Abstract
South Africa’s Master of the High Court administers property inheritance. Described as a ‘creature of statute’, and staffed by legally trained officials, the law takes centre-stage. Focusing on Johannesburg, the Master’s biggest and busiest branch, this article examines how law is performed in bureaucratic encounters, and how this shapes the everyday relations that make legal bureaucrats as middle-class professionals. Middle-class status is performed in the very enactment of a professional system, inflected by the racialised positioning of a new post-apartheid generation of largely black officials. Formal qualifications facilitate forms of distinction that maintain both prestige and everyday roles. Yet this is fraught. The Master and its administrators are positioned between post-apartheid potential and apartheid legal legacies; between transformation and a still racialised society; between professional ideal as legal bureaucrats and the career possibilities of a more lawyerly legal world.
After a pre-recorded segment, the hour-long television programme on wills and inheritance cut to studio. The interviewer – short hair, chic shweshwe dress, vividly green earrings – introduced her guests. ‘I do have two beautiful ladies with me in the studio … very educated ladies, so proud of you.’ They, like the presenter, stood for the post-apartheid accomplishments of professional black women. One was an access-to-justice lawyer from a legal non-governmental organisation. The other introduced Johannesburg’s Office of the Master of the High Court: responsible for insolvency, trusts, curatorship, the fund for assets inherited by minors, and her own brief as a Deputy Master, deceased estates. ‘So, you basically look after people,’ the interviewer responded. A modest smile from the Deputy Master. In the waiting room, her Assistant Master photographed the television display to document her already well-recognised outreach work.
This early spring morning in October 2017, the Deputy Master, the Assistant Master and I had taken our leave from their central Johannesburg office, for a few hours in the iconic tower of the South African Broadcasting Corporation (SABC) nearby. Perhaps surprisingly for a senior supervisory bureaucrat, the Deputy Master had substantial media experience, including on SABC’s Morning Live and on this very programme, Yilungelo Lakho (‘It’s Your Right’), a live Zulu-language daytime initiative for legal literacy. Previously, for six months while working for the Western Cape Province’s regional office, she had hosted a weekly hour-long radio slot covering legal issues. Her attire was perfectly attuned to the context. Long blue skirt, white blouse covered with a blue shawl, blue head-wrap, ZCC (Zion Christian Church) badge – her outfit emphasised the elegant yet demure public persona for which she was known in her professional circles: the ‘face’ of the Master’s Office.
Responding to call-ins and Facebook interventions, the panellists discussed popular aversion to will-writing (as inviting death), pervasive misunderstandings, fraud and proper procedure, and outreach initiatives including the recent National Wills Week. From a position of legally qualified professional expertise, the panel took a stance of concern about widespread unfamiliarity and discomfort with inheritance law and process. In an era when far more South Africans own significant assets, the stakes of such fluency are heightened.
This public appearance showcased legal expertise at the heart of a caring bureaucratic state, underpinned by a distinctly post-apartheid professional middle class. The Deputy Master’s expertise informs her mission: I feel that when it comes to public education … we should just be drastic about it … engaging the Department of Education so that children, even from primary school, can be taught law of succession, deceased estates and all that, because they can also be affected when their parents die.
The nexus is fundamental to Johannesburg’s formal inheritance system, through which a vastly larger number of South Africans than previously pass on property at death, with or without a will. South Africa’s Master of the High Court is, officials routinely explained, a ‘creature of statute’ – a scale-shifting concept blurring system and personnel. It refers to institution and processes; the totality of legal-bureaucratic actors; individual senior administrators. The Master is the artefact of the Administration of Estates Act 1965 – defended as ‘our bible’. All decision-making ranks – frontline Assistant Masters; supervisory Deputy Masters; branch-level Masters; national Chief Master – are one statutorily constituted person: ‘the Master’. A new generation of officials inflect the institution with distinct commitments but also challenges. Almost none are from South Africa’s white minority, as their predecessors were. Their professional roles contend with assumptions that they will identify and empathise with recently enfranchised members of the public. Educated representatives of law in a progressively constitutional era, they also stand for what remain opaque, anachronistic arrangements.
This article explores the racialised middle-class positioning and the inheritance institution that together emerge from legal training and legal-bureaucratic work. In post-apartheid South Africa’s extreme inequality and enduring spatial segregation, the term ‘middle class’ is applied across a broad spectrum – from those who are positively wealthy to those who are simply not-destitute (see Phadi and Ceruti, 2011). Unsustainable debt has expanded a vulnerable consumer class (James, 2015). But central to South Africa’s more enduring middle-class formation has been a mostly black post-apartheid professional stratum forged through the state (Southall, 2016). It has been popularly cast as self-enriching and incapable, and indeed the Master’s Office plays into these narratives. Only a few months before the SABC panel, a sharply contrasting depiction was televised. An exposé on ‘family housing feuds’ brought hidden cameras into the deceased estates process, reporting negligence. The next day, a junior official complained that ‘everyone’ had spotted her, in a portrayal unfairly ignoring the Master’s limited access to information and lack of enforcement capacity. More recently, alleged inefficiency and corruption led to a national investigation; deeper ‘chaos’ followed during the coronavirus pandemic (Business Day, 2021). The Law Society of South Africa’s 2021 Annual Report described ‘operational capacity’ as ‘dismal’: ‘the Master’s Office, as a state institution, is in breach of its constitutional obligations’ (LSSA, 2021: 43).
