The wolf at the door, entropy, negotiated settlements, and the dompas
The concept of apartheid as a service
There is that saying about the wolf at the door. We think of it as a warning against impending hunger, poverty, and financial ruin, the sort that we must keep out at all costs. But this is just a pretext. More important is the forensic subtext. The wolf at the door does not want to break down your door and devour you. At least, it will never do so all at once. Rather, the wolf at the door wants to be placated. There is not going to be an outright invasion or an apocalypse. The monster is not stalking you; it is recruiting you. It is offering a service. If the wolf eats you today, what will it eat tomorrow? So, it must eat what you give to it to eat, not eat you.
The wolf will only eat you as a last resort. If it eats its victims in one go, then it would be fated to spend its life looking for new victims each time it feels the hunger pangs. Rather, the wolf wants you to live your life with the wolf at the door rather than the wolf going from door to door and repeating the eating of a different victim each day. That is, if it is to eat you, the wolf must not do so at a go. Rather, it must eat you alive, such that you have the clarity of mind to negotiate how much and how long to be eaten. It is, thus, a negotiated settlement. Essentially, the victim must contribute to his or her own demise and foot the bill of his or her own oppression. The pig, as it were, must provide the fat in which it fries. That is, the wolf is at your door precisely because it seeks entropy; it seeks breakfast in bed. In Apartheid Studies: A Manifesto, I wrote:
A farmer who keeps chickens does the same; he or she feeds them and keeps them safe from the fox. But the farmer does this not out of concern for the wellbeing of chickens. Chickens have no wellbeing. (Even if we suppose that chickens have wellbeing, we cannot understand it). That is, chickens have no wellbeing independent of the needs (and the palate and the wallet) of the farmer. Rather, the farmer “takes care” of chickens (or other livestock) precisely for the wellbeing of the pot. Indeed, in 2017, a British farmer thanked firefighters who had saved his pigs from a blaze by serving the same firemen with sausage from the very same pigs that they had earlier saved (Mboti 2023: 290).
So, the wolf wants to farm you, to “take care” of you. This is the relationship that humans have to institutions, public or private. We are being farmed, like crops. We are being maintained, like seedlings and gardens. But the cost of the maintenance is debited from our accounts. The wolf at the door is, in the end, a service that he renders us, and so he sends us the bill at monthly intervals.
The point is that the wolf at the door is preventing you from leaving your house to get a living, but, more importantly, the wolf at the door will prevent you from returning home, too. There won’t be wolves at doors if people did not return to their homes. Hence it is in the wolf’s interest to have you return to your house if the whole maxim of the wolf being at the door is to make normative sense. Victims must come and go, for as long as possible. Any careful study of oppression shows that murder and genocide are exceptions to the norm. Most of the time, victims must stay alive the way fishermen keep live bait alive and the way slave masters “look after” their slaves. I wrote:
A fisherman does the same sort of thing with live bait. He keeps it in a well-built tank, and even feeds it, ensuring that it remains alive for as long as possible. The importance of live bait is not that it is alive, but that it is bait. But it cannot be bait if it is not alive. Hence attention must be paid to maintenance. It is all about maintenance. A British royal once said that “If you have a game species, you want it to survive because you want to have some next year – exactly like a farmer. You want to crop it; you don’t want to exterminate it” (Mboti 2023: 290)
The point, as I argue, is not outright genocide at all but, rather, what I call distributed eugenics. The victim is not kept alive for his or her own sake, but for the sake of the oppressor – so that the oppressor can have breakfast in bed. So, we must not be limited to thinking about the wolf at the door only as if we are trapped in the house. We must also think that we want to get back into the house from which the wolf at the door expels us and colonises from us. The wolf at the door is less a monster than a parasite. It wants us alive for as long as possible. It wants to negotiate a settlement with us. That is, the role of the wolf at the door in regulating the victim’s life is far more complex than the surface interpretation of the idiom supposes. How the wolf at the door works is how the dompas works. This is apartheid as an operating system. In a word, this is apartheid as a service.