Politics at a Distance from the State by Kirk Helliker Lucien van der Walt

Author:Kirk Helliker, Lucien van der Walt [Kirk Helliker, Lucien van der Walt]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Political Science, Political Economy, Political Ideologies, Anarchism, World, African
ISBN: 9781629639437
Google: MyWLzgEACAAJ
Publisher: PM Press
Published: 2022-07-05T04:59:52+00:00

The question that faces South Africans, as well as those who have an interest in South African issues, is how history features in post-Apartheid South Africa. Critical questions include, what is remembered, recorded, and by whom, and crucially the manner in which different histories contribute or do not contribute to current understandings of nationhood.

The Mpondo Revolt, which involved widespread open revolt for nine months and, in many regards, endured into the 1960s, was sustained for a longer period than most urban struggles in South Africa. As such, Ntsebeza and Kepe (2011, 21) make the important point that urban struggles culminating in the Sharpeville Massacre of 1960 should not overshadow the significance of the events in Mpondoland occurring roughly around the same time. Yet, this event, which presented an organic, organised, militant peasant rebellion, has been silenced in most nationalist historiography, and the rural sphere has been portrayed as quiescent and backward.

The Mpondo Revolt, which was a sustained resistance to colonial and apartheid policies and an affirmation of people’s defence of democracy in Mpondoland, in many ways shatters modernist conceptions of the political and the way struggle should be organised, which has always been seen as an almost exclusively urban, ‘progressive’, project. The ways in which idioms and symbols associated with this form of militant rural resistance which were present in the Marikana/Lonmin strikes of 2012, such as traditional dress, weapons and medicine, and song, were endowed by journalists and political analysts with the characteristics of backwardness, traditionalism and violence, demonstrate the way in which the official political domain is conceptualised in South African society through the media and the academy. However, if we are able to extend our analysis beyond these narrow forms of representation to the ways in which people actually practise politics in the everyday, we are able to grasp alternative ways of imagining democracy and citizenship beyond liberal constitutionalism and state subjectivities.

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