Yet legal bureaucrats’ class positioning and professional personae tell another story. Public service brings not only salaries but also a sense of ownership of a transformed state project compared with still white-dominated areas of the private sector (Southall, 2016). Moreover, requiring law degrees, Master’s officials’ professional status has the stricter sense of vocational training through higher qualifications, unlike many officials (Southall, 2016), which is further heightened by massive attrition in law programmes (Greenbaum, 2015/16).
The specialist training and work that make a legal-bureaucratic middle class also make a professional public system (see e.g. E Hull, 2020; Lentz, 2015). Hidden in this observation’s apparent self-evidence is a question. What exactly is the place of the law in the standing of legal bureaucrats and the legal-bureaucratic system they staff? The law undergirds bureaucracy’s legitimacy, as ‘the authoritative language of the state’ (Hansen and Stepputat, 2001: 8). What it does in concrete administrative settings, however, is less clear. Where the relationship between law and bureaucracy has been examined ethnographically, the former collapses into exigencies of process (e.g. Gupta, 2012; Mathur, 2016).
In what follows, I contend that law’s performance in bureaucratic encounters shapes the professional status of legal bureaucrats. Bureaucratic work is saturated with the arbitration, adjudication, and ascription of categories and positions fundamental to the power of legalism (see Pirie, 2013). More than mere ‘routinized reassurance’ of the state’s unity (Hansen and Stepputat, 2001: 17), performances mobilise ‘the relative fixity of formalised language’ (Bloch, 1974: 62) to sustain scripts in bureaucratic encounters. As those scripts anchor formal roles, they anchor professionalism. Authoritative expertise is further reinforced by stage-managing formalisation through explanations of rules and process. Roles and scripts forge popular expectations even where directive power dissipates at the office doors or rumours of malpractice circulate: the legalistic ritual of process offers a legitimating frame for disputes (Roberts, 2009) and for the officials who mediate them. Recognition of officials’ occupational standing, in turn, is inseparable from their particular middle-class status (cf. Goffman, 1951).
Away from the law’s glamorous upper reaches, professional roles and personal prestige together depend on expertise and the training that produced it. They are the basis for asserting and performing distinction, central to the ‘boundary work’ (see Lamont and Molnár, 2002) both of the everyday state and of middle-class status. Demarcation through distinction is key to boundary work in ‘doing being middle class’ (Lentz, 2020). For those like state officials, class recognition depends on credentials, occupation and professional behaviour, not wealth. Boundary work is equally fundamental to state authority, in demarcations of who embodies state institutions and how (Thelen et al., 2014). Juxtaposing these separate scholarly insights draws attention to the mutual constitution at play. Officials’ performances of fluency in ‘state thinking’ (Bourdieu, 2014) constitute them as middle-class professionals while creating ‘state effects’ (Mitchell, 1991) of institutional solidity and legitimacy (see Introduction, this issue, Bolt and Schubert, 2022).
Yet bureaucratic encounters also render professional positioning fragile. Master’s officials emphasise expert and sensitive public service, yet in practice this means huge backlogs and unremunerated overtime, amidst damning public narratives of institutional inefficacy. If ‘the Master’ is legally singular, professional personae are multiple. Beyond the gloss of the television show, ‘clients’ are unsure what the Master does – how its officials ‘look after people’. Officials are addressed as judges, or little more than clerks. In between, they are mediators, counsellors and investigators. Meanwhile, the Master lacks capacity to enforce, even as people come in droves, seeking redress and submitting to its mediations and formalities. A new generation of administrators steps into racialised histories of regulation, amidst a still disproportionately white private inheritance sector surrounding state administration. That makes formal status from LLBs, sometimes with legal practice experience, especially important. Yet even education and training place them awkwardly. Legally qualified exemplars of middle-class success, in their daily engagements with attorneys they are civil servants in an underfunded department. At the level of everyday practice, such ambivalence characterises law in legal-bureaucratic work, and its institution-making and class-making effects.
The remainder of the article begins by explaining the effects of South Africa’s transition, and the centrality of legal education in officials’ professional self-understanding, pride and frustration. It then explores situational performances of legal professionalism in community engagement and office-based work, before demonstrating the fragility of legal-bureaucratic identities in encounters with practising lawyers. The analysis is based on a year’s ethnographic fieldwork in 2017, during which I shadowed and interviewed Master’s officials, in their offices and their outreach work. This was part of broader ethnographic fieldwork following the network of institutions governing formal inheritance in Johannesburg. The research ramified out from a focus on the world of wills, following officials’ and others’ suggestions of what was important to it.
