kagablog

ORIGINS CENTRE, YALE ROAD, WITS UNIVERSITY
28 – 31 JANUARY 2007

TUESDAY 29 JANUARY 2008

CIVIL SOCIETY AND THE CONSTITION OF COUNTER PUBLIC SPHERES
The democratic practices of communal organization that often prevail within organized social movements, the pursuit of public deliberation through the exertion of active citizenship, and the discussion of alternative policies, modes of organization, and social and political visions – often via global networks, physically and virtually, in public meetings, on electronic mailing lists, research institutes and policy forums – indicate the potential of the social movements to act as counter-public spheres. Understanding civil society to be a sphere of free associations that are independent of state power, that can potentially interact with the state, affect the course of its policy, and possibly even challenge it, this session explores the extent to which organizations of civil society and the new social movements are potentially, and sometimes already, significant participants in public deliberation, articulating autonomously and publicly ideas of general interest.

CHAIRPERSON
South Africa’s most influential AIDS activist, ZACKIE ACHMAT started his political life at 14, setting fire to his school during the period of the 1976 Soweto uprising to force his fellow students to boycott classes. Most widely known as founder and chairman of Treatment Action Campaign (TAC) and for his work on the behalf of people living with HIV and AIDS in South Africa, Achmat won the inaugural Desmond Tutu Leadership Award in 2001, and the Jonathan Mann Award for Global Health and Human Rights as well as the Nelson Mandela Award for Health and Human Rights in 2003. The same year he was named one of TIMEeurope’s ‘Heroes of 2003’. The TAC initially focused on access to medicine for those who could not afford private health care and has now has broadened its outlook to improving all aspects of health care provision, particularly with the implementation of an anti-retroviral programme in the public health sector. Achmat married long time partner and fellow activist, Dalli Weyers, on January 5, 2008 at a ceremony held near Cape Town.

PLENARY ADDRESS
Graeme Reid: The canary of the Constitution: Debating same-sex equality
Nowhere is the paradox between the ideals of the South African Constitution and lived reality more apparent than in public contestations around gender and sexuality. Gay and lesbian equality has come to occupy a symbolic place as a litmus test of the success of constitutional democracy in South Africa. And yet, because gay and lesbian equality is not widely supported, it is also one of the key moral barometers that test the gap between the Constitution and popular opinion. This paper will look at a series of hearings held under the auspices of the National House of Traditional Leaders to gauge public opinion on same-sex marriage. This will be used as a case study to explore how sexuality becomes pivotal in debates about nationhood and belonging.

GRAEME REID has paid research attention to small yet significant voices emanating from the South African counter public sphere. His ethnographies, whether of a Pentecostal-style church community or small town hair salons, use the local and the particular to reflect on broader social processes taking place in South Africa. He was founder of the Gay and Lesbian Archives (GALA) of South Africa, and is a research associate at WISER, where he was based prior to his current position as a lecturer at Yale University. He has published on a range of topics including sexuality, masculinity and on HIV/AIDS. His PhD entitled How to be a Real Gay was awarded, cum laude, by the University of Amsterdam in 2007.

PANELISTS
Natascha Mueller-Hirth (PhD candidate, Department of Sociology, Goldsmiths College, University of London): South African NGOs and the public sphere: Between popular movements and partnerships for development
There are currently a number of South African NGOs whose main programmatic focus lies in enhancing public debate and critical dialogue. Generally funded by international donors, the activities of such NGOs are conceptualised as deepening democracy, supporting a healthy ‘civil society’ and broadening public participation. Does their work around discussion and deliberation encourage democratic development or are such endeavors by definition elitist, excluding the experiences and socio-economic realities of the majority population? Drawing on fieldwork data, Mueller-Hirth argues that donor understandings of the role of NGOs in democratic development as well as NGOs’ own positioning towards civil society at large may contribute to a narrowing of democratic space in Post-Apartheid South Africa.

