Urban Politics After Apartheid

Sandrine Gukelberger

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• eBook ISBN:
  9780429956058
• Subtopic: Politics
• Index: Politics & International Relations

Urban Politics After Apartheid presents an understanding of gendered urban politics in South Africa as an interactive process. Based on long-term fieldwork in the former townships 20 years after the end of apartheid, it provides an in-depth analysis of how activists and local politicians engage with each other.

Sandrine Gukelberger contributes to the ongoing debate on urban governance by adding a new historicising perspective as an entry point into the urban governance arena, based upon the political trajectories of ward councillors and activists. Integrating urban governance studies with new perspectives on policy and social movements provides insight on the everyday events in which people engender, negotiate, and contest concepts, policies, and institutions that have been introduced under the catch-all banner of democracy. By conceptualising these events as encounters at different knowledge interfaces, the book develops a locus for an anthropology of policy, highlighting everyday negotiations in urban politics.

Urban Politics After Apartheid dissects the social life of policies such as Desmond Tutu's rainbow nation metaphor beyond national symbolism, and academic and public discourse that largely portray participation in South Africa to be weak, local politicians to be absent, and social movements to be toothless tigers. Proving the inaccuracy of these portrayals, this book will be of interest to students and scholars of South African politics, urban studies, political anthropology and political sociology.

1 Introducing urban politics after apartheid

The legal abolition of apartheid and the declaration of the Republic of South Africa in 1994 were heralded as the end of a system that was internationally condemned for racist segregation and dehumanisation. However, the legal abolition of apartheid has not put an end to the daily experiences of these forms of discrimination and disempowerment.

South Africa has a long history of violence and conflict, from colonial and civil wars, to political repressions and racial discrimination. Following the struggle for independence and the landmark democratic elections of 1994, hope burgeoned in South Africa as it began the transformation process into a new, self-assured democratic nation.

Given the huge inequalities in living conditions, and extreme poverty affecting the majority of the population during apartheid, people attached great expectations to the transition to democracy, which would bring with it equality in rights, social justice, and dignity, along with alleviation of poverty. In this sense, shared visions of democracy that induced ideas of peace, improvement, and reconciliation in people’s lives were undisputed. Fulfilling these hopes and aspirations through policy means such as decentralisation and democratisation, however, is a different proposition, as Appadurai suggests (2007: 29):

Democracy rests on a vision. And all visions require hope. But it is not clear whether there is any deep or inherent affinity between the politics of democracy and the politics of hope.

In the first two decades of democratisation in South Africa, “the politics of hope” became entangled with “the politics of democracy”. The politics of hope built upon peoples’ confidence and expectations of becoming a democratic nation and converted these into encouraging political slogans such as “The people shall govern”. This slogan has its roots in the pursuit of independence by the liberation movement, which was outlawed by the apartheid state in the 1950s and thereafter forced to operate underground. The political project of the liberation movement, fighting for democratic principles and a better future, naturally required hope, yet at the same time its appeal to the people rested on the assumption that these goals were also achievable. Post-1994, when the process of formalising and institutionalising democracy began, the inherent affinity between the politics of democracy and the politics of hope did indeed become much more complicated than during the apartheid era. The politics of democracy lay the anchor of democratic values in the legal framework of the nation-building process. These were subsequently formalised in the constitution and white papers on the developmental nature of the (local) state, putting it in a role to influence policies on (good) governance, public participation, and leading the creation of an informed and engaged citizenry. In the same vein, the “rainbow nation” allegory, originally coined by the renowned anti-apartheid figure Archbishop Desmond Tutu, has been widely used in public discussions as a metaphor for sustaining a vision of unity and peace amid a society that is, in reality, segregated, divided, and fractured following decades of political, economic, and racial violence. The use of slogans such as “the people shall govern in the rainbow nation” aimed to channel the hopes of the citizenry post-1994 into a formally determined and legally sustained democratisation process. The will to and effort towards building an integrated society remain an unchanged narrative in politics and policies, which at the same time are being constantly challenged to attach the hope for a better South Africa to the concrete practices and institutions that aim to bring about social justice.

This book’s interest lies in the politics at Cape Town’s outskirts, focusing our lens on actors and their agency, in the context of the emergence of a contested post-apartheid political and social order. In contrast to existing approaches that discuss whether democracy has been achieved in post-colonial societies, this research concentrates on the processes of “negotiating order” (Strauss 1978: 5). Toward this end, the overarching purpose of this work is to outline how people at the urban periphery participate in political processes, contribute to the search for solutions to social and economic problems, as well as deliberate on the decisions that affect their lives.