Making the Master
A characteristic feature of South Africa’s Roman Dutch legal past, 1 a Master’s Office is attached to each of 15 branches of the High Court. New courts proliferated as South Africa re-absorbed rural reserves for black people, which under apartheid had been designated self-governing ethnic homelands, and the post-1994 dispensation extended the reach of governance over a unified territory. Master’s Offices act as wardens for economic interests requiring protection, such as minors, the cognitively impaired and, through inheritance, the deceased. The Master’s hierarchy, organisation and operations stand out within its parent Department of Justice and Constitutional Development (DoJCD). One distinction is a simultaneous emphasis on legal and economic administration, involving legal adjudication and holding assets (such as the Guardian’s Fund on behalf of minors). Inheritance-focused officials’ legal educations have contracted to a fine specialism, their decisions giving effect to the Administration of Estates Act, the Wills Act and the Intestate Succession Act. Expertise is reinforced by follow-up training at the DoJCD’s internal Justice College.
Administering asset distribution at death, Johannesburg’s Master’s officials wrestle with far-reaching changes to urban tenure and inheritance in the wake of apartheid’s demise. Here, some context is in order. Johannesburg, like other South African metropoles, has seen dramatic shifts in property ownership. State-owned rental homes, in historically black townships built to segregate by racial classification, were transferred to inhabitants. From the 1970s, amidst rising unrest, stabilising the social order was seen to require a black middle class with a stake in the system. Long leases, and later freehold title, were offered to municipal tenants, initially at subsidised rates, then without charge. Increasingly unable to maintain its housing stock, in the 1980s and 1990s the government expanded the policy’s reach and shifted the rationale towards redress for apartheid inequity. By the end of the 1980s, around 120,000 houses were eligible for freehold in the Johannesburg township cluster of Greater Soweto alone (Emdon, 1993). And by apartheid’s final years, local authorities received monetary incentives to transfer as many houses as possible (Emdon, 1993). In opaque tribunals in the 1990s, residents came forward as ‘custodians’, sent by their relatives to represent ‘family houses’ as collective patrimony. This characterisation was legitimated by popular claims to custom, as well as by now defunct apartheid ‘family permits’ that listed occupants (and previously regulated black people’s urban residence). Unbeknownst to their kin, or even sometimes to themselves, custodians were registered as sole owners. When they died, groups of siblings would claim entitlement to the house, while surviving spouses and nuclear families had the support of intestate succession law (see Bolt and Masha, 2019). In theory, township dwellers achieved tenure security. In practice, a privileged minority was created through an asset windfall amidst a housing shortage. Today, the resulting disputes are among the most common matters that come to the Master.
The deceased estates system was itself deracialised. Under apartheid, the Black Administration Act largely excluded black people from the Master’s Office’s remit, with magistrate’s courts acting as general sites of segregated legal administration. They were also excluded from intestate succession law, their inheritance regulations instead crudely approximating ‘custom’ through male primogeniture. These measures were struck down by landmark Constitutional Court judgments in 2000 and 2004. 2
The Master’s Office expanded quickly. Officials had been generalists catering to relatively small numbers. The Johannesburg office, created to handle nearby Pretoria’s overload, is now the busiest, dealing with over 32,000 estates annually. Increased workload meant greater specialisation: testate (with a will) or intestate (where statutory rules delineate kinship and entitlement); appointing executors or supervising ‘liquidation and distribution’. The law already treated small estates distinctly: those worth less than R250,000 (£15,000 during fieldwork) follow simplified procedure with an appointment but no supervised distribution. Those cases, in particular, have ballooned. And in Johannesburg there is a streamlined process for testate estates represented by recognised banks, wealth managers and attorneys, assumed to have their clients’ affairs already in order. Members of the public face complicated directions from front-hall staff, depending on precise circumstances, far from popular images of ‘the Master’ as a single powerful individual – as though ‘on a throne’, officials and others joke.
The officials who comprise ‘the Master’ have had to accommodate themselves to their roles in a changing society. As middle-class professionals, they are recent entrants to an ‘old’ state-centred middle class. The latter, with its emphasis on occupational status, contrasts with the ‘new’ and ‘neoliberal’ middle classes whose consumption has been a particular focus of ethnographic research (see Heiman et al., 2012). 3 Middle-class identities interweave with the day-to-day workings of public institutions (see E Hull, 2017): official roles (e.g. Lentz, 2014), not just ‘informal’ bureaucratic cultures (see Olivier de Sardan, 2014); ethics of professionalism and proficiency (Bear and Mathur, 2015; Lentz, 2020; E Hull, 2020; Schubert, 2022, this issue). Vocational commitment to ‘office’ is anchored in specialist training (Du Gay, 2008: 134). Performances of professional expertise are relational (Brown, 2016) and affective (see Lea, 2021): they sustain institutional cultures, hours in the office beyond what is required, and satisfaction in navigating and honing procedure. Commitment to legalism, even despite personal reservations, shapes institutions and shores up middle-class identities in equal measure.
The current Master’s officials are new in a significant sense. Under apartheid, the Master’s Office largely excluded the black majority, 4 as members of the public and as prospective legal administrators. 5 In South Africa, the state has long been an unparalleled engine of middle-class formation. After apartheid’s inception in 1948, state expansion and affirmative action made Afrikaners the beneficiaries of salaried professional employment and upward mobility (Posel, 1999). This was mirrored in the post-apartheid dispensation after 1994, as many of the old guard were offered incentives to vacate their posts, and new opportunities were created (see James, 2015). In the Master’s Office, members of the new generation included those from among a growing stratum who had come through historically black universities, which also supplied a new generation of lawyers and judges (Gibbs, 2020).
