Rethinking the South African Crisis

Nationalism, Populism, Hegemony

Gillian Hart

• Editore: University of Georgia Press
• Anno: 2014
• ISBN:
  9780820347257
• Argomento: Social Sciences
• Categoria: Human Geography

Since the end of apartheid, South Africa has become an extreme yet unexceptional embodiment of forces at play in many other regions of the world: intensifying inequality alongside "wageless life," proliferating forms of protest and populist politics that move in different directions, and official efforts at containment ranging from liberal interventions targeting specific populations to increasingly common police brutality.

Rethinking the South African Crisis revisits long-standing debates to shed new light on the transition from apartheid. Drawing on nearly twenty years of ethnographic research, Hart argues that local government has become the key site of contradictions. Local practices, conflicts, and struggles in the arenas of everyday life feed into and are shaped by simultaneous processes of de-nationalization and re-nationalization. Together they are key to understanding the erosion of African National Congress hegemony and the proliferation of populist politics.

This book provides an innovative analysis of the ongoing, unstable, and unresolved crisis in South Africa today. It also suggests how Antonio Gramsci's concept of passive revolution, adapted and translated for present circumstances with the help of philosopher and liberation activist Frantz Fanon, can do useful analytical and political work in South Africa and beyond.

1

Contours of Crisis in South Africa

A crisis occurs, sometimes lasting for decades. This exceptional duration means that incurable structural contradictions have revealed themselves … and that, despite this, the political forces which are struggling to conserve and defend the existing structure itself are making every effort to cure them, within certain limits, and to overcome them. These incessant and persistent efforts … form the terrain of the ‘conjunctural’, and it is upon this terrain that the forces of opposition organise (Gramsci 1971: 178; Q13 §17).

Confronting the Present

On Thursday, 16 August 2012, South African police and paramilitary units opened fire on striking mineworkers near the town of Marikana in the north-west platinum belt, killing 34 strikers and injuring another 78. Televised images ricocheted around the world, seeming to support the official story that mineworkers attacked police who then retaliated in self-defence. Yet mounting evidence shows that most of the killings subsequently took place in an area sheltered by rocks that served as an open-air latrine for workers and their families living in the nearby shack settlement of Nkaneng. Out of view of the media, it appears, police assassinated some of the strikers at close range.¹ In addition, eyewitnesses and researchers assert that the initial, widely publicised round of killings was in fact precipitated by police actions. Marikana, in other words, was far more a military operation than an exercise in community policing.

The Marikana massacre was the single most traumatic event of the post-apartheid era, evoking images and memories of police brutality at Sharpeville in 1960 and the Soweto uprising in 1976. Along with the corpses, hopeful visions of a new South Africa lay shattered on the killing fields of Marikana.

Over the weekend following the massacre, Julius Malema – the firebrand former leader of the African National Congress (ANC) Youth League – was cheered by a large crowd of angry mineworkers and their families in Marikana at a moment when ANC officials were terrified to set foot in the area. There and on subsequent occasions, Malema reiterated his claims that white settlers had stolen the rich natural resources of South Africa, and his calls for nationalisation of the mines. Marikana also launched a series of other strikes that swept through urban and rural South Africa. In a revealing commentary the following Monday, Peter Bruce, editor of the influential Johannesburg newspaper Business Day, confessed to his own traumatic response to this turn of events:

What’s scary about Marikana is that, for the first time, for me, the fact that the ANC and its government do not have the handle they once did on the African majority has come home. The party is already losing the middle classes. If they are now also losing the marginal and the dispossessed, what is left? … To misquote Winston Churchill: it’s not just the beginning of the end. It’s the end of the beginning of the end (Business Day, 20 August 2012).²

The beginning of the end, I suggest, was the Bredell land occupation in early July 2001, when thousands of hopeful settlers ‘bought’ tiny plots on a barren stretch of land between Johannesburg and Pretoria, and ANC officials moved swiftly and violently to evict them.³ Bredell precipitated a profound moral crisis for the ANC government. It also fed into pressures that had been mounting since the mid-1990s, when the ANC’s conservative policies and opening to the global economy dashed hopes of material improvement for many black South Africans. Some of these pressures then found vociferous expression in oppositional movements that burst onto the global stage at the World Conference Against Racism in Durban in August 2001, and the World Summit on Sustainable Development in Johannesburg in 2002. Following the bitter disappointments of the 1990s, the rise of what came to be called ‘new social movements’ – such as the Anti-Privatisation Forum and the Landless Peoples’ Movement – renewed faith in South Africa as a site of hope for many on the left. Activists within and beyond the country heralded the movements as embodiments of counter-hegemonic globalisation and transnational civil society fighting against the ravages of neoliberal capitalism.

