Popular Politics and Resistance Movements in South Africa

Thula Simpson, Mfaniseni Fana Sihlongonyane, Chizuko Sato, Kelly Rosenthal, Mandisa Mbali, Genevieve Klein, Simonne Horwitz, Rebecca Hodes, Tim Gibbs, Marcelle C. Dawson, Tracy Carson, Julian Brown, William Beinart

Description

This volume explores some of the key features of popular politics and resistance before and after 1994. It looks at continuities and changes in the forms of struggle and ideologies involved, as well as the significance of post-apartheid grassroots politics. Is this a new form of politics or does it stand as a direct descendent of the insurrectionary impulses of the late apartheid era? Posing questions about continuity and change before and after 1994 raises key issues concerning the nature of power and poverty in the country. Contributors suggest that expressions of popular politics are deeply set within South African political culture and still have the capacity to influence political outcomes. The introduction by William Beinart links the papers together, places them in context of recent literature on popular politics and ‘history from below’ and summarises their main findings, supporting the argument that popular politics outside of the party system remain significant in South Africa and help influence national politics. The roots of this collection lie in post-graduate student research conducted at the University of Oxford in the early twenty-first century.
Chapter 1: Popular politics and resistance movements in South Africa, 1970–2008
William Beinart
Chapter 2: The Durban strikes of 1973: Political identities and the management of protest
Julian Brown
Chapter 3: ‘There’s more to it than slurp and burp’: The Fatti’s & Moni’s strike and the use of boycotts in mass resistance in Cape Town
Tracy Carson
Chapter 4: The role of the African National Congress in popular protest during the township uprisings, 1984–1989
Thula Simpson
Chapter 5: Strategies of struggle: The Nelson Mandela campaign
Genevieve Klein
Chapter 6: From removals to reform: Land struggles in Weenen in KwaZulu-Natal, South Africa
Chizuko Sato
Chapter 7: From popular resistance to populist politics in the Transkei
Tim Gibbs
Chapter 8: ‘It’s a beautiful struggle’: Siyayinqoba/Beat it! and the HIV/AIDS treatment struggle on South African television
Rebecca Hodes
Chapter 9: The Nelson Mandela Museum and the tyranny of political symbols
Mfaniseni Fana Sihlongonyane
Chapter 10: Black nurses’ strikes at Baragwanath Hospital, Soweto, 1948–2007
Simonne Horwitz
Chapter 11: The ‘New Struggle’: Resources, networks and the formation of the Treatment Action Campaign (TAC) 1994–1998
Mandisa Mbali
Chapter 12: New social movements as civil society: The case of past and present Soweto
Kelly Rosenthal
Chapter 13: ‘Phansi Privatisation! Phansi!’: The Anti-Privatisation Forum and ideology in social movements
Marcelle C. Dawson

Sujets

• Post-Colonialism
• Political Science
• HISTORY
• África
• General officer
• History of Africa
• Colonialism
• General
• Africa

Informations

• Publié par: WITS University Press
• Date de parution: 01 décembre 2010
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781868149438
• Langue: English
• Poids de l'ouvrage: 2 Mo

