The Mandela Decade 1990 - 2000Labour, Culture and Society in Post-Apartheid South Africa ` … an innovative and highly illuminating set of reflections on the transition from apartheid.’ About the book ‘The Mandela Decade, the period of the 1990s, will be for generations to come a haunting turning point. It has been a privilege to have lived, thought and struggled through it,’ says author Ari Sitas. Sitas was a participant observer of the social changes addressed in this book. On 25 February 1990, hardly a week after Nelson Rolihlala Mandela’s release from prison, Sitas was there when Mandela told the 200 000-strong crowd at King’s Park Stadium in Durban to throw their guns into the sea. After five years of extreme violence and civil war in the province, what the majority expected was the arrival of a decisive and avenging Mandela. In the popular story-telling tradition, the release of the hero was to make the homesteads whole again, wrong would be made right, the shredded would be stitched again and the enemy routed. Sitas continued to have direct access to the intimate experiences of alienation by the ‘non-winners’, ‘non-mobiles’ and ‘losers’ of the transition. These were working-class poets and cultural activists who were themselves heroes during the resistance period but who were now lost in the world of hardship, rainbows and freedoms. Qabula, Max Masango, Martha Mkhize and others grappled with the contradictions of the changes around them and their daily black working-class experience. Going beyond poetry, Sita addresses Mandela’s charisma, of reconciliation, of the ‘new’ forms of thinking about the South African nation and its meanings. He goes about this by interrogating four separable, but interlinked themes. Long description ‘The Mandela Decade, the period of the 1990s, will be for generations to come a haunting turning point. It has been a privilege to have lived, thought and struggled through it,’ says author Ari Sitas Sitas was a participant observer of the social changes addressed in this book. On 25 February 1990, hardly a week after Nelson Rolihlala Mandela’s release from prison, Sitas was there when Mandela told the 200 000-strong crowd at King’s Park Stadium in Durban to throw their guns into the sea. After five years of extreme violence and civil war in the province, what the majority expected was the arrival of a decisive and avenging Mandela. In the popular story-telling tradition, the release of the hero was to make the homesteads whole again, wrong would be made right, the shredded would be stitched again and the enemy, routed. Sitas continued to have direct access to the intimate experiences of alienation by the ‘non-winners’, ‘non-mobiles’ and ‘losers’ of the transition. These were working-class poets and cultural activists who were themselves heroes during the resistance period but who were now lost in the world of hardship, rainbows and freedoms. Qabula, Max Masango, Martha Mkhize and others grappled with the contradictions of the changes around them and their daily black working-class experience. Going beyond poetry, Sita addresses Mandela’s charisma, of reconciliation, of the ‘new’ forms of thinking about the South African nation and its meanings. He goes about this by interrogating four separable, but interlinked themes. The second theme deals with how the globalisation of the country re-defined the conditions of existence of its working population, while the third theme is about how the elastic band that held together the comradeship of the labour movement has not snapped, given the radical inequalities and sharp forms of differentiation and stratification that have been experienced. The fourth theme looks at the theorising aspects of this process, away from disembodied and disembedded theories of society The poor are embedded and governed by laws of gravity with their own patterns of a politics of encroachment and defiance. Without such contextual analyses, social systems, states and civil societies or networks cannot be understood. Contents Acknowledgements MORE ABOUT THE IMAGINED SOUTH AFRICA BOOK SERIES Unisa Press celebrates 16 years of democracy in South Africa with a range of books entitled Imagined South Africa. To publish is to name reality; it is to mark identity and to confer the status of valid knowledge on the opinions, views and knowledge of a mass of voices once denied a hearing. This series chronicles the multiple ways in which South Africans of all colours and ideological persuasions have been responding, either critically or creatively, to the numerous contradictions in ten years of democracy. OTHER BOOKS AVAILABLE IN THIS SERIES Muff Andersson Leon de Kock, Louise Bethlehem and Sonja Laden (eds) Ashraf Jamal Chabani Manganyi (ed) Dial Ndima Reitumetse Mabokela and Zine Magubane (eds) Michael Titlestad Andries Oliphant, Peter Delius and Lalou Metzer (eds) Ari Sitas Keith Beavon Peter Stewart Louise Bethlehem Wessel le Roux and Karin van Marle Chris Ledochowski Devarakshanam Govinden (winner: HIddingh Currie Award for Academic Excelence) Archie Mafeje Greg Cuthbertson and Alan Jeeves (eds) Kenneth Parker Extract from the book The Mandela Decade by Ari Sitas: Preface I have been a privileged participant observer of the social changes that I am addressing in this book. I was there when Nelson Rolihlala Mandela told those present at King’s Park Stadium in Durban to throw their guns into the sea. This was hardly a week after his release. His directive induced an unexpected shock and a stir in the 200 000 people who had gathered to welcome him. I was one of the reception’s organisers as I was part of the cultural leadership of the Mass Democratic Movement (MDM). This was on 25 February 1990. After five years of extreme violence and civil war in the province, what the majority