Citizenship and Inequality in Post-Apartheid South Africa: Contours and Collective Responses

Abstract

When the African National Congress (ANC) was elected in the country’s first ever one person, one vote election in 1994 the newly elected President Nelson Mandela set out a vision for a post-apartheid South Africa of a ‘people centred society…[in] the pursuit of the goals of freedom from want, freedom from hunger, freedom from deprivation’ (cited in RSA, 1994: 6). In the shadow of the apartheid past, in which racialised inequalities were prescribed by law, the ANC undertook to remake South African society and in so doing forge a new form of democratic citizenship. The South African constitution was central to this and is often heralded as one of the most progressive in the world by virtue of its protection for social as well as political and civil rights. However, twenty years into South Africa’s democracy inequality has by a range of measures increased (see Marais 2011: 208-211) and this seriously compromises the ability of poor, Black South Africans, who were previously disenfranchised by apartheid, to claim social citizenship (Dawson 2010). This chapter provides an outline of the contours of inequality in post-apartheid South Africa and argues that the promise of democratic citizenship has been compromised by a neoliberal development path. That is a development path in which the State expands and defends the role of the free market in such a way that economic rationalities seep into every area of social life (Harvey 2005; Von Schnitzler 2008). Linking the analysis of post-apartheid social and economic policy to the lived experience of informal settlement and township residents this chapter demonstrates how the continuing and increasing inequalities serve to exclude poor, Black South Africans from democracy. Furthermore, the chapter reflects how this exclusion has formed the basis for collective political responses to rising inequality and situates this response as part of a global protest wave against inequality. The analysis developed in this chapter is based on research conducted over the last 5 years that theorises the politics of protest and social movements in South Africa.