Unsurprisingly, university study looms large in officials’ own stories. One Assistant Master offers an apt example. He dropped out of high school, but when Nelson Mandela was released from prison and change accelerated, he decided he needed to make something of himself. He completed school in a smaller town and came to Johannesburg to enrol in a major university, which was increasing its intake beyond white students. During that period, the Assistant Master lived in a rough neighbourhood and spent time with a gang, one other member of which was briefly a fellow student. He came to represent them as their lawyer, mostly for drug- and violent crime-related matters. He lived what he now views as an odd life: church with his wife, then duck out of lunch to take a call about a shooting. It took him a long time to gain his qualifications. One result was an acute sense of what the law could do in the mess of life. While Master’s work offers good benefits – he listed his pension, health care, 36 days of sick leave every 36 months, 21 days of leave a year – he would not be here if he did it for the money.
This Assistant Master’s trajectory reflects experiences across the office. Like him, others of the same rank have often been promoted from Estate Controllers (senior clerks, who also require an LLB), and they came from less metropolitan parts of the country to the maelstrom of Johannesburg as a condition of their promotion (he had returned home for a time). Also like him, some had previously entered private legal practice, but this was generally described as unlucrative. This Assistant Master and his colleagues see themselves as positioned for positive work through their legal understanding and fluency. At the same time, the law was their ticket out of the precariousness and vagaries of the context from which they had escaped.
Master’s Office work is middle-class consolidation, shaped by the legal world and state administration. Legal training produces prestige. While many officials spoke little of earlier or non-professional lives, I invariably came to know their histories of university study soon after meeting them. Their accomplishment is sharpened by high attrition rates. [O]f the law students registering in 2008, only 28.2% graduated in the minimum four-year time period for the LLB degree.… After six years, the graduation rate rose to 49.5% and the drop-out rate rose to 50.5%, which is an alarming figure. (Greenbaum, 2015/16: 476)
The legal dimension of Master’s Office work is thus part of its prestige and promise. This was made explicit when, in an outreach and internship programme with a black law student association, the Deputy Master we met earlier addressed students on a downtown skyscraper roof. ‘What I love about the law’, she began, ‘I decided in Grade 10: the law is broad – it can take you anywhere.’ The Deputy Master recounted her own path: she went to Legal Practice School, served her articles (attorney practice qualifications), and did her board exams to become an attorney. Unhappy about defending criminals, she responded to an advert for an Estate Controller clerk in Cape Town, to transform that office’s demographic. She impressed her Assistant Master, as a fast learner attracted to unglamorous estates law: ‘It’s a closed niche; not a lot of people know about these things.’ 6 Yet, despite promotion, it was ‘like post office work’, so she secured an Assistant Mastership, before being ‘unexpectedly’ promoted to Deputy Master. From her current position, she can become Chief Master, or Director General of the DoJCD – ‘They tell me I’m the face now.’ That promise informs her work with the student association, ‘to take you under our wing’, offering internships and mentoring.
Education has more ambiguous effects. There is steep inequality between universities, anchoring officials’ places in the work hierarchy. Today, Estate Controllers’ LLBs are generally from institutions established for the apartheid-era homelands, with a noticeable cluster from the University of Venda in South Africa’s marginalised north. Historically black universities remain acutely under-resourced, with less state funding (Greenbaum, 2015/16: 479). While the Deputy Master attended a historically black university, she did so earlier and it was among the most prestigious.
Education also underlies doubts and frustrations. Qualifications are viewed against the missed attractions of profitable private firms, or the potential of further degrees to open doors. In quiet moments, officials muse about possibilities, even as they recognise that Johannesburg lawyers more likely end up hustling for business in small inner-city clinics surrounding the Master’s Office – the 2018 Law Society Young Lawyers Survey revealed that ‘the majority were based in small firms with fewer than five attorneys’ (LSSA, 2019: v). The legal assistance networks in Master-related matters showcase those other lives: the dangers, dreams, and struggles. They are local attorneys, plugging gaps in client books with pro bono work to look busy; junior but generously paid corporate lawyers, fulfilling their firms’ obligatory ‘citizenship’ time; employees of civic organisations, principled but modestly paid and overworked. Where Assistant Masters land in the balance of pride and frustration varies. One, with an LLB from a well-regarded university, and now studying for a Master’s degree, was clear they would move into corporate or constitutional law if they could. The Office of the Master had brought them some way, but their LLB degree from a major university could take them further.
Membership of a new-old middle class is fraught. Hard-won education and credentials, professional standing and expertise, confront private-sector fantasies. Rapid institutional and societal change is experienced through post-apartheid middle-class consolidation and its limits. As pride and frustration are weighed, the concrete encounters of the job are crucial, establishing qualified state professionals vis-à-vis the public and their legal representatives. Officials’ performances of legal bureaucracy sustain classed identities and a frayed administrative system.
Demarcating legal officialdom
Officials distinguish themselves as professionals through immersion in law, in formalised encounters grounded in class-inflected educational credentials. This is contingent and negotiated, as an expanded public grapples with unfamiliar legal legacies, and scripts are forged and negotiated in bureaucratic situations that lack coherent connection to a wider coercive state (Bolt, 2021a). Appreciating law’s place in making professionals and their institution means analysing workplace performances in their own situational terms (see Gluckman, 1961).