Yet this optimism was short-lived: by 2003/04 many of these movements were in a state of disarray. Since then we have witnessed the emergence and proliferation of expressions of popular anger and discontent extending far beyond the reach of the first round of new social movements. These seemingly disparate mobilisations can usefully be understood in the same frame in terms of ‘movement beyond movements’. First, extremely violent outbursts of so-called service delivery protests erupted after the national elections in April 2004, and swept through the country.⁴ Often accompanied by intense rage, these municipal rebellions have become an entrenched feature of everyday life in the heavily segregated black townships and shack settlements of post-apartheid South Africa. Yet these uprisings coexist with what on the surface appears as remarkable acquiescence to appalling material conditions, and with ongoing (albeit uneven) electoral support for the ANC.

Popular support for Jacob Zuma in the second half of the 2000s constitutes a second dimension of ‘movement beyond movements’. Gathering force in 2005, this groundswell of support propelled him into the presidency of the ANC in December 2007, and of the country in May 2009 – despite his having been charged with rape (for which he was acquitted) and threatened with charges of corruption. A third manifestation burst violently on to the scene in May 2008, when 62 people defined as foreigners were brutally murdered, and hundreds of thousands more displaced. The rampage subsided, but everyday forms of xenophobia preceded the pogroms and remain a defining feature of life for many Africans from other parts of the continent – as well as some black South Africans defined as excessively ‘foreign’.

In 2010 yet another expression of anger emerged in the form of demands by the ANC Youth League and its vociferous then-President Julius Malema for ‘economic freedom in our lifetime’ – and, more specifically, for nationalisation of the mines as well as expropriation without compensation of land stolen by whites. Much attention and public commentary has focused on the controversial and flamboyant figure of Malema, who was dismissed from the ANC in April 2012 and faces fraud, corruption and tax evasion charges. Yet there is uneasy recognition that the anger and alienation of large and growing numbers of young men and women rendered ‘surplus’ to the requirements of capital will continue to burgeon even if Malema disappears.

Proliferating expressions of popular discontent over the decade of the 2000s have gone hand in hand with increasing government interventionism. Since 2001 we have witnessed intensified official efforts to manage poverty; rising expenditure at all levels of government; and amplified official ‘pro-poor’ and ‘developmental’ rhetoric. Together with a number of other shifts in official discourses and practices, these moves represent significant departures from harsh home-grown structural adjustment in the first phase of the post-apartheid era (1994–2000).⁵ While it may be tempting to dismiss such efforts as sheep’s clothing draped over a neoliberal capitalist wolf, we do so at our peril because they represent part of an ongoing official battle to contain and control popular discontent. This battle intensified over the decade of the 2000s, accompanied by growing tensions within and between the ANC and its alliance partners, and by the ramping up of populist politics that some see tending towards fascism. As is often the case, the rise of populist politics in South Africa over the 2000s has also gone hand in hand with multiple, proliferating expressions of nationalism.

While this book primarily focuses on South Africa, the processes and challenges it grapples with are far more widespread. South Africa is an extreme but far from exceptional embodiment of forces at play in many regions of the world: (1) massive concentrations of wealth alongside the mushrooming of ‘wageless life’⁶ (or what an administrator of the Bundesbank calls ‘populations with no productive function’);⁷ (2) oppositional politics that are assuming a multiplicity of forms: the Tea Party in the United States (US), explosive Hindu nationalism in India, widespread anti-Muslim and xenophobic sentiments in much of Euro-America, the re-emergence of fascism in Austria and other parts of Europe on the one hand – and, on the other, the uprisings in the Arab world, the Occupy movement and the anti-austerity movements in Greece, Italy and Spain; and (3) official efforts at containment ranging from liberal biopolitical interventions targeting specific populations (often in the name of security) to increasingly common police brutality and rampant militarism.

Defying the hopes and promises of liberation in the early 1990s, South Africa has come to exemplify all these dimensions in a form that is both extreme and deeply racialised – and the political stakes in how we interpret them are exceedingly high.

Rethinking the Transition from Apartheid

In Disabling Globalization: Places of Power in Post-Apartheid South Africa (2002a) I argued that local government was emerging as a key site of contractions in the first phase of post-apartheid restructuring (1994–2000). Over the decade of the 2000s, I maintain in this book, it has become the key site of contradictions. Broadly speaking, local government has become the impossible terrain of official efforts to manage poverty and deprivation in a racially inflected capitalist society marked by massive inequalities and increasingly precarious livelihoods for the large majority of the population. Ironically, attempts to render technical that which is inherently political are feeding into and amplifying the proliferation of populist politics.

While local government contradictions have their own specificities, they cannot be understood simply in local terms. ‘Neoliberalism’ – understood as a class project and manifestation of global economic forces, as well as a rationality of rule – has become the dominant frame for many critical understandings of post-apartheid South Africa, yet, while important, it is inadequate to the task.⁸ In this book I suggest that the turbulent, shifting forces taking shape in the arenas of everyday life need to be situated in relation to simultaneous practices and processes of de-nationalisation and re-nationalisation. Deeply in tension with each other, de-nationalisation and re-nationalisation enable new angles of understanding the transition from apartheid.

