Popular politics and resistance movements in South Africa, edited by William Beinart and Marcelle C. Dawson, Johannesburg, Wits University Press, 2010, 360 pp., R223 (paperback), ISBN 9781868145188
Charles Tarrow once observed that a burst of protest and social movement activism could either ‘sputter out like a roman candle or ripen into a cycle of contention’ (1998, p. 141). This collection, edited by William Beinart and Marcelle Dawson, includes cases of protest ranging from key moments in the ripening of anti-apartheid and labour protest in South Africa, to more recent bursts surrounding HIV and AIDS activism and the privatisation of basic services, via longer running struggles over land reform which have tended to sputter erratically rather than swell tidally.
The volume draws upon postgraduate student research from the University of Oxford, and the chapters are consistently richly textured, well-written, innovatively researched and illuminating historical case studies. They all draw upon a range of sources, including archive material, interviews, and other primary sources such as songs, adverts and television footage. Both individually and en masse, they represent a significant original contribution to the study of ‘old’ and ‘new’ social movements in South Africa.
Beinart's introductory chapter provides a historiographical overview of popular politics and resistance movements in South Africa between 1970 and 2008, and engages with a much broader literature on social movements, resistance and protest than the subsequent case studies. The central concern of the volume with continuity and change is established when he asks whether the recent social movements and community protests are ‘a new form of politics, or [do they] stand as a direct descendent of the insurrectionary impulses of the late apartheid era?’ (p. 1).
The first two case studies, by Julian Brown and Tracy Carson, deal with strikes in the 1970s, in Durban and Cape Town respectively. Both chapters examine key moments in the development of the independent trade union movement in South Africa, and their relation to the broader liberation struggle. Brown shows how the framing of the Durban strikes as ‘non-political’ facilitated a non-violent resolution, whereas Carson argues that it was only through a wider community boycott that striking workers in Cape Town in 1979 managed to achieve their limited success. The significance of supermarkets as sites of protest in 1979, involving students spoiling Fatti and Moni bread, flour and pasta products on shop shelves, has its echoes in protests in 2009 when crowds began eating products from the shelves in branches of Shoprite and Pick n Pay.
The next two chapters deal with aspects of the ANC's role in the broader struggle. Thula Simpson considers the impact of the underground ANC and the MK (Umkhonto we Sizwe, the military wing of the ANC) in the township protests of the 1980s, while Genevieve Klein examines the use of Mandela iconography by, among others, the anti-apartheid movement in Britain. This is a theme taken up by Mfaniseni Fana Sihlongonyane in his exploration of the politics surrounding the establishment of a Nelson Mandela Museum in Alexandra Township, which for some residents meant forced removals in a manner reminiscent of the apartheid era.
Chapters by Chizuko Sato and Tim Gibbs focus on rural politics: land reform policies and protests in KwaZulu-Natal, and state–society interactions in the Transkei, respectively. Struggles against HIV and AIDS in the 1990s and 2000s are the focus of chapters by Rebecca Hodes and Mandisa Mbali. The former looks in detail at the narratives and images presented by the popular SABC (South African Broadcasting Corporation) TV programme Siyayinqoba/Beat it!, whilst the latter contextualises the rise of the Treatment Action Campaign (TAC) in the light of pre-existing activist organisations. The medical theme is continued by Simonne Horwitz in a fascinating account of six separate strikes involving black female nurses at Baragwanath Hospital, Soweto, in 1949, 1958, 1985, 1992, 1995 and 2007.
The final two chapters address two of the most frequently discussed ‘new’ social movements: the Soweto Electricity Crisis Committee (SECC) and the Anti-Privatisation Forum (APF). Kelly Rosenthal's chapter compares the SECC's ideology since 2000 with that of the Soweto Civic Association (SCA) since 1976. Michelle Dawson's chapter discusses the songs, slogans and marches of the APF as inherited repertoires of protest. Both Rosenthal and Dawson argue that one of the key differences between the earlier movements and the post-apartheid social movements is that the latter are more explicitly and consistently socialist. This argument is not shared by all authors within this collection, however, and Beinart's introduction signals his disagreement (pp. 12–13), noting both that the ideological diversity within the anti-apartheid struggle was considerable, and that there is far greater ideological diversity within the ‘new social movements’ than is sometimes suggested by interviews with prominent activist-intellectual leaders. TAC, as shown by Mbali and Hodes, has a very different ideological and political outlook to the SECC and the APF, just as do environmental justice, shack-dwellers, and anti-gangster movements. Even within the APF and SECC there are those who rail against the ANC as the tool of neoliberalism one day, whilst praising them as the scourge of apartheid the next. The ideological and political content and meaning of terms like ‘socialism’ are probably more contested and ambiguous in contemporary South Africa than these latter two chapters imply at times.
Most of the chapters in this volume however contribute to understandings of South African social movements without losing any of this ambiguity and nuance. Indeed, as a collection its strength is the richness of the detail and the vividness of the historical material. In places the historiographical or political implications of the arguments could be made more explicit, and underlying research questions could be answered more directly. The willingness of contributors such as Dawson to engage with existing secondary literature on South African social movements – such as Richard Ballard et al.'s Voices of protest, and Nigel Gibson's Challenging hegemony – was welcome, even if the argument was not always persuasive.
Overall, the strength of the collection lies in its historical detail, rather than broader theoretical or revisionist arguments. There are of course other topics and themes which could have been included; Beinart himself notes that these are ‘essentially modernist essays’ (p. 29), and the similarities or differences between mainstream struggle histories and neo-patrimonial, animist, spiritualist, or Pentecostalist forms of resistance and protest would have been a fascinating further theme to explore. In that respect, this book highlights both the continuing richness of existing seams of historical and contemporary research into South Africa's new and old social movements, as well as pointing, both implicitly and explicitly, towards further sites and repertoires of struggle. The strength of this collection, and the contours of recent South African history, implies that the study of such forms of contentious politics will continue to swell and ripen, rather than sputter and fade away.