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One of the most significant facts about us may finally be that we all begin with the natural equipment to live a thousand kinds of life but end in the end having only lived one. —Clifford Geertz, The Interpretation of Cultures It was autumn in the southern hemisphere when an unexpected victory in allWhite national parliamentary elections swept South Africa’s National Party (NP) to power in 1948. The victory signaled the consolidation of the Afrikaner ethnic identity and facilitated the implementation of a series of racist laws that became known to the world as apartheid. These laws provided the pattern for a social fabric , woven by South Africans from their everyday activities. On another autumn day twenty-eight years later, that fabric was punctured in a violent convulsion that released some of the resentment that the normality of ordinary life had effectively hidden from view. Then, in 1994, forty-six autumns after its designs were laid out and eighteen autumns after the unraveling began in earnest, another election placed the African National Congress (ANC) at the head of a government dedicated to severing the last threads that held together the apartheid way of life. In a world still hung over from the Cold War, this transformation struck many as inspirational , even miraculous. Amid the celebrations that accompanied the formal transfer of power to erstwhile rebels, a few warned of the problems that South Africa still faced, but for the most part, South Africans took the opportunity to revel in the success of their negotiated revolution. Miracle did not seem too strong a word. Even ANC leader Nelson Mandela, in his speech claiming electoral victory, referred to the birth of non-racial democracy in South Africa as “a small miracle.” 1 Chapter One Introduction While commentators are still able to find aspects of the transition worthy of being labeled a miracle, the use of the term has become problematic. Analyses published since 1997 tend to position themselves in opposition to earlier journalistic accounts that present the transition through anecdotal stories in which personalities, chance encounters, and transformative moments dominate.1 Even academic texts published in the years immediately following the elections seem, from this “morning-after” position of “painful sobriety,” to have been so caught up in the celebratory atmosphere that they overstated the successes of the transition and mythologized change while downplaying significant continuities and obstacles still to be overcome.2 By constructing this antinomy, more recent studies are juxtaposed against once-dominant trends in South African analysis and cast as attacking, if not eliminating, the euphoric residue of this “misunderstood miracle.”3 The implication is that the transition has been neither as complete nor as deep as the term miracle would suggest. Aside from apparently overstating the quality of the transformation, using the term miracle to describe the end of apartheid carries an implicit theory of super-human agency that deprives South African actors of their role in remaking their social order. This rhetoric of transcendental causation, even as a metaphor, is indicative of the presumption of stability that dominates both formal Political Science and everyday social discourse. We have been trained to think of change as an anomaly, as something that needs to be explained. This book argues that we can gain valuable insights by adopting a perspective in which change is always happening—to societies, to actors, and to the identities of both. Certainly some changes are more important than others. The transformation of the apartheid social order is an important change, and one that might yield valuable lessons if it is understood more fully. One way to understand it better has been to search for its causes, divine or otherwise. But rather than asking why, this study seeks to explain how the transformation of apartheid society happened. In it, I argue that understanding social change, both in the South African context and generally, depends on examining the political identities of the actors involved. This book describes the transformation of the South African social order as seen through the window of identity. It traces the demise of apartheid by focusing a gaze on the concepts and words, the labels, that are available for South Africans to use as they struggle to make sense of themselves, their actions, and their society. The protagonists in this story are the shifting networks of ideas that mediate the relationships between South Africans and between South Africans and their social order. I am not concerned with personal identity, with the identity...

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