At the moment when former president F.W. de Klerk unbanned the ANC and other liberation movements in 1990, the ‘South African nation’ was deeply in question. Quite literally, it had to be conjured into existence from the rubble of a deeply divided past. At precisely that moment, powerful South African conglomerates were straining at the leash to break away from confines of any sort of national economy and reconnect with the increasingly financialised global economy, from which they had been partially excluded during the 1980s by the heightening crisis of the apartheid state.⁹

De-nationalisation refers to alliances through which corporate capital defined the terms of reconnection with the global economy, as well as to the forces unleashed in the process. As such, it encompasses but extends beyond the extremely conservative package of neoliberal macro-economic policies set in place in 1996. The most compelling analysis of changing relations between corporate capital, the global economy and the South African state highlights what Ben Fine and others call the minerals energy complex that has shaped capitalist accumulation in South Africa since the minerals discoveries in the second half of the nineteenth century, and that remains in force today. This analysis, as we shall see, directs attention to the heavily concentrated character of South African corporate capital; the highly advantageous terms on which these conglomerates engineered their re-engagement with the global economy after the fall of apartheid through their relations with strategically placed forces in the ANC; how the conglomerates have restructured and de-nationalised their operations; massive and escalating capital flight; the formation of a small but powerful black capitalist class allied with white corporate capital; understandings of the ‘economy’ fostered through these alliances; their ongoing influence over ANC government policy; and multiple ways these forces continue to play into and intensify brutal inequalities and the degradation of livelihoods of a large proportion of the black South African population.

It is important to emphasise that de-nationalisation does not refer to political intervention in the ‘economy’ conceived as a separate sphere. It signals instead the simultaneously economic, political and cultural practices and processes that are generating ongoing inequality and ‘surplus’ populations, and the conflicts that surround them. De-nationalisation focuses attention on the historical and geographical specificities of southern African racial capitalism and settler colonialism, their interconnections with forces at play in other parts of the world, and their modes of reconnecting with the increasingly financialised global political economy in the post-apartheid period. The forces of de-nationalisation continue to shape the present – but they can only be understood in relation to, and deeply entangled with, practices and processes of re-nationalisation.

One can, I suggest, discern three key dimensions in which re-nationalising practices and processes have taken place. First are inclusive discourses of the ‘rainbow nation’ associated with Nelson Mandela that Ari Sitas (2010) calls ‘indigenerality’ – the liberal, ecclesiastical discourse of forgiveness that made possible the negotiations to end apartheid, and found further expression in the Truth and Reconciliation Commission. Discourses of inclusion were not just imposed from above – like the ‘national question’ discussed later they had (and to some degree still have) popular appeal. Yet, as Sitas argues, they abstracted from and papered over historical geographies of racial oppression, exploitation and racialised dispossession – and were falling apart by the end of the ‘Mandela decade’.

A second key dimension of official post-apartheid re-nationalisation is found in the ANC government’s immigration policies and practices. Indigenerality and rainbowism coincided with what Jonathan Crush (1999a) calls ‘Fortress South Africa’ – the ANC government’s latching onto apartheid-era immigration legislation premised on control, exclusion and expulsion. The Aliens Control Act was repealed in 2002, but the bounding of the nation through immigration policy and practices – as well as popular vigilantism, abuses by police and brutal detention of ‘aliens’ – have ramped up and fed into xenophobia.

Third, the most important elements of post-apartheid nationalism are embodied in the keywords of the ANC Alliance: the ‘national question’ and the National Democratic Revolution (NDR).¹⁰ The NDR refers to the first stage in a two-stage theory of revolution adopted by the South African Communist Party (SACP) in 1962 and subsequently by the ANC, in which the overthrow of the apartheid state would inaugurate a phase of bourgeois national democracy that would pave the way for the second-stage socialist revolution. This aspect of re-nationalisation highlights that it is not a separable ‘political’ process, but is crucially about making the case for accommodation of the inequalities of post-apartheid capitalism as a transitory phenomenon, to be superseded by the (ever-retreating) second phase. Forged in the context of fierce debates over race, class and nationalism since the first part of the twentieth century; elaborated during the anti-apartheid struggle; and reworked in the context of the transition, these terms carry deep popular resonance. Within the ANC Alliance, the NDR has become a site of increasingly vociferous contestation in which articulations of race, class, sexuality, gender, custom and tradition figure prominently.¹¹

Practices and processes of de-nationalisation and re-nationalisation, understood in relation to one another, are crucial to comprehending the amplifying tensions and contradictions through which the ANC’s hegemonic project has been unravelling over the past decade. ANC hegemony hinges crucially on official articulations of nationalism and claims to moral authority through leadership of the liberation movement – an authority that has severely eroded ov...