Luke Sinwell (PhD Candidate, Development Studies, Wits University): Participatory spaces and the Anti Privatization Forum’s contestation over housing allocations on the Alexandra Renewal Project
The ANC supports local social spaces for citizen participation in development. However, certain voices within the ‘community’ are excluded from these spaces because their development agendas do not fit into the dominant discourse that these spaces encompass. This paper draws mainly from interviews of people involved with the Alexandra Development Forum (ADF) – the core space for citizen participation in the Alexandra Renewal Project (ARP), a large-scale national flagship development project – and argues that although the development discourses of local organisations such as the South African Communist Party, the South African National Civic Organisation, and the Anti-Privatisation Forum may initially have been excluded, over time these voices have altered what is “acceptable” discourse within the ADF, thereby influencing the ARP’s development trajectory.

Bodil Folke Frederiksen (Institute of Society and Globalisation, Roskilde University): From counter-publics to political society: Organising young men in urban Kenya
Public engagement with politics and the state in South Africa and Kenya has many similarities. A number of debates and confrontations take place outside formal politics. In South Africa public discussions of sexuality, patriarchy and violence may be a form of ‘proxy’ politics. In Kenya discussions of the ethnic character of the Mau Mau nationalist resistance does similar work. This paper traces politics from below, as debated and carried out by two groups of young men in a Nairobi slum. In which sense do they take part in a democratic politics? In which sense are the two groups expressions of ‘counter publics’, and what is their relationship to an emerging ‘political society’?

Jenny Robinson (Professor of Urban Geography, Open University): Postcolonial city futures: Between public consultation and global circulations of knowledge
Envisioning the futures of South Africa’s cities has been an important feature of the post-apartheid urban policy context. With new linkages to international urban policy circuits, and an innovative network of the major metropolitan areas (South African Cities Network), the urban public sphere has been substantially repositioned within a globalised world of ideas and practices about cities and development. This paper suggests that urban policy cannot easily be understood as simply the result of neo-imperial or neo-liberal influences; it considers ways in which we might come to understand and engage with the complexities of power and influence as the global circuits of urban policy shape, and are themselves influenced by, the challenges of South Africa’s urban futures. Robinson also considers the serious fragmentations of the postcolonial/postrepressive public sphere, which limit robust debate around region-wide city visioning processes. With a fragmented or formalised local public sphere the capacity of communities, social movements and even the business community to engage in broad city visioning debates is seriously limited. Is there hope that such engagements will emerge through the challenges and vitalities of life in South Africa’s cities?

TEA

RELIGION AND THE PUBLIC SPHERE
South Africa is nominally a secular society. In reality, however, a significant part of its public life is dominated by religious organisation and practice. How do such religious forms of debate intersect with broader forms of political activity? How do constitutional guarantees of secular democracy interact with religious and other forms of cultural interpretation, notably those termed ‘traditional’? This session gives attention to the complex ways in which the terrains of rationality, belief and tradition are negotiated in post-colonial settings.

CHAIRPERSON
ABDULKADER TAYOB is NRF Chair of Islam, African Publics and Religious Values at the University of Cape Town. He has published extensively on the history of religious movements and institutions in South Africa, and on modern Islamic thought. He has taught and lectured at a number of Universities inside and outside the country. He is currently developing an interdisciplinary research project on Muslim Publics in African countries since the end of the Cold War. In this regard, he will be examining the agents, sites and values that are constructed and promoted through Muslim engagement in public spheres. Some of his key publications and projects can be viewed at http://web.uct.acza/depts/religion/Staff/tayob.php

PANELISTS
Annie Leatt (Doctoral fellow, WISER, Wits University): Faithfully secular: Secularism and the negotiation of South African constitutionalism
Is South Africa’s secularism merely cosmetic? This paper will examine the secularity of post-apartheid South African society. First, it goes to the foundational moments of the negotiation of secularism during CODESA, the Multi-Party Negotiating Process and the Constitutional Assembly. It tells the story of emerging secular constitutionalism in the negotiated transition, and the reframing of religion, culture and tradition under the rubric of rights. Leatt examines what was at stake in these debates against the backdrop of recent international theorizing about the role of secularism in politics and its investment of ‘the political’ with ‘the religious.’ She argues that instead of positing a secularism that has failed to adequately separate state and church into domains of rationality and belief, it is more illuminating to explore how the public powers of religion and the symbolic powers of the state have been changed and co-constituted in this transition to secularism in South Africa.

