Building on Chapter 3, one would expect that free and fair elections, as well as expansive democratic citizenship would translate to considerably different strategies and claims making in Johannesburg, South Africa. Yet, on the contrary, urban communities in Johannesburg have been engaging in housing protests using unruly tactics and populist claims that are surprisingly similar to the tradition of bread uprisings in Cairo. In this case, residents have drawn on the history of township protests developed in the fight against apartheid, as well as the legacy of Nelson Mandela and the ANC. Using archives and interviews, I trace the history of popular rights to housing developed alongside a set of insurgent practices of riots, boycotts, and land occupations. They have formed a foundation that still informs housing protests in the township today, with communities combining unruly protest with electoral and legal mobilization. More broadly, this chapter challenges assumptions about what politics in a democracy is supposed to look like.

Through its Programme to Combat Racism (PCR), the WCC supported Southern African liberation movements. The PCR constituted a remarkable act of solidarity with those engaged in the struggle against apartheid, garnering the WCC heightened credibility in the Third World. But the PCR’s solidarity with the armed struggle waged by the African National Congress (ANC) in the 1970s led it to downplay human rights, a concept it – like the ANC – associated with liberal humanitarianism. This stance effectively subordinated individual rights to the cause of liberation, leading the WCC to turn a blind eye to the internal repression practiced by liberation movements. Having been a feature of the ANC’s agenda in the 1950s, human rights only returned to prominence in the 1980s, as the end of apartheid came into sight. Meanwhile, however, it was South Africa’s black ecumenical leaders, especially Desmond Tutu and Allan Boesak, who worked to reconcile human rights and liberation. Their prominent role in South Africa’s domestic anti-apartheid movement ultimately facilitated the integration of a capacious conception of human rights into South Africa’s post-apartheid constitution.

Chapter 4 introduces the second section of the book by situating the theoretical framework of protest brokers within the South African context. Often referred to as the “protest capital of the world,” South Africa offers a rich and complex setting for studying protest dynamics and the role of intermediaries. The chapter begins by justifying the choice of South Africa as the primary case study location, highlighting its history of protest from the apartheid era through the democratic transition and into the present day. It provides a concise historical overview of protest in South Africa, emphasizing how evolving political conditions have shaped the forms, frequency, and actors involved in collective action. The chapter also outlines the empirical foundation of the book, detailing the case selection process and introducing the twelve communities at the heart of the study, as well as providing an overview of the data collected. This groundwork sets the stage for the chapters that follow. By anchoring the study in South Africa, this book demonstrates the value of contextually grounded research in developing and testing new theoretical insights.

In Tongoane v National Minister for Agriculture and Land Affairs, the Constitutional Court of South Africa ruled that the government’s attempt to regulate property in traditional communities through the Communal Land Rights Act (CLARA) was unconstitutional. It emphasised that traditional land was already governed by indigenous ‘living law’ and CLARA sought to replace this vernacular law, a system evolved over time, with legislation. This highlighted the presence of indigenous law predating colonialism, challenging colonial notions like ‘lex nullius’ (no law) and ‘terra nullius’ (empty land), which denied indigenous Africans their rights. This chapter argues that South Africa’s post-apartheid constitutional vision fails to fully recognise and integrate this vernacular law, undermining true transformation, and instead advocates for ‘Alter-Native Constitutionalism’, which would amalgamate ‘customary’, ‘common’ and vernacular law to reflect the realities and normative convictions of most South Africans. This approach aims to rectify historical injustices and create a more just legal system, rooted in indigenous values and addressing social and economic inequities. Explicating the indigenously feminist decolonising concept of Alter-Native Constitutionalism, the chapter calls for reconstitution of South Africa’s legal framework and content to give full voice to indigenous world-sense and law-sense, advocating a shift away from Eurocentric logics and norms.

As with the Left, the Conservative Party also began to look to charity for the delivery of social services. Following the enormous appeal of Band Aid and Live Aid, the Government turned to the voluntary sector to make up for the cuts to the social services budgets. However, it also hoped to embrace a compliant sector. Conservative MPs regularly complained to the Charity Commissioners about the political advocacy of the humanitarians and other poverty lobbyists. From the mid-1980s, this became a concerted campaign through neoconservative organisations such as Western Goals. The most successful was the International Freedom Foundation, an anti-communist libertarian group which triggered an investigation into Oxfam’s advocacy on apartheid. The Charity Commissioners concluded that Oxfam had overstepped its remit and publicly rebuked it in 1991, even though the end of apartheid was in sight. It later emerged that the IFF was a front organisation for the South African military. The racist politics of the region, which shaped so much humanitarian intervention, had returned to the UK to impact the regulation of all charities’ campaigning work.

