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Carl Death, Troubles at the top: South African protests and the 2002 Johannesburg Summit, African Affairs, Volume 109, Issue 437, October 2010, Pages 555–574, https://doi.org/10.1093/afraf/adq039
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Abstract
Political protests have visibly increased in frequency and intensity in South Africa in recent years, and they seem to indicate a more adversarial relationship between the post-apartheid state and civil society. This article uses the 2002 Johannesburg World Summit on Sustainable Development, and the protests which accompanied it, to illuminate these broader trends. It analyses the legacy of the Summit as a ‘mega-event’, and highlights the importance of the ‘mega-protests’ in 2002. The most important effects are shown to be the disruption of South African extraversion; the marginalization and repression of particular social movements; and the exacerbation of broader trends toward a more polarized political landscape in South Africa. Importantly, however, the article concludes that such developments are not evidence of growing distance between the state and civil society, but rather between those considered legitimate and responsible partners, and those who are excluded from ‘normal’ politics. Thus the Johannesburg Summit illuminates broader trends toward the governmentalization and transnationalization of politics in South Africa, and destabilizes conventional understandings of what and where ‘South African politics’ actually is, as well as raising important questions regarding the impacts of such mega-events in the future.
The tumultuous street protests outside the UN World Summit on Sustainable Development (WSSD), held in Johannesburg between 26 August and 4 September 2002, were the largest since the end of apartheid and were met with arrests, tear-gassings, rubber bullets and government condemnation. In their aftermath the South African Freedom of Expression Institute held a workshop on the right to dissent in which African National Congress (ANC) spokesman Michael Sachs conceded that ‘there were certainly serious problems and violations that took place from the side of the police’.1 Sachs also suggested, however, that the clashes at the Johannesburg Summit were merely flashes in the pan resulting from the unique context of an international summit. This led Jane Duncan, Director of the Freedom of Expression Institute, to respond that they were, on the contrary, ‘symptoms of a far more systematic crisis that is not only national, but international, in nature’.2 Moreover, ‘the theory and practice of repression and dissent in recent years in South Africa and beyond should tell us that the WSSD was a taste of things to come’.3 Duncan’s predictions appear to have been borne out, as since 2002 South Africa has experienced waves of so-called ‘service delivery protests’, often violent and sometimes xenophobic, peaking at almost 30 per day in 2006.4 By late August 2009 more violent protests had taken place across the country than in any previous year since 2004, primarily in informal settlements or townships such as Khayelitsha, Thembisa, Diepsloot, and Sakhile, and soldiers had protested at the doors of the Union Buildings in Pretoria. Some have suggested that one could be forgiven for imagining that the days of the ‘rolling mass action’ of the 1980s had returned.5 With reports of protests in the first third of 2010 rising above 100 per month far earlier than in preceding years, commentators have raised concerns about a ‘winter of discontent’ prior to and in the aftermath of the 2010 FIFA World Cup.6
The exchange between Sachs and Duncan raises a number of important questions: what effects did the Johannesburg Summit have on South African politics? What can ‘mega-events’ like the Summit tell us about the relationship between national and international politics? And how do the Summit ‘mega-protests’ connect to more recent cycles of contention? In this article I examine the effects of these ‘troubles at the top’ of South African politics, and argue that they were significant in illuminating broader trends, as well as exacerbating existing tensions within the national polity. By drawing on the literature on mega-events, I shall show that the Johannesburg Summit illustrates the technique of extraversion, although its attendant mega-protests disrupted dominant discourses of South African national branding, stimulated the repression of particular movements, and polarized the political landscape. This paradoxical relationship between the extraversion of the mega-event and the polarization of the mega-protest is embedded in the broader context of the changing character of the South African state, and the state–civil society relationship. I argue that the South African state is increasingly governmentalized – a process in which the smooth space of the modern state is replaced by fractured and overlapping spaces of highly governed localities and international institutions, and increasingly ungovernable hinterlands – and that the Johannesburg Summit protesters were inserted within these complex and heterogeneous networks and spaces of rule. Such an analysis is primarily focused on South Africa; however the trends observed are not unique. Many are more general characteristics of globalized states, and African states in particular. Indeed, the blurring and interpenetration of urban, provincial, national, regional, continental, and global politics is one of the broader transformations illuminated by the Summit protests.
The next section briefly introduces the concept of the mega-event, and highlights how such events produce their own mega-protests. This is followed by an account of the Summit and its protests. The effects on South African politics are then discussed in three parts: (1) frustrated nation branding; (2) the repression of particular movements; and (3) the polarization of South African politics. The analysis draws on the extensive documentary archive produced by the Summit, as well as semi-structured interviews with key individuals conducted in Johannesburg, Durban, Cape Town, and New York between 2006 and 2008. The final section situates these effects within the broader context of the governmentalization of the state in a globalized era.
