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Since the end of apartheid, South Africa has become an extreme yet unexceptional embodiment of forces at play in many other regions of the world: intensifying inequality alongside \"wageless life,\" proliferating forms of protest and populist politics that move in different directions, and official efforts at containment ranging from liberal interventions targeting specific populations to increasingly common police brutality. Rethinking the South African Crisisrevisits long-standing debates to shed new light on the transition from apartheid. Drawing on nearly twenty years of ethnographic research, Hart argues that local government has become the key site of contradictions. Local practices, conflicts, and struggles in the arenas of everyday life feed into and are shaped by simultaneous processes of de-nationalization and re-nationalization. Together they are key to understanding the erosion of African National Congress hegemony and the proliferation of populist politics. This book provides an innovative analysis of the ongoing, unstable, and unresolved crisis in South Africa today. It also suggests how Antonio Gramsci's concept of passive revolution, adapted and translated for present circumstances with the help of philosopher and liberation activist Frantz Fanon, can do useful analytical and political work in South Africa and beyond.

For nearly three decades, Umkhonto we Sizwe (MK), the armed wing of the African National Congress (ANC), waged a violent revolutionary struggle against the apartheid state in South Africa. Stephen Davis works with extensive oral testimonies and the heroic myths that were constructed after 1994 to offer a new history of this armed movement. Davis deftly addresses the histories that reinforce the legitimacy of the ANC as a ruling party, its longstanding entanglement with the South African Communist Party, and efforts to consolidate a single narrative of struggle and renewal in concrete museums and memorials. Davis shows that the history of MK is more complicated and ambiguous than previous laudatory accounts would have us believe, and in doing so he discloses the contradictions of the liberation struggle as well as its political manifestations.

Nelson Mandela’s release from prison in February 1990 was one of the most memorable moments of recent decades. It came a few days after the removal of the ban on the African National Congress (ANC); founded a century ago and outlawed in 1960, the ANC had transferred its headquarters abroad and opened what it termed an External Mission. For the thirty years following its banning, the ANC had fought relentlessly against the apartheid state. Finally voted into office in 1994, the ANC today regards its armed struggle as the central plank of its legitimacy. This book studies the ANC’s period in exile, based on a full range of sources in southern Africa and Europe. These include the ANC’s own archives and also those of the Stasi, the East German ministry that trained the ANC’s security personnel. The book reveals that the decision to create the Umkhonto we Sizwe (Spear of the Nation)—a guerrilla army which later became the ANC’s armed wing—was made not by the ANC but by its allies in the South African Communist Party after negotiations with Chinese leader Mao Zedong. It shows that many of the strategic decisions made, and many of the political issues which arose during the course of that protracted armed struggle, had a lasting effect on South Africa, shaping its society even up to the present day.

The ANC is a party-movement that draws on its liberation credentials yet is conflicted by a multitude of weaknesses, factions and internal succession battles. Booysen constructs her analysis around the ANC’s four faces of political power – organisation, people, political parties and elections, and policy and government – and explores how, since 1994, it has acted to continuously regenerate its power.

When Amin Cajee left South Africa to join the liberation struggle he believed he had volunteered to serve ,a democratic movement dedicated to bringing down an oppressive and racist regime,. Instead, he writes, in this powerful and courageous memoir, ,I found myself serving a movement that was relentless in exercising power and riddled with corruption,. Fordsburg Fighter traces an extraordinary physical journey , from home in South Africa, to training in Czechoslovakia and the ANC,s Kongwa camp in Tanzania to England. The book makes a significant contribution to the hidden history of exile, and documents Cajee,s emotional odyssey from idealism to disillusionment.

