Popular Politics and Resistance Movements in South Africa

This volume explores some of the key features of popular politics and resistance before and after 1994. It looks at continuities and changes in the forms of struggle and ideologies involved, as well as the significance of post-apartheid grassroots politics. Is this a new form of politics or does it stand as a direct descendent of the insurrectionary impulses of the late apartheid era? Posing questions about continuity and change before and after 1994 raises key issues concerning the nature of power and poverty in the country. Contributors suggest that expressions of popular politics are deeply set within South African political culture and still have the capacity to influence political outcomes. The introduction by William Beinart links the papers together, places them in context of recent literature on popular politics and ‘history from below’ and summarises their main findings, supporting the argument that popular politics outside of the party system remain significant in South Africa and help influence national politics. The roots of this collection lie in post-graduate student research conducted at the University of Oxford in the early twenty-first century.

William Beinart is a historian and was Rhodes Professor of Race Relations at the African Studies Centre, at Oxford University from 1997 to 2015. Julian Brown is Associate Professor in the Politics Departments at the University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg. Tracy Carson is an author and academic and previously served as as a Presidential Management Fellow for the U.S. federal government Marcelle C. Dawson is a Senior Lecturer in Sociology and Departmental Postgraduate Committee Chair at the University of Otago. Tim Gibbs is a Lecturer in African Studies at University College London. Rebecca Hodes is the Director of the AIDS and Society Research Unit at the University of Cape Town. Simonne Horwitz is Assistant Professor in the Department of History, University of Saskatchewan and Research Associate in the Centre for Indian Studies in Africa at the University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg. Genevieve Klein is Research Manager: Monitoring and Evaluation at the Council on Higher Education in Pretoria. Mandisa Mbali is Senior Lecturer in the Department of Historical Studies at the University of Cape Town. Kelly Rosenthal is Program Director: International Honors Program: Cities in the 21st Century at World Learning in Cape Town Chizuko Sato is a research fellow at the Institute of Developing Economies in Chiba, Japan. Mfaniseni Fana Sihlongonyane is an associate professor at the School of Architectureand Planning at the University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg. Thula Simpson is Senior Lecturer in the Historical and Heritage Studies Department at theUniversity of Pretoria. William Beinart is a historian and was Rhodes Professor of Race Relations at the African Studies Centre, at Oxford University from 1997 to 2015. Marcelle C. Dawson is a Senior Lecturer in Sociology and Departmental Postgraduate Committee Chair at the University of Otago.