Summits: mega-events and mega-protests
Summits are complex and theatrical political moments. The 2002 Johannesburg Summit, coming ten years after the Rio Earth Summit, was hailed by many as one of the largest political meetings in human history.7 A hundred world leaders, representatives of nearly two hundred countries, and about 22,000 other participants attended the main conference in the Sandton Convention Centre. A further 15,000 attended one or more of the many side-events, such as the parallel Global People’s Forum.8 One way to conceptualize the effects of a major summit is through the literature on ‘mega-events’. The concept refers to short-term, high-profile events associated with high levels of participation and international media attention, most notably world fairs (expos), the Olympics, and other major sporting and cultural occasions.9 Although not often used in reference to UN conferences, the word captures the scale of participation in the Summit, its festival atmosphere, and the scope of activities going beyond the official negotiations. For ten days in Johannesburg it felt as though the global community was assembled in miniature, and that ‘the world had come to one country’ in order to put aside their differences and cooperate in striving for a new political order.10
The mega-event literature focuses upon effects such as ‘increases in tourism, urban infrastructural improvements, or the more intangible benefits of civic pride, boosterism, and international image building’.11 In this way such events can be regarded as examples of what Jean-François Bayart refers to as the politics of extraversion: the mobilization of resources by African elites ‘derived from their (possibly unequal) relationship with the external environment’.12 A special issue of Third World Quarterly in 2004 highlighted the importance of mega-events in developmental or nation-building strategies, and South Africa is an oft-cited example given its enthusiasm for hosting major sporting, cultural, and political events.13 South African economists calculated ‘that for each Rand of expenditure in hosting the Summit, R3.17 [was] generated throughout the South African economy’.14 Despite the Summit’s budget overspend, organizers reported that ‘the benefits of the WSSD to the country’s image were much better than could have been achieved by spending the same money on marketing’.15 The Summit also gave the South African hosts the opportunity to cement South Africa’s growing reputation for successful international diplomacy. Brigalia Bam, chairperson of the Independent Electoral Commission, declared that ‘South Africa has become a major destination for international dialogue. It has simply become the “negotiating capital of the world”.’16 The Summit was thus an important way of reinforcing the ‘branding’ of South Africa as a transformed and reconciled ‘Rainbow Nation’, playing a leading international role at the helm of the African Renaissance.17
Yet analysis of the effects of such events cannot remain limited to their commercial, diplomatic, or nation-branding dimensions. Mega-events produce specific power relations and forms of resistance, which a critical research agenda must unpick.18 Many such events produce conflicts with local residents, or are utilized either by protest movements to communicate their grievances, or by state authorities to clamp down on ‘troublemakers’ in the name of national security. Thus in a pioneering article Kris Olds showed how Canadian Expos in Vancouver, Calgary, and Toronto led to forced evictions and in some cases stimulated local residents’ organizations to campaign against the event itself.19 The literature on mega-events can therefore be usefully supplemented by considering the mega-protests that increasingly accompany major global conferences, and which themselves ‘exploit the window of visibility offered by summits’.20 These mega-events often work, by virtue of their very visibility and prominence, as polarizing or catalyzing moments for broader social tensions. As Donatella Della Porta et al. observe,
the fortification of the summit sites produces effects that tend to be dangerous; concentrating police efforts of defending it greatly restricts the kinds of protest that can be peaceful but visible and increases the distance between the rulers and the population. The perceived risks of invasion reduce the room for dialogue and encounter between demonstrators and the institutions, as well as between demonstrators and the police.21
At the Johannesburg Summit, this was most evident during the social movements’ protest on 31 August, when between 20,000 and 25,000 people marched from the township of Alexandra to the Summit convention centre in Sandton. In such cases the concepts of mega-events and mega-protests usefully capture the ways in which the occasion – with its inherent theatricality, prominence, and visibility – functions both as a technique of extraversion, and as a moment of polarization. The following section discusses these protests in more depth, before considering their effects.
The Johannesburg Summit and its protests
As in any international conference the Summit negotiations were protracted and often tense. However, aided by considerable South African diplomatic effort, delegates finally reached an official agreement and the ‘Political Declaration’ asserted grandly that ‘significant progress has been made towards achieving a global consensus and partnership among all the people of our planet’.22 Outside, however, in stark contrast to the largely self-congratulatory atmosphere within the Sandton Convention Centre, vociferous and angry protesters were demonstrating against the government, the UN, and the vision of sustainable development under negotiation. The most prominent manifestations of dissent were the marches from Alexandra on 31 August. The march organizers pointed out that
the massive unemployment, lack of essential services, housing evictions, water and electricity cut-offs, environmental degradation, and generalized poverty that is present-day Alexandra sits cheek-by-jowl with the hideous wealth and extravagance of Sandton where the W$$D is taking place.23
The march route was chosen to make visible to a global audience the differences between Alexandra, where people live, and Sandton, where Summit delegates spent most of their time.24
Yet there were actually two rival marches, highlighting the contested politics of South African civil society. The ‘official’ march was led by the ANC and their Alliance partners, the Congress of South African Trade Unions (COSATU), and numbered less than 5,000, whilst the more confrontational social movements mobilized at least four times as many, drawn from a wide range of groups including the Landless People’s Movement and the Anti-Privatization Forum, under the banner of the Social Movements United (SMU). The latter constituted the largest and ‘most militantly anti-government march since 1994’.25 Commentators interpreted the marches as ‘a battle for control of South Africa’s revolutionary tradition’, the unexpected outcome of which suggested a ‘new era’ in South African politics.26 In the immediate aftermath it was claimed that ‘the map of the South African political landscape was fundamentally transformed’.27
These marches were only the most visible and high-profile protests amidst a number of other flashpoints during the Summit, which occurred during a period of broader tension that led commentators to proclaim ‘an undeclared state of emergency’.28 The clashes intersected with tensions over the economic policies of the ANC government, which had been rising since the shift from the Reconstruction and Development Plan (RDP) to the more overtly neo-liberal Growth, Employment and Redistribution (GEAR) programme in 1996. Exacerbated by the transition in the presidency from Nelson Mandela to Thabo Mbeki and the apparent end of the ANC’s political honeymoon, GEAR’s policies of cost recovery and the privatization of basic services have led to increased frictions within the ruling alliance, as well as among local communities and social movements.
