Mapping movement landscapes in South Africa

ABSTRACT

The concept of a movement landscape is used to analyse continuities and changes in popular mobilization since the end of formal apartheid. Focusing on four different episodes of protest since 1997, the article examines their relationship to the ANC movement and traditions, and their organizational forms. It finds a general theme of fluid and ephemeral organization, and a distrust of formal hierarchal organization, that is relatively new in South Africa. The Marikana strikes produced the most far-reaching organizational realignments, while the student struggles generated the most innovative re-imaginings of political forms and discourses. It concludes that although there have been critiques of and challenges to the ANC tradition, and experiments with new forms of organizing, they have not produced alternatives that have lasted or dislodged the dominant approaches defined and popularized by the ANC movement.

KEYWORDS:

• ANC
• collective action
• movement landscape
• organization
• ‘post-apartheid’
• protest
• social movements

Acknowledgements

We would like to acknowledge the contribution made to our thinking by fellow researchers Malose Langa, Crispen Chinguno, and Ahmed Veriava, and the helpful comments of many colleagues, and three anonymous reviewers.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1. Karl von Holdt writes: an idea encountered in a conversation with Laurence Cox at the annual Manchester ‘Alternative Futures and Popular Protest’ conference in 2014; it is intriguing to see how similarly our thinking has evolved in parallel since that discussion, though with significant differences of emphasis – see the references above. ‘Movement landscape’ provides a richly productive metaphor, and I am deeply indebted to Cox for sparking this exploration.

2. From here on, we use the term ‘Congress’ to refer to the broader set of organisations and traditions at the centre of which is the ANC, and ‘ANC’ to refer to the organisation so named.

3. The term ‘new social movements’ as used here does not correspond with its prior use in the context of Europe and North America. In South Africa, it became popular after 1998 in reference to a number of movements that emerged after 1994 and outside the old political formations.

4. Our use of the term ‘elite’ in this context is a relative one. In poor communities, such elite layers include some who are distinguished by wealth derived from local businesses or insertion into important regional networks of patronage; others simply possess some political capital by virtue of their history as ANC activists and location in one or other of the ANC constellation of organisations, and thus have some potential to claim patronage or dispense it on a small scale.

5. The Congress movement of the 1980s developed a strategy of organising in multiple ‘sites of struggle’, including schools and universities, combining struggles for specific changes in each such site with a national struggle to end apartheid.

6. Government reduced subsidies to universities in the late 1990s. Institutions of higher learning began to operate increasingly along business principles, with some of the results including rapidly and continually increasing student fees, and the contracting out (or outsourcing) of functions considered to be ‘support’ rather than ‘core’ services to private companies (Naidoo, 2006, 2009; Pendlebury & van der Walt, 2006).

Additional information

Funding

This work is drawn from research supported by the National Institute for the Humanities and the Social Sciences (South Africa), Ford Foundation, The Royal Norwegian Embassy, Pretoria, the CS Mott Foundation, and the National Research Foundation (South Africa).

Notes on contributors

Karl von Holdt

Karl von Holdt is director of the Society, Work and Politics Institute (SWOP) at the University of the Witwatersrand, where he has led research on community protest and on labour on the platinum mines. He was active in labour, community, and political circles in the 1980s and worked as a policy and strategy researcher with the Congress of South African Trade Unions (COSATU) in the 1990s and 2000s.

Prishani Naidoo

Prishani Naidoo was a founding member of the Anti-Privatization Forum (APF), coordinating its research subcommittee. She also interacted with social movements nationally through coordinating the Independent Media Centre–South Africa (Indymedia–SA). Her PhD research focused on struggles of the poor after 1994. Most recently, both authors have been part of and offered support to #FeesMustFall and #OutsourcingMustFall.