Limits to Liberation after Apartheid: Citizenship, Governance and Culture

Abstract

Limits to Liberation after Apartheid: Citizenship, Governance and Culture. Edited by Steven L. Robins. Athens: Ohio University Press; Oxford, U.K.: James Currey; Cape Town, So. Afr.: David Philip Publishers, 2005. Pp. x, 246; index, bibliography, illustrations. $49.95 cloth, $26.95 paper. Whether one dates it from Nelson Mandela's release in 1990, or from his election to the presidency in 1994, the miracle of South Africa's transition from apartheid to non-racial has acquired a mythical resonance that may have had the unanticipated side effect of freezing it in an embalmed time frameat least as far as the outside world is concerned. For students now entering college in the United States or in Europe-if they have any awareness of Africa-the image of the rainbow nation is the only one to which they have been exposed, while apartheid looms in a dark ages background, along with such gruesome episodes as the slave trade, the Gulag, or the Nazi death camps. Nor is the general population in the West immune to this sanguine perception that, by virtue of some divine surprise akin to that which brought about the end of the Cold War, South Africa has morphed into a model of harmony and communal tolerance. South Africans, for the most part, are exempt from this sort of self-induced myopia, and have long since come to realize that the promises of the democratic would be much harder to achieve than had been hoped-especially in such matters as employment, housing, education, health delivery, or land reform-or, to put it more succinctly, that the ostensible triumph of liberty did not automatically entail equality or fraternity. The structural limits of liberation, which are the focus of this collection of essays-originating in a number of workshops sponsored by CODESRIA-have often been analyzed from a political economy perspective that suggests disturbing parallels between the continued dependency of African states encapsulated in a world capitalist order and the sort of internal neo-colonialism perpetuated by the new South Africa's commitment to neo-liberal pragmatism. In this volume, however, problems are approached from a different angle, and instead of dissecting economic policies, voting behavior, or electoral strategies, the authors attempt to investigate the limits of (and prospects for) liberal democracy in the context of cultural diversity, identity, and emerging practices of citizenship and governance. …