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SOUTH AFRICA: THE SECOND
DECADE Volume 72 No. 3 (Fall 2005) Ahmed C. Bawa, Guest Editor Arien Mack, Journal Editor |
| Table of Contents | Summaries/Bios | Editor's Introduction |
Order/Subscribe | Links |
| Guest Editor's Introduction Postapartheid south africa held its third general election in April 2004. This time the United Nations decided that it did not need to send any electoral observers to pass judgment on the quality of the process. Soon after the election the public debate about the qualities and characteristics of the next president took root as Thabo Mbeki—having defined the post-Mandela era in his own image as the “intellectual president”—began to navigate his second term as president. Eleven years of press freedom, the separation of the executive, parliament, and judiciary, and a growing vigor in civil society provide clearly defined positive signposts. South Africa’s transition into a nascent democracy has been celebrated in many ways but perhaps the most important and invigorating is the amount of writing about this first period. This wide variety of analysis spans the spectrum from euphoric to celebratory, through various kinds of sociopolitical critique to outright condemnation of the state for failing the poor and most vulnerable majority—for destroying the vision of the struggle against apartheid or what the Communist party of South Africa referred to as internal colonialism. Has the revolution been betrayed and according to what benchmarks? Some of this critical writing featured the failure of the program of the government in meeting well-recognized tenets of the Freedom Charter, adopted by the Congress of the People in Kliptown, outside Johannesburg, in June 1955. For four decades the Freedom Charter had come to symbolize the minimum revolutionary program of the nonracial Congress Alliance led by the African National Congress (ANC). Some of this writing also focuses attention on the failure of the transition to address the basic elements of the more contemporaneous Reconstruction and Development Program. This program came into being in the run-up to the first election in April 1994 as a minimum program of action that bound together the broad liberation movement led by the ANC. These charters hold an iconic status in the history of the nation and act as a kind of metric. In all of this post-ten-year analysis most focus has been on the state of the economy and the delivery of social services. This special issue of Social Research is another attempt to explore the nature of the transition in the years since April 1994. To accomplish this scholars and activists have been invited to contribute to this issue. Each brings a special perspective. Their papers span a broad range of topics—from the state of the economy, with its deeply structural problems and an unemployment rate of 20 to 30 percent, to the nature and impact of important symbols of the South African transition, such as the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, to the state of South Africa’s foreign policy forays. A theme that runs through several of these papers is the way in which the nature of the negotiations process reaches into the transition period, a point we will return to.... Click here for the complete guest editor's introduction. Ahmed C. Bawa Editor's Introduction Iin 1988, Social Research initiated a series of recurring issues on Central and East Europe, which then was part of the extended Soviet empire. Our intention at the time was to publish the writings of intellectuals and social scientists from the region who, because of the tight control of the press then in place, were largely unknown in the West and thus not familiar to most of our readers. Not long after the publication of the first two issues in the series, the situation in the region dramatically changed-in 1990 the communist states collapsed and the transition to democracy began. As a consequence, we shifted our focus to the transition that was then under way, and the next five issues in the series addressed that subject. By 2002, when we published the tenth of these issues, the rationale for continuing to publish a series focused on Central and East Europe no longer made sense. The changes in the region seemed far enough along that they did not demand entire issues focused exclusively on them. Although we remained committed to continuing to publish articles by authors from the region about what is occurring there, we no longer believed that isolating them in special issues was appropriate. With the current issue, our series on “Transitions” sharply changes its focus. In this eleventh issue in the series, we turn our attention to the transition to democracy that followed the collapse of the apartheid regime in South Africa. The issue was originally to be a celebration of this transition 10 years after it began (in 1994), but given the time it takes to organize an issue, it turns out that we are celebrating that transition 11 rather than 10 years later. Readers of this issue familiar with the transitions in Central and East Europe will note many important difference between those transitions and what has occurred and is occurring in South Africa. In fact, we hope some time in the future to publish an issue that compares not only the transitions in these two parts of the world but those occurring elsewhere as well. Before that, however, our Spring 2006 issue will address the transition now occurring in China, which is probably the most unique of all the transitions to which we so far have devoted issues. Neither the present issue on the transition in South Africa nor the forthcoming issue on China would have been possible without the collaboration of knowledgeable and generous guest editors. I am enormously grateful to Ahmed Bawa, the guest editor of this issue, for all the work he did to make this issue possible, and I am deeply grateful to have had this occasion to become his friend. Arien Mack, Editor |