Addressing ‘the community’
The Johannesburg Master’s Office regularly participates in on-stage events in township ‘community’ halls, coordinated by local civic organisations that also ensure popular attendance. In a well-established formula, government bureaucracies such as the Deeds Office and Human Settlements (the housing department) send delegates to explain administrative processes, articulate the law and its consequences, and take questions. An example expands our view beyond the idealised display of expertise and authority on the television show; here, ‘the community’ answers back.
A May early winter’s day in a township community hall on Johannesburg’s far-eastern fringe. At an event commemorating a victim of apartheid enforcers, an enormous grid of chairs was broken by a central avenue of gas heaters. The Deputy Master responsible for outreach joined the presenters and the largely male VIPs (invited politicians; board members of the organising foundation) on a dais, at a long table draped with a municipality banner and flanked by institutional information panels. After an hour’s delay waiting for endorsing parliamentarians – in vain – the sizeable crowd, in coats and beanies, grew restless.
The Master’s Office followed a pastor’s opening prayer and a ward councillor’s welcome. In isiZulu and English, the Deputy Master summarised imiteto yethu (our law) in technical register: from fundamental concepts (‘community of property’), to common but jargonistic (‘moveable and immoveable assets’), the esoteric (‘accrual’ – a little-observed principle reckoning pre-mortem support in inheritance), and routine but largely alien process. In closing, the Deputy Master delivered unfailing bombshells: there is legally no family house; only divorce or death – not separation – ends marriage. When she asked who had a will, virtually no hands were raised; her expression underlined an expectation confirmed.
So far, legal expertise was on show. Now, however, the Deputy Master took questions. She was immediately challenged about the law’s moral correctness, particularly regarding estranged spouses’ entitlements. Questions combined difficult personal situations and systemic dysfunction: legal-administrative impenetrability; regulatory bewilderment; inheritance matters going back to the 1970s; alleged corruption in paperwork and evictions. The tone veered into reprimand. One middle-aged man expressed exclusion from state processes as inseparable from the downtown Master’s Office’s physical distance: Some of the people will feel left out.… They are actually here because they have problems.… Would it be possible for the Master of the High Court to decentralise? Some of these matters are sensitive, and people don’t know what the process will be.
As legal authority and a formalised register were challenged, the Deputy Master’s performance reaffirmed her role and its status. The gap between law and popular perception underlined her distinction as possessing specialist and counterintuitive knowledge. She foregrounded that knowledge’s value by expounding once again on how estates law needs teaching in schools. The area’s Chief Magistrate rose with a reinforcing message about the law’s significance, contrasting legal eviction and fraudulent expropriations through police connections. In doing so, she shifted between a technical-legal-processual explanation and presenting herself as standing for the system: ‘I will not tolerate corruption in my office. Come to my room … at the Magistrate’s Court. You will not be an impimpi [a sellout]!’
State engagement was public education; questions revealed complaints and confusion. Officials are perfectly aware of the gap between the law and popular views. Hence the attempts to persuade in the law’s own terms. They strive to turn titleholders into effective and administrable property-owners, able to manage, transfer and plan with their assets – not least by exhorting them to write wills and avoid the vagaries of intestate succession law. That divergence informs how an administrative state constitutes its public – citizens ‘conceptualised as anonymous, equivalent to each other and in principle interchangeable’ (Barber, 2007: 140). Distance from legal thinking is framed in cultural idiom as characterising ‘the community’ – an aggregate echoing Mamdani’s (1996) postcolonial bifurcation of liberal individuals and custom-governed groups. The same might be said of the television appearance in the opening vignette; public education in that case was on a Zulu-language show, on a channel that, the producer explained, is required not to deviate unduly into English.
In Johannesburg’s legal bureaucracy, popular notions of urban custom are counterposed to the properly administered citizen. Legal expertise underlies a didactic register, which buttresses performances of professionalism – key to the double boundary work of state- and class-making outlined earlier. Such distinction is equally evident back in the office, where it grounds the roles through which officials execute their work.
The office
If community engagement showcases public performance, the office is where professional roles and personae are negotiated in everyday encounters. The Master’s didactic role pervades day-to-day administrative work, at the intersection of uneasily coexisting positions. Informed by professional commitments and legal training, officials stand for public-benefiting law. Yet, for members of a younger and mostly non-white generation of civil servants, it is clear that the law is ill-suited to the majority and the system is too stretched to satisfy professional expectations.
As in many contexts, state employment is now compared unfavourably to the corporate world’s perceived glossiness (Bear and Mathur, 2015). In South Africa, such comparisons are long-standing and express profound ambivalence. In the mid-20th century, white officials occupied positions of judgement and educative authority. They were responsible for socially engineering other Afrikaners as prime beneficiaries and standard bearers of the new apartheid regime’s racial Fordism (Roos, 2015), and for the increasingly far-reaching ‘administration’ of the black population (Evans, 1997). They were also viewed with contempt by the more privileged, as unable to succeed beyond a state sphere of pro-Afrikaner affirmative action (Posel, 1999). Officials today face similar incongruity.
