Contemporary theory can be used at this moment to properly explain how a country like South Africa which presents a picture of a rainbow nation, full of possibility, where democracy seems to be working is actually a xenophobic, corrupt, often violently authoritarian, poverty stricken society were majority of the people feel a sense of betrayal in terms of the dream that was sold to them as to the kind of society South Africa would become post-Apartheid. This essay will look at the firstly the issue of land in South Africa which has sparked a lot of unrest and has often been incorrectly labeled as being an issue of service delivery when it is actually a political problem. Also looking at the role of civil society in further marginalizing the masses and the manner in which people have been separated from politics though engaging with them as populations and not as citizens. Politics in South Africa has become technocratic, everything is about how much the government can provide, not how much people can influence government and exercise real political power and lastly the essay will engage with Lewis Gordon’s argument about how people are turned into problems which he draws off Frantz Fanon’s idea of the lived experience of oppression.
The
issue of land and space in South Africa has been the most dominant cause when
it comes to popular uprisings. The current situation is one where poor black
South Africans are still as economically and politically disenfranchised as
they were during apartheid; they remain landless and spatially or
geographically excluded from the rest of the society. The “liberation” of South
Africa has resulted in no real transfer of power into the hands of the people,
what has occurred now is that South Africa is in a state of what Nigel Gibson
refers to as “neoapartheid” (Gibson,
2011: 6). There has not been any real systematic change that allows power to
work from the bottom up, the system is still the same, it just has a black face
to it. In The Wretched of the Earth, Fanon writes that when a true, complete
liberation has occurred the proof “lies in a social fabric that has been
changed inside out” (1961[2004]:1). In a complete revolution every part of the
society must be “changed inside out” and Fanon also states that “the last shall
be first” (1961[2004]:2). This has not occurred in South Africa. The people at
the bottom, the disenfranchised remain the last and are systematically excluded
from exercising any economic or political power. The system of oppression still
exists except in contemporary South Africa it is not through systematic racism
like during apartheid now it is the poor who are oppressed. South Africa is
painted as this rainbow nation with an emerging powerful black elite, but the
majority of the previously disadvantaged people in South Africa are still
exactly that, disadvantaged.
A
colonized world is divided into two different worlds, the world of the
dominated and the world of the oppressor. This speaks to the land issue in
contemporary South Africa, which is rooted in the actual transition from
apartheid to the “new South Africa”. “Fanon challenged the newly independent
nations to deal with the legacies of colonialism by redistributing land and
decentralising political power horizontally” (Gibson, 2011: 12), the new South
Africa has not risen to the challenge. The end of apartheid did not occur
through a total revolution but through a compromise between the old apartheid
regime and the African National Congress
(ANC), “this means that only a government succession occurred instead of state
succession…the ANC leadership and its negotiating partners – in the same manner
described by Fanon – pressurized by the USA, Britain, France, Germany, Japan,
the World Bank and IMF, among others, and obsessed by an intense desire to
destroy racial apartheid, opted for a nonracial liberal democratic model but
not for true independence ” (More, 2011). That is why land has not been
redistributed and power has not been horizontally distributed, the system of
oppression still exists, it just does not oppress non-white people anymore, it
is the poor who are marginalized.