Recommended Reading Vol. 54 No. 4 (Winter 1987) South Africa: The Second Decade Vol. 72 No. 3 (Fall 2005) Their America: The United States in the Eyes of the Rest of the World Vol. 72 No. 4 (Winter 2005) China in Transition Vol. 73 No. 1 (Spring 2006) Russia Today Vol. 76 No. 1 (Spring 2009) |
| Ahmed C. Bawa |
South Africa's Young Democracy, Ten Years On: Guest Editor's Introduction |
| Gerhard Maré |
Race, Nation, Democracy:
Questioning Patriotism in the New South Africa
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| Daniel Herwitz | The Future of
the Past in South Africa: On the Legacy of the TRC |
| Vishnu Padayachee |
The South African Economy, 1994–2004 |
| Ted Leggett | Just Another Miracle: A Decade of Crime and Justice in Democratic South Africa |
| Ahmed C. Bawa |
Science, Power, and Policy Intersecting at
the HIV/AIDS Pandemic |
| Shireen Hassim | Turning
Gender Rights into Entitlements: Women and Welfare Provision in Postapartheid South Africa |
| Cherryl Walker | Misplaced
Agrarianization? Reflections on Ten Years of Land Restitution |
| Adam Habib | State–Civil
Society Relations in Postapartheid South Africa |
| Nico Cloete and Tebojo Moja | Transformation
Tensions in Higher Education: Equity, Efficiency, and Development |
| Chris Landsberg |
Toward a Developmental Foreign Policy? Challenges for South Africa's Diplomacy in the Second Decade of Liberation |
| Steven Friedman | Getting Better Than "World Class": The Challenge of Governing Postapartheid South Africa |
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South Africa's Young Democracy, Ten Years On: Guest Editor's Introduction and Science, Power, and Policy Intersecting at the HIV/AIDS Pandemic Ahmed C. Bawa Back To Top Race,
Nation, Democracy: Questioning Patriotism in the New South Africa Class
This article notes the statement on the title page of the Constitution of South Africa: ‘One law for One nation’. It argues that the law might be there in the Constitution accepted in 1996, but that the present struggle for nation in South Africa is fraught with difficulties. Not only is the territory the outcome of colonial occupation, and an imperialist war, but the state has taken over many of the relationships that preceded democratisation in 1994. In addition the past weighs heavily, while certain aspects (such as the acceptance of ‘races’) have continued. The new state has to confront the ravages of the HIV/AIDS epidemic while attempting to address growing inequality. It is in this context that the nation can be stated, but can it be created through a deliberate ‘nation-building’ project? The author argues that it is neither possible, nor desirable; but that there is another commitment that can more realistically, and desirably, be striven for, namely a wide notion of democracy. Such a goal has served as a shared commitment for the majority of South Africans during the struggle against apartheid, and has been generally accepted in its formal existence by nearly all citizens. Gerhard Maré, Professor in Sociology, University of KwaZulu-Natal, Durban, is the author of articles and books on nation and on ethnicity in South Africa. He has published widely on forced population removals under apartheid, identity and work, and other topics in political sociology. His present research concerns the construction, reproduction, maintenance, and subversion of race thinking and social identity construction in a society in transition. Back To Top The Future of the Past in South Africa: On the Legacy of the TRC Daniel Herwitz The paper understands memorialization in the South Africa of the 1990s to have been a practice which endeavored to set a moral regime remembrance: about the past and for the future. The setting of this moral agenda was, the paper argues, crucial for the dynamics of social transition. These points are made through a wide ranging philosophical discussion around a case study, in which the question of what it is to do something "in the names of the dead" is explored. The paper concludes with the view that the TRC's moral regime of remembrance is finally a demand for a culture of human rights, and a sanguine view of that legacy a decade into South Africa's democracy. Daniel Herwitz is the Director of the Institute for the Humanities at the University of Michigan. Prior to that, he was Chair of the Philosophy Department and Director of the Centre for Knowledge and Innovation at the University of Natal in Durban. Based on his experiences in South Africa, he has written a book of essays on that country’s transition to democracy, Race and Reconciliation (2003). Back To Top The South African Economy, 1994–2004 Various
perspectives emerge from official government reviews, academic and
union
conference proceedings, books and special editions of journals have
already
been produced which review economic performance in the first ten years
of South
African democracy. Various
positions emerge from these, some supportive of government economic
policy,
others more reflexive and critical, and a few openly hostile. This
paper
focuses on a narrow range of issues within the broad theme of economic
policy
and performance. These include macroeconomic stability and performance,
developments in the labour market; and trends in poverty and
inequality. A
number of clearly important areas, including black economic
empowerment,
industrial policy, South Africa’s reinsertion into
the global
economy, among others, are not addressed, given the constraints of our
mandate.
