Controversy, Conflict and Struggle in South Africa (uncorrected pre-proofs) (original) (raw)
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58 Thesis Eleven The ANC youth league and the politicization of race
One of the most striking features of the South African polity, as the 20th anniversary of democratization draws closer, is the intensity of public arguments about race that show no signs of abating any time soon. In the midst of worsening socio-economic inequality, it's the economic question -of the terms of access to wealth, status and economic power, and of how to erase the residues of apartheid's economic dispossession -that dominates these arguments. In recent years, the ANC Youth League -a renewal of the Youth League originally created in 1944 and then banned in 1960 -effectively positioned itself at the forefront of this politicization of race. I argue in this essay that from 1994 to early 2012, the contemporary Youth League retained its predecessor's political persona of precocious provocateur, particularly on matters of race -but differently styled, and deployed to different political ends in the new conjuncture. The repertoire of the Youth League during this period was shaped by a clientelist politics, informed by a version of freedom as a freedom to consume, and the concomitant spectacles of conspicuous consumption that infused the iconography of the 'new' South Africa. These tendencies were most dramatically illustrated during Julius Malema's controversial tenure as Youth League president. Largely disconnected from discursive, deliberative notions of the political, the Youth League's version of politics became an amalgamation of angry street protest, patronage, and lavish partying, which produced a racialized iconography of being well-heeled and down-trodden in a seamless narrative of black solidarity.
South African Apartheid: A Struggle for New Order
This paper deconstructs the various conflicts that arose as a result of the democratic transition and regime change in South Africa. To explain the spawn of conflicts that evolved as a direct result President F.W. De Klerks decision to "unban" the anti-apartheid political organizations like the African National Congress (ANC), free Nelson Mandela, and abolish apartheid; I will use four (4) approaches: Conflict Spiral Model, Contender-Defender Model, Power Imbalance, and Social Identity. Each approach will identify the main components of the conflict and a comparative analysis will provide a comprehensive understanding of South Africa's paradigm shift.
1995
As it turned out, Joseph made was later to become the minister of Lands, and he was responsible for leading the charge of Robert mugabe's 'fast track' resettlement programme that began in 2000. During the years from 1990 to 1992 I lived in Sengezane village in Gwaranyemba Communal Area in Zimbabwe's Gwanda District in matabeleland. At the time I was busy doing my doctoral fieldwork on village-level politics of land resettlement and rural development. Quite early on during my fieldwork I visited Zimbabwe's capital city Harare with the intention of conveying to Dr Joseph made, then a senior manager in the Agricultural Rural Development Authority (ARDA), some of the seething problems I had encountered at ARDA's 'model D' resettlement scheme in Sengezane village. In good faith, and in retrospect rather naively, I thought that I could convince the ARDA manager to change the top-down, technicist implementation of extremely disruptive land-use planning interventions in Sengezane village. I had seen first hand how these land-use plans had caused havoc with villagers' daily lives and livelihood practices. I had hardly begun to outline the kinds of village-level complications and hardships these plans had unleashed, when Dr made launched into a tirade against foreign researchers who criticised his government without providing solutions. 1 By the time I left this volatile meeting I had reconciled myself to the reality that my research findings would have no impact, and that Robert mugabe's ZANU-PF government was not interested in criticism. I was relieved to know that, once I finished my fieldwork, I could return to South Africa to make a contribution to my country's new democracy. The release of Nelson mandela in February 1990, and the unbanning of the anti-apartheid liberation movements shortly thereafter, ushered in expectations of democratisation and transformation that had once seemed unimaginable. It was this optimism that I witnessed following the 1994 election of mandela as the first President of the new South Africa. These heady times were also reflected in the extraordinary vibrancy of civic organisations, NGOs, and new social movements that emerged in a post-apartheid political landscape framed by one of the most progressive constitutions in the world. The proliferation of new political movevii viii Foreword & Acknowledgements ments included those concerned with the environment, indigenous rights, land, biotechnologies, low-income housing, gay and lesbian issues, housing and HIV/ AIDS. It was within this dynamic political moment that the seeds for this book found fertile ground. During the early 1990s, I became increasingly interested in the role of popular land struggles in catalysing new forms of identity politics amongst people in the Northern Cape Province who were previously classified as 'Coloured' but were increasingly identifying themselves as San, Grique and Nama (Chapters 2 and 3). This period also witnessed the emergence of new forms of transnational activism initiated by community-based organisations such as the South African Homeless Peoples' Federation (SAHPF) (see Chapter 4). Following President Thabo mbeki's controversial embrace of AIDS dissident views in 1999, my research began to focus on the ways in which AIDS activism was producing new political subjectivities, identities and practices (see Chapters 5 and 6). AIDS activism quickly became much more than a scholarly interest. Like the Treatment Action Campaign (TAC) activists, I too was outraged that President mbeki embraced AIDS dissident theories and seemed to be in a state of AIDS denial at a time when five to six million South Africans were living with HIV. I soon found myself confronted with new ethical and intellectual dilemmas and challenges as a South African political anthropologist doing research in the midst of a devastating pandemic. This interest in political anthropology, and my particular focus on social movements and activism, was not accidental; it reflected my