Unlike in the apartheid era where
there were these two totally different spaces occupied by two different groups
according to race, now it is separated according to socio-economic power, which
has never touched the hands of the people outside the elite club of the ruling
bourgeoisie. The land issue in South Africa can be highlighted by looking at
the mass mobilization of the shack dwellers movement, Abahlali baseMjondolo who
are challenging the spatial layout of the “new democratic South Africa” which
mirrors the spatial layout of apartheid South Africa. Abahlali came about as a
result of the people living in shack settlements, where the conditions are
terrible; there is a constant struggle for decent housing, clean water,
electricity and against the introduction of Slums Clearance program by former
housing minister Dumisani Makhaye. The Slums Clearance program allowed the
state to forcefully remove people from their shack settlements which are close
to the city centers and move them to areas outside of the city (Zikode, 2009:
10). The Slums Clearance program was fundamentally undemocratic because none of
the actual people who were being removed where consulted, the decisions were
made from the top-down. As a result of the government succession and not a state
succession, post-apartheid South Africa is democratic in the sense that
everyone has equal rights but not everybody has a right to govern. The ruling
party has created a political arena where only they have the right to make
decisions that affect ordinary South African’s without any consultation and the
ANC legitimates this kind of behaviour where the party acts like it knows what
is best for the people by its continued use of history of the struggle for
liberation. The ANC continues to remind people that it is the party of Nelson
Mandela, Oliver Tambo and Walter Sisulu, constantly reminding people that it is
them that liberated South Africans the chains of apartheid (Zikode, 2009: 9). Fanon speaks about this when he argues that
the liberators end up betraying the people and will use their history and will
wave their national flags as a way of masking the simple fact that they have
failed the people. In South Africa’s case the ruling party failed too, in terms
of the promise that “the people shall govern”. Fanon writes “The leader
pacifies the people. For years on end after independence has been won, we see
him, incapable of urging the people to a concrete task, unable to open the
future to them or of flinging them into the path of national reconstruction, that
is to say, of their own reconstruction; we see him reassessing the history of
independence and recalling the sacred unity of the struggle for
liberation…During the struggle for liberation the leader awakened the people
and promised them a forward march, heroic and unmitigated. Today, he uses every
means to put them to sleep” (Fanon, 1961[2004]).
Abahlali are against
this idea of power being used in a top-down system and people being excluded
from really governing themselves. S’bu Zikode, speaks about a living politics
which is the politics of lived experience, living politics goes against the
idea that ordinary people cannot take part in politics or that they do not have
the ideas or the knowledge necessary to take part in politics. Living politics
says that you do not need to be a politician to know that you do not have
adequate water, electricity, housing and other social services, “it is not
complicated; it does not require big books to find the information. It doesn’t
have a hidden agenda-it is a politics of living that is founded only on the
nature of living. Every person can understand these kinds of demands and every
person has to recognize that these demands are legitimate” (Zikode, 2009).
Michael Neocosmos argues that Abahlali baseMjondolo are the closest
attempt by South Africans be stay committed or faithful to period between
1984-1986 where there was mass mobilisation against apartheid. “In the period
between 1984-86, it can be described as an ‘event’ in Badiou’s sense of the
word, meaning a process after which the political reality of the situation
could no longer simply be understood in the old way it had before (Neocosmos,
2007: 20). Badiou argues that emancipatory experiences do not come out of the
ordinary and they have the ability to transform a particular space. Badiou
argues that emancipatory politics cannot happen through the states as the state
is oppressive and it limits the possibility of an event occurring, the state is
“the system of constraints that limits the possibility of possibilities...the
state organizes and maintains, often by force, the distinction between what is
possible and what isn’t. It follows clearly from this that an event is
something that can occur only to the extent that it is subtracted from the
power of the State” (Badiou, 2010: 7). Emancipatory events require political
will, which is autonomous free will that cannot be achieved through
representation, it is about direct engagement. “An exercise in political will
involves taking power, not receiving it, on the assumption that (as a matter of
‘reason’ or ‘natural right’) the people are objects” (Hallward, 2010: 125).
Abahlali baseMjondolo’s term ‘living politics’ is again relevant here as it
shows how they as a movement are not going to wait for someone to bring them
power, for their humanity to be presented to them from another source, they are
taking it into their own hand. They have decided to take part in politics
themselves not through NGOs and they are not going to wait to be told when they
are ready or worthy of taking part in politics that effects them. The kind of
politics they are promoting is about equality and direct participation
(Hallward, 2010: 126).