Protest poetry has long been a central element within South Africa’s literary culture and was arguably the defining genre of the country’s anti-apartheid literature. This chapter traces this history from the 1950s to the present. It argues that the genre has evolved through a rolling wave of distinct literary moments deeply linked to the prevailing politics of the time. These include the Colored poetry of the 1950s, the anti-poetics of the 1970’s Black Consciousness affiliated Soweto Poets, the dramatic worker poets of the 1980s, and today’s #Fallist reincarnation of the genre. In offering this history, the chapter disputes traditional understandings of protest and, instead, proposes a new definition of a genre that is characterized by a call for change that is never achieved. Moreover, it highlights the importance of audience and demonstrates how each wave, describing an increasingly desperate need for social and political change, has been addressed to an ever-widening demographic.

From the 1950s, the aims of economic warfare began to shift from disabling adversaries to using economic sanctions to shape the internal policies of states seen to be violating international norms. Sanctions remain important tools of geopolitics, despite fierce debates about their effectiveness. Historically, their impact has been influenced by two factors: externally by the degree of enforcement and internally by the adaptability of sanctioned economies to living under sanctions. The chapter compares the sanctions imposed on white minority regimes in South Africa and Rhodesia from the 1960s. Their impact was blunted by adaptation and the manner of enforcement. In both countries, white elites accepted economic isolation as the price of preserving minority rule. Both redirected trade and mobilised domestic resources to compensate for loss of trade. Adaptation was eased by slow and uneven enforcement. The structure of domestic economies and political institutions made it possible to displace many costs of sanctions onto African workers. When minority regimes eventually ended, the extensive government controls that had managed these adaptations remained.

Employment testing is routinely performed in South Africa today, but this was not always the case. Turning its back on its apartheid history of racial segregation and discrimination, South Africa has developed a progressive legal system to thwart bias and promote fairness in employment testing. This chapter explores employment-related testing in the public and private sectors, beginning with an overview of South Africa’s apartheid history, followed by a discussion of how the current legal system addresses fairness. A distinctive aspect of South African law is that preferential treatment, including lower cutoffs and within-group norming for protected groups, is not only mandated but also widely practised as the norm rather than the exception. Our review concludes that South Africa has enacted an extensive legal framework to promote equality and prevent unfair discrimination.

This chapter explores the thought of the intellectual and revolutionary activist, Zweledinga Pallo Jordan, in South Africa. It argues that a global intellectual history approach can be usefully incorporated in understanding his key writings, both archival and curated. Jordan’s writings, largely overlooked, personify a vibrant and engaged intellectual project of anticolonialism, drawing from a transnational circulation of ideas. Their style, content, and form vary considerably, incorporating discussion papers, editorials, newspaper columns, published chapters, articles, speeches, and lectures. The chapter therefore recovers the meaning of the central ideas contained in these writings, by examining Jordan’s own biography and the global context of political exile. It focuses on significant themes such as nation, race, class, and democratic constitutionalism as Jordan attempts to articulate the scope of the South African national liberation project in line with his ideological commitment to the African National Congress (ANC).

Chapter 2 situates the activism of La Fulana and Free Gender in historical contexts. The chapter draws on the theoretical framework of the previous chapter to argue that an intersectional approach illuminates the roles that race, class, and gender have played alongside sexuality in the historical process of constructing citizenship. The chapter advances this argument first with examination of the construction of the colonial state in each context, which instantiated strong norms of race, class, gender, and sexuality. The chapter then shows how these interlocking systems of power mediate organizations’ contemporary interactions with the political system, with other social movement organizations, and with opposition and oppositional discourse. The chapter discusses each of these factors for both organizations, first showing how the democratic transitions and adoption of human rights discourse affected La Fulana and Free Gender’s identity strategizing by providing new political and discursive opportunities. Next, the chapter explains how La Fulana’s and Free Gender’s interactions with the broader LGBT movement influenced their identity strategizing. Finally, the chapter explores the impact of anti-LGBT opposition and oppositional discourses on each organization’s identity strategies.