The Johannesburg Summit took place after a turbulent and fractious preparatory process, during which meetings of the South African Civil Society Secretariat were characterized by disagreements over structure, financial irregularities, and clashing personalities.29 Tensions between radical social movements, NGOs, and more established mass organizations such as COSATU resulted in a number of social movements leaving the formal preparatory process and forming the Social Movements Indaba (SMI), which declared itself ‘opposed to the hoax of the W$$D’.30 The official Civil Society Secretariat, chaired by COSATU’s Bheki Ntshalintshali, proceeded to organize the Global People’s Forum and eventually marched with the ANC on 31 August, whilst the SMI concentrated instead on a series of events at the fringes of the official Summit.31
Media reports fuelled the confrontational atmosphere. Headlines were militaristic and alarmist: ‘Battle lines drawn at Jo’burg Summit’; ‘A new war for the allegiance of the poor’; ‘Summit marchers attack government’; ‘Invasion of the would-be wealth-snatchers’; and ‘Militant siege of Summit feared’.32 In this atmosphere security concerns were heightened, and the Johannesburg authorities adopted a ‘zero tolerance’ policing strategy, meaning that street vendors, hawkers, and the homeless were swept out of the city.33 Social movement activists alleged that squatters were being dumped ‘miles from Johannesburg to hide poverty from summit delegates’.34 According to Naomi Klein, ‘vendors and beggars have been swept from the streets, residents of squatter camps have been evicted’, and the Sandton precinct was transformed into a ‘military complex’ with remote spy planes and a 1.8 kilometre ‘struggle pen’ for authorized protests.35
Protesting in Johannesburg was tense and dangerous. When activists and academics from the International Forum on Globalization (a North–South educational and research group in town for the Summit) joined a candle-lit march from the University of the Witwatersrand on 24 August in support of freedom of expression, they were blocked by riot police who fired stun grenades into the march, injuring several protesters. On 2 September police and security guards clashed with pro-Palestinian demonstrators outside the Wits Education Campus over a scheduled speech by Shimon Peres, resulting in injuries caused by rubber bullets to a number of activists. There were also protests in Sandton against pollution from steel works in the Vaal Triangle, and in Durban against pollution from oil refineries. Greenpeace International hung a banner from one of the cooling towers at the Koeberg nuclear power station near Cape Town, to the intense irritation of the ANC. Countless other smaller demonstrations occurred during the Summit, including the noisy disruption of Colin Powell’s speech in the Sandton Convention Centre, angry speeches in the Global People’s Forum, and innumerable placards and banners. GroundWork organized a satirical ‘Greenwash Academy Awards’ ceremony on 23 August 2002 as part of their campaign for corporate social accountability, presenting first prize to BP for their ‘Beyond Petroleum’ adverts. As a result, ‘many of the potentially controversial partnerships, particularly those involving corporations, held their meetings on the outskirts of the Summit, fearing bad publicity’.36
The effects of the Summit protests
This corporate nervousness points to some of the ways in which the impact of the protests was felt in broader political outcomes and power relations. The following sections chart the effects of the Summit and its protests in terms of various aspects of mega-event politics and their mega-protests: the disruption of South African nation branding; the repression of specific social movements; and the polarization of politics in South Africa. Such effects are difficult to measure objectively or scientifically, but, as Patrick Bond argues, for a wide range of participants, observers, and commentators, ‘something new and extremely important surfaced at the WSSD’.37
Frustrated nation branding: The South African achievement in producing a smoothly run conference and a negotiated consensus, given the fractious Summit diplomacy and US intransigence, was widely perceived as a major diplomatic coup. In their appropriation of resources ranging from the material and the economic to the symbolic and political, the Johannesburg Summit functioned as a technique of extraversion for South African elites, through which South Africa was able to brand itself as a modern, successful, and vibrant member of the international community, leading the African Renaissance from the front. These effects explain, at least in part, the attraction of hosting mega-events for political elites, and the experience of hosting the Johannesburg Summit merely whetted South African appetites for the 2010 FIFA World Cup.38
It was in their (partial) frustration and disruption of these strategies of branding and extraversion that the protesters had their most immediate impacts. Discontents outside the Summit reinforced and amplified reservations expressed inside the negotiations, especially over the prominence of voluntary partnerships and the absence of legally enforceable, time-bound multilateral targets.39 As a result, negotiators conceded that the partnership approach was ‘reshaped’ into something ‘less dynamic and aggressive than had been envisaged when we started’.40 Whilst the protests were not able to derail the partnerships, nor reverse prevailing trends in development discourse towards the inclusion of business and the courting of private sector approaches, they undoubtedly did contribute to an atmosphere in which the partnerships were pursued less enthusiastically than they might otherwise have been.
Not only did the protests disrupt the Summit performance of consensus, but they also worked to contest the widely held international image of South Africa as a reconciled and peaceful Rainbow Nation, which had put the troubles of its past behind it. The arrests of 196 protesters during the Summit (all of whom were subsequently released without charge), the use of water cannons and rubber bullets, the attack on a peaceful candle-lit march in full view of the watching global media, and the infiltration of social movement organizations by the intelligence services, undermined organizers’ claims that ‘South Africa has had a history of quite constructively managing mass protest’.41 Activists claimed in the aftermath of the Summit that ‘we shattered Mbeki’s image – it was a PR disaster . . . Mbeki revealed his dictatorial instincts’.42 Whilst the clashes in Johannesburg did not negate the usefulness of the Summit as a technique of branding and extraversion, the mega-protests did at least question and challenge the consensual and congratulatory tenor of the Johannesburg outcomes.
Repression of the social movements: A predictable consequence of this disruption of the reconciled Rainbow Nation image was the South African state’s condemnation and repression of many of the movements involved. The ANC’s own struggle history and dominant position in township politics has made it especially sensitive to large urban protests, and quick to criminalize and repress.43 Thabo Mbeki castigated the protesters for seeking the ‘collapse of the Summit’, and for being people who ‘do not want any discussion and negotiations’.44 In an influential pre-Summit article, the ANC’s Michael Sachs warned that ‘the Seattle movement will, in all likelihood, converge on our biggest city in a festival of dissent’, and suggested that international NGOs might manipulate South African social movements against the ANC.45 The most revealing ANC response to the protesters was contained in their statement following the clash between the candle-lit marchers and the police.
