The clash of ideologies: Notions of multiparty (liberal) democracy versus African systems

In South Africa traditional leaders, aka (also known as) chiefs or collaborators, had hoped that the new liberation political environment would retain and safeguard their deeply embedded cultural practices and values, which had existed for centuries, but had been partly violated during the colonial era. However, the new liberation era brought with it notions of liberal democracy—characterised by concepts of meritorious selections, based on democratic “elections”, a practice that further marginalised and frustrated hereditary cultural norms and practices, upon which the pillars and identities of each ethnic group or community were based. In discussing the complex and interlocking interests, epochs of colonial and postcolonial experience, the introduction of “foreign” meritorious notions that dispensed with the craved hereditary positions, the chiefs, traditional leaders and former collaborators appear to have been forced to abandon the liberation project and take up the issue of their survival as custodians of customs and chiefdoms; even against the messaging coming from the new political classes. Inevitably, this has created new tensions in the political governance of urban and rural communities, by elected officials who have either failed or succeeded to coopt traditional leaders. This article argues for a balance between democracy and traditional leadership that can inform modern electoral processes and modernise the cultural practices and eliminate unnecessary conflict and tensions.     

South Africa’s civil war, 1985–1995

The end of apartheid in South Africa is typically characterised as ‘peaceful’. However, between 1985 and 1995, South Africa experienced a civil war in which more than 20,000 people died. In this war, the African National Congress (ANC) implemented a strategy of ‘people’s war’ based on Vietnam’s experience while the government pursued a counterinsurgency strategy based on models employed by the United States. In the war’s second phase, the ANC and Inkatha employed unconventional tactics in a campaign to gain political and military control of disputed territory. Owing to its success in the war, the ANC was able to prevent its rivals from significantly limiting its power in the central government after 1994 as well as exclude Inkatha from operating in key areas even in its home province.     

Commonwealth Diplomacy and the End of Apartheid

This article recounts the struggle that those fighting for an end to apartheid in South Africa faced and the role that the Commonwealth played in that struggle. The author recounts the contribution of the Whitlam, Fraser and Hawke administrations in Australia in bringing down the apartheid regime but stresses that these leaders chose the Commonwealth as their primary vehicle for change. In the author’s view, the fight against apartheid was, arguably, the finest achievement of the modern Commonwealth.     

International Norms and the End of Apartheid in South Africa

This article examines the interface in the post-World War II era between expanding global movements supporting human rights and traditional great power concerns regarding global security, and asks why an international alliance of actors mobilized to pressure the Western powers, particularly the USA, to politically isolate and economically sanction South Africa in the midst of the cold war. We argue that in the international struggle against apartheid, humanist (human rights) ideology emanating from social movements in global civil society clashed with traditional realist ideology regarding what constituted state security in the global polity. The norms of self-determination of nations and anti-racism together fueled global activism and challenged powerful Western states. Facing mass protests and lobbying efforts from citizens, democratic states across the Western world found greater security in upholding their own professed human rights principles than in maintaining close economic ties to the apartheid regime.     

Deliberative democracy and the politics of traditional leadership in South Africa: A case of despotic domination or democratic deliberation?

A heated debate developed in South Africa as to the meaning of ‘deliberative democracy’. This debate is fanned by the claims of ‘traditional leaders’ that their ways of village-level deliberation and consensus-oriented decision-making are not only a superior process for the African continent as it evolves from pre-colonial tradition, but that it represents a form of democracy that is more authentic than the Western version. Proponents suggest that traditional ways of deliberation are making a come-back because imported Western models of democracy that focus on the state and state institutions miss the fact that in African societies state institutions are often seen as illegitimate or simply absent from people's daily lives. In other words, traditional leadership structures are more appropriate to African contexts than their Western rivals. Critics suggest that traditional leaders, far from being authentic democrats, are power-hungry patriarchs and authoritarians attempting to both re-invent their political, social and economic power (frequently acquired under colonial and apartheid rule) and re-assert their control over local-level resources at the expense of the larger community. In this view, the concept of deliberative democracy is being misused as a legitimating device for a politics of patriarchy and hierarchy, which is the opposite of the meaning of the term in the European and US sense. This article attempts to contextualise this debate and show how the efforts by traditional leaders to capture an intermediary position between rural populations and the state is fraught with conflicts and contradictions when it comes to forming a democratic state and society in post-apartheid South Africa.     