The United Democratic Front (UDF) between the 1984-86 space but also
generally was engaged in the kind of emancipatory project that Hallward and
Badiou speak about where there is collective political will, people stood up
for themselves and decided to take power into their own hands. The UDF was a
mass movement, that mobilized everybody from the trade union to students organizations,
sports club, churches and many more who became active citizens in the fight
again apartheid and the UDF to a large extent succeeded in making South Africa
ungovernable (Neocosmos, 2007: 21). The UDF was not a political party, although
there was a leadership, the leadership was expected to be accountable, had to
report back directly any information that needed to be reported back because
the movement saw knowledge as power and the leadership had to be open to
criticism (Neocosmos, 2007: 24). The kind of leadership demanded within the UDF
is a far cry from the leaders in government and the ANC, which absorbed the
UDF, who take any form criticism as an attack.
When the ANC came out of exile and
it and other anti-apartheid organizations were unbanned, the UDF disbanded into
the ANC. What resulted was “the gradual de-politicisation of civics and the
renegotiation of their role vis a vis the state” (Neocosmos, 2007: 26). Not
only were the masses depoliticised but they also lost their agency in terms of
the role they had played in bringing down apartheid, the whole struggle against
apartheid was historicized into the struggle of the ANC against apartheid. Post
Apartheid South Africa has not stayed faithful to the event of 1984- 1986. Max
du Preez wrote a newspaper article in response to the recent attempts by
non-profit organisation Proudly Manenberg to relaunch the UDF and the negative
response they received from former UDF leaders Trevor Manuel and Pravin Gordhan
among others. These former leaders now part of the ANC or the part of
government in general have responded by saying that the ANC has stayed
committed to the mission of the UDF, Du Preez writes “If anyone told me in the
mid- to late-1980s that the UDF would one day be “an integral part” of a party
that had turned its back on the masses; sold out the youth by criminally
neglecting education; harboured corrupt leaders; celebrated politicians
recklessly driving expensive limousines in blue-light convoys, I would probably
not have believed it. Manuel, Cronin, Mfeketo and Gordhan serve in senior ANC
and government positions. I accept that they are truly concerned about the
sullying of the good name of the UDF. But they will forgive me if I’m a wee bit
cynical and ask them exactly what they have done to get the ANC to stick to the
UDF’s mission to bring freedom and dignity to all the people of SA” (du Preez,
2012). South Africa has not shown any fidelity to the event of 1984-1986 except
in the form of Abahlali who employ the same tactics of taking power into their
own hands and working outside of the state.
Other than grassroots organisations like Abahlali, social movements and
civil society in post-apartheid South Africa have often also taken the form of
Non-Governmental Organizations (NGOs). Partha
Chatterjee claims that "Civil society as an ideal continues
to energize an interventionist political project, but as an actually
existing form it is demographically limited" (Chatterjee,
2004:39). Chatterjee talks about how during Marx and Hegel’s time, civil
society used to include anything that was not part of the state including for
example corporations, the family and the market, however now it only includes
NGOs. Civil society as it is today, Chatterjee claims is an “ideal (that) continues
to energize an interventionist political project, but as an actually
existing form it is demographically limited" (Chatterjee,
2004:39) in that civil society (NGOs) are seen as being there to speak for the
people, that civil society is good and inclusive when in reality, civil society
is undemocratic and all NGOs have their own agendas. The spreading of the
neoliberal ideology is an example of some of the agendas (Chatterjee, 2004:39). NGOs are not accountable to people but to
their donors or to the state.
