The Politics of Necessity: Community Organizing and Democracy in South Africa

Preface

Preface This book investigates the creation of democracy from the perspective of the ordinary people who helped to bring it about by organizing, protesting, and demanding a wide range of rights. The initial idea for the project developed during my work interviewing volunteers with the Wits/Vaal Regional Peace Secretariat in mid-1994, just after South Africa’s historic democratic elections that brought Nelson Mandela to the presidency. I was struck by the great contrast between the stories that these volunteers told and those that I had read in both journalistic and academic texts on South Africa’s transition . Many popular accounts described the creation of nonracial democracy as a miracle. In-depth analyses of the transition often suggested that the real work was done by elites during the on-again, off-again negotiations that began even before Nelson Mandela was released from prison. Neither the image of a miracle nor that of elites ironing out the details of the new democracy captured the experiences of these volunteers. They found themselves on the front lines of the struggle for democracy, standing as peace monitors between rival political parties, working to prevent violence from erupting, and trying to minimize it when it did occur. They often could only enter tense areas in armored vehicles dubbed “doves,” named so because of the Peace Secretariat’s logo, a blue dove, emblazoned on the side of the vehicles. For these volunteers, as for so many other South Africans, the creation of a democratic regime in South Africa was not the miraculous product of elite actions but rather the result of a long and ongoing popular struggle. Since 1994, I have followed the work of many community organizations, from the older township-based civics to newer social movements. As a PhD student, I conducted preliminary fieldwork in South Africa in 1995 and then returned for the year in 1997. The most important insights that I gleaned came from the many interviews that ordinary South Africans granted me. It was xi
through these interviews that I began to develop an understanding of how people living in the impoverished townships created by apartheid viewed the struggle for democracy, their sacrifices, their achievements, and the shortcomings of their new system. These interviews also placed an important check on many of the models of democratic transitions that I had read before engaging in fieldwork. I was frequently struck by how poorly those models matched the realities described by the people I interviewed. Not only were many of the broader understandings of how transitions happen incorrect, but, as I was to learn, they led researchers to ask the wrong questions. I began with questions about how people believed their country had achieved democracy but learned that I needed to ask what democracy was and what people were actually struggling for. I have been very fortunate to return to South Africa regularly since 1997. These annual visits offered me an opportunity to see the changes that occurred from one year to the next and to continue interviewing the people who sought to be part of ongoing political processes in their local communities . Their answers to my many questions and their rephrasing of these questions form the basis of this book. The struggle for the overwhelming majority of the people I interviewed is a struggle for human rights and democracy, but not in the way in which mainstream western approaches most often employ these terms. Liberal democracies such as the United States and prominent international human rights organizations tend to focus on civil and political rights while sidelining socioeconomic rights. This narrow view that ignores the fundamental indivisibility of all human rights is a legacy of the cold war and the triumph of capitalism. During the cold war, the United States could point to its respect for civil and political rights and demonstrate the general absence of those rights in the Soviet Union. A focus on socioeconomic rights would have complicated the argument of straightforward U.S. supremacy. Since the end of the cold war, the ideology of neoliberalism has worked to perpetuate this partial attention to human rights by defining freedom as the focal point in rights-based discussions . Within this framework, the state engagement required to ensure socioeconomic rights is often presented as limiting fundamental civil and political freedoms. South Africans have directly challenged this approach by arguing that freedom can only be realized when civil, political, and socioeconomic rights are protected and enforced. This book traces the...