THE COSATU PARTICIPATORY DEMOCRATIC TRADITION AND SOUTH AFRICA'S NEW PARLIAMENT: ARE THEY RECONCILABLE?

COSATU, The Congress of South African Trade Unions, has a participatorydemocratic tradition on the shopfloor that dates back to theemergence of some of its constituent unions in the 1970s. Infact, an ethic developed among members that the unions oughtto be democratic. By 1994, when South Africa underwent a majorpolitical transformation and the African National Congress cameto power with the support of COSATU, the question arose whetherthe new parliament would be reconcilable with COSATU's expectationsof it. A random survey of 643 COSATU members shortly beforethe 1994 election established that COSATU had sustained itsdemocratic shopfioor tradition and that its members expectedthe 20 union leaders it sent to parliament on an ANC ticketto be as accountable to them as their shop stewards are. Subsequentresearch found dissatisfaction with the ANC on account of unsatisfactorydelivery and inadequate consultation, especially by the ministries.In response, COSATU has adopted a dual strategy of strengtheningits representation in parliament by opening a ParliamentaryOffice and putting pressure on the government and organizedbusiness by engaging in mass action on selected issues. COSATUthus reconciled itself to parliament by combining new terrainsof struggle.     

South African foreign policy in the post-Mbeki period

President Thabo Mbeki's resignation in September 2008 six months before the expected end of his term was triggered by the recall issued by the ANC National Executive Committee. It is highly unlikely that any major changes in foreign policy will be made by the caretaker government of President Kgalema Motlanthe before the 2009 elections. However, the significant changes in the domestic political environment signal the start of a new era in South Africa's transformation — what might be called the ‘post post-apartheid period’. This paper explores what those changes might entail, especially in the realm of foreign policy. After reflecting on the legacy of Mbeki's foreign policy, the paper considers the potential implications of the relevant resolutions agreed at the December 2007 ANC National Conference in Polokwane. Constraints on South African foreign policy towards the African continent are considered, especially with regard to perception versus reality of its economic and political hegemony as well as its complex identity as a nation. In light of this analysis and the inevitable impact of the current global economic crisis, the paper concludes with a series of recommendations for a new vision and agenda for South Africa's foreign policy under the government to be elected in 2009.     

TRANSFORMATION: THE CHANGING CONTEXT OF ACADEMIA IN POST-APARTHEID SOUTH AFRICA

The transformatory paradigm of post-apartheid South Africa hasleft few of the country's institutions free of critical scrutiny.Higher education has been no exception. As elsewhere in Africaunder new post-colonial governments, South African universitieshave a relatively high profile on the agenda of change. Thisinterest has been spurred not only by the ANC government's awarenessof its large share in the funding of universities but also becauseof the political imperatives engendered by the disaffectionagainst the historically white universities (HWU's) among itsyouth constituency. This article assesses the current interplaybetween universities and their new environment and focuses onthe following issues central to the debate on university transformation:the higher education heritage of apartheid; the impact of thechanging racial profile of students at HWU's; perceptions ofthe role of universities; affirmative action staffing policies;competing claims by universities, the government and the privatesector on scarce black and especially African human resources;the negative implications of the African brain drain from universitieson civil society; and the question of Afrocentrism versus Eurocentrism.Where relevant these issues are examined against the backdropof the African experience. In doing so a number of yet to beresolved problems are highlighted.     