Although the paper ends with some ideas about the kind of policy
approaches
which government could consider to address the continuing challenges of
reducing unemployment, inequality and poverty, no comprehensive ‘model’
to
achieve this is proposed. Vishnu Padayachee is a Senior
Professor at the School of Development Studies, University of
KwaZulu-Natal. His articles have appeared in such journals as World
Development, The Journal of International Development, and The
Cambridge Journal of Economics. His books include Urban Vortex (2002)
and the forthcoming volume The Development Decade: Social and Economic
Change in South Africa (2005). Just Another Miracle: A Decade of Crime and
Justice in Democratic South Africa
Ted Leggett has been
researching crime and justice issues in South Africa for most of the
last decade, first in the School of Development Studies at the
University of KwaZulu-Natal and then at the Institute for Security
Studies. His interests include ethnographic work in crime and policing,
and highly localized Turning
Gender Rights into Entitlements: Women and Welfare Provision in From 1897 through about 1912, film producers would shoot their footage and then make a contact print of the entire film on a roll of photographic paper. Mailed to the Library of Congress, these rolls of paper established copyright. The films document a very busy world indeed. They show people thronging streets, working, shopping; they show crowds shuffling through gates at Ellis Island or welcoming returning war heroes. More than just documentary, the films include satire ad commentary on the nature of life at the turn of the last century. In these early films, which almost never run much longer than two or three minutes, the camera almost never moves—no zooms, pans, or fast cuts or clever editing. But the screens are never still, full of action and movement. They document great disasters and everyday events, the dynamic world of the turn of the last century. These very early films played almost entirely to a working class audience. Indeed, when middle class observers began noticing this new phenomenon, the “movies,” sweeping working class neighborhoods they saw it as both fast paced, as a “get thrills quick” medium that played magical games with time and space, and also as a dangerous soporific. They show a busy world, but they show confusion about what “busy” means. Shireen Hassim, is Associate Professor in
Political Studies at the University of the Witwatersrand. Her most
recently published book is Women’s Organizations and Democracy in South
Africa: Contesting Authority (2005). A coedited volume, Gender and
Social Policy in a Global Context: Uncovering the Gendered Structure of
the Social (with Shahra Razavi), is forthcoming in 2006. Misplaced
Agrarianization? Reflections on Ten Years of Land Restitution Cherryl Walker is Professor in the
Department of Sociology and Social Anthropology, Stellenbosch
University, and the former Land Claims Commissioner for KwaZulu-Natal.