[W]e wish to roundly condemn the actions of those factions (both local and international) for whom these democratic victories, so recently won after so much sacrifice, are mere fodder in the irresponsible pursuit of confrontation and anarchy. We know well from our own struggle that such mindless violence is the practice of at best the naïve, and at worst the agent provocateur.46
Newspapers labelled the protesters as violent, destructive, and dangerous, and the Sunday Times memorably warned that ‘war veterans from Zimbabwe, ultra-leftists, disgruntled former soldiers, right-wingers, international anarchists, Palestinian and Israeli campaigners and hackers’ were all coming to Johannesburg to ‘shut down’ the summit.47
This language of violence and fear worked to delegitimize many of the social movements, and has had direct effects in terms of their subsequent organization and activities, ranging from arrests and the detaining of leaders during the Summit, to harassment post-2002. The Summit illuminated broader trends of gradually increasing levels of violence, repression, and intimidation of critical social movements, as well as of striking workers and trade unionists. One activist has described the situation since 2002 as ‘a low intensity civil war’.48 Roger Southall agrees that the government’s response to protests has been at times ‘heavy-handed’, justified by ‘dark hints that the violence was being orchestrated by sinister forces’.49
The waxing and waning of social movement protest and activism is an inevitable part of cycles of contention, and state harassment usually exists alongside internal organizational problems, and alternating gluts and dearths of donor funding.50 However, the impact of the Summit mega-event did lead to serious organizational challenges for many groups post-2002, as well as making deeper trends more visible. The arrests of their leaders, fear and intimidation, lawsuits, and the nervousness of international donors and funders have all contributed to murmurs of ‘an interregnum’ or ‘stasis’ in many social movements.51 Organizations affected most seriously by the Johannesburg Summit included the Environmental Justice Networking Forum (EJNF), the Rural Development Services Network, the National Land Committee, and the Landless People’s Movement (LPM). Many of these groups are members of the SMI, which has evolved since 2002 from a leadership and coordination role to that of an ‘open space’ for other movements to occupy.52 The difficulty of maintaining such open spaces in an increasingly conflictual political environment was demonstrated by the tense stand-off at the December 2006 annual SMI meeting in Durban, where clashes between rival groups led to the temporary suspension of the programme and bitter recriminations.53
The LPM has been hit particularly hard by their exclusion from legitimate politics since the Johannesburg Summit. In 2002 it was one of the fastest-growing and most influential movements, and it brought thousands of rural members and activists to Johannesburg to draw attention to the slow pace of land redistribution.54 Based in the Shareworld complex, they organized a ‘Week of the Landless’, and received a great deal of media attention and also took a prominent role in the march on 31 August.55 However, the strains of such a large event ‘brought to a head simmering tensions between different political trajectories’, and fears of National Intelligence Agency infiltration soured relationships within the movement.56 According to a former organizer, ‘there was a deep conflict within the camp . . . there were accusations of people carrying guns, others were going to be assassinated . . . The future of the movement was at stake.’57 The divisions within the movement, exacerbated by the pressures of a major international Summit, combined with the impact of the arrests of members and leadership and increased police harassment meant that ‘for the LPM [the Summit] was a disastrous event, in terms of its future’.58
The disintegration of the EJNF post-2002 has also been a great disappointment for many environment and development activists in South Africa. Jacklyn Cock noted how ‘participation in the WSSD was clearly a radicalizing experience for EJNF’, and ‘as a key component of the Social Movements Indaba, relations with the ANC and the post-apartheid state have become increasingly confrontational’.59 Whilst it played a leading role in the social movements in 2002, since then personnel problems, internal struggles, and donor mistrust have meant it has virtually ceased to exist.
The difficulties faced by these movements highlight the constant struggle to keep open a democratic space within which dissent, protest, and radical critique are possible. As Ballard et al. argue, ‘social movements contribute to the restoration of political plurality in the political system’, and ‘a more human-centred development trajectory and the consolidation of democracy thus require in part the systematic presence and effective functioning of contemporary social movements in South Africa’.60 It is clear, of course, that the Johannesburg Summit was not the only, or even necessarily the prime reason for the difficulties faced by these movements post-2002, and other factors including donor withdrawal and personnel shifts to government and industry have taken their toll.61 The perennial crises of the South African Non-Governmental Organization Coalition (SANGOCO) with regard to funding, personnel, and leadership are symptomatic of the sector’s difficulties. Yet, even in the case of SANGOCO, the destabilizing effects of a mega-event and mega-protest are evident, most notably in the fallout from the acrimonious World Conference against Racism in 2001 in Durban. In the conference aftermath the ANC condemned SANGOCO for the way in which ‘South African civil society repeatedly embarrassed itself through public division and open squabbling in full view of the international NGO community’, rather than playing a ‘constructive role’.62 For the ANC such incidents raised serious questions over the legitimacy of NGOs in South Africa, and the proper role of civil society in a democratic state. For analysts, they illustrate how the right to protest in South Africa is conditional upon this right being exercised ‘responsibly’ and ‘constructively’.63
However, despite the chaos and disruption for movements in the wake of these mega-events and mega-protests, such moments often acquire a foundational importance in the history of particular organizations. Many movements draw their legitimacy and cohesion from their radical and confrontational stance, and from memorable battles with the police or the state. As Sidney Tarrow observed, ‘contention is the bridge they have constructed between them and their followers’.64 High-profile marches such as 31 August have acquired a seminal importance, demonstrated when in 2006 the SMI proudly looked back at the Johannesburg Summit as ‘the landmark in the history of social movement cooperation’.65 As Ashwin Desai proudly asserted, ‘this is a struggle that already has heroes, legends, and martyrs’.66
Polarization of the South African political landscape: Such statements are typical of a longer-term tendency to frame state–society relations in South Africa in terms of struggle and confrontation.67 The Johannesburg Summit was both emblematic of, and a contributory factor to, an increasingly adversarial relationship between the post-1994 South African state and many social movements. March organizers aimed ‘to draw the political lines more clearly’ in South Africa, and whilst this was not always as clear or as successful as they hoped, it has been reflected in broader trends since 2002.68 In 2004/5 the Minister for Safety and Security, Charles Nqakula, reported almost 6,000 protests in South Africa; by 2006 this had risen to 11,000 protests, over 30 per day.69 Angry demonstrations, often turning violent, were reported in Diepsloot, Harrismith, Ekurhuleni Metro, Vryburg, Valhalla Park, Khayelitsha, Khutsong, Frankfort, and across the country, peaking during September 2004 and March 2005.70 New social movements emerged, such as the Abahlali baseMjondolo shack-dwellers movement, formed in Durban ‘after a tyre-burning road blockade’.71 In 2009 an even larger wave of protest swept the country, and was met with rubber bullets, tear gas, and widespread condemnation by the main political parties. Familiar repertoires of protest – such as burning tyres on highways – were accompanied by new forms, such as risking arrest by the en masse eating of food in supermarket chains. These protests are complex and multi-faceted, and cannot be reduced to simple anger at the lack of service delivery, given that in many cases a lack of democratic consultation and engagement, or the removal of residents or traders from certain areas, have mixed with resentment at official corruption or even xenophobic attacks on foreign businesses.72 The Johannesburg Summit had its role to play in the illumination and exacerbation of this polarization of South African politics.