Natasha Erlank (Head of the Centre for Culture and Languages in Africa, University of Johannesburg): Tradition and Modernity in Mainstream Christianity
In this paper Erlank engages with some of the debate around tradition and modernity in much of the writing on African Christianity, reflecting on the insights offered by some of the more recent work on Christianity, modernity and colonialism (including Talal Asad, Frederick Cooper and Birgit Meyer). She employs these insights to consider the interplay between so-called tradition and mainstream Christianity amongst educated black South Africans. For much of the first half of the twentieth century, membership of a mainstream Christian church served as a marker of modernity for black South Africans. Locating her argument within mainstream Christianity, more particularly educated black, Xhosa-speaking, Christian communities in the Eastern Cape in the early twentieth century, Erlank posits that church membership and participation were part of the delineation of a modernity that was neither inimical to black aspiration nor necessarily dependent on colonial separations of public and private.

Federico Settler (Research Director, Institute for Comparative Religions in Southern Africa, University of Cape Town and AW Mellon Doctoral Fellow in Humanities): Indigenous authorities and the postcolonial state: The domestication of indigeneity and African nationalism in South Africa
Since the advent of the African Union, confidence in Africa’s renaissance has been high but a number of state-civil society anxieties continue to challenge stable social relations. One such anxiety is that of postcolonial African governments’ attempts to incorporate traditional authorities into largely secular, constitutional democracies. Indigenous authorities have been a significant part of South Africa’s colonial/apartheid history – in resistance and collaboration – and are widely imagined as a part of the country’s political culture for the foreseeable future. Yet it would appear that a failure to give adequate attention to the questions of indigeneity in the public imagination leaves the postcolonial (African nationalist) state vulnerable to divisions informed by ethnicity (politics of representation) of fundamentalism (politics of violence). In this paper Settler interrogates the questions of indigeneity in terms of the post-apartheid State’s promotion of religious, linguistic and cultural rights and its protection of indigenous authorities through legislation that serves to domesticate and exclude such organic, indigenous institutions and social movements from matters of state making.

Isak Niehaus (Dept of Social Anthropology, Brunel University): Witchcraft as subtext: Deep knowledge and the South African public sphere
It is hard for ethnographic researchers to ignore the salience of witchcraft in everyday conversations in South African village and township settings. It is through discourses of witchcraft that people explain the occurrence of otherwise incomprehensible misfortunes. Since witches are imagined to be deprived kin and neighbours who take revenge by mystical means, these discourses also implicate tensions arising from inequalities in wealth and power. However, witchcraft has been a far less prominent topic of deliberation in the public domain than in the sorts of conversations that take place between ethnographers and their research subjects. Reflecting upon developments over the past fifteen years, this paper examines the occasional incursions by witchcraft into national politics. Niehaus focuses largely on the debate over witchcraft and the law, showing that apart from interventions by the Ralushai and Gender Equality Commissions, as well as the provincial government of Mpumalanga, Traditional Healers Association and South African Pagan Rights Alliance, these debates involved little popular participation. He argues that the relative silence about witchcraft in the public domain is a product of the intrinsic nature of these discourses as ‘deep knowledge’ and as ‘subtext’ amongst ordinary South Africans.

