White Belonging and Brokerage at a South African Rural Frontier

Abstract

This paper discusses the case of a broker who played a key role in introducing a model of rural development to the Limpopo Province which is based on an adaptation of UNESCO’s Man and Biosphere Programme. His brokering is situated in the cultural politics of land, showing how enterprising whites may combine their roles as trustees in development projects with their, increasingly challenged, subject position as landowners. Demonstrating how this broker forges alignments, the paper emphasises the agentive roles of situated brokers who translate spatial conservation-development imaginaries across different contexts, produce a space of intermediation and help construct provisional natural-cultural assemblages. This assembling over time became increasingly disarticulated with societal pressures to deracialise land relations, highlighting in turn the moral ambiguity associated with liberal whites seeking to obtain a stake in societal transformation.