Paperwork and power plays: contestation and performance at a Limpopo municipality

Abstract

Abstract:This article considers the role that documents played in episodes of political conflict that gripped the conflictual Mogalakwena Local Municipality in Limpopo province, South Africa. Advancing from the idea that an organisation is a 'collective storytelling system', the article shows how the authoring of official documents offers an important tool for actors in state institutions to anchor a narrative in a material form, emblazoned with letterheads and signatures, symbols of official legitimacy. Access to the means of documentary production and distribution can be used to generate resources of state power: to bestow power-plays with the seal of official validity; to legitimise actions in the language of bureaucratic neutrality, of disinterested rationality, of 'good governance'. Yet in the context of acute political division that prevailed at the Municipality, in which actors advanced competing versions of events, documents and the processes through which they were produced and disseminated became sites of contest. Tracing dynamics around documentary productions and processes in the Mogalakwena crisis reveals crucial ways in which power and authority are constituted and contested in a local municipality through narrative forms, symbolic strategies and story performances.