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Abstract Six years after the end of apartheid there have been many changes, but little change in South Africa. Poverty and inequality seem to be increasing rather than decreasing. How were the dreams of freedom and social and economic equality so quickly dashed? Much of the answer can be found in South Africa’s integration into globalized capitalism, yet pointing an accusatory ˇnger at the IMF or the “West” does not allow us to consider the contested terrains of homegrown South African politics. In this essay I investigate the limitations of post-apartheid South Africa within the narrow conˇnes of the anti-apartheid movement, particularly the absence of debate about alternative humanist futures. This methodological insight is suggested in Frantz Fanon’s The Wretched of the Earth. It so happens that the unpreparedness of the educated classes, the lack of practical links between them and the mass of people, their laziness, and let it be said, their cowardice at the decisive moment of the struggle will give rise to tragic mishaps.
(Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth)
Arriving at Johannesburg’s airport is quite different from arriving at any other airport in Southern Africa. It is a Disneyland airport: postmodern, clean, and efˇcient.
One leaves the terminal for a carpark full of expensive cars and White faces and travels to Johannesburg along a three-lane highway (a shock to someone coming south from Zambia where one judges a road not by width but by the extent of the blacktop and the number of potholes) lined by hi-tech companies, hi-security and hi-rental business and residential space. Johannesburg is a different city by day than by night when the BMWs leave and it becomes an “African Town,” but even when one arrives through the inner city suburb of Hillbrow during the day one sees the Africanization of Johannesburg’s residential areas. Hillbrow, once solidly a White area, is now mainly Black, with a smattering of Whites, “Coloreds” and Indians, housing people who have “escaped” the townships, escaped rural areas, or are from outside South Africa altogether.1 Though the Johannesburg inner city suburb, Hillbrow, for example, has experienced a racial sea-change over the past 20 years, the townships, those creations of apartheid—or more correctly of the colonial regime(townships are not unique to South Africa)—have undergone little racial change. The spatial legacy of apartheid has shifted but has not been fundamentally challenged.
Next to Sandton, where the rich White escapees from Johannesburg spread out in luxurious mansions (and where they want to move Johannesburg’s central business district and stock exchange), is Alexandra, the cramped and over¸owing African township. On Avis car- ental maps, international business travelers on their way to Sandton are warned not to use the Alexandra exit on the highway. They go directly from Johannesburg airport to the rich suburb, never seeing the South Africa of the majority. There have been improvements in housing since the African National Congress (ANC) became the government in 1994, but the legacy of apartheid is palpable. The crude racial laws of apartheid have been abolished. Grand and petty apartheid that determined where people lived, where they worked, and how they were represented has been abolished. The Truth and Reconciliation Commission, for all its shortcomings, did make public the terrible legacy of apartheid: murders, tortures, beatings, and forced removals. These have all become part of the historical record. There is no going back. The homelands have been abolished. There is a universal suffrage, freedom of movement, freedom of speech, and freedom of sexual orientation. There is the right to love whomever you want and to live wherever you want. Despite media hype about South Africa’s new White poor,2 however, South Africa remains a multi-racial, not a non-racial, society, where the correlation between race and poverty remains extremely strong.3 In a recent “Statistics South Africa,” it was stated that 26.8% of Black households reported that hildren under seven years old were hungry and over a quarter of Black homes were shacks.4
My argument is that the ANC has failed in its attempts to alleviate poverty, not simply due to a lack of resources but also from specific policy choices. For example, the much-vaunted ANC program of building a million new houses has fallen short, not only in numbers and where the housing is constructed but also in the quality of housing. The government’s desire to privatize the ˇnancing and building of new houses has, in many cases, simply exacerbated the dire situation of the poor. The new construction has passed them by or incorporated them into an ever increasing spiral of indebtedness.5 What has changed in the post-apartheid period is the expansion of a Black middle class. Though many middle class Blacks have moved out of the townships, the inequality in township housing is one indication of the enrichment of this small class. On the other hand, the shacks at Kliptown (where the Freedom Charter was signed) are devastating. Visibility is nearly nonexistent in the smokey environments inside and outside the shacks. Animals, not cars, park here and township wild pigs and other “domestic” animals walk along the rutted, muddy track. A shanty town with almost no amenities, communal porta cabins (one step up from the latrine) being the most modern convenience. The shacks are lean-tos made of corrugated iron sheets and, like a squatter camp, one can move the whole place.6 Is this South Africa in transition?
Six years after the end of apartheid, why has so little changed in South Africa? How were the dreams of freedom and social and economic equality so quickly dashed? The answer is complicated but is partly a result of the process of depoliticization in the negotiation process itself. That is taking politics out of the street to the green baize table, from the unpredictability of mass mobilization to calculable and instrumental politics of negotiation. Thus, the crisis that brought the parties to the negotiation table is “normalized” and “the struggle” against apartheid is rewritten as simply the means to a negotiated settlement. While apartheid South Africa was far from a closed economy with mining playing a major role, the end of apartheid (and with it the end of sanctions and trade boycotts) came at the very time the world was witnessed to increasing inequalities with pressures to maintain competitiveness based on lowering labor costs.7 In South Africa, despite the growth of a sizeable Black middle class, the
GINI curve coefˇcients (a measurement of income inequality) have not changed with the end of apartheid. But the accusatory ˇnger mpointed at the IMF, World Bank, or the “West” also obscures important determinants in the contested terrains of homegrown South African politics. In the following, I take this latter insight a little further and offer perhaps a counter- ntuitive approach. I investigate the problematic of post-apartheid South Africa within the conˇnes of the narrowness of the anti-apartheid movement, particularly in its articulation of alternative futures. This methodological insight is suggested in the work of the Algerian revolutionary, Frantz Fanon, to whom I now turn.8
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