She is the author of “Piety in the Sky? Gender Policy and Land Reform
in South Africa” in the Journal of Agrarian Change (2003). State–Civil
Society Relations in Postapartheid South Africa Adam Habib is an Executive Director
of the Human Sciences Research Council and a former Director of the
Centre for Civil Society, University of KwaZulu-Natal. He has published
on democratic transitions, political economy, institutional
transformation, higher education reform, and state-civil society
relations. He was coeditor of Transformation and Politikon. Transformation
Tensions in Higher Education: Equity, Efficiency, and Development How does the experience of busyness impact democratic political life? My hunch is that those reading this essay might very well offer the following answer: busyness means that we relegate political activities to the bottom of a long and sometimes tedious laundry list of “things to get done.” In fact, many of us no longer even bother to include the basic activities of citizenship –getting informed about the issues, deliberating with our peers about matters of common concern, attending a political meeting, or even voting —on the list in the first place. Like this author, many of you probably feel somewhat guilty about this as well, and thus try to compensate in some way or another… At worst, busyness generates political disinterest and apathy: many of our fellow citizens openly describe the most fundamental form of democratic participation, the vote, as “a waste of time.” At best, it seems to privilege an acceleration of political activity: we seek speedy and rapidly consummated types of involvement that do not unduly add to the enormous time pressures we already feel. Unfortunately, it remains unclear whether even such high-speed forms of citizen involvement are normatively satisfactory. Can liberal democracy flourish when a growing number of us avoid the responsibilities of citizenship altogether, while even those of us who try to remain politically involved insist that they be dealt with quickly and painlessly? In this essay, I hope at the very least to deepen our understanding of this quagmire. If I am not mistaken, it provides a useful starting point for examining one of the core challenges of contemporary political life: how can we make sure that busyness and citizenship coexist in a potentially fruitful, though by no means necessarily harmonious, relationship? Nico Cloete is a full-time Director at the Centre for Higher Education Transformation. He served as Research Director for South Africa’s National Commission on Higher Education and as Coordinator of the Post-Secondary Education Report of the National Education Policy Investigation. He is widely published in the fields of Psychology, Sociology, and Education. Tebojo Moja is
Visiting Professor in Administration Leadership and Technology at New
York University’s Steinhardt School of Education. She has written
articles on higher education reform and is coauthor of a forthcoming
book on educational change in South Africa since the first democratic
elections. She was appointed Executive Director and Commissioner to the
National Commission on Higher Education by President Nelson Mandela. Toward a
Developmental Foreign Policy? Challenges for South Africa's Diplomacy
in the Second Decade of Liberation South Africa is a middle-ranked power in Africa, imbued with a vibrant political democracy, but it is nevertheless a democracy under severe socioeconomic stress. The republic faces significant development challenges—poverty, inequality, joblessness, and unemployment, many of which continue to run along race lines. Because of its precarious domestic situation, South Africa’s policy makers need to engage the international community in a way that deliberately tries to help address its national condition and the African condition. We argue here that a developmental foreign policy is pro-engagement; it is not isolationist. What has not been sufficiently appreciated to date is that South Africa has plenty of scope to revive a genuine developmental foreign policy; it is a developing country with significant international influence but it has often underutilized this authority by acting guardedly and warily—even at times when it could have pushed the diplomatic envelope more insistently. Chris
Landsberg
is a political scientist and the Director of the Centre of Policy
Studies in South Africa. He has written and lectured widely on South
Africa’s foreign policy and the international relations of South Africa
and Africa, with a specific focus on democratic governance and peace.
He coedited From Cape to Congo: Southern Africa’s Emerging Security
Challenges. Getting
Better Than "World Class": The Challenge of Governing Postapartheid
South Africa South Africa is a middle-ranked power in Africa, imbued with a vibrant political democracy, but it is nevertheless a democracy under severe socioeconomic stress. The republic faces significant development challenges—poverty, inequality, joblessness, and unemployment, many of which continue to run along race lines. Because of its precarious domestic situation, South Africa’s policy makers need to engage the international community in a way that deliberately tries to help address its national condition and the African condition. We argue here that a developmental foreign policy is pro-engagement; it is not isolationist. What has not been sufficiently appreciated to date is that South Africa has plenty of scope to revive a genuine developmental foreign policy; it is a developing country with significant international influence but it has often underutilized this authority by acting guardedly and warily—even at times when it could have pushed the diplomatic envelope more insistently. Steven Friedman is a Senior Research Fellow and former
Director at the Centre for Policy Studies in Johannesburg. He is a
social theorist whose main areas of research include democratization,
grassroots
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