Shauna Mottiar

A Rewarding Engagement? The Treatment Action Campaign and the Politics of HIV/AIDS

The current spread of democracy has not enabled the poor to use rights to win equity, raising questions about whether the poor and weak can use liberal democratic freedoms to address inequality. An oft-cited model of success, however, is the Treatment Action Campaign (TAC)’s campaign to press the South African government into distributing anti-retroviral medication to people living with HIV/AIDS. This article finds that TAC’s strategy of using the rights and rules of constitutional democracy to win gains may offer an exemplar for forms of collective action which can win substantive equality, but that the model remains of limited application.

Movements, protests and a massacre in South Africa

Abstract The Marikana Massacre of August 2012 exposed the most unstable configuration of forces in post-apartheid South Africa, forged through entrenched social and economic inequalities, ecological degradation, indebtedness and corruption. Dissent against prevailing power relations had arisen over many years, with impoverished communities registering thousands of ‘service delivery protests’, seemingly without either resolution or maturation into durable social movements. However, the critical missing linkages between trade unions and urban communities were finally found in Rustenberg, 100 km west of Johannesburg, in a strike which fused labour, social, gendered, environmental and other interests. In the months following the Marikana, it became apparent that some sought to weave a genuine national revolt of the sort witnessed in 2011 across North Africa. However, this challenge to the elite political economy faced extreme difficulties, with fragments of populist, post-nationalist and working-class politics remaining isolated from the largest trade union, Communist Party and nationalist forces within the working- and middle classes.

The Politics of Discontent and Social Protest in Durban

Social protests in South Africa are frequent, contributing to an average of more than 8000 ‘Gatherings Act’ incidents per year recently, according to the South African Police Service. This paper is focused on discontent and social protest in Durban in 2009–2012, considering emerging trends and tactics within current understandings of social protest in South Africa. It relies mainly on mainstream media articles such as those archived in the Centre for Civil Society Social Protest Observatory. The paper examines various protest activities and protest victories in Durban, arguing that in the light of state failure, protest has been an important mechanism through which Durban citizens have made gains in the struggle for improved socio-economic conditions.

Protest in South Africa: motives and meanings

South Africa is experiencing record levels of protest. Interpretations of protest fall into two groups. First, there is the argument that protests represent only limited rebellion and that though unruly, they are a mechanism for political re-engagement. A second understanding links “new social movements” that address general grievances to wider hegemonic challenges. This article addresses the issue of whether these upsurges in militant mobilization threaten or complement democratic procedures. The article draws from a study of two protest “hotspots” in Durban.

Protest and Participation in Durban: A Focus on Cato Manor, Merebank and Wentworth

Abstract This paper considers how Durban citizens understand protest and what other methods of participation they employ in their pursuit of service delivery, democratic citizenship and social change. It is based on a sample of 20 households drawn from Cato Manor, a ‘hotspot’ for ‘service delivery’ protest as well as Merebank and Wentworth situated in the South Durban basin well known for its civil society/community opposition to local petrochemical refineries. The paper employs theories of ‘invited’ and ‘invented’ spaces of participation and ‘participation as citizenship’ to understand protest and participation among Durbans low-income, urban citizens. It argues that protest and formal participation methods are used in parallel, but with differing levels of intensity across communities depending on how people view agency and democratic citizenship. The paper also considers the role of social movements and non-governmental organisations, arguing that their initiatives to effect ‘transformative’ participation have their limits.

Women's organisations and the struggle for water and sanitation services in Chatsworth and Inanda, Durban: The Westcliff Flats Residents Association and the Didiyela Women's Group

Struggles for the right to basic water and sanitation in Chatsworth and Inanda, Durban, have largely been undertaken by civil society organisations lead by women and comprising mainly female membership. This Perspective, following a typology put forward by Rachel Einwohner, Jocelyn Hollander and Toska Olson (2000), examines the way in which two of these organisations namely the Westcliff Flats Residents Association and the Didiyela Womens Group are gendered pertaining to composition, goals, tactics, identities and attributions. In terms of composition, it considers how movement issues may attract larger numbers of female as opposed to male members. In terms of goals it considers movement objectives and the level of attempts to transform gender hierarchies or differentiation. With regards to tactics the way protest is framed is examined including anything from demonstrations and picketing, to the signs and symbols employed by movement protestors. With regards to identities it is questioned whether movement actors include cultural meanings about gender into their identities and whether they use these identities to lay claim to certain issues. A review of attributions centres on the ways that meanings are attributed to movements by those outside of the movement, including its opponents, and whether stereotypes about gender alter responses towards the movements they are attributed to. In adopting this typology for analysis, the writers attempt to add some insight into the extent that approaches and techniques employed by womens organisations have been successful in securing the right to basic water and sanitation.

The role of community health workers in supporting South Africa’s HIV/ AIDS treatment programme

Community health workers deployed around South Africa’s primary health care clinics, supply indispensable support for the world’s largest HIV/AIDS treatment programme. Interviews with these workers illuminated the contribution they make to anti-retroviral treatment (ART) of HIV/AIDS patients and the motivations that sustain their engagement. Their testimony highlights points of stress in the programme and supplies insights into the quality of its implementation. Finally, the paper addresses issues about the sustainability of a programme that depends on a group of workers who are not yet fully incorporated into the public sector.

How social movements survive: the Treatment Action Campaign and the South African state, 2009–2016

Abstract This paper seeks to explain the survival of the Treatment Action Campaign (TAC) and to identify lessons it may offer on how social movements may resist demobilisation. It considers the role the TAC plays in the creation of social accountability dynamics around primary health care but with broader implications for strengthening rights-based notions of citizenship. The paper examines the TAC’s relative success in democratising public health care provision and explores shifts in the relationship between this social movement organisation and the South African state.