Chatterjee
uses the French Revolution as a focus point from which the idea of the
nation-state or popular sovereignty was born (Chatterjee, 2004:27). With
popular sovereignty came the idea of people not being treated as subjects but
as citizens, who can make decisions on social life, “to have modern and free
political communities, one must first have people who were citizens, not
subjects” (Chatterjee, 2004:33). Chatterjee mentions that although the notion
of the free, political citizen still exists in theory, in practice the
introduction of the concept of population has separated people from the
political domain and turned them into demographics or statistics (Chatterjee,
2004: 34). Chatterjee uses Michel Foucault’s emphasis on the idea that power is
no more about the citizen as participators in how the state function but power
is in how well the state can provide for the population (Chatterjee, 2004:34). The
state is no more subordinate to the citizens and under their direct rule, the
state now has its own principles and logic of governing, the state operates
through policy and numbers. People have no real access to government or how it
functions. All citizens do now is vote in elections, in the case of democratic
states, and the politicians or the government experts make the real decisions
(Chatterjee, 2004: 35). Chatterjee uses the word “governmentality” to describe
how government has become all about providing social welfare, it is all about
healthcare, education and housing which is a big issue in South Africa
(Chatterjee, 2004:35). Although these social needs are obviously important and
the government should not neglect them, the main concern is that the provision
of these social needs is all that legitimates governments in modern societies
and the citizen has no real power or decision making capacity. In the case of
say the housing situation in South Africa, the government has made it all about
the number of houses it has built for people,
however almost all of those people were not involved in deciding where
the houses where being built or the type of housing. The issue of housing and
land redistribution has been made into just being about service delivery which
is actually missing the point, Nigel Gibson writes this about Abahlali, “what
does the movement want? To have a house, to be safe? Certainly...the organised
shack dwellers don’t simply want things, they want to be recognised as human
equals. They are fighting for freedom and justice and the right to the city, a
struggle that fundamentally challenges the production of space. In other words,
they are challenging the post-apartheid ‘global city’ which remains
characterised by the bourgeois values of constant accumulation” (2011: 18).
People fought for the right to be citizens and not subjects, it might
have been during the French revolution, the struggle against colonialism or
apartheid but the common idea was that people did not want to be treated as
subjects anymore; people did not fight to be treated as numbers therefore
totally removing them from politics because statistics cannot be political.
Chatterjee states that there needs to be a political society where people can
really engage with real issues, civil society as it is now cannot be allowed to
be the one to exercise that power for people because civil society itself is
not democratic. At
the moment in post apartheid South Africa, the masses of the people are removed
from real power as they were during apartheid, there is a lot of frustration
around unemployment, lack of housing, proper water, electricity and toilets and
government corruption and policies which fail the people or leave them worst
then they were before (Gibson, 2011:6). Although the government and the ruling
elite continue painting a picture of happy, rainbow nation where everybody is
content, the truth is that the percentage of people living below the poverty
line in South Africa has not changed since the end of Apartheid, in fact there
has been an increase in the number of households living in poverty and South
Africa is the most unequal society in the world, with the widest gap between
the rich and the poor (Gibson, 2011:20).
It only makes sense that people are discontent. However instead of
fighting the government or the rich elites, some South Africans have turned
their anger on foreign nationals as seen in during xenophobic attacks which
spread across shack settlements in 2008. The attacks and the general xenophobic
attitude that many South African have is a result of the discourse of people
believing that foreigners are take South African jobs and houses and all the
things that people feel they are entitled to as South Africa (Gibson, 2011:7).
South Africans who do not have access to those things not because they are
being occupied by the ‘illegal aliens’ but because the government and the
ruling elites who make it impossible for them to gain access to these
resources. The frustration of the masses was not the only factor that played a
part in the xenophobic attacked, the politicians and the mass media also played
a role in creating national intolerance of foreigner by coining terms like
“illegal aliens” and by the government launching campaigns to crackdown on
illegal aliens, all of this as a distraction from the real issues, the issues of
unemployment, landlessness and increasing levels poverty (Neocosmos, 2010: 138).