From the start of the preparatory process in South Africa tensions had arisen over the proper relationship between the state and civil society. For the SMI, the involvement of trade union alliance partners and long-time (if fractious) ANC allies, COSATU, in the preparatory process was ‘part of a political strategy to control and silence civil society, and place the WSSD process under government control’.73 Authoritarian responses to the protests reinforced these perceptions, and comparisons were made between ANC policing tactics and apartheid-era repression.74 An SMI statement in the aftermath of the violence against the candle-lit march on 24 August indicated this apprehension.
If it was not before, it should now be crystal clear that the South African government is hell-bent on smashing legitimate dissent by whatever means they deem appropriate, including attacking peaceful marchers and terrorizing children. The ghosts of the South African past are returning with a vengeance.75
In response many activists gravitated towards more confrontational views of the South African state. For some it had become ‘the local and continental agent of imperialism’.76 In a much-quoted statement, leading activist Trevor Ngwane claimed marchers intended to shut down the Summit and ‘take Sandton’.77 In this vein more violent political rationalities were articulated, including talk of occupying and blockading the M1 motorway into Johannesburg, and placards appeared reading ‘Bomb Sandton’.78 Vula Mthimkhulu, writing in the civil society newspaper Global Fire, argued that the Summit presented an opportunity to ‘popularize the struggle against forces of evil’, and ‘the genuine enemies masquerading as comrades during the Summit’.79
These more conflictual and polarized forms of politics have been a feature of the post-2002 waves of protests, which often draw explicitly on particularly South African struggle repertoires and motifs of ‘ungovernability’. Nigel Gibson reports on protesters in Khayelitsha in May 2005 who blocked roads with burning tyres in protest against the lack of houses and facilities, saying ‘[w]e know burning tyres has consequences for this road, but it is the language (the government) understands . . . this is how they got into power, this is their language’.80 Marchers in 2002 threatened that if the government ‘does not address our issues and do what the people demand, we will do to them what we did to the apartheid government’.81 Whilst these protests could be interpreted along the lines of class struggle, or state versus civil society conflicts, I argue they are rather evidence of the governmentalization of South African politics.
The governmentalization of South African politics
The polarization produced by the Summit mega-protests was, importantly, not one between civil society and the state. Rather, it was between those regarded as legitimate and responsible political actors, and those who were seen as disruptive or uncivil. In this way – and through discourses of partnership, participation, and consultation – a diverse range of actors and techniques are brought within the ambit of broader regimes or rationalities of government.82 Michel Foucault’s insights into the ‘governmentalization’ of politics are useful here, since he draws attention to the way advanced forms of liberal government work through the production of ‘free’ and ‘responsible’ actors, at a distance from traditional centres of authority.83 From such a perspective the state is a heterogeneous and ‘dispersed ensemble of institutional practices and techniques of governance’, rather than a unified or homogeneous actor.84 In this vein, although in a different context, Jessica Kulynych argues that ‘yearly Washington marches, for example, may actually diffuse discontent by providing a legitimate outlet for protest; at the same time they verify system legitimacy by focusing protest toward the formal legal structures of government’.85 Such an approach to mega-events and mega-protests emphasizes the complexity and diversity of the sites of rule, and complicates any binary division between ruler and ruled.
This complexity comes through clearly in the case of the Johannesburg Summit protests. Many protesters, for example, were not class warriors against ruling elites, but remained strong supporters of the ANC. Often even the same individuals will, as Ashwin Desai admitted, praise the history of the ANC as anti-apartheid liberators at the same time as they condemn the cost-recovery policies of local government.
If Thabo Mbeki comes around, or Mandela, to remember the 16 June Soweto Uprising, people still see the need to go to the meeting and chant the slogans of the party of liberation: the ANC, slayer of apartheid. But the next day they are fighting evictions, and denouncing the ANC as a party of neoliberalism.86
Radical voices agreed that ‘the South African ruling class still enjoys political and constitutional legitimacy’.87 And when the LPM chanted ‘Viva Mugabe’ at the climax of the march in 2002, they were rebuked by Anti-Privatization Forum speakers who reminded them that Mugabe would not have tolerated such a public display of popular dissent. Many of the protests were therefore aimed at securing a voice and a hearing within liberal democratic politics – rather than overthrowing the system. The protests also worked to amplify the visibility of the official Summit negotiations, re-inscribed the right to protest within certain limits, and paradoxically reinforced the governmental role of the South African state and the institutions of global governance. After all, many of the protesters were demanding that ‘the powers that be’ govern global sustainable development more intensely and effectively.88
From the perspective of the ANC and their allies in government, responsible civil society actors are still regarded as important and legitimate partners; or at least as indispensable in a way not always recognized in many other African states.89 In the context of the ongoing post-1994 project of the ‘National Democratic Revolution’, around which all South Africans are urged to join in ‘the quest for a truly non-racial, non-sexist and democratic nation’, civil society has an important role to play.90 Indeed, given the ANC orthodoxy that ‘the organization is not merely a political party, but remains a liberation movement’, they regard themselves as constituting part of civil society – as the ‘official’ march on 31 August demonstrated.91 Although this attempt backfired, it speaks to the broader reality that the boundary between state and society in South Africa, as in the rest of Africa, is far from clear-cut.92
Rather than viewing the Johannesburg Summit as leading to greater conflict and antagonism between the state and civil society, therefore, one might note that these lines are actually increasingly blurred in South African politics – as elsewhere. But the Summit and its protests did signal the identification and marginalization of radical and dissenting social movements, and the polarization of South African politics between those within ‘normal’, ‘respectable’, and ‘legitimate’ politics, and those outside this sphere. This is in part a feature of how the ANC has increasingly cast transformation in terms of implementation, service delivery, efficiency, and ‘getting things done’.93 Responsible NGOs and constructive members of civil society have been enlisted in this project, cast as ‘assistants to government in service delivery’, part of a ‘social partnership’ together with government and business to further the ‘common national interest’.94 In a telling statement during the Johannesburg Summit, Mbeki asserted that ‘the people waged a difficult, costly, protracted and successful struggle to end and negate their role as a protest movement and to transform themselves into a united reconstruction and development brigade’.95 Such statements reveal one of the most durable legacies of the Summit: the increasingly visible polarization of South African politics into ‘responsible participants in national development’ – including business, local government, and ‘professional’ NGOs – and ‘uncivil society’ – the social movements, dissenters and protesters. Summits like Johannesburg thus constitute an important technique for the disciplining of civil society.