Researching urban politics took place during 18 months of fieldwork (from 2005 to 2007) in two adjacent former townships in Cape Town, where some historical context is required in order to understand important racialised inscriptions of the places.¹ In Cape Town (now the capital of the Western Cape Province, located in the south west of South Africa), apartheid legislation forced classified non-White people out of central urban areas designated for Whites only, into the areas called the Cape Flats (Report of the Department of Social Welfare 1942 [1943]). The apartheid government originally built township settlements as dormitory suburbs for classified non-White, working class people who were additionally excluded from the dominant political system. Furthermore, beginning in the 1960s, non-White citizens were forcibly removed from urban centres to these peripheral suburban regions, being racially segregated into so-called Coloured and Black African settlements (Western 1996). During the apartheid era, these townships became racialised and evolved into violent hot spots. These peripheral areas also developed into arenas where people mobilised political organisations, formed movements, and developed practices in the fight for independence. This forming of oppositions in the townships was progressively outlawed by the apartheid state. Accordingly, opponents reacted by advocating revolution rather than reform, since the apartheid system did not allow for the accommodation of oppositional activism and blocked debate on potential changes. Protest actions were criminalised, and politics became polarised, turning the struggle from a multi-faceted one into, at its peak, a two-sided battle “for or against” the state. “Amandla” (power) represented a popular rallying cry used by the African National Congress (ANC) and its allies during the days of resistance against apartheid. The leader of a grouping would call out “Amandla!”, with the crowd responding “Awethu” (in isiXhosa) or “Ngawethu” (in isiZulu), meaning “to us”, the South African version of the rallying cry “Power”, “[…] to the People!” This expression is still associated today with struggles against oppression, and is used in different political contexts.

In this book I conceptualise former townships as spaces where different social movements, coalitions, and configurations of actors and regimes of politics operate on different levels (i.e., local, municipal, regional, state, transnational, see Alvarez 2005: 254). In what follows, I describe townships as “formerly Coloured” or “formally Black African” only in reference to the way in which they were conceived of in the past, i.e. in the context of segregation politics during the apartheid era; I do not mean them as references to racial categories in the current context in South Africa. Nonetheless, the racialisation of townships as either Coloured or Black African remains relevant in everyday life and urban politics. Despite attempts to abolish the classification of people and places, the notion of townships embodies a historical legacy that is still remembered and relevant in people’s everyday lives.

Therefore, the main task of this book is to heighten our understanding of differing and sometimes competing forms of activism, an activism that follows the traditions of the common force that laid the foundations for the constitution of a (to a great extent) non-racialised post-apartheid civil society. Meanwhile, in contrast, the development of local government in the Western Cape Province within the context of a specific history of segregation helps to explain the rise of racism as an indelible political issue. It is in this context that the legacy of apartheid-era racialised laws remains alive in people’s social life-worlds. Women in particular started to assert themselves more forcefully and put voice to their concerns within the male-dominated liberation movement during the 1980s, the most important achievement of the women’s movement at the time being, alongside the vision of a non-racialised democratic South Africa, that of a non-sexist one. This became manifest in the establishment of a “National Machinery for Advancing Gender Equality” (NGM) to foster a women’s agenda and “gendered consciousness” within parliament, government, and civil society (Albertyn 1995: 12–13; Britton 2006: 71).² It is important to note that women’s participation on the whole, in party and movement politics, and the sharing of power has been a complex and difficult process, due to the legacy of the colonial, patriarchal, and masculine nature of South Africa’s state and societal order. Women’s participation in South African politics, for example, has leaned towards political party initiatives to create women’s movements with party affiliations or as part of the party structure. Moreover, South African politics were influenced by the introduction of quota policies in 1994, with the ANC being the first party to implement a 30 per cent-quota for female candidates, just before the national elections in 1994.³

Since the abolition of apartheid, both state and non-state actors, including international players, have re-structured local government and participated in the construction of civil society. Local government representatives, and activists of the former underground liberation movement, have become engaged in newly-emerged political spaces within and outside the urban governance system. The effects of state policies and participatory measures in and around the urban governance system have been little researched from an actor-oriented perspective. Most scholars have taken a more formal state-centred standpoint and categorise South Africa as a liberal democracy, i.e. a form of representative democracy, where elected representatives hold the decision-making power, based on a constitution emphasizing the protection of individual liberties and the rights of minorities in society (freedom of speech and assembly, freedom of religion, the right to private property, right to privacy, as well as equality before the law, etc.) (du Toit/Kotzé 2011; Misra-Dexter/February 2010; Muiu 2008). A common critique of South African democracy is that government tends to limit citizen participation to voting, leaving the actual governance to politicians, i.e. participatory governance is considered weak (Misra-Dexter/February 2010; Mathekga/Buccus 2006; Williams 2006; Mattes 2002). Despite having a constitution and formal institutions that supposedly enhance public participation, “it is in the functioning of institutions, in the interpretation of the constitution and in providing access to basic rights that democracy falls short” (Misra-Dexter/February 2010: vii). Critically examining this stance, my research develops a perspective from below and concentrates on local, national, and global dynamics, power structures, and appropriations of democratic and developmental reforms. Rather than concentrating upon the state and its failures, my main argument is that people have developed different forms of agency, thus challenging the oft-touted scholarly opinion of a total absence of public participation in council politics. The main contribution of my research to this debate is located in its actor-oriented approach, which examines local meanings, actions, and opinions circulating in different translocal and transnational social spaces, and changing forms of power and agency in the former townships of Cape Town.

