Africana Library
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Item Vigilantes, clientalism, and the South African State(1991-09-30) Charney, CraigOn the afternoon of July 22, 1990, residents of Sebokeng watched nervously as a procession of vans and busses threaded its way towards the African township's stadium, carrying men to a rally called by Inkatha. Rumours of an attack by members of the conservative Zulu movement were rife, and tension mounted during the meeting. When it ended, several hundred local youths confronted the Inkatha supporters as they came out. Firebombs were hurled at an Inkatha member's house and the two groups started fighting, but police quickly dispersed the youths with tear gas. Then hundreds of Inkatha men surged through the dirt streets, breaking windows and stabbing and shooting people, until they reached and stormed a workers' hostel controlled by political opponents... This paper argues vigilantism is the continuation of clientelist politics by other means, to paraphrase Clausewitz's dictum on war. Drawing on South African experience and other cases, counter-revolutionary vigilantism is defined as the unlicensed use of private violence to defend an oligarchic clientelist state under popular challenge ...Item Towards rupture or stasis? An Analysis of the 1981 South African general election(1981-08-24) Charney, CraigThe results of the 1981 white general election in South Africa seemed paradoxical to many observers. After three decades in which white politics appeared dominated by the unchallengeable hegemony of the ruling National Party, white party politics seemed to have taken on a new turbulence and uncertainty. The Sunday Times reported, "Nat Voters Bolt to the Right", while the Transvaler headlined a "Leftwards swing". Very few seats actually changed hands, yet many commentators sensed that the election was a watershed. The confusing aspects of the election resulted from the play of contradictory political and social forces. This paper contends that the old ethnic-based class alliances which formed the basis of the white South African party system are unravelling. Though power did not change hands, the 1981 election traced the outline of a possible class realignment of white political forces, with potentially far-reaching consequences. In the aftermath, nothing seemed to have changed, but nothing would ever be quite the same. To illuminate the changes underway, we will begin with a discussion of the background to the election, then skip ahead to consider the patterns of change evident in the election results. This is followed by an examination of survey data to discern the emerging class division, and of how the strategy of the parties promoted or retarded its expression. The paper concludes with the implications of the new trends in the white electorate for the future of white politics in South Africa.Item Black power, white press; literacy, newspapers, and the transformation of township political culture(1993-05-10) Charney, CraigBlack political mobilization in South Africa has largely been explained by factors which are either structural or external to the communities involved: falling wages and employment, the contradictions of school and township administration, and anticolonial wars on the country's borders. Social and political movements, leaders, and processes within black communities have received short shrift. The political consciousness of different sections of black society has frequently been neglected or read off from class positions. The institutions, organizations, and discourses which shape them have been ignored or treated as tools of the status quo. In particular, the movement which did the most to initiate the black political renaissance, the Black Consciousness Movement (BCM), has been written off as a "group of petit bourgeois intellectuals" without links to the masses. Yet the resulting accounts have failed to adequately explain the forms and gaps of the re-emergence of mass resistance over the past two decades or to predict or periodize the development of national political lifeItem A world of networks: power, political culture and collective action in black South African communities, 1945-1965.(1994-07-13T06:19:29Z) Charney, Craig