LUNCH

PUBLIC DELIBERATION AND UNCERTAIN CITIZENSHIP
Democracy imagines an ideal deliberative citizen capable of participating in public life and making informed political choices. This ideal is inhibited by conditions of social inequality and impoverished education. It is challenged in situations of substantial cultural diversity, and undermined when the citizenship of the speaker is rendered uncertain. Approaching the conditions of public domain as chiefly a question of the quantity and quality of public deliberation draws attention away from the form of the state. Does the idea of a critical public space not presuppose that political authority rests in places that are subject to or even influenced by such debate? Is not the dominant feature of postcolonial polities, even when they are formally democratic, that political authority resides in places and institutions beyond the reach of the public space?

CHAIRPERSON
SHIREEN HASSIM is Associate Professor of Political Studies at the Uiversity of the Witwatersrand. She is the author of Women’s Organizations and Democracy in South Africa: Contesting Authority (University of Wisconsin Press, 2006). She has co-edited with Anne Marie Goetz No Shortcuts to Power: African Women in Politics and Policy-Making, and with Shahra Razavi, Gender and Social Policy in Global Context: Uncovering the Gendered Structure of the ‘Social’.
PANELISTS
Ivor Chipkin (Chief research specialist in the Democracy and Governance research programme, Human Sciences Research Council): The dark side of citizenship
Despite an elaborate constitutional dispensation which sets out the norms and standards of citizenship, the measure of citizenship in the public domain is unclear. And despite a variety of institutions through which the rights associated with citizenship can, in principle, be exercised, it is frequently lamented that such a space is tenuous. Chipkin considers the state of the state with a view to posing the following strategic question: what would it take to further democratise South Africa? Where should such interventions aim? Is the obstacle to democratisation the enfeebled state of public participation in decision-making? This would imply that democracy would be served by a more vigorous civic life. He argues that such a conception is naïve. It does not take into consideration the specific character of the post-Independence state and, in particular, its relationship to nationalism.

Carolyn Hamilton (Constitution of Public Intellectual Life Research Project, University of the Witwatersrand): Uncertain citizenship and contemporary public deliberation: Social inequality, cultural diversity and a compromised commitment to complexity in post-apartheid South Africa
The paper argues that the post-repressive regime South African government has actively convened a public sphere bristling with institutions and policies designed to facilitate public deliberation. However, certain apartheid and struggle legacies and contemporary political compromises facilitate the reach of power into the convened public sphere, leading to the corralling of public deliberation and the attempted silencing of critical voices. Those legacies and compromises have the further effect of rendering South Africans uncertain about their rights and responsibilities as deliberating citizens. The paper goes on to draw out the implications of manipulations and misconceptions around the issue of what constitutes quality in public deliberation.

Preben Kaarsholm (Dept of Society and Globalisation, University of Roskilde): Public spheres, hidden politics and struggles over space: Defining the boundaries of public engagement in post-apartheid South Africa To engage with the paradoxes of the public sphere in South Africa it is necessary consider the ways in which public space has been fragmented in the course of history, and the trends and possibilities that exist for overcoming fragmentation. On the basis of research in KwaZulu-Natal over the last decade, this paper examines how moral debates around HIV/AIDS, local crime, and ideas of a ‘healthy community’ have constituted an alternative arena for political debate, and how traditionalist, Christian, Muslim and other cultural institutions and discourses have been used as the fora and channels of a local public sphere. Kaarsholm considers whether cultural and religious institutions within this local public sphere and civil society can be compared to social movements, and to what extent they can be seen as offering the potentials of a local democratic ‘deliberative public sphere’.
TEA

PUBLIC CULTURE, ARCHIVE AND PUBLIC DISCOURSE
Much of public discourse in the area of public culture assumes that the evidence on which it draws – collections, archives and memories – are static relics from the past. However, these sources all live active public lives across time, accruing histories, gaining and losing weight and form, scarring and healing as they engage life, and age. They are changed also through the history of their engagement in public discourse itself. This session examines the way in which archives, memories and memorials sometimes provide the resources for, and sometimes constrain, public deliberation about contemporary issues.

