Interventions International Journal of Postcolonial Studies
ISSN: 1369-801X (Print) 1469-929X (Online) Journal homepage: http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/riij20
South Africa After Twenty Years of Democracy Lucy Graham To cite this article: Lucy Graham (2016) South Africa After Twenty Years of Democracy, Interventions, 18:6, 767-771, DOI: 10.1080/1369801X.2016.1193441 To link to this article: https://doi.org/10.1080/1369801X.2016.1193441
Published online: 07 Jun 2016.
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INTRODUCTION South Africa After Twenty Years of Democracy
Lucy Graham University of the Western Cape, South Africa The essays and discussion published here were originally part of a colloquium held at New York University (NYU) in November 2014, and sponsored by the Postcolonial Studies Colloquium at NYU. Set up to commemorate the twentieth anniversary of South Africa’s first democratic elections, and to examine the state of South Africa after two decades of democracy, the colloquium had the title ‘House of Bondage and Home of Ubuntu’. It thereby referenced a retrospective exhibition of South African-born photographer Ernest Cole’s work that opened at NYU’s Grey Gallery on Washington Square in September 2014 – Cole’s photographic exposé of apartheid was entitled House of Bondage and was published in New York by Random House in 1967 – and the ‘Ubuntu’ music festival celebrating twenty years of South African democracy at Carnegie Hall in 2014. The year 2014 was also the year in which South African-born journalist Nat Nakasa’s remains were repatriated to South Africa from upstate New York where they had rested next to the grave of Malcolm X. Considering this flow of ideas, images and bodies between South Africa and New York, the colloquium sought to address the following questions: to what extent do South African issues speak to the rest of the world, particularly to the United States? How are continuing dispossession and unfreedom in post-apartheid South Africa being framed and understood? If ubuntu refers
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to an African sense of ethics expressed in the idiom umntu ngumntu ngabantu (isiXhosa)/umuntu ngumuntu ngabantu (isiZulu) (‘a person is a person through other people’), what relationships can be traced between the structures of oppression exposed in Cole’s House of Bondage and South Africa as home of ubuntu? To what extent can the humanities and social sciences work beyond western or European conceptualizations of humanism or ‘humanness’ without reifying or romanticizing what Achille Mbembe has called ‘the nativist reflex’ (2007, 28)? Little did we know at the time just how pertinent the last question would become a few short months later, when the student-led movement Rhodes Must Fall, with its demands to decolonize universities and curricula in South Africa, and its immersion in black consciousness and resonance with the Black Lives Matter campaign in the United States, exploded onto the scene in 2015. The colloquium at NYU was part of two events on South Africa sponsored by the Postcolonial Studies Colloquium. The other event was a screening of Rehad Desai’s award-winning film, Miners Shot Down (2014), which traces events leading up to the massacre of mineworkers striking for a living wage at Marikana in South Africa in August 2012. Through a combination of voice-over narration and documentary footage, the film presents a disturbing account of the enmeshment of state and corporate power in exploiting workers and suppressing dissent. Indeed, what emerges from the documentary is the close affiliation and cooperation between the government and multinational corporations such as Lonmin, which owns the platinum mine at Marikana. For certain commentators, the Marikana massacre was one of the major events that led to a questioning of South Africa’s status as a harmonious ‘rainbow nation’ and placed the emphasis instead on neoliberal exploitation, internal corruption and a predatory nation-state. At the screening at NYU, the director of Miners Shot Down, Rehad Desai, and his scriptwriter, Anita Khanna, were both present and available for questions after the film was shown to a group of staff, students and members of the public. The film had already garnered numerous awards, including the Human Rights Jury Award at the Amnesty International Film Festival, the Special Choice Award at the Encounters International Film Festival in South Africa, the Aung San Suu Kyi Award at the Myanmar International Film Festival, the Camera Justitia Jury Award at the Movies that Matter Human Rights Festival, and the Václav Havel Jury Award at the One World Human Rights Film Festival. In 2015 it
