SOAS Research Online

Abstract

Over the last decade, South Africa has experienced widening inequality, with the ostentatious lifestyles of a political and business elite juxtaposed against the growing unrest of a large “wageless” population. But what about the educated middle tier that are joining the lower ranks of government services, those who service the country’s hospitals, schools, police stations and offices? How have they experienced the promises of democracy since the transition to majority rule? Contingent Citizens explores the ambiguous status of the ‘professional’ classes, and asks what it means to be aspirational in South Africa today. The emerging tropes of liberal democracy—those of ‘accountability’ and ‘rights’—generate fear and criticism among nurses working in a rural government hospital in KwaZulu-Natal. But rather than simply responding to, or even resisting, these hegemonic discourses, nurses are engaged in a range of practices from international migration to new religious movements that signal a desire to formulate new material and ethical visions of citizenship.