CHAIRPERSON
Head of the Constitution of Public Intellectual Life Research Project at the University of the Witwatersrand, CAROLYN HAMILTON pursues understandings of how ideas enter into and shape political discourses, both in the past and in the present. Her earlier work included a study of the making of the image of the Zulu king, Shaka, and analysis of the role that it played in giving shape to ideas of Zulu nationalism.

PANELISTS
Anne Wanless (Research associate, Constitution of Public Intellectual Life Research Project, Wits University): Public discourse and the archive: Khoisan ethnologica and the making of public understanding of the Khoisan
In the 1920s, in the course of exercising power and control over the furthest reaches of South Africa’s recently acquired protectorate, Dr Louis Fourie, Medical Officer for the Protectorate of South West Africa, amassed what is probably the world’s most extensive collection of Khoisan artefacts. Today the results of a decade of part-time collecting and anthropologising form a relatively untapped resource of knowledge, which now belongs to MuseuMAfricA in Johannesburg. This paper presents a biography of the collection in order to explore the politics of the creation and dissemination of knowledge about the Khoisan from 1916 to 2006 with special focus on the ways in which an image of Khoisan hunter gatherers held, and still holds, significance for the people of the industrial society that is Johannesburg. In the process Wanless considers the history of material culture studies in South Africa in order to explore the relationship between academic, official and public (as represented by museums) understandings of the ways in which knowledge may be held in artefacts.

Sara G Byala (University of Pennsylvania): The museum in society: Society in the museum
To the extent that anyone bothers to speak about Johannesburg’s MuseuMAfricA today, it is with sadness at best and derision at worst. For most South Africans, MuseuMAfricA is – and always was – irrelevant to greater society. This paper counters this commonplace viewpoint by highlighting the interplay between this cultural history museum and larger socio-political debates about cultural difference. Interrogating the ways in which MuseuMAfricA (previously known as the Africana Museum) both reflected and impacted greater public discourses from the museum’s inception in the 1930s to the near present, this essay theorizes the role of a cultural history museum in the eras before, during, and after apartheid. Charting the wax and wane of museum engagement with the world beyond its doors, this paper adds to an overall discussion of public discourse just as it probes – through a nuanced biography of this museum – the institution’s enduring postcolonial relevance.

Kerry Bystrom (Assistant Professor, Dept of English, University of Connecticut): The public private sphere: Family memory and democracy in Argentina and South Africa
This paper explores the shifting boundaries of the public and private spheres in post-dictatorship Argentina and post-apartheid South Africa, and argues that the narration of seemingly ‘private’ family stories has been a critical site for the construction of a democratic public sphere in both of these post-conflict societies. Using the Argentine experience as lens of analysis, Bylstroom examines the role that the articulation of genealogical fictions has played in South Africa’s democratic transition, arguing that a wide-ranging production of such stories in the form of memoirs, fiction and film has served to supplement and to criticize governmental policies of ‘truth and reconciliation’, drawing attention to neglected zones of experience and opening these up for critical discussion. She explores examples ranging from written texts and speeches by Njabulo Ndebele to fiction by Achmat Dangor and the films Forgiveness and Zulu Love Letter.

Christa Kuljian (Independent development consultant and writer): Constricted space for public deliberation in the home of the Freedom Charter: Reflections on the Walter Sisulu Square of Dedication, Kliptown, Johannesburg
Kliptown was the site of the Congress of the People in June 1955 where the Freedom Charter was adopted – the culmination of two years of public deliberation. Fifty years later, in 2005, the Walter Sisulu Square of Dedication, a memorial to the Freedom Charter, opened on the same site. The new Square and a set of related buildings were built by the Johannesburg Development Agency (JDA) as part of the Kliptown Redevelopment Project and stand in stark contrast to their surroundings. Working with comments from local residents about the new Square, Kuljian reviews the process by which the design was chosen and the level of community involvement in the development of the Square. Exploring the concept of heritage as tourism, the paper argues that in the era of democracy, in Kliptown – the home of the Freedom Charter – space for public deliberation has been severely curtailed.