekkers during wars of resistance and apartheid; fear of being forced into becoming an immigrant labourer in the terrible mining and farm conditions in the late 1800s and early 1900s; the forced proletarianization of black men and much of life after the enactment of the Natives Land Act of 1913, when a “South African Native found himself, not actually a slave, but a pariah in the land of his birth” as Sol Plaatjies puts it in his 1916 book titled Native Life in South Africa. There have been more fears, including the fear of being in the white men’s town after the permitted time without a dompass[1], fear of losing one’s dompass; fear of being imprisoned or killed for one’s political activism; fear of being killed in exile without one’s family knowing; fear of the apartheid police and soldiers storming into one’s four-roomed dwelling, sleeping on the floor in the middle of the night, stark naked; humiliated and stripped off one’s dignity even in front of their children; and fear of teargas and bullets as a student in Soweto. All these fears were instilled to bring the black South African into complete submission.
South Africans endured the fear of retribution for simply failing to say, “Yes Bass” as a full-grown man addressing a 16-year-old white laaitie[2], the same way slaves in America had to say “Sir”, to white people. Those who overcame these fears paid dearly, many with their lives.
Black South Africans’ relationship with white people has always been governed by fear. In South Africa today, 30 years after ‘the end’ of apartheid, unemployment – or the fear of unemployment – still functions as a source of total submission of black people within the economic system and reinforcing existing power relations.
There are more than nine million people who are unemployed in South Africa today, of whom the vast majority are black people. And this is only according to what Statistics South Africa terms the ‘official definition’, meaning that it excludes another three million people who have given up finding employment. They don’t look anymore and are categorised as ‘discouraged’ worker-seekers. Added to this, the number of unemployed graduates continues to increase, sitting at 9.8% today. In extreme cases, you will find a graduate with a BSc Financial Mathematics or a BCom Accounting degree standing in Greyston Drive in Sandton, in the merciless scorching sun with a placard listing all their qualifications, begging for a job.
Just watch the news and you will find, for example, the Minister of Health, Aaron Pakishe Mostoaledi, justifying why we have medical officers—what we here in South Africa refer to as doctors—protesting outside government buildings against their own unemployment. This has been coming.
This brings us back to the historical continuity of fear. The reality is that the majority of the 16 million people fortunate enough to have a job live in fear of losing that job. It is the knowledge that it can happen anytime, with or without qualifications or experience. You can excel in what you do as a black professional in the banking sector and still lose your job for the most trivial reasons. Such is the life of a black person today in South Africa. And once you lose that job, there is a big chance that you are unlikely to find another one immediately, if you even ever do. It’s like crime and policing: you will think our police system is completely dysfunctional—until you commit a crime. In a similar way, lose a job and see how difficult it is to get another one. The fear is real. This is the lived experience of many black South Africans.
This is why people hold on to jobs even at the expense of their mental health, burnout, outright abuse, racism and sexual harassment, which are all too common in South Africa today. So strong is the fear of unemployment that even those who are unemployed, particularly women, are subjected to the horrendous ‘sex-for-job’—or, for those fortunate to be employed, ‘sex-for-promotions.’ This is prevalent in municipalities and government departments across the country.
Now, it is here where I try to make the link between the fear of unemployment today with the fear of death 300 years ago, to illustrate that it is this fear that compels the majority black people to submit to the South African economic structure—a structure that relegates them to the position of inferior participants. It makes them create wealth for a white capitalist system that continues to remind them of their non-beingness as bodies that can be manipulated at will.
Drawing on JanMohamed’s framework, where Black bodies were caught between being flesh (the bareness and vulnerability of life) and meat (the finality of what he calls actual death), I would suggest that Black people in South Africa exist as The Unemployed-Bound-Subject. Here, they are trapped between two oppressive states: precarity and exclusion. Precarity represents the unstable, exploitative conditions of low-wage work or underemployment, symbolising the fragility of holding onto a job. Exclusion, on the other hand, is the state of unemployment itself, where millions find themselves marginalised, some labelled as “discouraged workers,” and stripped off economic agency. Much like the unpredictability of lynching created a state of perpetual fear, the unpredictability of losing one’s livelihood enforces submission to a system that relegates black people to inferior economic roles.
This alternation between precarity and exclusion mirrors JanMohamed’s description of black lives caught between flesh and meat. For the unemployed-bound-subject, the fear of falling into complete exclusion ensures compliance within a system designed to maintain racial and economic hierarchies. This fear is not just a psychological weapon but a structural mechanism, wielded by those in power to maintain the status quo.
From a Marxian perspective, this relationship between the unemployed-bound subject and capital accumulation is both deliberate and structural, thus systemic. In South Africa today, the unemployed-bound subject is not merely a passive victim of the system but a crucial part in its profitability. Precarious working conditions ensure that wages remain suppressed, while the vast pool of the unemployed serves as a reserve army of labour, creating competition and fear among those who are employed. This fear—of losing a job and falling into exclusion—enforces voluntary submission to exploitative conditions, ensuring compliance and acceptance of inequalities in the workplace. Much like in slavery, where labour was provided without wages out of fear of death, today’s labour is coerced by the fear of unemployment. At the core of accumulation in South Africa’s capitalist society today, it is the unemployed-bound subjects who are instrumental to the profitability of many corporates and their relentless accumulation of wealth.
The concept of hegemony, as articulated by Gramsci, sheds light on how the unemployed-bound subject is coerced into complicity. Through economic and cultural dominance, those in power frame what constitutes work and its conditions, ensuring the precarious and exclusionary state of being persists. This hegemony sustains systemic inequality, reinforcing the fear of unemployment as a tool of control.
This why many black people are willing to take salaries lower than their white counterparts, sometimes despite having more experience and qualifications, simply because of this fear. Few will dare to challenge the status quo inside those financial institutions, including those who may find themselves in the boardroom or decision-making spaces, sometimes as high as the Chief Executive Officer (CEO) positions of some of the biggest corporations.
The visibly unemployed in South Africa, much like the public displays of lynched bodies hanging in trees during slavery, serve as a constant reminder of the fragility of one’s economic standing. This visibility reinforces the fear of exclusion, deterring resistance and ensuring compliance within the exploitative economic system. Such public spectacles of exclusion do not merely reflect the realities of unemployment but are weaponized as structural tools to sustain systemic inequalities. The unemployed are thus not just victims of the system but symbols of the consequences of defiance, perpetuating a state of collective submission.
I hear those crusaders who have made it against the odds talking big, saying how dedication, commitment, and hard work are all you need to succeed in the corporate world. However, they, too, are driven by the same fear of unemployment, even as they accuse people like me of making everything about race and class. By this, I can only assume, they mean those of us who refuse to lose the race and class perspective in our efforts to understand the world around us.
More often than not, you hear comments like: ‘Just move on already.’ But can you truly move on from systemic oppression? And what does moving on mean when these asymmetries still exist today? All in all, to be black in South Africa today is to exist as an ‘unemployed-bound subject,’ until such time when we can transform South Africa’s economy, reduce inequality, and allow for the redistribution of wealth where race is not a pre-determining factor, as it is today. And here, I repeat, I am not focused on the exceptions but the norm – a broad societal representation of the majority: the forgotten, living on the periphery, begging for a mere job at the entrances of shopping complexes, spending hard-earned money constantly fearing unemployment. This is the harsh reality of The Unemployed-Bound-Subject, the lives of blacks in South Africa’s economy today—integral to the profitability of corporates while being excluded from the fruits of their own labour
[1] A dehumanizing identification document imposed on Black South Africans during apartheid
[2] A person younger in age
