Claiming Community: Local Politics on the Cape Flats, South Africa

The article explores how the concept of community has become the nodal point for political power struggles, state formation and the production of political subjectivity. The ethnographic focus of the article is on the coloured townships in Cape Town, and the ways in which the local state bureaucrats and policy makers engage with and are engaged by township politicians. The article illustrates that community is a polyvalent category, invoked by a multiplicity of political representatives. It forms the central focal point in state-endorsed participation projects; perceptions of the townships and their people are organized around it, and it is the organizing principle for local power struggles in the townships over the right to define, defend and represent the people. The article also testifies to the continued marginalization of the townships and illustrates how fraught with ambiguities the production of political subjectivity is in situations of poverty, violence and marginalization.