Alexander Beresford

The Politics of Regenerative Nationalism in South Africa

In recent years the ANC government has encountered increasing unrest in the form of a wave of community protests and industrial action. Some analysts argue that this reflects widespread antipathy towards the ANCs ‘exhausted nationalism’ and the beginnings of a post-nationalist political era where class politics takes centre stage. This article will examine the position of South Africas powerful organised working class within this context, with reference to the attitudes of ordinary members of the National Union of Mineworkers. Rather than seeing ANC nationalism as a spent force, this article will highlight the more enduring nature of the ANCs nationalist appeal, which, while not making the party infallible, nonetheless restricts the potential for a new left-wing politics to emerge that can challenge ANC hegemony.

Infectious Injustice: The political foundations of the Ebola crisis in Sierra Leone

Abstract This article identifies the long-term political factors that contributed to the Ebola crisis in Sierra Leone, factors which are largely overlooked by the emerging international focus on building resilient health systems. We argue that the country exhibits critical symptoms of the recurrent crises of a gatekeeper state, including acute external dependency, patron–client politics, endemic corruption and weak state capacity. A coterie of actors, both internal and external to Sierra Leone, has severely compromised the health system. This left certain sections of the population acutely at risk from Ebola and highlights the need for political solutions to build stronger, inclusive health systems.

Nelson Mandela and the politics of South Africa's unfinished liberation

The death of Nelson Rolihlahla Mandela on 5 December 2013 provoked unprecedented emotional outpourings: newspaper columns swelled with obituaries, politicians lined up to praise this iconic figure, and his passing has been mourned by people from all corners of the globe. And little wonder: Nelson Mandela inspired generations of political activists around the world. He is one of the most revered politicians in world history. One dominant narrative that emerged in the tributes to Mandela was his famed capacity to moderate between competing social forces during the transition. While Mandela had been vilified by successive Western heads of state in the 1980s, Western politicians have since fallen over themselves to praise (and be pictured alongside) the great ‘moderate’ Mandela. Former UK Prime Minister Tony Blair praised Mandela for having:

Liberation movements and stalled democratic transitions: reproducing power in Rwanda and South Africa through productive liminality

ABSTRACT The lack of convergence towards liberal democracy in some African countries reflects neither a permanent state of political aberration, nor necessarily a prolonged transitional phase through which countries pass once the “right” conditions are met. Examining the cases of two ruling parties, the Rwandan Patriotic Front (RPF) and the African National Congress in South Africa, we develop the concept of productive liminality to explain countries suspended (potentially indefinitely) in a status “betwixt and between” mass violence, authoritarianism, and democracy. On the one hand, their societies are in a liminal status wherein a transition to democracy and socio-economic “revolution” remains forestalled; on the other hand, this liminality is instrumentalized to justify the party’s extraordinary mandate characterized by: (a) an idea of an incomplete project of liberation that the party alone is mandated to fulfil through an authoritarian social contract, and (b) the claim that this unfulfilled revolution is continuously under threat by a coterie of malevolent forces, which the party alone is mandated to identify and appropriately sanction.

An Ethnography of Trade Unions in Botswana: Pnina Werbner, The Making of an African Working Class: Politics, Law, and Cultural Protest in the Manual Workers’ Union of Botswana (London, Pluto Press, 2014), xiii + 306 pp., paperback, £22.00, ISBN 978-0-7453-3495-0.

a binary insistence that ignores the fluidity of social and political forms, does not permit any middle ground, and refuses to countenance hybridity. To take a rather obvious example, we are told early on that ‘many migrants’ rejected the ANC version of democracy, but ‘[o]f course, not all migrants hold this view – some support aspects of the ANC’s liberal project for various reasons’. And that is the last we hear or learn of male, middle-aged migrants who do not fit the pattern that provides the book’s analytical bedrock. Instead, there are frequent references to ‘many migrants’, and a couple to ‘most migrants’, with no sociological, ideological or political explanation for the beliefs of the minority. Hickel has some excellent details on Jacob Zuma’s appeal to his migrant informants – how, in 2009, his popularity ‘fundamentally reorganized the political landscape’ – but it leaves one wondering how much the Zuma presidency has altered the ‘cultural logic’ of the anti-democratic migrants? Does the book provide a snapshot of a particular moment, when Inkatha Freedom Party (IFP)/ANC rivalries still permeated the province, and, if so, how reliable a guide is it to the present? The emphasis in the text on the physical differences between rural homestead and urban housing is clear enough, but how would Hickel explain the fact that so much new housing being built by families in rural KwaZulu-Natal is conventionally urban in form? Finally (although the sub-title may have been the publisher’s choice), is the book in any way an effective analysis of ‘anti-liberal politics in South Africa’, or is it more narrowly a testimony to the particularity of KwaZulu-Natal?