expected was the arrival of a decisive and avenging Mandela. His release was at least expected to follow popular story-telling traditions – that the release of the hero would make the homesteads whole again, wrong would be made right, the shredded would be stitched again and the enemy, routed. In 1999, just before his farewell to parliament, I was once again present as part of the leadership of the African Renaissance Initiative in KwaZulu-Natal (KZN) at a glittering function at Durban’s International Convention Centre. I was supposed to hand over a poem to Mandela written by Moses Masakhane Ndlovu, a cultural activist of the labour movement of the 1980s, a leader who had enjoyed personal mobility in the new South Africa but was not ‘mobile’ enough for that function. His poem was a fine one: it was about the emotions Mandela’s release had roused and was punctuated by a struggle to grasp the contradictions of what Mandela was expected to be and what he had turned out to be: ‘a turner of the other cheek/ and when that finished/ a turner of the other’ – the hero who had asked them to ‘forgive and reconcile’. I have been doubly privileged: despite being seen to be part of the new elite I continued to have access to the intimate experiences of alienation by the ‘non-winners’, ‘non-mobiles’ and ‘losers’ of the transition. They were working-class poets and cultural activists who were themselves heroes during the resistance period but who were now lost in the world of hardship, rainbows and freedoms. Many of them were recently proletarianised migrants, steeped in orality and its traditions and were hurting from the fact that their movement had become all ‘CODESAs and Briefcases’. Alfred Temba Qabula, a close friend and associate, and perhaps the most celebrated of them all, did not spare me: with my ‘computer, blue briefcase and funny tie parading as an Idi Dada, Bantubonke Holomisa’. His latest poems hurt. Reference to Uganda’s Idi Dada Amin and to the then Transkeian homeland leader are not something to be associated with comfortably, however metaphoric the intention was – especially so, since he took pleasure in saluting me like that in public. Having lost their prestige and status, having lost their jobs, watching their comrades become ‘mobile’, losing their revolutionary audiences, they wrote poems and scoured the streets for livelihoods. They also kept on passing their lines over to me, to comment, to help them with a publication outlet and, in the case of Qabula, to put me in my place. I still possess quite a few of those poems and as will become obvious in the book I have quoted sections of them by Qabula, Max Masango, Martha Mkhize and others who have really grappled with the contradictions of the changes around them and their daily black working-class experience. Take a few lines from the late Masango about how stealing TVs was a mistake because they ‘all show the same darned thing…’ and how he was duped into thinking that ‘Soweto day/ would make us cry/ and on the screen would be the reckoning of sins/ instead of the parade of bureaucrats/ Blacker than you and me/ Ranked according to their desk-size/ and the rhythm of their cell-phone ring’. His poem grapples with globalisation, experience and mutinous discord. The poems, their continuous stories, conversations and arguments helped me to become a better sociologist and helped me to decipher more complex realities in the transformation process than literature reviews, deductive reasoning or inductive cunning. The chapters of this book though, are not about poetry, they are about four separable but interlinked themes: the first is about the nation and nationalism and seeks to answer why the black working-class uploaded their hope in Mandela’s leadership and how a new national ontology has created the conditions for a ‘grand compromise’, which in turn defined the national democratic terrain of the transition. The second is about how the globalisation of the country re-defined the conditions of existence of its working population. The third is about how the elastic band that held together the comradeship of the labour movement has not snapped, given the radical inequalities and sharp forms of differentiation and stratification that have been experienced. The fourth is about theorising aspects of this process away from disembodied and disembedded theories of society that are adopted because they have an international pedigree. I had grappled with the relationship between class, race, nation and ethnicity during the 1980s at the height of the civil war between Zulu conservatives mobilised by Inkatha and Zulu democrats, socialists and communists grouped around the United Democratic Front (UDF) and Congress of South African Trade Unions (COSATU). Contrary to fashionable theories of the time, I insisted then as I insist now that people are not dupes: they are not just ‘interpellated’ from above into subjects, shaped or misguided by populists; also, however false their ideas might be, they do not suffer from ‘false consciousness’. I also argued that non-class forms of solidarity and the meanings they occupy like ‘nation’, ‘nationalism’ and ethnicity is always a ‘negotiation’ between those who mobilise, interpellate and control the expressive platforms, and those who are supposed to be mobilised – with their specific histories of experience, struggle and dispossession. Yes, the negotiation is asymmetrical, but however much the asymmetry favours those who have access to symbolic power, it is never a one-way process. I have since then found a better wording to delineate this process – it is a process of ‘symbolic figuration’ between the interpellators and between people’s cultural formations. So, in approaching the subject at hand – of Mandela’s charisma, of reconciliation, of