The Johannesburg Master’s Office occupies a once-palatial insurance building. Stone steps, wide entrance and high wooden doors open onto a large, light atrium with carved friezes. Yet creaking infrastructure – plumbing, paintwork, furniture – betray constrained public budgets. In frank moments, officials point to the limits of their positions and institution. One lamented the conditions in an underfunded department. Returning from a break, they railed against the drain smell. Getting into stride, they asked: ‘Have you seen the chairs in the waiting room? It’s a disgrace, treating people like this!’ Moreover, amidst allegations of corruption, there is the worry that lawyers hanging around the hallways might be funnelled work illicitly.
It is under these conditions that officials perform professional encounters and public service. Assistant Masters’ offices contain high-backed black armchairs for members of the public, sustaining a register of ‘consultation’ for clients. Reportedly, officials are not supposed to appropriate the furniture for this purpose; they did so on their own initiative in the name of professionalism and dignity. Adverse conditions are themselves given virtuous significance. The building’s ground floor is extremely busy, with long queues for assistance, free rein for the public, and difficulties tracing missing files. But, I was informed, this is what ‘public’ means: other offices may put up barriers and cordon off workspaces, but working among the clients demonstrates commitment to accessibility. Even the express visibility of waiting people inflects ethical performances of professionalism and the public good (see Bear and Mathur, 2015).
At the coalface of administration, legalistic performances palpably make professional roles. Different sections have distinctive environments. ‘Accounts’ – supervising estates’ liquidation and distribution – exudes calm. Drawn-out processes take the heat from occasional disputes. An Assistant Master known as ‘My Learned Friend’ 7 coolly demonstrates skill in shifting self-presentation between conferring respect and demanding recognition. In a mediation between warring kin in a far-from-wealthy white Afrikaans family, he quickly established hierarchy in a large group of people by determining each person’s ‘interest in the estate’ – and then having some wait outside. He moved seamlessly between apologising for his ‘deurmekaar’ (Afrikaans: muddled, messy) office; joking that this was because he went to the rugby rather than cleaning on a Saturday (he did not – there was a family emergency); acknowledging on behalf of the Master’s Office that ‘we know that we have problems’; yet pointedly and periodically reminding participants that ‘I will be making a decision on this matter.’ Afrikaans communicated familiarity (although it is not his own language) while his three-piece suit underlined his lawyerly difference from a room of fleeces and leather jackets. Deft navigation is crucial in an institution lacking coercive power. In mediation, the Assistant Master’s decision only works if everyone is persuaded – any objection, and the matter proceeds to the High Court. What drew his shifting persona together, though, was his status as a lawyer-turned-official. In this meeting, an executor, accused of inadequate house valuation, attempted to curry favour by recognising that he was more than an administrator: ‘I am not a learned man like you.’
The ground floor offers less room for affability and displays of cultural familiarity. Family fights are intensified by urgency: who will be appointed to distribute property, and especially all-important houses, often in small estates lacking further state supervision. Professional status is tested by the complexity, fractiousness and sheer number of encounters. The queues underscore the overstretch.
Yet here, too, the performance of professional standing is key. Known as sticklers, Assistant Masters pointedly return below-standard documents to their beleaguered Estate Controllers. Professional performances are ultimately grounded in legalism. In family meetings, kinship is recast in legal terms, as intestate succession law privileges spouses over siblings or parents, and children – even out of marriage – over anyone except marital partners. Meetings begin by establishing everyone’s genealogical place – which Assistant Masters describe and draw out on notepaper – and thus their rights. Such allocation of categories, positions and entitlements, more commonly associated with judges, constitutes legalistic authority (see Pirie, 2013). Some entitlements are formulated in Latin: ‘per stirpes’ (by branch [of a lineage]); ‘pater est quem nuptiae demonstrant’ (the father is demonstrated by marriage). One Roman Dutch principle, routinely rehearsed and occasionally emblazoned on documentation, is ‘Die bloedige hand erf nie’ (the bloody hand does not inherit – i.e. those causing death are disqualified from benefit). The archaic phrases and genealogies start with legal training: I attended succession law lectures in a top South African university; it is precisely through principles encapsulated in aphorisms, combined with intricate illustrative kinship diagrams, that law students are instructed.
Such legalistic performances of distinction are complicated by Assistant Masters’ membership of a new post-apartheid generation of officials. They are keen to demonstrate appreciation of popular norms described as customary, aware that procedure is obscure. Given its restrictive history and norms, succession law is unsurprisingly viewed as written by and largely for white people. Even the most recent iterations date from the apartheid era – the Administration of Estates Act 1965; the Intestate Succession Act 1987 (although there have been marginal amendments). From the beginning of fieldwork, I was told about struggles with the limits of legal ownership following the transfer of rental houses into individual title. Officials’ experience brings acute understanding of popular conceptions of the ‘family house’ as a contested but widely shared category lacking legal recognition. They also appreciate the wider context of the dispute mediations that they convene. Families have often already turned to other authority figures, beginning with the ‘uncles’ of the patriline, then perhaps community support workers at ANC branch offices, and even conflict resolution volunteers at police stations. As de facto mediators, advisers and judges, Assistant Masters commit considerable energy to an institution that – as the Deputy Master suggested on television – is formally committed to public care because it stands for the interests of people who cannot represent themselves. Lunch breaks disappear as convoluted and intractable mediations over-run and fighting parties require careful explanations of official positions and their implications.
