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The Cape fur seal was an abundant resource in southern Africa, when first discovered by itinerant sailing vessels in the late 16th century. Seals were slaughtered indiscriminately by the sailors for skins, meat and oil for three centuries from around 1600 to 1899. Government controls over the sealing industry were first introduced as late as 1893, by which time at least 23 seal colonies had become extinct and the seal population had been significantly reduced. This paper reconstructs the historical seal harvest from the time of arrival of the first settlers in 1652 up to 1899. These data are then compared with modern harvest data from 1900 to 2000, illustrating the marked increase in the harvest from about 1950, and the concomitant recovery of the seal population to a level of around 1.5-2 million animals.

Redistributive processes do not belong to the pantheon of Neo-liberalism. In this framework, inequality of resources can only be addressed by equality of opportunity. Even in ‘softer’ impersonations of Neo-liberalism, corporate (mis)behaviour is tamed by corporate social responsibility, not by state disciplinary action. Yet, in the context of post-apartheid South Africa, the state can not ignore political pressure for redistribution, even if only rhetorically. The process of Black Economic Empowerment (BEE) is an attempt at marrying redistribution and Neo-liberal economic policy. The South African state, however, has different degrees of power to force real or imagined redistributive efforts in different sectors of the economy. Fisheries – along with energy, telecommunications, and mining – is one of the sectors where the allocation of licenses, exploitation rights and quotas makes the state theoretically more likely to be successful in achieving BEE. In this paper, we examine redistributive processes in the hake deep-sea trawl (HDST) industry through a historical analysis of the principles, narratives and management systems that have been used to identify certain groups as ‘legitimate fishers’ since the late nineteenth century. We place this evolution as a background for a nuanced understanding of the first allocation of long-term fishing rights that took place in early 2006. We conclude that BEE, despite ist formal intentions, is doubly conducive to the interests of large-scale South African capital – for which investment in fishing is only one among many others. First, it has largely confirmed the historical share of fishing rights to incumbent, largely white-controlled, operators. It has also allowed for the more flexible allocation of rights via the market in response to changing environmental, economic and social conditions. Second, BEE has created a new layer of ‘black captains of industry’ to whom incumbent players are increasingly outsourcing primary production in a volatile, high-risk, and currently loss-leading sector. While fishing operations are being outsourced under the banner of redistribution, fish trade is still effectively controlled downstream by white capital through logistics, distribution, marketing and branding assets.

Black Economic Empowerment (BEE) has been a major policy thrust of the democratic governments in South Africa since 1994 in attempting to redress the effects of apartheid. This paper explores the historical precedents to BEE in South Africa, its origins, and its points of contact with the experience of ‘empowerment’ in Malaysia. The authors review the different steps taken by the South African government in promoting empowerment over the past 12 years, together with some of outcomes to date. They also draw from three case studies of sectors where government has different degrees of leverage over the process of BEE – industrial fisheries, metals and engineering, and wine. The paper highlights that the new ‘broad-based’ configuration of BEE has become a managerial and technocratic process that may thwart the overall objectives of ‘empowerment’ in at least four ways. First, it is moving the debate from a political terrain, where redistribution is in theory possible, to a managerial terrain, where discussions are technical and set within the limits of codification, measurement intervals and systemic performance. Second, by so doing, it is partially shifting the responsibility for promoting change and for bearing the consequences of failure away from elected government and towards a generic ‘system’ that has a life of its own. An emerging industry of accountants, technocrats, auditors and certifiers are the foot soldiers of this system, but bear no responsibility. Third, BEE is now based on such levels of complexity that it implicitly legitimizes ‘outsourcing’ of its management from government to the private (auditing) sector, thus reinforcing a further weakening of the state and facilitating a next round of ‘outsourcing’ of previously political and now managerialized functions. Finally, BEE managerialism is forwarding the idea that (some level of) redistribution is actually possible in a neo-liberal economic policy setting, thus disenfranchising more radical options in policy-making.