Ruptures: From Post-politics to the Urban Political

This chapter introduces the terrain of post-apartheid urban social movements that disrupted the post-political status-quo achievements of the first transition. I present an analytical chronology that divides these movements into three phases of struggle: 1998-2004, 2004-2012, and 2012-present. South Africa has experienced unprecedented upheaval over the past two decades, with some scholars arguing that it has the highest level of protests per capita in the world after China. Taken together, the plethora of resistance movements and protests which emerged in the early 2000s challenges hegemonic narratives of Africa as a paradigmatic site of underdevelopment and civil war, a continent in need of sympathy and aid. Rather, inverting the presumed directionality of solidarity, I argue, important lessons can be gleaned from the political experiments underway in South Africa for movements in other parts of the world. Thinking against the grain of many existing accounts of African movements, I argue that the most interesting forms of rupture have emerged from currents operating at a distance from more orthodox left spaces.