Conclusion: Fractured Labour Struggles and the Unfinished Project of Liberation

The events of the last few tumultuous years in South Africa have undoubtedly drawn international focus to the country. The death of the ‘father of the nation’, Nelson Mandela, coupled with the brutal massacre of striking mineworkers in Marikana, provoked a period of reflection on just how far South Africa has progressed in the two decades since apartheid. In one moment, the images of police standing over the bodies of dead workers in Marikana reminded South Africans of a not too distant past, but they also laid bare the realities of South Africa’s violent present. It might sound strange or even alarmist to describe South Africa as a country beset by endemic violence, but not if we consider violence in a broader sense. Structural violence — in the form of massive inequalities of opportunities and resources that prevent people from achieving their full potential — continues to represent the defining feature of post-apartheid society. As Johann Galtung (1969) would have it, we can only consider a nation to have attained a meaningful peace when there is an absence of such structural violence. South Africa’s elusive social peace therefore reflects its unfinished project of liberation, one that has not yet sufficiently emancipated people from massive structural inequalities of class, race and gender.

Class Formation and the Politics of Social Mobility

South Africa’s trade unions are believed to hold the key not only to galvanising a new class politics in South Africa; they are also lauded as an example for labour movements in other parts of the world to follow in their struggles against neoliberal globalisation. This stems from COSATU’s pivotal role in the struggle against apartheid: it was a role made possible by an adherence to what Webster (1988) identified as ‘Social Movement Unionism’ (SMU), combining deeply embedded traditions of democratic shop floor organisation (which encouraged rank-and-file militancy) and engagement in a broader political struggle to overcome apartheid in alliance with other social movements (Baskin 1991; Buhlungu 2004; Friedman 1987; Siedman 1994; Wood 2003). This won the labour movement global acclaim, and academics heralded South Africa’s unions’ virtuous commitment to democratic organisation, membership participation, linkages with civil society and broader social/political goals as a model of unionism that could be replicated elsewhere in an effort to regenerate labour moments in the north in particular (Clawson 2003; Moody 1997; Waterman 2001). Moody (1997: 201–227), for example, implores northern unions to ‘look south’ to the example of SMU offered by unions in Brazil and South Africa who, Moody argues, have retained a ‘solid class outlook’ in their political organisation.

Blurred Ideological Fault Lines

Since the beginnings of the neoliberal era in the 1980s some scholars have argued that alliances between trade unions and political parties can no longer be justified given that they seldom offer anything more to the trade unions than a tokenistic opportunity to influence the party when it takes up a seat of government. Leading labour scholars have thus called on unions to take on a more radical counter-hegemonic posturing by forging alliances with civil society groupings and joining the ‘movement of movements’ against neoliberal globalisation (Fairbrother and Yates 2003; Moody 1997; Turner et al. 2001; Waterman 2001).

Union Democracy, Social Mobility and Stifled Militancy

In the labour studies literature, democratic union organisation and workers’ control over the direction of union struggles are deemed essential to checking the ‘oligarchic tendencies’ of union leaders who, it is assumed, are inherently more inclined to reach accommodations with management or political leaders owing to the bureaucratic pressures on their positions (Lipset 1977; Michels 1962). It is argued that the democratic organisation of unions can act as a counterweight to such bureaucratic tendencies by transferring power to ordinary members and thereby giving greater weight to their demands (Wood 2003).

Exhausted or Regenerative Nationalism

In May 2014 the ANC secured a fifth successive landslide election victory, garnering an impressive 62 per cent of the poll, which reflects the party’s continued domination of South African electoral politics. The ANC, like other liberation movements in the Southern African region (Dorman 2006; Melber 2003), has sought to command a position within South African politics and society that extends well beyond that traditionally occupied by a political party elected to serve a term of office: it discursively constructs itself as a liberation movement charged with radically transforming South African society as part of an ongoing (and seemingly infinite) ‘National Democratic Revolution’ (Darracq 2008; Lodge 2004; Southall 2009, 2013). Dorman notes the manner in which the ANC has employed the ‘exclusionary languages of liberation’ to construct and maintain an insider/outsider dichotomy whereby the ANC depicts itself as the ultimate guarantor of the ‘National Democratic Revolution’, which it alone is mandated to fulfil (Dorman 2006: 1092). Johnson (2003: 218) thus notes how by virtue of its impartiality, the democratic state is seen as the only legitimate expression of the interests of the whole nation, becoming coterminous with the ‘national interest’ or the ‘public will’. At the same time all other demands or proposals for social change emanating from outside the state are viewed as partial, subjective or sectarian, regardless of the legitimacy of the demands.