ECAS 2013

This paper examines the constitution of local contentious politics in the freehold location of Evaton in the 1940s and early 1950s, a period of general radicalisation of black politics. It focuses attention on the efforts by a community of squatters to assert ownership over urban land and more broadly to claim a right to the city, in a context in which state policy increasingly sought to limit and reverse African land and property rights in urban areas. The occupation of land in Evaton, the legality of which was disputed, produced an uncontrolled place (from the perspective of the authorities) or contentious space, which, in turn, generated a form of resistance politics that was simultaneously distinctive and reflective of general struggles of urban land occupations at the time. Its distinctiveness was premised on the freehold character of the land, which created a strong sense among the land occupiers that they had a legitimate right to own a plot of land. The organisation that led this struggle - 'the eye of the land' - took the fight to the highest courts in the land, while mobilising defiance against the local state's efforts to remove the community. What this struggle revealed was the relative weakness of the local state and how it was outmanoeuvred by local activists, whose approach to the state oscillated between resistance and a desire to be recognised as orderly and legitimate.

In South Africa, the Rainbow Nation is associated to the Struggle against apartheid. The - often illegal - resistance organized from below in the cities during the 1980s has become an essential myth in building the New South Africa, even in the city of Cape Town where the ANC was repeatedly defeated in local elections. Results from my PhD led in Cape Town in former 'African' and 'Colored' communities show how the collective narrative of the Liberation infuses individual memories and structures contemporaneous interpretations of urban citizenship beyond partisan allegiances. Nevertheless, what Henri Lefebvre has called the 'citadin-citoyen' (city-dweller-and-citizen) remains an abstract figure that is constantly renegotiated through tactics ranging from pragmatic collaboration with the local authorities to continued insurgency and alternative ordering. Ethnographic fieldwork led in a central neighbourhood of Luanda shows on the contrary that in the Angolan context, political manoeuvre is contained within the dominant party. Clientelism might then become the exclusive mode of negotiation to access urban resources.

By building a comparative analysis of Cape Town and Luanda through in-depth interviews of their ordinary residents, this paper aims at questioning what multipartism brings to local democracy. Do recent protests in both cities mean a return to a more direct interpretation of what ctizenship means? Or are they rather the sign of a post-political fragmentation of local identities?

This paper examines the role of localised conflicts in the Vaal Triangle, South Africa, in shaping locally generated ideas about appropriate political strategies to achieve change. Such localised conflicts, despite being within the realm of broader political dynamics, exhibited a certain contingency that differentiated them from those of other areas. They have to be understood beyond a master narrative of struggle that has come to dominate contemporary discourses of the past.

The paper pays particular attention to the 1980s. The everyday experiences of local actors during this period were vital in shaping understandings of rights, community, conflict, equality and freedom that infused the liberation struggle with its content. While economic and political structures did not shape political, cultural and social identities in any deterministic way, they certainly set the ground for such everyday experiences, which were at the core of the formation of new subjectivities. The way local communities imagined freedom and a post-apartheid nation intersected with ideologies and discourses of the liberation movements but cannot be reduced to them. Thus the disjunction between localised strategies and expectations of change and political agendas at the national level have at times led to uneasy and contending relations.

The socio-economic struggles for better services and living conditions, which formed part of popular protests in the 1980s, have produced few tangible results in the region. To contextualise contemporary popular protests, an understanding of the content and meaning of past political practices and discourses is inevitable.