Liberation and Compromise?

Abstract

This book has sought to frame contemporary debates, policies and events surrounding the land question in Southern Africa in terms of three intertwined themes, the enduring role of the regional political economy, the effect of the transition and the important place of narrative. As has been demonstrated through examination of the empirical case studies drawn from the region, the political economy of settler colonialism and the transitional arrangements to majority rule in the embattled ex-settler states have been formative to the construction of the liberal-constitutional political regime and the accompanying constraints upon it. As a bulwark of neoliberalism produced in the wake of lengthy transitions, the liberal constitutional regime had not taken account of the underlying inequalities in the political economy of settler colonialism and thus replicated many of the contradictions inherent in it. When challenged by the failures of independence to realise the promise of liberation, be they justified or utopian, the institutions and political practices of the transition themselves became obstacles to addressing the structural features of the political economy that had allowed for black elite accumulation while entrenching white economic privileges. These transitional arrangements, of course, were drawn from a ‘happy convergence’ of neoliberalist institutions, past ‘dirigiste’ practices in settler states, African traditionalist assumptions of political power and the liberation movements’ politics of domination.