Public and private higher education in South Africa in the context of the African renaissance

Abstract

This article examines the concept of higher education as a public good in relation to the currently evolving interface between public and private higher education in post‐apartheid South Africa. In order to illuminate the significance of the particular ways in which this public‐private divide is unfolding, the first part of the article sketches the history of the emergence of higher education from the South African public and private elementary and secondary education system, and reaches some conclusions about the social, political and economic considerations that drove the emergence of this dualism in the colonial era and during apartheid, and the emergent assumptions on education as a public good. Making use of Amartya Sen's thesis of development as the expansion of freedoms, the second part constitutes an examination of the manner in which the liberatory agenda of post‐apartheid education policy is shaping the current articulation between public and private higher education in South Africa. This is specifically with respect to issues of access, funding and knowledge acquisition and production. This article makes observations, not only about the consequences for development of the particular ways in which the public‐private divide is evolving and how the nature of the interface connects with issues of the public good in education, but also about the degree to which the drive for the marketisation of education is impacting on current understandings of education as a public good. In the very last section, a South African case study is used to provide broad commentary on the nature of the public‐private interface that may benefit development in the context of the African Renaissance.     

The continuing salience of race: Discrimination and diversity in South Africa

The end of apartheid has brought a resurgence of research into racial identities, attitudes and behaviour in South Africa. The legacy of systematic racial ordering and discrimination under apartheid is that South Africa remains deeply racialised, in cultural and social terms, as well as deeply unequal, in terms of the distribution of income and opportunities. South Africans continue to see themselves in the racial categories of the apartheid era, in part because these categories have become the basis for post-apartheid ‘redress’, in part because they retain cultural meaning in everyday life. South Africans continue to inhabit social worlds that are largely defined by race, and many express negative views of other racial groups. There has been little racial integration in residential areas, although schools provide an important opportunity for inter-racial interaction for middle-class children. Experimental and survey research provide little evidence of racism, however. Few people complain about racial discrimination, although many report everyday experiences that might be understood as discriminatory. Racial discrimination per se seems to be of minor importance in shaping opportunities in post-apartheid South Africa. Far more important are the disadvantages of class, exacerbated by neighbourhood effects: poor schooling, a lack of footholds in the labour market, a lack of financial capital. The relationship between race and class is now very much weaker than in the past. Overall, race remains very important in cultural and social terms, but no longer structures economic advantage and disadvantage.     

The Ethics of Waste in Zoë Wicomb’s You Can’t Get Lost in Cape Town

Zoë Wicomb’s You Can’t Get Lost in Cape Town (1987) uses bodily and material waste to figure larger social processes of marginalization, dispossession, and racial abjection during the apartheid era. As the apartheid regime sought to devalue the lives of those categorized as “Black” and “Coloured,” while simultaneously profiting from their land and labor, it pushed non-white South Africans into dangerous proximity to hazardous and unseemly waste. Waste, in You Can’t Get Lost in Cape Town, becomes both metonymy and metaphor. Wicomb not only uses it to index the historical and material processes of abjection that obtained in twentieth-century South Africa; she also takes up garbage, feces, vomit, and other refuse as an ethical lens for the consideration of how individual and collective subjectivities are formed by what is thrown away. In its relationship to waste of all kinds, the individual body becomes a site in which social processes of acceptance and disavowal play out.     

South Africa and Japan: maintaining a difficult friendship

Japan's economic and political relationship with South Africa has been characterised historically by ambiguity. Throughout the twentieth century, economic ties were underpinned by mercantilist and strategic considerations. During apartheid, this placed Japan in an uneasy position as it sought to balance a relationship of expediency with wider foreign policy objectives in the rest of Africa and beyond. The demise of apartheid created the space for new forms of engagement centred on the pursuit of cognate goals. This has seen the intensification and deepening of economic ties in particular. Yet relations, especially at the political and diplomatic levels, have also been more complex than anticipated, and in recent years, the rise in Africa of other players from Asia and the Global South has had a bearing on South Africa–Japan ties. In this paper, it is argued that two related dynamics pivoting on policy elites’ changing conceptions (or self-view) of the nature of the state they are running and its place in the wider world order help explain the post-apartheid evolution of the South Africa–Japan relationship. First, there has been an apparent shift in South African foreign policy elites’ self-view, mediated by a changing systemic context. The development and manifestation over time of a stronger Global South self-conception in South African foreign policy, fashioned in juxtaposition to what have been considered in the past key Global North relationships, had direct consequences for South Africa–Japan ties. Second, meso- and micro-level dynamics – the role of the general operations in the diplomatic (i.e. bureaucratic) arena, and the personalities and shifting political preferences of individual executive leaders – had major impacts on how South Africa engaged with Japan in the past two decades.     

