Ayanda BoyBoy Manqoyi

AYANDA MANQOYI, then a graduate student at University of California, Davis, California, received funding in April 2022 to aid research on “Black Family Businesses and Racial Capitalism in an Out-Of-The-Way South African Town,” supervised by Dr. James Smith. This research explores the ways black entrepreneurs in the rural town of Lusikisiki are made over the long-durée and the practices to anchor themselves in business and community despite uncertainties of millennial capitalism and the shifting state power in post-apartheid South Africa. It investigates how black entrepreneurs anchor themselves through 1) property acquisition; 2) kinship making; and 3) business. The main argument is that, to understand “capitalism” and how different forms of capitalism operate, it is important to understand the history of their emergence in a particular place. The apartheid state set to transform a small group of black men into entrepreneurs operating retail businesses in allocated towns of the reserves. As new black entrepreneurs, they were expected to meet political and economic ends and thus no longer be subject to customs. In the case of Lusikisiki, a bottom-up response to their actions ended up producing a kind of capitalism that relied heavily on mutual support and indebtedness that was very different from the original intention. Black entrepreneurs invested in strategies to anchor in spatial settings making it difficult to expand and go elsewhere. Consequently, local opportunities must be maximalized leading to a particularly protective and competitive form of business.