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

Elke Zuern’s book The Politics of Necessity: Community Organizing and Democracy in South Africa is an ambitious work. Zuern’s goals in this case study are to provide readers with a historic overview of the rise of South African civic organizations and their role in community organizing; explain how democracy in South Africa does not fit the western definition of the term; and compare the South African struggle and protest for democracy with that of Latin American countries.

The Politic of Necessity is most successful in documenting South African politics, especially in explaining how the brand of South African democracy sought by its leaders and community activists is different from that of other states and countries, as well as in identifying the role of local and national civic associations in shaping South African democracy. While she clearly identifies the leaders and activists interviewed in South Africa, the identification and affiliation of persons whom Zuern interviewed for the discussion on the struggles of civic leaders in Brazil and Chile are unclear. What is clear is their dissatisfaction with the new regime in their countries and the loss of their community leaders to government positions. Interviewees believed this loss weakened those organizations that formerly challenged government practices. The Politics of Necessity is important for what it does well, which is to use the hundreds of interviews conducted with social movement leaders and activists in South Africa to tell the story of their own struggles.

Zuern reconstructs the role of civic organizations through interviews she conducted with residents over the course of a decade starting in the mid-1990s. She supports them by mining archival records and court documents. These interviews, which provide space for the voices of movement leaders, also provide essential historical context for the definition of and struggle for a democracy in South Africa, one that blends what Zuern describes as three mandatory elements: civil rights, political rights, and socioeconomic rights. The six chapters that compose the book each offer an in-depth look at the events that took place during and after apartheid.

Chapter 1, “Community Organizing in South Africa,” provides the history and background of the rise of civic organizations. Their central role in interacting with the African National Congress (ANC), and their relationship with the apartheid state is crucial to Zuern’s argument that ordinary South Africans’ definition of democracy is different from that of the accepted western model. In the western model, democracy is a process that prizes civil and political rights and makes the assumption that socioeconomic rights will follow. Zuern attributes this model partly to the rise of capitalism and sees it as an outcome of the Cold War. South Africans, whom she interviewed throughout the decade starting in 1997, spoke passionately about their struggle for a democracy that included human rights along with other elements. Their ideal of democracy, framed long before the new multiracial state after apartheid was in place, was one that addressed the needs of a people locked into social, educational, and economic oppression that their oppressors systemically and strategically designed. That design created classes that were assigned varying levels of privileges. South Africans, in rejecting the western model of democracy, sought a model that incorporated political, civil, and socioeconomic rights and equality for all. They argued that only this model would allow for freedom. Anything else would be insufficient to allow for a transition to a democracy necessary for South Africans.

Chapter 2, “Material Inequality and Political Rights,” is informed by the interviews of protestors who are adamant that only when material equality and political rights are joined do all citizens benefit. Chapter 3, “Power to the People,” uses the interviews to show how the civic organizations struggled for liberation. It is with this chapter that Zuern makes readers aware of the goal of socioeconomic equality that drove both protesters and the organizations. In Chapter 4, “Disciplining Dissent,” Zuern explores the environment...