the ‘new’ forms of thinking about nation and its meanings – I had to be conscious of the symbolic figurations ‘from above’ and ‘from below’. The first theme deals with the heavy-duty work of the transition – about the construction of a novel national ontology, an ‘indigenerality’ – that overcame the irreconcilable nationalisms of the African majority and the white minority regime. But this, indigenerality, like all such processes, represses and marginalises key forms of discord: ever ready to threaten its existence. I also argue that the third-space for the creation of it, provided by the ecclesiastical and primarily Christian ethos was not only downloaded, it was also uploaded from below. It is here once again that poetry, like Qabula’s, strikes to the core of the negotiation process which is about ‘land, bones and money’. This ‘third-space’ provides the emotive canopy for the emergence of what I call the four pillars of the Grand Compromise. The second theme is an obvious one: how South Africa’s ‘globalization’ affects and re-defines the conditions of its working population and its forms of organisation. It attempts to delineate the tremendous forces transitions unleash once institutions of racial domination get dismantled, once economic and developmental trajectories are chosen and once, racially defined obstacles to accumulation are removed. There is, primarily through this process, a logic of fragmentation that gets unleashed which has profound implications on worker livelihoods, communities and organisations. The key reconfiguration is of the nation-state itself which is transformed into a fiscal regime whilst at the same time it grapples to engineer a normative social agenda. I explore how, in short, neo-liberal protocols stump the perceived goals of the ‘national democratic revolution’. The third theme answers what has remained a quandary for social scientists – given the rapid changes, the growing forms of differentiation and inequality, why has the elastic band that held the comradeship of the movement together, not snapped? That it is very stretched, there is no doubt. Governance shocks, fiscality and restructuring had explosive repercussions for workers, the working poor, their communities and their extended networks of reproduction. Their responses and their continuous support of the movement cannot be understood without attention to their cultural formations. I seek to show that the black working-class is not a tabula rasa and through in-depth oral work, I trace at least what an elastic band could have meant through its forms of ‘umzabalazo’ and its multifaceted solidarities. I then proceed through a longitudinal overview to show what has happened to its leadership. The transition has produced winners, losers and those who are stuck in between, and how their solidarities are maintained. There is a deep concern with the ‘losers’ who in an economy in drift, drift away into the amorphous ‘livelihoods sector’ in a world of desperate efforts to procure and secure livelihoods. They have joined the ranks of the ‘new poor’, informal ‘productive networks’ and new forms of survival strategies animating the challenge and movements over conditions of basic reproduction. This is the world that most of the poets quoted and to be quoted inhabited and articulated with clear convictions. The fourth theme allows me to theorise about ‘macro’ and ‘micro’ social processes on the basis of deep contextual patterns that are impossible to understand through the grand textbooks of the sociology of modernity, post-modernity and globalisation. The poor are not demanding a space from an internet domain, they are embedded and governed by laws of gravity with their own patterns of a politics of encroachment and defiance. Without such contextual analyses, social systems, states and civil societies or networks cannot be understood. The attentive reader of this book will realise that eight of the worker poets quoted in this text have passed on: three died from the dreaded disease, two were victims of violence, one died of a stroke and another of the complications of old age. Most of them were part of the 22% of black worker leadership whose conditions of life had deteriorated through the decade. It is fitting to close this book with two postscripts. The first traces the demise of Alfred Temba Qabula, the famous imbongi of the labour movement, and his lesser known comrade, Martha Mkhize (pseudonym). The second postscript is obvious: ‘The Road to Polokwane’ attempts to update the work. Without a proper grasp of how socio-economic pressures are worked through dynamic cultural formations in KZN’s working class any talk of populism remains a cliché. The decade under scrutiny in this book set the foundations for the polarisations that are experienced today – it provides the necessary but not the sufficient conditions for its explication. What is new in the years since then is the reality of democratic local authorities and the unprecedented horizontal expansion of the African National Congress’s (ANC) mass base and the first murmurings of a division. The little child on his father’s shoulder waving at the newly released Mandela in Cape Town way back then is the youth of today ready to make history in his/her own way in a brand new society. Sociologists can only point to the dynamics of an unequal, interconnected, patterned and evolving sociality. I have hopefully thrown some further insight into the symbolic figurations that define the social weight that the young of today will have to ‘negotiate’. The Mandela Decade, the period of the 1990s, will be for generations to come a haunting turning point. It has been a privilege to have lived, thought and struggled through it. Ari Sitas
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