Abstract
After hours of laughter, food, and music with my fictive family, I was in a car headed out of Rabie Ridge—a predominantly “coloured” township within the City of Johannesburg Metropolitan Municipality—when I spotted a Black South African man wearing a red mining uniform holding a newspaper and shouting for the attention of those moving through the busy intersection. I inquired about who that was, and my fictive brother said, “he’s EFF” (referring to the Economic Freedom Fighters, a leftist party in South Africa). In 2016, I lived, worked, and conducted independent research in South Africa. Thus, I find Marcel Paret’s new book, Fractured Militancy: Precarious Resistance in South Africa after Racial Inclusion, advances social movements scholarship and provides the background to color in my experiences within South Africa, or what Desmond Tutu coined the “Rainbow Nation.”
Over the past 30 years, South Africa has seen tremendous change through racial inclusion, democracy, and the end of apartheid. Yet, one thing has not changed for poor Black urban communities in South Africa: their demands of the government to provide water, housing, and electricity. In Fractured Militancy, Paret spotlights how poor Black urban residents of informal settlements feel betrayed by the African National Congress (ANC)—the post-apartheid ruling party—and respond in protest because of their continued poor living conditions. Paret aims to understand why these local protests in poor Black residential areas have not coalesced into a mass movement in a predominantly Black country not far removed from one of the largest mass movements of the twenty-first century focused on ending racial and economic domination.
Fractured Militancy examines how four poor Black urban residential areas near Johannesburg take different approaches to organizing and protesting for resources from the South African government. Drawing on visits to South Africa from 2007–2019, 29 months of ethnographic observations, and hundreds of in-depth and protest interviews, Paret argues that the “elite-led reorganization” of South Africa generates poor and working-class resentment while deploying logics and techniques that prevent a broad-based social movement (p. 4). Through an analysis of South Africa, the author provides an account of the anticolonial warning that has come to pass—when a grassroots anticolonial movement becomes a top-down state ruling party that takes the form of the colonizer.
The book is split into two parts. The first part traces how a radical anti-apartheid movement intent on racial inclusion and economic redistribution results in a neoliberal state. Paret shows how the ANC and other key groups organized around the idea of a national democratic revolution (NDR), where the goal was to create a democratic South Africa that redressed the racial, economic, and gendered oppression of apartheid. Yet, with the 1994 transition to democracy and the subsequent presidencies of Nelson Mandela, Thabo Mbeki, and Jacob Zuma, the NDR became a project of “elite empowerment” (p. 41) that emphasized the assimilation of Black elites into “liberal capitalism and [a] representative democracy” (p. 34). This shift with the NDR positioned the ANC as the ruling party who represents the voice of Black South Africans, and the state as the provider of resources.
The second part of Fractured Militancy examines how poor Black urban communities organize and protest for the state to fulfill its promise of service delivery or providing resources such as housing and electricity to improve living conditions. Although the four residential areas in the study have similar living conditions and demands, the author identifies three reasons why these protests do not form a larger broad-based movement: community as the unifying category, nationalism, and differing views on class politics. First, Paret finds that while community serves as means of collective identity formation, the place-based logics promoted competition between residential areas over resources, and limited solidarity efforts. Second, nationalist rhetoric advanced by state officials fueled local xenophobia which directed growing resentment toward non-native business owners within the communities studied. Thus, nationalism counteracted the efforts of local organizers who aimed to unite their residential area and keep the attention on the state and its promise of service delivery. Third, each of the four residential areas within the study had a different approach on how to address their material needs through political engagement, which caused further divisions. For example, one residential area sought to address their material needs by entering one of their own residents as a candidate in the local government elections, while another residential area sought solidarity outside of the community and formed a socialist party. By examining these four residential areas, Paret demonstrates that although fragmented and co-opted, in part, the spirit of anti-apartheid protest in South Africa continues.
Through an analysis of South Africa after racial inclusion, Fractured Militancy succeeds in its aim to “emphasize the political dimensions of capitalism and class struggle” as a response to “recent calls for greater attention to capitalism, class, and political economy within scholarship on social movements” (p. 139). Paret concludes with how current theorizations of resource mobilization, political opportunities, and framing do not fully explain what is observed in the four examined residential areas in South Africa. For those teaching an advanced undergraduate- or graduate-level course on social movements, this book is useful toward the end of the seminar as a challenge to dominate theorizations of social movements and to generate insightful discussions on the future direction of social movements scholarship.
Overall, those interested in social movements, political economy, or methodologically rigorous qualitative work, will find Fractured Militancy an engaging and fruitful read. And for those like me, who encounter this book after visiting or living in South Africa, you will be reminded how post-apartheid South Africa is considered the “Rainbow Nation,” which is apt, because in rainbows, Blackness is in constant demand to be seen.