growing political awareness as a white South African of the historical burdens of the twin legacies of colonialism and apartheid. These concerns had emerged in the course of my studies at the University of Cape Town (UCT) in the early 1980s. Although I had developed a gut sense of the systemic injustices of apartheid growing up as the son of a German Jewish refugee in the conservative, middle-class white suburbs of Port Elizabeth, it was my voracious reading of the works of South African sociologists, anthropologists and historians such as martin Legassick, Harold Wolpe, Jean and John Comaroff, and Shula marks that provided me with a historically and culturally informed understanding of the emergence of what marxist theorists referred to as South Africa's particular version of 'racial capitalism' and 'colonialism of a special type'. my training in political anthropology, and my political education more broadly, had begun in earnest in 1979 in the Department of Social Anthropology at the University of Cape Town (UCT). In the late 1980s, social anthropologists at UCT-Emile Boonzaier, mamphela Ramphele, Peter Skalnik, John Sharp, Andrew Spiegel, Robert Thornton and martin West-published a pathbreaking critique of apartheid state discourse in an edited volume called South African Keywords (1988). This text provided students like myself with the intellectual tools to unpack and deconstruct the apartheid state's discourses on race, ethnicity, tribe and so on. my understanding of the political situation in South Africa was further deepened by my 1982 Honours research on forced removals in Qwaqwa, an impoverished and overcrowded rural homeland of the South Sotho. It was here that I witnessed first hand the devastating consequences of apartheid social engineering, ix Foreword & Acknowledgements whereby hundreds of thousands of black South Africans were forcibly removed from 'white South Africa' and dumped in underdeveloped labour reserves. This was my real political and intellectual awakening. After completing my Honours degree, I was fortunate to study at Columbia University (1986-1994) in New york with two pre-eminent political anthropologists, George Bond and Joan Vincent. This training exposed me to broader theoretical questions raised by political anthropology in Africa. This book is a culmination of ethnographic investigations done over the period of more than a decade. The essays were written during a period of dramatic political transformations in terms of which nothing seemed stable and certain. In recent years this political landscape has become even more uncertain. In December 2007, South Africans, including political pundits, journalists and commentators, were taken by surprise by the dramatic electoral victory of former Deputy President Jacob Zuma's 'camp' at the ANC's Conference at Polokwane in Limpopo Province. Although the polls had indicated that Zuma had considerable support at the ANC branch level, not many pollsters predicted that his 'faction' would take a clean sweep of the top six positions of the ANC party leadership. This constituted a 'palace coup' and a dramatic routing of President mbeki and his support base. Zuma became President of the ANC, thereby thwarting President mbeki's attempt to win a third term as president of the ruling party. The book does not, however, deal with ANC party politics and struggles for political power of the sort that surfaced during the build-up to the December 2007 ANC Conference. Neither does it focus on the role of the trade unions and the SACP in national political life. Instead, it focuses on NGO and social movement activism and popular politics during the post-apartheid period. The case studies on land, housing and AIDS activism and mobilisation were researched and written during a period characterised by the global emergence of new social movements and new forms of identity politics. Although class-based mobilisation in the trade union movement has persisted, the book does not delve into the rich and well-researched field of labour movements. The book has also deliberately avoided analysing the twists and turns of political parties, ballots and procedural democracy, an area of study that has tended to be the domain of political science. Hopefully by focusing quite narrowly on NGOs and social movements, it will contribute towards expanding our understandings of new political discourses, organisations, citizenships and identities. There are numerous individuals I wish to acknowledge. These include my teach
Engel/Pallottii (eds.) 2016. South Africa after Apartheid
South Africa after Apartheid Policies and Challenges of the Democratic Transition, 2016
South Africa is a work in progress, in which at every step the contradictions between promises and expectations must be negotiated in a context of fractures and hierarchies inherited by the legacy of apartheid and influenced heavily by dominant international blueprints. The essays proposed here succeed to make connections between scholarly research and political and social action, between theory and practice. To show how state decision-making is influenced, and in what measure determined, by the nature and internal social changes and by government staying in power in regional and international relations. Connections that raise further relevant questions to stimulate the critique of the democratic process and on how these relations of power may influence, stall or even drive back, the path of autonomous emancipation, as it was and is embedded in the history of suffering and sacrifice of the population.
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Speaking at the Centre for Post-Conflict Justice at Trinity College, Dublin in 2010, Kader Asmal, formerly anti-apartheid activist, recently minister of education, and now professor of law in South Africa, asked the question: APost-Conflict Justice: Industry or Necessity?@ As a critic of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) for allegedly sacrificing justice and the criminal prosecution of perpetrators to the ends of national reconciliation (Asmal et al, Reconciliation through Truth), Asmal may have been a controversial choice to inaugurate a centre whose website features Nelson Mandela framed by the new South African flag, and whose members honor the TRC as a key model for the resolution of conflict in Ireland. Nonetheless, the TRC has become, as Paul Gready suggests in The Era of Transitional Justice (hereafter: Era), both an example for later commissions and the stimulus for commentary on an industrial scale.
