Abstract:
Consumption has become a central focus in South African politics, one that hinges especially on
evaluation of the behaviour of the new black middle class. Based on an ongoing ethnographic study
of Durban, mainly among the lower middle or ‘professional’ class across a range of racial
categories, the article addresses three aspects of this question: food provisioning and
consumption across and within the various communities; interaction in shared social spaces
that were previously segregated, especially shopping malls; and moral discourses in the media
concerning this new class. The so-called ’black diamonds’ are a South African urban type of
the sort labelled by Benjamin as a phantasmagoria. South Africans are willing to experiment
beyond the boundaries of their native communities and there is an emergent national
middle-class culture, but there are marked regional differences and nothing yet that would
amount to ‘creolisation’.
