‘Political Corruption’ and the Moral Economy of Apartheid: The Case of Dawie Walters, the ‘Lobster King of South Africa’

Historians of apartheid ‘political corruption’ have employed universal definitions which generate normative judgements rather than historical understanding of changing practices and derive measures of corruption from the macro topography of state and society not their actual micro practices. An alternative historical approach recognises political corruption as contingent and requiring situated micro readings to reveal the shifting moral economy of power. This essay offers just such a reading from the inshore fisheries and the early apartheid period (pre-1966) when the extant scholarly literature agrees that ‘political corruption’ was absent. It traces the endeavours of Dawid Johannes Louw ‘Dawie’ Walters to secure a lobster export licence for himself over the decade 1955–1964 and argues that his quixotic quest engineered a key shift in state policy to break the inherited Anglo-Jewish monopoly in the fisheries. Walters’ lack of education, naiveté and alcoholism ensured that others picked the fruits of his labours, but here too the prevailing moral economy of volkskapitalisme determined who those beneficiaries were.