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The period of apartheid rule in South Africa officiallyl astedf rom 1948 until April 1994,when democratic elections took place. The policy of apartheid (Afrikaans for separateness) was formallyi ntroduced in South Africa by the National Party (NP) when it came to power in the whites-onlyelections of 1948. This culmination of apolitical, economic and social system of raciald iscrimination was, however,basedo n policies of racialdiscrimination practiced and legislated since the first European settlement in South Africa in 1652. Colonial rule in South Africa by Dutch and British administrations involved wars of conquest,enslavement of local peoples, the deprivation of land and political control of indigenous populations. Colonialism also saw the establishment of numerous waveso fD utch, French and Britishs ettlers occupying various parts of the country (particularlythe Cape Provinceand Natal) in subsequent centuries. Dutch settlers who were unhappy with British rule of the Cape Province (includingt he abolishment of slavery) moved into the country'si nterior and established independent 'Boer'¹ republics,the OrangeF ree State and the Transvaal. This migration alsoinvolvednumerous battles resulting in the conquest of land and the forced displacement of local populations. Violent conflicts between indigenous people and European settler populations continued until the earlyt wentieth century.T he last major military confrontation was the Bambatha Rebellion (1906-1907), when the Zulu Chief challenged the introduction of ap oll tax by the Natalg overnment. The whole period of colonial control of South Africa involved various raciallydiscriminatory laws and the denial of political rights. In the earlytwentieth centurythis gave rise to am ore united African movement of protest and resistance, particularly through the leadership of the African National Congress (ANC), which was founded in 1912 (initiallya st he South African Native National Congress). The ANC led various protests against discriminatory laws and campaigned for full democracy.I nt he 1950s these campaigns became increasingly confrontational while retaining aprincipled stance of non-violence. In March 1960 the Pan Africanist Boer is the Dutch word for farmer,which is how the majority of Dutch settlers referredt ot hemselves. Their descendants were subsequentlyc alled Afrikaners.
Liberation Diaries - Reflections on 20 Years of Democracy in South Africa.pdf
The book Liberation Diaries: Reflections on 20 Years of Democracy by was published by Jacana Media in April 2014. The book has 50 chapters including contributions from prominent scholars like Professors Raymond Parsons, Hebert Vilakazi, Ntongela Masilela and Metz Thaddeus. We also have chapters by social activists like Mugabe Ratshikuni and Wayne Duvenage, journalists like Nozipho Mbanjwa, business women like Khanyisile Kweyama of Anglo American as well as university students like Mhlengi Ngcaweni and Mpho Tshivhase. These writers give different critiques of what it means to live in South Africa @ 20. Many of those who categorize the book as a spin in favor of the ruling party and government are immediately disappointed when they navigate the first chapters of the book. This is a critical reflection of the journey we have traveled as a nation, the victories scored and dreams differed. However, even among the worst critics like Wayne Duvenage of OUTA (opposition to urban tolling), the book’s overall conclusion is that South Africa is a country on the move, making strides towards creating a better life for all. Although the book was meant to contribute to the discourse on 20 years of democracy, it has actually achieved more. Most chapters as well as book reviews have moved beyond a critical reflection of the state of the nation @ 20 to pose the question: given what we know about South Africa @ 20 (both negative and positive), using historical and current trends, where will South Africa be @ 30, 40 and so on. Whilst some of the chapters to speculate about our prospects, others challenge us to think hard about the future we chose and the extent to which it will influence the future we choose. This rhetorical exposition suggests that choices made in 1994 have influenced the outcomes 20 years later. Concomitantly, the choices we make today, like introduction of the National Development Plan, will determine the kind of society South Africa will be in the year 2034. The book was among the best sellers of 2014 and has gone through a reprint. It is available in major bookstores internationally. Timeline and Milestones 1. Publication date: April 2014 2. First launch: Oxford University, United Kingdom 3. Featured in the City Press, April 2014 4. Featured in the Sunday Times Autumn Hot Reads, April 2014 5. Second launch: May 2014 at Wits University 6. Featured on CNBC Africa: May 2014 7. Reviewed on Power FM, June 2014 8. Featured on the Mail and Guardian, June 2014 9. Reviewed by Chai FM (Jewish Radio Station), June 2014 10. Reviewed by the Cape Times, June 2014 11. Reviewed in the Public Sector Manager Magazine, July 2014 12. Reviewed on Ukhozi FM in July 2014 13. Reviewed by the Centurion ANC Youth League Branch, July 2014 14. Launch at North West University by Progress Professionals Forum, August 2014 15. Reviewed on Metro FM in August 2014 16. Featured at Jozi Book Fair in September 2014 17. Reviewed at Poppy’s Café, September 2014 18. Reviewed at The Presidency, December 2014 19. Special Reconciliation Day Feature, SABC, 16 December 2014