Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Dedication
- Contents
- Foreword
- Preface
- Acknowledgements
- Introduction: Politics is thought, thought is real, people think
- Part 1 Thinking political sequences: From African history to African historical political sequences
- 1 Theoretical introduction: Understanding historical political sequences
- 2 From Saint-Domingue to Haiti: The politics of freedom and equality, 1791–1960
- 3 Are those-who-do-not-count capable of reason? On the limits of historical thought
- 4 The National Liberation Struggle mode of politics in Africa, 1945–1975
- 5 The People's Power mode of politics in South Africa, 1984–1986
- 6 From national emancipation to national chauvinism in South Africa, 1973–2013
- 7 Rethinking militancy in the current sequence: Beyond politics as agency
- 8 Understanding fidelity to the South African emancipatory event: The Treatment Action Campaign and Abahlali baseMjondolo
- Part 2 Opening up the thought of politics in Africa today: Exceeding the limits of sociology: Beyond representation
- Conclusion: Reclaiming the domain of freedom
- Bibliography
- Index
5 - The People's Power mode of politics in South Africa, 1984–1986
from Part 1 - Thinking political sequences: From African history to African historical political sequences
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 21 April 2018
- Frontmatter
- Dedication
- Contents
- Foreword
- Preface
- Acknowledgements
- Introduction: Politics is thought, thought is real, people think
- Part 1 Thinking political sequences: From African history to African historical political sequences
- 1 Theoretical introduction: Understanding historical political sequences
- 2 From Saint-Domingue to Haiti: The politics of freedom and equality, 1791–1960
- 3 Are those-who-do-not-count capable of reason? On the limits of historical thought
- 4 The National Liberation Struggle mode of politics in Africa, 1945–1975
- 5 The People's Power mode of politics in South Africa, 1984–1986
- 6 From national emancipation to national chauvinism in South Africa, 1973–2013
- 7 Rethinking militancy in the current sequence: Beyond politics as agency
- 8 Understanding fidelity to the South African emancipatory event: The Treatment Action Campaign and Abahlali baseMjondolo
- Part 2 Opening up the thought of politics in Africa today: Exceeding the limits of sociology: Beyond representation
- Conclusion: Reclaiming the domain of freedom
- Bibliography
- Index
Summary
The people shall govern!
– The Freedom Charter, 1955The people have formed these area committees, so that they can try to control themselves.
– An activist from the Eastern Cape, Isizwe, March 1986RETHINKING THE SOUTH AFRICAN LIBERATION STRUGGLE
Having shown at some length the features of the National Liberation Struggle (NLS) mode of politics, I now wish to assess how it was transcended in South Africa in the 1980s. I will outline the new popularly based subjectivities which saw the light of day in that decade and will argue that the period 1984–6 witnessed an event (in Badiou's sense of the term) in South Africa. This event gave birth to a new mode of politics for the 21st century in Africa, which can be called the People's Power mode of politics, one that was revived in 2011 in North Africa. I will suggest that the People's Power mode in South Africa inaugurated a frankly new way of thinking emancipatory politics for the 21st century, which has attempted to overcome some of the limitations of the NLS mode on the continent.
Throughout this chapter, the struggle for liberation in South Africa is considered within an African context, as illustrative of and not exceptional to an African experience, for it also occurred, although to a more limited extent, in Nigeria, Congo- Zaire and elsewhere and ultimately resulted in the formation of liberal-democratic state systems in most of the continent. This form of state became both the norm and a condition for the spread of neo-liberal capitalism in Africa. South Africa is, after all, probably the most consistently politically neo-liberal of African countries, at least in the eyes of empire, which regularly sets it up (along with Botswana and Mauritius) as a model for the continent. What was optimistically named the ‘second independence’ of the continent was not born exclusively of the neo-colonial imposition of neo-liberal economic policies; it was also, and primarily in South Africa, the result of mass popular movements which, for a while at least, challenged the dominance of capitalist hegem-ony and its attendant state modes of rule. Given that this period is occluded today, it is imperative to provide an assessment of it, especially as it produced a number of political innovations of universal significance.
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- Information
- Thinking Freedom in AfricaToward a Theory of Emancipatory Politics, pp. 134 - 156Publisher: Wits University PressPrint publication year: 2016