1.1 National and global forces re-structuring local government after apartheid

Even in modern South Africa, a majority of those previously classified as non-Whites still live in Cape Town’s outskirts, while the majority of inhabitants in the better-off suburbs are White. This fact is the legacy of apartheid local governments instituting spatial segregation of the classified non-White and White population groups (Stytler 2005; Cameron 1998; Meyer 1978; Cloete 1982; Evans 1969). Spatial segregation was linked with massive inequalities in the provision of basic services such as housing, sewage, and sanitation systems, and while classified White areas were provided with electricity and water, classified non-Whites received inferior or no such services (Cameron 1998: 76–80). During the apartheid era, local governments mainly functioned as the administrative arm of the highly centralised provincial and national governments, and were defined as the lowest tier in a strict government hierarchy. This book shows how the goal of the transformation of local government was to eradicate the racial origins of apartheid government. State actors and (international) policy makers expect post-apartheid local government to work as a vehicle for the equitable redistribution of resources and therefore the successful integration of previously disadvantaged townships into a fairer South Africa. The entrenchment of local government as a “fully-fledged sphere of government” (Stytler 2005: 184) in the 1996 constitution was fundamental to this undertaking. This shift was underlined by the expression of local government as a distinctive “sphere of government”, alongside national and provincial governments. The term “sphere” reflected a deliberate modification of the category of “tier” used during apartheid, in an attempt to dismantle notions of hierarchy and instil importance to local self-government.⁴

Between 1993 and 1996, the transformation of metropolitan governance was marked by debate between the political parties concerning the exact nature of the governance system. The smaller opposition parties, including the National Party (NP), the former ruling party of the apartheid government, were against a model of a unified metropolitan system (so-called “unicity”), arguing that centralised governance would create distance between residents and their representatives (Stytler 2005: 190; Cameroon 1998; Parnell et al. 2002). Conversely, the ruling party, the ANC, was in favour of unicity, which became manifest in the White Paper of Local Government (1998). The immediate aim of the metropolitan government was to overcome the racialised divisions of the past by creating integrated cities where the surplus of the central tax base would be redistributed to the previously ignored townships (Wooldridge 2002: 128–129).

In order to avoid a centralised urban governance system, two internal devolutions of power were enacted in 1998⁵ that invoked “the transfer of authority to locally instituted units of government” or to special purpose authorities (Crook/Manor 1998: 7).⁶ The first delegation of powers was establishing ward committees in each municipal ward, with the geographical area electing a ward councillor. Second, several wards would constitute a metropolitan sub-council. Both institutions are supposed to create effective channels of interaction with residents, in order to foster citizenship, and strengthen “community-state” relations. Integrating previously-excluded townships into the municipal system of Cape Town has proved to be a complex task for both local government and society. To this day, there are many informal settlements, both old and new, which remain unincorporated into the system and whose size and population are unknown.

These visions and imaginations of local self-government were the points of departure for conducting research into urban politics in the two adjacent former townships of Mitchells Plain and Khayelitsha. A set of key research questions were developed to uncover how participation works, and does not work, at the urban level. The key questions also proposed to look at relationships with people outside formal and elite political institutions, paying attention to gender relations that form important structuring dimensions of power relations at the local level. With reference to urban governance at Cape Town’s outskirts, the guiding questions were: How do the institutions of ward councillor, ward committee, and sub-council perform in practice and give meaning to integration and public participation? How do women and men make use of the tools provided by local government for participation and representation? How do activists interact with local government and promote people’s participation? Bearing these questions in mind, not only state actors and national policy makers, but also the international donor community had great expectations for the metropolitan governments, in t...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Abbreviations
• Glossary of terms
• 1. Introducing urban politics after apartheid
• 2. From a violent past to democratic futures
• 3. Old racism in new guises
• 4. Urban governance and parallel spaces
• 5. Institutionalising activism at the interface with government
• 6. Urban experiences in politics and activism
• Index