Simply blaming the xenophobic attacks on poverty is not good enough because
there needs to be an explanation as to why it is that South Africans in general
have a xenophobic attitude, from our government, to the police and people of
all races and genders, it varies from the different groups of course but
poverty cannot explain how a whole nation suffers from the same phobia
(Neocosmos, 2010: 123). The explanation has to be political; it is a result of
the structures within the society that makes it so intolerant. Frantz Fanon wrote about the lived experience of racism and how people
were experiencing systematic oppression, inequality and rejection and they were
being treated as if they were the problem and not the society. Fanon wrote that
“reason had a tendency to exit whatever room he entered” (Gordon, 2006: 11). He
wrote this because he recognised that he was never going to be seen as an
adequate human being who has the capability to reason. “The black is either
flawed by virtue of not being white or flawed by virtue of appearing “too
white” which is abnormal for a black” (Gordon, 2006: 12). An example of this
happening in South Africa, post Apartheid, is when looking at young black
people who for example speak fluent English, there will be people who say
things like “you speak very good English for a black person” and they will ask
what school you went to and so on but the same questions will not be asked to a
Afrikaner person for example, for whom English is also not their mother tongue.
Lewis Gordon, drawing from Fanon’s experience of being a problem, uses
the term “theodicy” to show how dominant perceptions like that of everything
that is white being considered universal and making it as if that system or
theory is perfect, and that it is the
people outside that are the problem. This creates a situation whereby people
who are oppressed by the system are made into seeming not adequate enough to
operate within the system. The theodicy argument basically states that God is
ultimately good as He is omnipotent and omniscience which can be argued in two
main arguments firstly God is all knowing and has an ultimate plan for humans
even if there are bad things occurring, it for the greater good. The second
argument is that God gave us freewill and he has allowed humans to do as they
will, even if it is bad. What the theodicean argument tries to prove is that it
is not God that is problematic but the problem is with humans (Gordon, 2006: 6).
Contemporary theory operates in the same way that theodicy works. Society is
seen as being good, the system is good but it is people who are problematic.
This is a methodological and ethical problem because it alienates people and
makes it seem as if there is something fundamentally wrong with people who are
outside of the dominant discourse. Poor
people are turned into the problem and not the political circumstances. This can
also be applied to the miners who work for the British owned Lonmin in Maricana
who went on a strike that become very violent on both ends but the South
African polices showed more extreme brutality. These miners are turned
into the problematic ones when most of their demands are very rational. Instead
of looking at the real issues that lead to the strike, stories about
traditional doctors giving muthi to the
miners to give them strength, makes the miners look like they are incapable of
reason, it just makes them appear irrational and superstitious. The reality is
that the miners have serious concerns, the fact that the mine union which was
supposed to protect them from exploitation has neglected on a large part to do
so, it has been inclined to side with the mining companies then with the
miners. There is nothing irrational about feeling such frustration (Mail and Guardian,
19 August 2012). The fact that most popular protests in South Africa are just
thrown under the banner of service delivery problems also shows how poor people
are not viewed as being able to think beyond that.
Contemporary
political theory can at the moment be used in South Africa to give a proper
explanation and understanding of why a country that is supposed to be a rainbow
nation, full of possibilities, where democracy is working for everyone is
actually a xenophobic society, a society where the poor are even more
marginalized then during apartheid, a society where the police and government
are becoming more aggressive. Poverty is rip, unemployment and corruption at
extreme levels. A society were the leaders are totally separated from the
masses, leaders who do not except any criticism and are not accountable to the
people. Contemporary theory can explain how the goals and dreams of South
Africans who mobilised and took power into their hands in the 1980s and
defeated the monster that was apartheid, how their dream of a better South
Africa has not yet been fully realized.
References:
Chatterjee, P., 2004, The Politics
of the Governed: Reflections on the Popular Politics in Most of the World, New Delhi: Permanent Black.
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September 2012 http://www.iol.co.za/mercury/why-have-they-forgotten-their-mission-1.1375685#.UEein-hROIU, date accessed: 06 September 2012
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Wretched of the Earth. New York: Grove Press
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