From liberation movement to political party: ANC foreign policy in transition

With the dramatic changes in the international and domestic environment, the African National Congress (ANC) has been faced with reconciling the policies of liberation with those of a political party. In response, the ANC has taken up a series of positions representing a new foreign policy outlook, one which takes cognizance of both the changing international environment and the ANC's new role as an emergent political party on the verge of taking power. This paper will investigate this transformation of ANC foreign policy by first examining the broad outlines of policy during the period of the liberation struggle; secondly, looking at the nature and effect of the crisis induced by both the end of the Cold War and the implementation of the South African government's radical reform programme; and finally, examining the preliminary contours of a new foreign policy as the organization emerges out of the transitional period and into the role of governing power.     

Looking from South Africa to the World: A Story of Identity for our Times

The article is a consideration of the question of identity in South Africa, and also in a global context. Just as South Africa has looked to the world in order to understand its place, so too the world might look to South Africa to illuminate patterns less immediately visible elsewhere. Far from being unrepresentative in the apartheid period, South Africa was the ‘state of exception’ that incarnated and concentrated global realities; equally in the current era the reciprocal relations between the South African and the global evoke haunting concerns. The article begins with a consideration of the ‘classic’ generation of anti-apartheid activists, including figures such as Nelson Mandela and Bram Fischer, as they fashioned a new sense of South African identity. Yet it goes on to consider what happens when the classic period is over, and older definitions and oppositions are no longer available. Here the navigations of fiction, both in South Africa and elsewhere, become significant, and the article examines the work of writers from Gordimer, Coetzee and Ndebele, to Caryl Phillips and W. G. Sebald. It ends with a contemplation of the current period, nearly twenty years after the democratic transition in South Africa. In the era of the Marikana massacre and other pressing developments, both music and fiction open up some of the ambiguities and obligations. Drawing on Agamben, I suggest the intrinsic mutuality of the ‘home’ and the ‘foreign’ in establishing a more promising—and challenging—sense of belonging and identity both in South Africa and the world.     

The “Thin Dividing Line”: Prime Ministers and the Problem of Australian Nationalism, 1972–1996

This paper is concerned with the way in which Australian prime ministers gave expression to an idea of “national community” in the post–1972 era. With the declining relevance of the British connection, the departure of “great and powerful” friends from the region, the imperative of engagement with Asia and the emerging concept of Australia as a “multicultural” society, one of the central challenges for these leaders has been whether or not they could offer an alternative myth of community which would preserve social cohesion in the new times. This raises an important historical question concerning Australian political culture at this time — what happened to the need for nationalism? By examining the speeches of Prime Ministers Whitlam, Fraser, Hawke and Keating, it can be seen that far from asserting an old–style, exclusive Australian nationalism, in most cases these leaders expressed great caution and hesitation towards the idea of nationalism itself.     

The Commonwealth,Apartheid, and the Role of Micro-states

In the 1980s, the debate surrounding South Africa apartheid consumed the Commonwealth. While superficially this discussion might appear to have had little relevance to the interests of micro and small state members of the Commonwealth, the behemothic nature of apartheid presented significant challenges to such states. This article attempts to assess the varied ways in which South African apartheid affected the diplomatic strategies of micro-states within the political landscape of the Commonwealth, and how it could be perceived as both a hindrance to their agendas, as well a potential tool in the fight to amplify their voices. Micro-states used the egalitarian structure of the Commonwealth and combined it with the prominence of apartheid in international debate to both elevate their status and even to garner support for their own personal concerns. Apartheid’s reframing of the international conversation had broad reverberations which affected Commonwealth responses to a variety of seemingly disparate issues. This culminated in the ejection of Fiji from the Commonwealth in the aftermath of the 1987 coup due to concerns over racial discrimination, emblematising the all-pervasive nature of the apartheid debate within the Commonwealth.     