Conclusion
I have argued that the effects of the Johannesburg Summit and its attendant protests on South African politics can be captured through the concepts of mega-events and mega-protests. These concepts emphasize the importance of such summits as political, diplomatic, cultural, and economic events, rather than disembodied negotiations, as well as stressing the mutually dependent relationship between techniques of governance such as summits, and the forms of protest which accompany them. By analysing the Johannesburg Summit as a mega-event and mega-protest, a wider range of effects can be discerned than simply by focusing on the official negotiations, and the role of protests within (rather than outside) formations of advanced liberal government is illuminated. The primary effects of the Johannesburg protests were the contestation of Summit discourses of consensus and partnership, and South African discourses of reconciliation and transformation; the repression and de-legitimization of particular social movements such as the LPM and EJNF; and the development of more antagonistic and confrontational relationships between those inside ‘civil’ politics, and those outside. Thus the Summit illuminates a trend of increasing protest as well as being a contributory factor in the polarization of South African politics, while for activists it ‘ushered in a new period of political struggle in South Africa’.96
The events of the Johannesburg Summit in 2002 also illuminate changes in the nature of the South African state. Michel Foucault suggested that ‘maybe what is really important for our modernity, that is to say, for our present, is not then the state’s takeover (étatisation) of society, so much as what I would call the “governmentalization” of the state’.97 Whilst the broader governmentality literature has not tended to pay much attention to forms of dissent, resistance, or social movement protest, a focus on mega-events and mega-protests can help redress this lacuna. I have argued that even confrontational and violent protests have a function within broader regimes of government, when it comes to the inclusion and disciplining of dissent. The Johannesburg Summit can be understood within this context, as it functioned as a mechanism for separating responsible civil society from disruptive elements. By excluding and marginalizing protest, a space was created for more constructive partners to act as a ‘united reconstruction and development brigade’. A reliance on the coercive and repressive arm of the state during the Summit is not evidence of the limits of governmental techniques, but rather shows how practices of authoritarian sovereign power are always implicated within liberal forms of government.
This simultaneous blurring of the lines between the state and ‘responsible’ civil society, and the sharpening of divisions between those defined as legitimate and illegitimate actors, is emblematic of broader tectonic shifts in the nature of statehood more generally, both in Africa and elsewhere. As Kevin Dunn suggests, the apparent ‘crisis of the African state’ is really a crisis ‘in the dominant (Western) discourse of the state’.98 The smooth extension of state sovereignty within territorial boundaries is rarely a convincing description of government: rather, particular places and times – such as the Sandton Convention Centre during the Johannesburg Summit in 2002, or the host cities, stadiums, and fan parks during the 2010 FIFA World Cup – are intensively governed, secured, monitored, surveyed, and audited, whilst other regions are increasingly ungovernable or ‘non-governed’.99 The Johannesburg Summit illustrated the transnationalization of political space and the proliferation of variegated and ‘rhizomatic’ networks of global and local governance.100 Through elite strategies of extraversion and the branding of the South African state, the globally networked structure of transnational social movements, and the interpenetration of local, national, and international forms of governmental power in Johannesburg, the Summit complicated conventional pictures of when and where politics takes place. Whilst this article set out to analyse the effects of the Summit on South African politics, then, the most significant insight produced is perhaps that ‘South African politics’ is not an easy object or field to demarcate clearly, and its constitution is always already political.
Quoted in Jane Duncan, ‘A flash in the pan? The relevance of the WSSD for freedom of expression’, in Simon Kimani Ndung’u (ed.), The Right to Dissent: Freedom of expression, assembly and demonstration in South Africa (Freedom of Expression Institute, Johannesburg, 2003), p. 101.
Ibid.
Ibid., p. 108.
FXI, ‘The right to protest: a handbook for protesters and police’ (Freedom of Expression Institute, Johannesburg, 2007), p. 4.
Doreen Atkinson, ‘Taking to the streets: has developmental local governance failed in South Africa?’, in Sakhela Buhlungu, John Daniel, Roger Southall, and Jessica Lutchman (eds), State of the Nation: South Africa 2007 (HSRC Press, Cape Town, 2007), p. 53.
Media Tenor, ‘World Cup to be used as a platform for protest action?’, 21 May 2010,
< http://www.mediatenor.co.za/newsletters.php?id_news=156 > (10 June 2010).
For an extended discussion of the diplomacy and theatre of the Summit, see Carl Death, Governing Sustainable Development: Partnerships, protests and power at the World Summit (Routledge, London, 2010).
Pamela Chasek and Richard Sherman, Ten Days in Johannesburg: A negotiation of hope (Department of Environmental Affairs and Tourism and United Nations Development Programme, Pretoria, 2004), p. 117.
Harry Hiller, ‘Assessing the impact of mega-events: a linkage model’, Current Issues in Tourism1, 1 (1998), pp. 47–57; Maurice Roche, Mega-Events and Modernity: Olympics and expos in the growth of global culture (Routledge, London, 2000).
Victor Munnik and Jessica Wilson, The World Comes to One Country: An insider history of the World Summit on Sustainable Development, Johannesburg 2002 (Heinrich Böll Foundation, Johannesburg, 2003).
Hiller, ‘Assessing the impact of mega-events’, p. 47.
Jean-François Bayart, ‘Africa in the world: a history of extraversion’, African Affairs99, 395 (2000), p. 218.
Scarlett Cornelissen, ‘“It’s Africa’s turn!” The narratives and legitimations surrounding the Moroccan and South African bids for the 2006 and 2010 FIFA finals’, Third World Quarterly25, 7 (2004), pp. 1293–1309.
JOWSCO, ‘Report of the economic impact of the World Summit on Sustainable Development on South Africa’, (Johannesburg World Summit Company, Johannesburg, no date), p. 24.
‘World Summit overspent budget by “modest” R188m’, Mail and Guardian, 14 November 2002.
Brigalia Bam, ‘Preface’, in Civil Society Secretariat, ‘A sustainable world is possible: outcomes of the Global Peoples Forum at the World Summit on Sustainable Development’ (report, Johannesburg, undated), p. 4.