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went on to win the award for best documentary at the International Emmy Awards in New York. Miners Shot Down is now one of at least three documentaries about Marikana, but it is unique in that it presents a powerful and unflinching record of events immediately leading up to the massacre as well as footage of the massacre itself. It shows how internal politics and disagreements within the National Union of Mineworkers of South Africa (NUM) led striking miners to split away from this union. In fact, the first violence occurred when the strikers marched on NUM offices and were shot at by union members. The documentary is particularly convincing when it points to many missed opportunities, mainly on the part of the police and Lonmin officials, where tension could have been defused and violence averted. As tensions escalated, security guards, miners and police were killed in skirmishes, leading to a final confrontation between the miners and police on 16 August 2012. During this confrontation, miners who refused to leave the small hill at Marikana, which was not mining property and which they regarded as a strategic point, were hemmed in with razor wire and fired upon with live ammunition by an elite special unit of the police. Thirty-four miners were killed and more than seventy severely injured. The Marikana massacre was deeply shocking to South Africans as it recalled killings of political protestors under apartheid, and many feel that Marikana remains a major, lingering wound in the postapartheid body politic. Student movements such as Rhodes Must Fall, Open Stellenbosch and Fees Must Fall that emerged in South Africa in 2015 have continually referenced and identified with the Marikana massacre. When he threw excrement onto the statue of Cecil John Rhodes at the campus of the University of Cape Town (UCT), an act of performance art that brought the Rhodes Must Fall movement to the attention of people all around the world, Chumani Maxwele was wearing a miner’s hat. During protests on campus, South African students have made ‘graveyards’ of white crosses to commemorate each of the miners killed during the Marikana massacre, while singing the anti-apartheid struggle song ‘Senzeni Na? Sono sethu, ubumnyama?’ (‘What have we done? Our only sin is that we are black and poor’). When Jameson Hall, named after the friend of Cecil John Rhodes and one-time Prime Minister of the Cape Colony, Leander Starr Jameson, was occupied during the Fees Must Fall protests at the University of Cape Town, students posted photographs of the miners killed at Marikana over the faces of
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white former Vice Chancellors of the university that lined the hall, and renamed the place Marikana Hall. During a demonstration against outsourcing that was held on the grounds of the UCT Business School, one of the students pointed to Judge Farlam, who sits on the UCT council and who had presided over the commission of enquiry into the Marikana massacre, and stated that he had allowed the government and the mining company Lonmin to get away with the murder of miners at Marikana. He asked whether Farlam did not feel there was a conflict of interest between his position as a member of the UCT council and his position as judge in the commission of enquiry into the Marikana massacre. This followed revelations that UCT had investments in Lonmin. Universities in South Africa continue to be major sites of contestation in the struggle for decolonization, and it seems significant that South Africa, a country that came late to political decolonization from white rule, is leading the way towards decolonization of institutions of higher learning. Contributors to the NYU colloquium in November 2014 were Xolela Mangcu, Jacob Dlamini, Hlonipha Mokoena, Mark Sanders and Jennifer Wenzel, and each of these intellectuals drew attention to some of the contradictions and complexities of South Africa, past and present. As their essays, collected for this issue, show, they foregrounded the dissonance of South Africa’s post-‘rainbow nation’ status. Xolela Mangcu discusses the apparent contradictions of a ruling party that claims to represent the black underclass but has its roots in a black elite. Jacob Dlamini alerts us to the complexities of South African history, which has not only comprised a struggle for power between black and white, but has also been marked by a long and sometimes secret history of black (and white) collaboration. Hlonipha Mokoena’s essay spurs questions about a contemporary police force that can only be haunted by the history of black policemen who served colonial government and the apartheid state. Mark Sanders elaborates on the discomfort of learning to speak ‘good’ or ‘proper’ Zulu and finding out that ‘proper’ Zulu is being used in South Africa as a shibboleth, as a xenophobic test to weed out ‘foreign’ Africans. Jennifer Wenzel outlines the ironies of South Africans demanding ‘power to the people’, attaining democracy, and then being left with poor service delivery and rolling blackouts of electrical power that affect the poor most keenly. The colloquium led to an intense discussion between the audience and the speakers that ran far over its allotted time. In order to convey the spirit of the event, and the insights gained during the
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discussion, a transcription of the discussion is included in this special issue. An essay by myself, entitled ‘Representing Marikana’, which says more about Miners Shot Down and other cultural representations of the tragic events that took place at Marikana in August 2012, is included as an afterword.
Reference Mbembe, Achille. 2007. ‘Afropolitanism.’ In Africa Remix: The Art of a Continent, edited by S. Njami
and L. Durán, translated by L. Chauvet, 26–30. Johannesburg: Johannesburg Art Gallery.