Essays On The Evolution Of The Post Apartheid State

This book critically examines the challenges, successes, and failures of the post-1994 South African state against the humane values enshrined in its constitution: nonracial democracy and respect for all generations of human rights—civil, political, social, economic, resources and the environment and gender and communication. The book sheds light on the difficulties faced by the State when trying to bring together a diverse society comprised of traditional South African, Western-based and "other" African (immigrant) cultures into a cohesive nation with a common South African identity. The views of the essays may not be entirely consistent and the issues they raise may be contentious. This merely affirms the truism that the State is a contested terrain. The aim of this book is to deepen the search for an understanding of the theory of the State as it applies to a transforming society such as ours and to trudge the dividing line between theory and practice so they can feed into each other in a progressive spiral towards the desired end-state.

Democracy came to South Africa in April 1994, when the African National Congress won a landslide victory in the first free national election in the country’s history. That definitive and peaceful transition from apartheid is often cited as a model for others to follow. The new order has since survived several transitions of ANC leadership, and it averted a potentially destabilizing constitutional crisis in 2008. Yet enormous challenges remain. Poverty and inequality are among the highest in the world. Staggering unemployment has fueled xenophobia, resulting in deadly aggression directed at refugees and migrant workers from Zimbabwe and Mozambique. Violent crime rates, particularly murder and rape, remain grotesquely high. The HIV/AIDS pandemic was shockingly mishandled at the highest levels of government, and infection rates continue to be overwhelming. Despite the country’s uplifting success of hosting Africa’s first World Cup in 2010, inefficiency and corruption remain rife, infrastructure and basic services are often semifunctional, and political opposition and a free media are under pressure. In this volume, major scholars chronicle South Africa’s achievements and challenges since the transition. The contributions, all previously unpublished, represent the state of the art in the study of South African politics, economics, law, and social policy.

The book, made up of three parts, covers a wide spectrum of political economy issues on post-apartheid South Africa. Although the text is mainly descriptive, to explain various areas of the political economy of post-apartheid South Africa, the first and the last parts provide illuminating insights on the kind of society that is emerging during the twenty-one years of democracy in the country. The book discusses important aspects of the political history of apartheid South Africa and the evolution of post-apartheid society, including an important recap of the history of southern Africa before colonialism. The text is a comprehensive description of numerous political economy phenomena since South Africa gained its political independence and covers some important themes that have not been discussed in detail in other publications on post-apartheid South Africa. The book also updates earlier work of the author on policy and law making, land and agriculture, education and training as well as on poverty and inequality in post-apartheid South Africa thereby providing a wide-ranging overview of the socio-economic development approaches followed by the successive post-apartheid administrations. Interestingly, three chapters focus on various aspects of the post-apartheid South African economy: economic policies, economic empowerment and industrial development. Through the lens of the notion of democratic developmental state and taking apartheid colonialism as a point of departure, the book suggests that, so far, post-apartheid South Africa has mixed socio-economic progress. The author’s extensive experience in the South African government ensures that the book has policy relevance while it is also theoretically sound. The text is useful for anyone who wants to understand the totality of the policies and legislation as well as the political economy interventions pursued since 1994 by the South African Government.

Sparked by the enormous political changes in South Africa since the fall of apartheid, the essays in this collection focus on the rapidly changing nature of South African mass media, art, and other forms of aesthetic expression.

This book critically examines the current social policy in post-apartheid South Africa and proposes an alternative social policy agenda to create a new development pathway for the country. Taking social policy as a vehicle that will facilitate the creation of a new society altogether, namely the "Good Society," the author argues for the adoption of policy that will socially re-engineer South Africa. The author shows how the policy tools and development interventions which were undertaken by the post-apartheid state in driving South Africa’s transformation agenda failed to emancipate many individuals, families, and communities from the cycle of intergenerational poverty and underdevelopment. He contends that social policy interventions that foster the social re-engineering of South African society must take place to untangle the inherited colonial-apartheid social order. This book includes comparative analyses on the Global South and Global North to present the ways in which countries such as post-Second World War Great Britain and Sweden, and post-independence Zambia of the 1960s and 1970s, were able to use social policy to create new societies altogether or places similar to the "Good Society." The conceptual and methodological issues that form the basis for this book reside in public policy-making and the public good and will be of interest to scholars of social policy, social development, and South African society.

Black Economic Empowerment (BEE) policies have been a central pillar of attempts to overcome the economic legacy of apartheid. Yet, more than two decades into democracy, economic exclusion in South Africa still largely re?ects the fault-lines of the apartheid era. Current discourse often con?ates BEE with the so-called tenderpreneurship referred to in the title, namely the reliance of some emergent black capitalists on state patronage. Authors go beyond this notion to understand BEEs role from a unique perspective. They trace the history of black entrepreneurship and how deliberate policies under colonialism and its apartheid variant sought to suppress this impulse. In the context of modern South Africa, authors interrogate the complex dynamics of class formation, economic empowerment and redress against the backdrop of broader macroeconomic policies. They examine questions relating to whether B-BBEE policies are informed by strategies to change the structure of the economy. These issues are explored against the backdrop of the experiences of other developing countries and their journeys of industrialisation. The relevant black empowerment experiences of countries such as the United States are also discussed. The authors identify policy and programmatic interventions to forge the non-racial future that the constitution enjoins South Africans to build.

The 21st century belongs to cities, especially those of a rapidly urbanising Africa. South Africa experienced a historic change in city government in 2016, when three major metros changed political leadership. The realities that city governments must confront range from dynamic population growth to the potential presented by breakthroughs in digital innovations. In View from City Hall Patricia de Lille and Craig Kesson scrutinise the complexities of governing a growing city, including what it means to run a modern city with a particular historical context like Cape Town and the choices that must be made for a better future.

The post-apartheid era in South Africa has, in the space of nearly two decades, experienced a massive memory boom, manifest in a plethora of new memorials and museums and in the renaming of streets, buildings, cities and more across the country. This memorialisation is intricately linked to questions of power, liberation and public history in the making and remaking of the South African nation. Ali Khangela Hlongwane and Sifiso Mxolisi Ndlovu analyse an array of these liberation heritage sites, including the Hector Pieterson Memorial and Museum, the June 16, 1976 Interpretation Centre, the Apartheid Museum and the Mandela House Museum, foregrounding the work of migrant workers, architects, visual artists and activists in the practice of memorialisation. As they argue, memorialisation has been integral to the process of state and nation formation from the pre-colonial era through the present day.