Janis van der Westhuizen, ‘Marketing the “Rainbow Nation”: the power of the South African music, film and sport industry’ in Kevin C. Dunn and Timothy M. Shaw (eds), Africa’s Challenge to International Relations Theory (Palgrave, Basingstoke, 2001), pp. 64–81.
David Black and Janis van der Westhuizen, ‘The allure of global games for “semi-peripheral” polities and spaces: a research agenda’, Third World Quarterly25, 7 (2004), pp. 1195–1214.
Kris Olds, ‘Urban mega-events, evictions and housing rights: the Canadian case’, Current Issues in Tourism1, 1 (1998), pp. 2–46.
Donatella Della Porta, Massimiliano Andretta, Lorenzo Mosca, and Herbert Reiter, Globalization from Below: Transnational activists and protest networks (University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis, MN, 2006), p. 147.
Ibid., p. 167.
UN, ‘The Johannesburg Declaration on Sustainable Development’, adopted at the WSSD 17th plenary meeting on 4 September 2002 (UN, Johannesburg, 2002), Paragraph 10.
SMI, press release (Social Movements Indaba, Johannesburg, 25 August 2002).
Interview, Dale McKinley, SMI press secretary, Johannesburg, 23 October 2006; Interview, Bheki Ntshalintshali, deputy general secretary, COSATU, Johannesburg, 4 October 2006.
Patrick Bond, ‘Geopolitics of Jo’burg protests: independent left beats ruling party’ (briefing paper, Centre for Civil Society, Durban, 2002).
Rian Malan, ‘New reds challenge ANC and win skirmish’, Focus27 (2002).
John Appolis, ‘The political significance of August 31’, Khanya Journal2 (2002), p. 7.
Salim Vally, ‘The political economy of state repression in South Africa’ in Ndung’u, The Right to Dissent, p. 62.
Interview, Bryan Ashe, Earthlife Africa, Durban, 18 December 2006; ‘Top WSSD official suspended’, News 24, 14 March 2002.
Munnik and Wilson, The World Comes to One Country, p. 31.
Civil Society Indaba, ‘CS Indaba walks out of WSSD NGO forum’ (press release, 19 March 2002); Interview, Ntshalintshali, 4 October 2006.
Mail and Guardian, 27 August 2002; Mail and Guardian, 6–12 September 2002; The Citizen, 2 September 2002; The Star, 2 September 2002; The Citizen, 28 August 2002.
Vally, ‘The political economy of state repression’, p. 68; Interview, Teboho Mashota, Anti-Privatization Forum (APF) finance administrator, Johannesburg, 18 October 2006.
Sarah Duguid, ‘ANC “behaving like Nat regime”’, Mail and Guardian, 23–29 August 2002.
Naomi Klein, ‘Booby traps at Rio + 10’, The Nation, 16 September 2002.
Antonio G. M. La Viňa, Gretchen Hoff, and Anne Marie DeRose, ‘The outcomes of Johannesburg: assessing the World Summit on Sustainable Development’, SAIS Review23, 1 (2003), p. 59.
Patrick Bond, ‘Civil society at an uncivil Summit’, in Patrick Bond and Ashwin Desai (eds), ‘Foreign policy bottom up: South African civil society and the globalization of popular solidarity’, (CCS, Durban, 2008), p. 139.
Cornelissen, ‘“It’s Africa’s turn!”’, p. 1296; see also Udesh Pillay, Richard Tomlinson, and Orli Bass (eds), Development and Dreams: The urban legacy of the 2010 Football World Cup (HSRC, Cape Town, 2009).
‘“We’ll take Sandton”’, Mail and Guardian, 15 August 2002.
Interview, Diane Quarless, vice chair and rapporteur on the bureau of the Preparatory Committee for the WSSD, and co-chair of Partnership Initiatives, New York, 17 October 2007.
Interview, Chippy Olver, director general of DEAT and chairman of JOWSCO, Johannesburg, 5 October 2006.
APF, ‘Assessment of WSSD mobilization and activities’, conducted by the 8 September 2002 co-ordinating committee meeting (APF document, undated, unpublished).
Death, Governing Sustainable Development, pp. 123–30.
Thabo Mbeki, ‘Reports on economy tell us we are on course’, ANC Today2, 35 (30 August–5 September 2002).
Michael Sachs, ‘The Seattle movement in Johannesburg’, Umrabulo15 (2002).
ANC, ‘Statement on the WSSD’, 25 August 2002,
< http://www.anc.org.za/ancdocs/pr/2002/pr0825.html > (29 July 2008).
Ranjeni Munusamy, ‘The summit of all fears’, The Sunday Times (SA), 25 August 2002.
Interview, Trevor Ngwane, APF activist, Soweto, 28 September 2006.
Roger Southall, ‘Introduction: the ANC state, more dysfunctional than developmental?’ in Buhlungu et al., State of the Nation, p. 13.
Sara Dorman, ‘Studying democratization in Africa: a case study of human rights NGOs in Zimbabwe’ in Jim Igoe and Tim Kelsall (eds), Between a Rock and a Hard Place: African NGOs, donors and the state (Carolina Academic Press, Durham, NC, 2005), pp. 53–4.
Mondi Hlatshwayo, ‘Secretary’s report’ (presented at Social Movements Indaba 2006, 2–6 December 2006, UKZN, Durban), pp. 6–7.
Interview, McKinley.
Shannon Walsh, ‘“Uncomfortable collaborations”: contesting constructions of “the poor” in South Africa’, Review of African Political Economy35, 116 (2008), p. 261.
Andile Mngxitama, ‘National Land Committee, 1994–2004: a critical insider’s perspective’ in Nigel C. Gibson (ed.), Challenging Hegemony: Social movements and the quest for a new humanism in post-apartheid South Africa (Africa World Press, Trenton, NJ, 2006), pp. 157–201.
Stephen Greenberg, ‘The Landless People’s Movement and the failure of post-apartheid land reform’, in Richard Ballard, Adam Habib, and Imraan Valodia (eds), Voices of Protest: Social movements in post-apartheid South Africa (University of KwaZulu-Natal Press, Scottsville, 2006), pp. 133–53.
Ibid., p. 138.
Interview, Samantha Hargreaves, Landless People’s Movement, Johannesburg, 27 October 2006.
Ibid.
