Urban identity in post-apartheid Soweto
Date
2006-10-26T07:43:39Z
Authors
Wafer, Alex
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Abstract
This research report is an examination of urban identity in post-apartheid Soweto,
using the SECC as a case study. The report examines the emergence of the Soweto
Electricity Crisis Committee (SECC), one of a number of post-apartheid social
movements in urban areas around South Africa. The SECC have emerged in response
to the policy of cost-recovery and cut-offs in the provision of services to poor
communities in Johannesburg, and have also managed to tap into a broader discourse
of anti-privatisation. While the SECC maintain a political agenda, and are affiliated to
a number of overtly political organisations such as the Anti-Privatisation Forum
(APF), I argue in this report that the SECC affirm a particular set of post-apartheid
identities. This set of identities is constituted within a very particular relationship to
place; the SECC emerged and lives in Soweto.
Through the everyday activities in the branches of the SECC members of the SECC
actively construct themselves and the places in which they live. The report draws on a
literature that has considered the emergence of social movements in Latin American
and post-colonial cities since the 1980s. This literature argues that social movements
contest not only the material conditions but also the cultural and symbolic order of
space and the city. The report then considers how the SECC is constituted across
different scales. These different scales of movement activity represent a potential
tension within the organisation between the leadership and the branches of the SECC.
It is in the branches that the SECC exists from day to day, and it is in the branches
that a strong sense of place is constructed through the everyday activities of the SECC
branch. The report concludes that the everyday practices of the SECC at the scale of
the local branches are part of a broader process of remaking place and identity in postapartheid
Soweto.
Description
Faculty of Social science
School of Geography
0214462v
wafera@hse.pg.wits.ac.za
Keywords
Social Movements, Identity and Place, Post-Aparthied, Cities