Contesting the ‘Active’ in active citizenship: youth activism in Cape Town, South Africa

ABSTRACT

In post-apartheid South Africa, efforts to encourage practices of citizenship and new citizens who will act in ways that support communities and the nation are promoted by government policies and networks of international organizations, civil society groups, and NGOs. In this paper, we analyse the pedagogy of citizenship that is common in these efforts and the role of ‘active citizenship’ within it. Relying on interviews with leaders of NGOs and activist groups and on participatory research with six organizations, we examine the ways in which different meanings and aspects of active citizenship are mobilized. Active citizenship is often dismissed depoliticizing citizenship and dampening dissent. The activists we interviewed and with whom we worked, however, challenge that critique. A central issue in our analysis are competing views as to whether active citizenship should be evaluated in terms of ‘effectiveness’ or ‘disruption.’ While some agents might incline toward effective and incremental change, many youth activists understand active citizenship as a tool that enables radical, disruptive acts capable of decolonizing South African society. Their use of active citizenship points to the need to avoid conflating citizenship with particular political goals and to not assume that active citizenship is necessarily and unequivocally enrolled in post-political consensus.

KEYWORDS:

• Active citizenship
• protest
• post-politics
• South Africa
• youth

Acknowledgements

The authors would like to acknowledge the very helpful comments of our reviewers and of Ronan Paddison.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes on contributors

Chloé Buire is a Researcher at the Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique. Her research uses visual ethnography to explore the construction of political identities in Cape Town (South Africa) and Luanda (Angola).

Lynn A. Staeheli is Professor of Human Geography at Durham University. Her research expertise includes citizenship, democracy, public space, youth, and protest.

ORCID

Lynn A. Staeheli http://orcid.org/0000-0001-7223-0970

Notes

1 As discussed in the third section of the paper, the names of individuals and organizations have been changed. Individuals were aware that the distinctive, and occasionally high-profile, nature of their work meant that it was possible they could still be identified.

2 Ubuntu has been widely promoted in citizenship education and training programmes as a specifically African way of being part of a community of humans. In these programmes, ubuntu is presented as a set of norms that incorporate respect, responsibility and common bonds that link all of humanity. While presented as coming from southern African traditions, Jansen (2009) argues that the specific forms and practices that were promoted in the name of ubuntu have more to do with the need to imagine new ways of living together in a non-racialist society than they did with the forms that ubuntu takes in traditional societies.

3 See also Ranciere (1999) and Dean (2009) who present a similar argument with respect to democracy more generally. Dean is more cautious and qualified in her analysis, however. It should also be noted that in the South African context, the word ‘transformation’ is used specifically to speak about the unmaking of racial hierarchies and divisions that are structurally embedded in society.

4 In South African policies, the category ‘youth’ includes people under 35 years of age.

5 The ‘Bill’ of Responsibility was produced by the Department of Basic Education in 2008. The Bill is not a law, but instead is a guide for students and teachers outlining the responsibilities that come with the rights enumerated in the new constitution. In 2011, LeadSA, a civil society organization, partnered with the Department to launch a campaign to spread the Bill and the values its promotes more broadly through public events, social enterprises, and NGO programming.

6 For a theoretical discussion, see Parnell and Pieterse (2010).

Additional information

Funding

This research was funded through the European Research Council Advanced Grant, Youth Citizenship in Divided Societies: Between Cosmopolitanism, Nation and Civil Society [ERC 295392].