Jacklyn Cock, ‘Connecting the red, brown and green: the environmental justice movement in South Africa’ in Ballard et al., Voices of Protest, pp. 207–8.
Richard Ballard, Adam Habib, and Imraan Valodia, ‘Conclusion: making sense of post-apartheid South Africa’s voices of protest’ in Ballard et al., Voices of Protest, pp. 413–15.
Jacklyn Cock and David Fig, ‘The impact of globalization on environmental politics, 1990–2002’, African Sociological Review5, 2 (2001), pp. 15–35; Interview, Richard Worthington, Earthlife Africa, Johannesburg, 31 October 2006.
ANC, ‘Evaluating the WCAR NGO forum (and preparing for the WSSD)’, Umrabulo13 (2001).
A similar dynamic is shown with respect to the churches in South Africa in Barbara Bompani, ‘“Mandela Mania”: mainline churches in post-apartheid South Africa’, Third World Quarterly27, 6, (2006), pp. 1137–49; and more broadly in post-liberation African states in Sara Dorman, ‘Post-liberation politics in Africa: examining the political legacy of struggle’, Third World Quarterly27, 6 (2006), pp. 1085–1101.
Sidney Tarrow, Power in Movement: Social movements and contentious politics (Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1998), p. 146.
Hlatshwayo, ‘Secretary’s report’, p. 4.
Ashwin Desai, ‘Neoliberalism and resistance in South Africa’, Monthly Review54, 8 (2003), p. 10.
Dorman, ‘Post-liberation politics in Africa’, p. 1092.
APF, ‘Assessment of WSSD mobilization and activities’.
Atkinson, ‘Taking to the streets’, p. 58; and FXI, ‘The right to protest’, p. 4.
Atkinson, ‘Taking to the streets’, pp. 54–8.
Walsh, ‘“Uncomfortable collaborations”’, p. 259; see also the special issue of the Journal of Asian and African Studies43, 1 (2008).
Steven Friedman, ‘Fixing the toy telephone will not still the grassroots clamour’, Business Day, 26 August 2009.
Civil Society Indaba, ‘CS Indaba walks out of WSSD NGO forum’.
Duguid, ‘ANC “behaving like Nat regime”’.
SMI, ‘Press release’, 24 August 2002.
Appolis, ‘The political significance of August 31’, p. 10.
‘Militants warn: “we’ll shut down Summit”’, The Citizen, 28 August 2002.
Interview, Ahmed Veriava, SMI and Freedom of Expression Institute, Durban, 2 December 2006.
Vula Mthimkhulu, ‘Naked body of the poor exposed in the sumptuous warmth of Sandton’, Global Fire, 22 August 2002.
Quoted in Nigel Gibson, ‘Calling everything into question: broken promises, social movements and emergent intellectual currents in post-apartheid South Africa’ in Gibson (ed.), Challenging Hegemony, p. 8.
Quoted in Liesl Venter, ‘Summit marchers attack government’, The Citizen, 2 September 2002.
Rita Abrahamsen, ‘The power of partnerships in global governance’, Third World Quarterly25, 8 (2004), pp. 1453–67.
Michel Foucault, Security, Territory, Population: Lectures at the Collège de France 1977–1978 (ed. Michael Senellart, tr. Graham Burchell) (Palgrave Macmillan, Basingstoke, 2007), pp. 87–114.
Thomas Blom Hansen and Finn Stepputat, ‘Introduction: states of imagination’ in Thomas Blom Hansen and Finn Stepputat (eds), States of Imagination: Ethnographic explorations of the postcolonial state (Duke University Press, Durham, NC, 2001), p. 14.
Jessica J. Kulynych, ‘Performing politics: Foucault, Habermas and postmodern participation’, Polity30, 2 (1997), p. 342.
Holly Wren Spaulding, ‘Between the broken and the built’, an interview with Ashwin Desai in Notes from Nowhere (ed.), We Are Everywhere: The irresistible rise of global anticapitalism (Verso, London, 2003), p. 488.
Appolis, ‘The political significance of August 31’, p. 9.
SANGOCO et al., ‘South African NGO statement’, 1 September 2002.
Dorman, ‘Post-liberation politics in Africa’.
Steffen Jensen, ‘The battlefield and the prize: ANC’s bid to reform the South African state’, in Hansen and Stepputat, States of Imagination, p. 98.
Tom Lodge, ‘The ANC and the development of party politics in modern South Africa’, Journal of Modern African Studies42, 2 (2004), p. 215.
Jean-François Bayart, The State in Africa: The politics of the belly (Longman, London, 1993), pp. 98–9.
Steven Friedman, ‘South Africa: building democracy after apartheid’ in Emmanuel Gyimah-Boadi (ed.), Democratic Reform in Africa: The quality of progress (Lynne Rienner, London, 2004), pp. 236–7.
Krista Johnson, ‘State and civil society in contemporary South Africa: redefining the rules of the game’ in Sean Jacobs and Richard Calland (eds), Thabo Mbeki’s World: The politics and ideology of the South African President (Zed Books, London, 2002), p. 237.
Thabo Mbeki, ‘The masses are not blind’, ANC Today2, 40 (4–10 October 2002).
Appolis, ‘The political significance of August 31’, p. 11.
Foucault, Security, Territory, Population, p. 109.
Kevin C. Dunn, ‘Madlib #32: The (blank) African state: rethinking the sovereign state in international relations theory’ in Dunn and Shaw (eds), Africa’s Challenge to International Relations Theory, p. 59.
James Ferguson talks about Angola, the DRC, and Sierra Leone/Liberia in these terms, as ‘nongovernmental states’ where governance is spread irregularly over transnationally networked, non-contiguous humanitarian emergency zones. James Ferguson, Global Shadows: Africa in the neoliberal world order (Duke University Press, London, 2007), p. 40.
Bayart, The State in Africa, p. 220.
Author notes
Carl Death ( crd@aber.ac.uk) lectures in African Politics and Development at Aberystwyth University. The support of the ESRC (award PTA031200400008) and Dublin City University’s Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences Research Travel Programme is gratefully acknowledged, as are the comments of Sara Dorman, Rita Abrahamsen, Richard Rathbone, and two referees, together with feedback from workshops at the ECPR Joint Sessions, Bristol University, and the LSE. Any errors remain my own.
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