Officials attempt to forge shared scripts to establish popular legitimacy, while members of the public do so to pursue their own goals through state processes (Oldfield and Zweig, 2010). The notion of the ‘family house’ is sustained as officials show understanding of popular concerns and township dwellers assert the moral weight of their residential histories (Bolt, 2021b). Those negotiated scripts may obfuscate: the family house facilitates shared talk of stable ‘culture’, even as officials grapple with realities of fractured kinship, fraud perpetrated on close relatives, and houses burnt down to deny others benefit (see Bolt, 2021b). They are also shaped by the Master’s lack of enforcement capacity, intensifying the dependence of public institutions on popular appeal and compliant users (Lund, 2006). The Master’s Office counterposes legal clarity with abruptly restricted responsibility, most strikingly among small estates. Here, official attention ends with the appointment of a ‘Master’s Representative’ from among the beneficiaries, who then distributes with no further checks. Inclusion by South Africa’s ‘caring’ state becomes opaque, as citizens turn to fending for themselves by unsanctioned means (Oldfield and Greyling, 2015).
Limited control sharpens Assistant Masters’ concerns about lying, which expand into a kind of detective work. ‘It’s a skill’, one reflected. ‘It’s hard to explain, but you look for where the story is not coherent.’ They probe kinship details, working from the deceased and the applicants, looking for inconsistencies. If applicants say they are the only children, they pick a relative at random and telephone to verify. Assistant Masters may also recommend paternity tests. Another asserted: ‘As a rule of thumb, I would say about 30 per cent of matters we get here are not legitimate.… Ubuntu [Humanity] … doesn’t exist here, when it comes to deceased estates.’ Discretion in decisions is balanced against calculated risk. Perhaps most consequentially, appointing Master’s Representatives can proceed without all interested parties present, if officials conclude that some cannot be found or are disruptive (such as when a fight erupts). Their duty, it was impressed on me, remains to look after everyone’s legitimate interests. The discretion has particular weight because decisions are hard to reverse.
The performance of professionalism in legalistic register is buffeted by post-apartheid positioning and powerlessness. The result is variation: as one Assistant Master noted, ‘You will see that our approaches are very different.’ Yet officials emphasise their rule-boundedness as a ‘creature of statute’. If documents diffuse bureaucrats’ agency (M Hull, 2003), legislation positions officials’ difficult decisions as a direct outworking of legalistic reasoning. This is not evasion of responsibility. Difficult decisions are manifestly individual, with sole signatories on paperwork. Officials draw attention to that fact, stamping and signing with what one called ‘my unique style’. Assistant Masters even assert expertise by taking critical views on each other’s decisions. The law represents aspiration to a professional ideal – appeal to regulation’s clarifying force, in the face of overwhelming complexity. That ideal sets the terms of distinction: the ‘boundary’ between the qualified, even if they disagree on particular decisions (or because they have the proficiency to disagree), and people who appear before them.
Professionalism and legal expertise are inseparable from the educational and economic trajectories that brought officials into their current positions, the performances grounded in those trajectories, and their resultant status – secure and expert, but not affluent or elite. Their standing is negotiated through scripts balancing grounded understanding and legalistic didacticism. These refract the limited prestige and discomfort of representing the post-apartheid state – juxtaposing transformation and legal-bureaucratic legacies – as new members of an old middle class.
Lawyerly distinctions
Legal bureaucrats’ dealings with practising lawyers – another intersection of law-as-performance and classed biographies – highlight the fragility of their professional identities. In the busy ground-floor walk-in section, for example, Assistant Masters define their roles partly in relation to the local attorneys who hope to pick up business. They range from the respectable and the known quantities, who have relationships with officials, to a man who posed as a lawyer to perpetrate fraud through fake wills and illegal house sales. More generally, attorneys are constantly passing through the building, representing existing clients, or staffing a helpdesk for people requiring pro bono assistance.
Such diverse encounters afford opportunities for officials to underline their own legally trained professionalism, which may involve further didacticism. On one occasion, a smartly dressed young attorney shielded his file from an Assistant Master he was meeting. Increasingly impatient, the latter put him in his place by explaining the institution’s statutory role: ‘This is a neutral office – I am not the opposing attorney!’ Impatience may be cultivated: another Assistant Master reflected between appointments that they can occupy the role of ‘the bad one’, upsetting people.
At the same time, lawyerly encounters challenge professionalism. White attorneys may cleave to a racialised status script – such as by undermining a black Assistant Master with patronising compliments about their ‘beautiful name’ 8 – even if they are later sarcastically referred to as ‘that fancy lawyer’. More generally, officials’ status may simply not be recognised in working encounters. On an otherwise unusually quiet morning, an Assistant Master was surprised by a black adviser to a client, sitting in their desk chair and shouting at them. To the official’s objections, the adviser retorted: ‘You are an administrator!’ They were quick to correct and dispatch him: ‘Will you let me take my next meeting now? Hamba kahle (isiZulu: go well)’. But they were left stunned; fortunately, no meetings followed. If the authority of the legal bureaucrat is worn explicitly, this is partly because it cannot be taken for granted.