Extrait

Popular Politics and Resistance Movements in South Africa

Published in South Africa by:
Wits University Press
1 Jan Smuts Avenue
Johannesburg
2001
http://witspress.wits.ac.za
Published edition copyright © Wits University Press 2010
Compilation copyright © Edition editors 2010
Chapter copyright © Individual contributors 2010-09-01
First published 2010
ISBN 978-1-86814-518-8
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the written permission of the publisher, except in accordance with the provisions of the Copyright Act, Act 98 of 1978.
Cover photograph: Africa Media Online – Graeme Williams – Protest March
Cover design by Hybridesign
Book design and layout by Sheaf Publishing
Printed and bound by Creda Communications
Contents
Contributors
List of Abbreviations and Acronyms
1 Popular politics and resistance movements in South Africa, 1970–2008
William Beinart
2 The Durban strikes of 1973: Political identities and the management of protest
Julian Brown
3 ‘There’s more to it than slurp and burp’: The Fatti’s & Moni’s strike and the use of boycotts in mass resistance in Cape Town
Tracy Carson
4 The role of the African National Congress in popular protest during the township uprisings, 1984–1989
Thula Simpson
5 Strategies of struggle: The Nelson Mandela campaign
Genevieve Klein
6 From removals to reform: Land struggles in Weenen in KwaZulu-Natal, South Africa
Chizuko Sato
7 From popular resistance to populist politics in the Transkei
Tim Gibbs
8 ‘It’s a beautiful struggle’: Siyayinqoba/Beat it! and the HIV/AIDS treatment struggle on South African television
Rebecca Hodes
9 The Nelson Mandela Museum and the tyranny of political symbols
Mfaniseni Fana Sihlongonyane
10 Black nurses’ strikes at Baragwanath Hospital, Soweto, 1948–2007
Simonne Horwitz
11 The ‘New Struggle’: Resources, networks and the formation of the Treatment Action Campaign (TAC) 1994–1998
Mandisa Mbali
12 New social movements as civil society: The case of past and present Soweto
Kelly Rosenthal
13 ‘Phansi Privatisation! Phansi!’: The Anti-Privatisation Forum and ideology in social movements
Marcelle C. Dawson
Endnotes
Bibliography
Index
Contributors
William Beinart is professor of Race Relations at the University of Oxford. In recent years he has been involved in establishing the African Studies Centre and the School of Interdisciplinary Area Studies at Oxford and is currently president of the African Studies Association of the UK. He is author of Twentieth-century South Africa (2001); Rise of Conservation in South Africa (2003); with Lotte Hughes, Environment and Empire (2007); and with Luvuyo Wotshela, Prickly Pear: The Social History of a Plant in South Africa (forthcoming). He is currently researching and supervising on environmental history and popular politics in Southern Africa.
Julian Brown completed a DPhil thesis on ‘Public protest and violence in South Africa, 1948–1976’ at the University of Oxford. He is currently engaged as a post-doctoral research fellow in the NRF Programme in Historical Research, ‘Local Histories and Present Realities’, at the University of the Witwatersrand. His research focuses on the development of political and factional identity in the northern Free State.
Tracy Carson began her doctoral studies at Oxford University in 2004 on a British Marshall Scholarship. Upon completion of her DPhil in 2008 she was awarded a US Fulbright Scholarship to continue her research in Cape Town, South Africa. She is currently completing a two-year internship with the US federal government as a Presidential Management Fellow and her first book, Tomorrow It Could Be You: Strikes and Boycotts in South Africa, 1978–1982 , will be published in 2010.
Marcelle C. Dawson works as a senior researcher attached to the South African Research Chair in Social Change at the University of Johannesburg. She obtained a DPhil in Politics from the University of Oxford in 2008. She is a member of the editorial collective of the South African Review of Sociology , the official journal of the South African Sociological Association. Her work has been published in Race, Ethnicity and Education , Journal of Higher Education in Africa , Citizenship Studies and Globalisation and New Identities: A View from the Middle (Jacana Media, 2006). Dawson researches and supervises topics related to social movements, popular protest, service delivery and democracy. Her current projects include the policing of protest in post-apartheid South Africa and ‘southern theorising’ of social movements.
Tim Gibbs is based at St Antony’s College, Oxford, where he is completing his doctoral thesis on nationalism and Transkei’s elite during the apartheid period. He took his undergraduate degree at Cambridge University and completed a master’s in Development Studies at the University of KwaZulu-Natal, writing a dissertation on the textiles trade unions in Lesotho. His work has been published in the Journal of Southern African Studies .
Rebecca Hodes is deputy director of the AIDS and Society Research Unit at the University of Cape Town. She completed her DPhil at the University of Oxford in 2009. Extracts from her thesis, which focused on HIV on South African television, have been published in the Social History of Medicine and The Culture of AIDS in Africa (Oxford University Press). During 2009, Hodes was the manager of policy, communications and research at the Treatment Action Campaign. Her current research focuses on the responses of HIV activists to the global economic crisis. She is also the co-founder of the Students HIV/AIDS Resistance Campaign (Rhodes University).
Simonne Horwitz graduated with a DPhil from the University of Oxford in 2007. She is currently an assistant professor of History at the University of Saskatchewan, where her major teaching, supervision and research areas are in African History and the History of Medicine. She has published on nursing history in Social History of Medicine , as well as on the history of leprosy in African Studies . Her current research focuses on comparative histories and on the history of HIV/AIDS.
Genevieve Klein was awarded a DPhil from the University of Oxford in 2007 for her thesis, ‘The Anti-Apartheid Movement (AAM) in Britain and support for the African National Congress (ANC), 1976–1990’. Her honours and master’s studies were completed at the University of Pretoria with dissertations on Dutch-South African relations during apartheid and the Dutch anti-apartheid movements, respectively. She has published articles on this research in the Journal of Southern African Studies , South African Diaspora Review , and Journal for Contemporary History . Klein is currently a research collaborator at the Department of Historical and Heritage Studies, University of Pretoria.
Mandisa Mbali is a post-doctoral associate in the History of Medicine at Yale University. She obtained her DPhil in Modern History at the University of Oxford in 2009. She has published articles on the political history of AIDS activism in South Africa, AIDS denialism and AIDS policymaking. Mbali is conducting ongoing research on the history of AIDS activism, health activism, public health policy and ethics, migration and health, and the politics of gender and sexuality in Southern Africa.
Kelly Rosenthal completed her undergraduate and honours degrees in Social Anthropology at the University of Cape Town, before moving to Oxford to pursue a master’s in African Studies. She is currently completing her doctorate at Oxford in Social Anthropology. Her research focuses on socio-economic rights in post-apartheid South Africa, activism and citizenship.
Chizuko Sato is a research fellow at the Institute of Developing Economies, a parastatal research institute in Chiba, Japan. She obtained a DPhil in politics from the University of Oxford in 2007. Her doctoral dissertation examined the development of land struggles in late twentieth-century KwaZulu-Natal, South Africa, focusing on the interactions between liberal activists and black community leaders. She is currently working on a comparative research project on the international migration of nurses from Asia and Africa.
Mfaniseni Fana Sihlongonyane is an associate professor at the School of Architecture and Planning at the University of the Witwatersrand. He obtained a DPhil from Oxford in 2009. His interests are spread over a wide range of theoretical, applied and policy arenas in the global as well as African realms of development. His work encompasses the interface between development and urban studies, largely within the context of the dynamics of the political economy in Africa. He has researched and published in the areas of land reform, housing, planning, gender, spatial development, urban politics, local economic development, community development, political culture and African cities. His insights into the exploration of these areas come from his experience as a GlobalAfrican.
Thula Simpson received his DPhil from Birkbeck College, University of London, in 2007 for a dissertation on the ANC’s armed struggle. He completed a two-year post-doctoral fellowship at the University of Pretoria between 2007 and 2009, and is currently senior lecturer in the Historical and Heritage Studies Department at the University of Pretoria. He has published articles based on his research in the South African Historical Journal , Journal of Southern African Studies, Social Dynamics and African Historical Review.
List of Abbreviations and Acronyms AAC Alexandra Action Committee AAM Anti-Apartheid Movement ACT UP AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power AFRA Association for Rural Advancement ALP AIDS Law Project ANC African National Congress APF Anti-Privatisation Forum ARP Alexandra