Transition: Fissures in the Time and Space of Democracy

This chapter documents the transition from apartheid to democracy by paying close attention to its radical critics. It contrasts the celebrated discourse of transitional justice from the mid-1990s with the reality of the persistence of apartheid logics in the post-apartheid era. The prevailing global resonance of South Africa’s “transition” tends to situate it within a liberal international discourse of human rights, as a successful model of transitional justice, shepherded in by the compassion and forgiveness of ‘great men’ like Desmond Tutu and Nelson Mandela. In the South African context, however, the term also has two meanings: one race- and the other class-based. I contribute another critique of transition discourses from the perspective of Abahlali baseMjondolo’s democratic praxis, where neither communism nor genuine democracy are future stages to be realized through intermediary transitions, but a ‘living politics’ that can only be realized through active experimentation in the present.