African Studies Institute - Seminar Papers

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Author: search.filters.author.Greenberg, StanleySubject: search.filters.subject.South Africa. Politics and government

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    Legitimation and control: Ideological struggles within the South African state
    (1983-08-08) Greenberg, Stanley
    In June 1979, Piet Koornhof, minister for Cooperation and Development, proclaimed before the National Press Club in Washington that "apartheid is dead." He may have been grandstanding, of course, but Koornhof's words also resonated at home where doubts about ideological orthodoxy were being expressed both within and outside the state. The Bureau for Economic Policy and Analysis at the University of Pretoria, with well-developed contacts within the government and the Afrikaner business community, reported in July 1980 that the "failure of socio-economic growth in the territories of the Black national states ... is becoming embarrassing." (1) The head of the bureau, Jan Lombard, referred to "separate development" as a 'sinking philosophy." (2) The perception has spread to yet more official "think tanks": BENSO has published articles that now refer to the failure of the "development paradigm." Little wonder, then, that outside observers, like John Saul and Stephen Gelb and Stanley Greenberg, have begun to write of an "organic crisis" or a "crisis of hegemony." (4) To understand the ideological ferment in South Africa -- and move beyond generalized statements about crisis (5) -- it will be necessary to elaborate the thematic aspects of a disintegrating, dominant ideology and of an emergent, and still fragmentary market-based substitute. This ideological transformation, we shall see, is rooted in political struggles within the state that center on these thematic changes and that depend profoundly on "connections" with actors and struggles outside the state.