Reinstating the importance of categorical inequities in South Africa

Abstract

South Africa was one of the most unequal countries in the world in 1994 and inequality has featured prominently as a key socio-economic and policy challenge over the post-apartheid period. Yet, despite policy interventions with the aim of reducing inequality, these high levels of inequality remain in place. Such resilience in inequality demands from us a better understanding of the mechanisms that reproduce and create inequalities. Having consolidated the research on South Africa’s income and wealth inequality, we explore the interactions between these inequalities and different sets of categories (gender, race and class) in space to surface how the dynamics of inequality relate to mechanisms that create and reproduce inequalities in South Africa. We build this analysis further by taking stock of recent work on social mobility. In the conclusion we pull together this picture of precarious mobility and review policies to overcome inequality against this prevailing reality. These policies have not worked, making clear the urgent need for interdisciplinary research on how to break the inequality traps.