On 8 January 2012 the African National Congress (ANC) of South Africa, the oldest African nationalist organisation on the continent, celebrated its one hundredth anniversary. This historic event has generated significant public debate within both the ANC and South African society at large. There is no better time to critically reflect on the ANC’s historical trajectory and struggle against colonialism and apartheid than in its centennial year. One Hundred Years of the ANC is a collection of new work by renowned South African and international scholars. Covering a broad chronological and geographical spectrum and using a diverse range of sources, the contributors build upon but also extend the historiography of the ANC by tapping into marginal spaces in ANC history. By moving away from the celebratory mode that has characterised much of the contemporary discussions on the centenary, the contributors suggest that the relationship between the histories of earlier struggles and the present needs to be rethought in more complex terms. Collectively, the book chapters challenge hegemonic narratives that have become an established part of South Africa’s national discourse since 1994. By opening up debate around controversial or obscured aspects of the ANC’s century-long history, One hundred years of the ANC sets out an agenda for future research. The book is directed at a wide readership with an interest in understanding the historical roots of South Africa’s current politics will find this volume informative. This book is based on a selection of papers presented at the One Hundred Years of the ANC: Debating Liberation Histories and Democracy Today Conference held at the University of Witwatersrand, Johannesburg from 20–23 September 2011.

In 1994, the African National Congress (ANC) won South Africa's first ever democratic election. It inherited a health service that was indelibly marked with the inequities of the apartheid era, highly privatized and distorted toward the hospital needs of urban Whites. The ANC's manifesto promised major improvements, but this study finds only two significant health equity improvements: (1) primary care had funding increased by 83 percent and was better staffed; and (2) health care workers became significantly more race-representative of the population. These improvements, however, were outweighed by equity losses in the deteriorating public-private mix. Policy analysis of the elite actors attributes this failure to the dominance of the Treasury's neoliberal macroeconomic policy (GEAR), which severely limited any increases in public spending. The ANC s nationalist ideology underpinned GEAR and many of the health equity decisions. It united the ANC, international capital, African elites, and White capital in a desire for an African economic renaissance. And it swept the population along with it, becoming the new hegemonic ideology. As this study finds, the successful policies were those that could be made a part of this active hegemonic reformation, symbolically celebrating African nationalism, and did not challenge the interests of the major actors.

In 1995, a South African journalist informed Frank Wilderson, one of only two American members of the African National Congress (ANC), that President Nelson Mandela considered him a threat to national security. Wilderson was asked to comment. Incognegro is that comment. It is also his response to a question posed five years later in a California university classroom: How come you came back? Although Wilderson recollects his turbulent life as an expatriate during the furious last gasps of apartheid, Incognegro is at heart a quintessentially American story. During South Africa's transition, Wilderson taught at universities in Johannesburg and Soweto by day. By night, he helped the ANC coordinate clandestine propaganda, launch psychological warfare, and more. In this mesmerizing political memoir, Wilderson's lyrical prose flows from unspeakable dilemmas in the red dust and ruin of South Africa to his return to political battles raging quietly on US campuses and in his intimate life. Readers will find themselves suddenly overtaken by the subtle but resolute force of Wilderson's biting wit, rare vulnerability, and insistence on bearing witness to history no matter the cost.

Arising in the 1910s and emerging as legitimate governing bodies in the 1990s, the South African and the Palestinian national liberation movements have exhibited remarkable parallels over the course of their development. The fortunes of the African National Congress and the Palestinian Liberation Organization, however, have proven strikingly different. How the movements, despite similar circumstances and experiences, have arrived at such dissimilar outcomes is described in Liberation and Democratization.

The political atmosphere in the ruling party, the African National Congress (ANC), is characterised by a culture of political intolerance. This persisting culture disregards the internal morality espoused in internal democratic grounds. The notion that the ANC is a “leader of the society” is diminishing in its capacity to inspire public confidence and is worsening in this era of renewal and unity, bridled as it is by the deepened culture of factionalism. In this regard, any political party that emerges out of the struggle may seem to be engulfed by deeper challenges from decades of not realising its objectives. For the ANC, the fundamental enquiry is whether the National Democratic Revolution (NDR) that was sold to South Africans is still on course or is an abandoned struggle. This study intends to introspect the ANC’s trajectory with regard to the current project renewal and unity implications in the run-up to the 55th national conference. The fundamental themes are whether there is a rescue from corruption that seems to be sticky, and whether unity can co-exist with renewal and what kind of ANC character will emerge in the developmental state. Reflective, chaos and developmental theories are used to explain the theatrics in the ANC ahead of the 55th national conference amid renewal and unity repulsion. The study is a qualitative literature review to explain the existing culture of the ANC and developmental state. The conclusion is expected to answer a pertinent question on whether renewal and unity are conceptually diagonal opposites given the turbulence that has engulfed the ANC and the government ahead of the 55th national conference and beyond.