Authoritative legalistic performance and its challenges have particular significance for a new generation of officials who are not white. Revealingly, during my fieldwork, an Assistant Master whose interactions were not shaped by such a performance was white and Afrikaans-speaking. In her section, attorneys’ firms, wealth managers and banks bring testate estates. A familiar cast of mostly white and largely Afrikaans couriers, clerks and occasional lawyers come directly to see her and her colleague. Behind these rushed corporate representatives are high-profile attorneys and fiduciary specialists, ready to telephone if anything goes awry. Emissaries are not only long-standing fixtures, but a former state official, for example, or a daughter of a lifelong practitioner who now runs a specialist firm with roots in an Afrikaans client base. Yet, grounded in dense social networks, the tone is cooperative, even collective, with little reference to expertise. In contrast to ‘My Learned Friend’, this Assistant Master is ‘Skattie’ (Afrikaans: treasure, darling), marked by a different intersection of gender, race and middle-class status.
The emphasis is on getting paperwork done at high speed, even though ‘Skattie’ is acutely aware of the pressures of giving effect to the law. She sits at a desk in the middle of a large room, its surface, surrounding floor and windowsill piled high with files. There, she processes documentation at a prodigious pace, managing the pressure from banks and others to process estates quickly. She switches fluidly between a bewildering array of stamps – accepting a will, authorising a copy, approving Power of Attorney, attesting to a decision’s date. More striking still is the trust evident in couriers together finding files in the stacks, offering her encouragement amidst stress, and assisting in locating papers, stapler and stamps when these disappear.
Like other officials, ‘Skattie’ brings to her Master’s work the previous experience of completing articles (attorney practice qualifications). She has also worked in an accountancy firm and a bank, undergirding professional familiarity with clients. But the way she is positioned by those clients is not reducible to this. A largely Afrikaans-language rhetoric of fictive kinship here underscores shared administrative experience, not setting her apart from others as a qualified lawyer and legal bureaucrat. One client praised her: ‘In this department, you have to multi-multi-multi-task.’ Unremarked upon, of course, her legal expertise informs substantive decisions about material entitlements. There is discretion in what to accept as evidence: ‘You know when to take a risk, and when not.’ Caution and discretion jar in relation to the space of the work. As she bemoaned, speeding through the files: ‘It’s such a big responsibility, and you don’t have time.’
In this instance, clients collapse distinctions, sustaining a cooperative community. This contrasts with the way officials’ distinctions sustain their legal-bureaucratic standing – or are challenged in a more adversarial manner – elsewhere in the building. Even engaging with similar clients, other officials fit the more familiar pattern of a formal demeanour. In practitioner briefings, the Deputy Master treats the specialists who send those couriers and clerks as ‘stakeholders’ – as known counterparts with whom expertise and professional insights are shared. The contrast throws into relief the sharpened significance of legal education and expertise for a new-old black middle class in legal bureaucracy.
Conclusion
The South African state, today as during apartheid, is an engine of middle-class formation through salaried professional employment and upward mobility. Recruitment to state service is mediated by changing commitments to who should be in such roles, based on exclusions and inclusions of race and class. At the Master’s Office, middle-class status is performed in the very enactment of a professional system, inflected by the racialised positioning of a new generation of officials. Hierarchies between officials, clients and lawyers are materialised in the distribution of work, space, access, and even calm. But legal expertise and legalism lie at their heart. They do not produce legal authority in a broader sense – people routinely disobey advice and decisions – but they do create and sustain categories of identity.
For new members of a state middle class, formal qualifications undergird the performance of prestige and everyday roles. Yet this is double-edged. Legal bureaucracy ties its representatives to an older kind of middle class with its own restrictions. This particular configuration of legal expertise grounded in education and state employment draws boundaries: not only those desired, but also those limiting recognition. The Master – ‘creature of statute’, both person and institution – is positioned between apartheid legacy and post-apartheid potential, between transformation and a still racialised society, and between professional ideal and the possibilities of a more lawyerly legal world.
Footnotes
Acknowledgements
I am very grateful for the generous participation of my interlocutors in the research. Many thanks to Neville Bolt, Charlotte Bruckermann, Thomas Cousins, Tim Gibbs, Jessica Jacobson, Myfanwy James, Jon Schubert, Miranda Sheild Johansson, Leila Strelitz and peer reviewers for invaluable comments on drafts of this article. Thanks also, for stimulating discussion and earlier feedback, to Jon Schubert and all contributors to the Engineering the Middle Classes group, including panels at the European Conference on African Studies 2017 and the American Anthropological Association 2017 conference, and a 2019 writing workshop at Senate House, University of London; to Jessica Johnson, George Karekwaivanane and our Legal Bureaucracies panels at the African Studies Association UK 2018 and ECAS 2019 conferences. Research and the 2019 writing workshop were funded by ESRC Future Research Leaders grant ES/N003071/1.
Declaration of conflicting interests
The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
Funding
The author(s) disclosed receipt of the following financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article: This work was supported by the Economic and Social Research Council (ES/N003071/1).