The influence of the South African transition on the Northern Ireland peace process

The Provisional Irish Republican Army's announcement of a ceasefire at the end of August 1994 prompted widespread comment around the world. A notable feature of the commentaries was the frequency with which reference was made to the transition in South Africa and the peace process in the Middle East. The South African analogy derived additional credibility from the fact that nationalist leaders in Ireland themselves made constant reference to it, both at the time of the ceasefire and in the months leading up to it. Comparison with South Africa became a major theme of Sinn Fein's rhetoric during the 1980s, when comparison with the African National Congress (ANC) was used to legitimise the IRA's ‘armed struggle’. It is argued that the analogy itself became an influence on developments in Northern Ireland in the mid‐1990s, when South Africa underwent fundamental change, putting pressure on Sinn Fein leaders either to drop the comparison or to justify it through establishing an Irish peace process.     

Living Beyond Apartheid: The Territorial Ethics of Reconciliation

This essay explores the ethical murkiness of interpersonal reconciliation in the post-liberation era, focusing on the problem of material, and specifically territorial, restitution—an aspect of justice which critics say was the missing component of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission. A reading of J.M. Coetzee’s Disgrace alongside Bessie Head’s A Question of Power offers a window into the knotty relationship between reconciliation and redistribution, a relationship which, these novels insist, must be accounted for in reassessing directions for the future and defining new political horizons. Theories of post-apartheid interpersonal ethics, this essay argues, are incomplete and unachievable without a territorial dimension. While Coetzee shows territorial demarcations to be the silent shaper of human interaction and a constant snag in the fabric of the “new” South Africa, Head goes outside the boundaries of the apartheid state to envision the ethical restructuring of human relations through transformative practices of cooperative farming. While ethics is fundamentally about a relation to the other, these novels suggest that land distribution must be factored into the interpersonal equation.     

ANC foreign policy making during the Mbeki period: More democratic or less?

The African National Congress, as an entity distinct from government, served during the 1994–2008 period as an independent forum for debate about South Africa's foreign policy, particularly in the National Executive Committee's Subcommittee on International Relations. This debate retained the oligarchic character of the movement in exile, with few voices – Thabo Mbeki's most prominent among them – dominating the discussion, inputs from subnational party structures almost non-existent, and dissenters expected to keep quiet publicly. That said, participants in these discussions largely dismissed characterisations of Mbeki as a dictator in the foreign policy debate, noting that the predominance of his views stemmed mostly from his strong argumentation and knowledge rather than bullying. Senior ANC leaders also claimed that limited interest in foreign policy, outside of national party structures, hindered efforts to broaden participation in foreign policy formulation.     

THE LOCAL ELECTIONS IN KWAZULU-NATAL: 26 JUNE 1996

The transformation of local government is an essential partof democratization in South Africa. The difficulties of restructuringagainst a background of exclusion, inequality and conflict aresharpened and complicated in KwaZulu-Natal by the conflict betweenthe ANC and the Inkatha Freedom Party (IFP). The thrice-postponedlocal elections, which finally took place in June 1996 (sevenmonths later than most of the rest of the country) representedthe first major test of party strength in the province sincethe disputed general election of April 1994. The principal result of the election was that the IFP remainedthe majority party in KwaZulu-Natal, but with a severe lossof support in the urban areas, which was compensated for byan even bigger turn-out in its rural strongholds. The balanceof power revealed by the local election results will be influentialin determining the course of the peace process, through whichthe ANC and the WP are addressing their differences. As SouthAfrica's parties move from the era of negotiation and constitution-makingand look forward to the 1999 general election, the results ofthe KwaZulu-Natal local elections will also provide some cluesas to the prospects of party realignment.