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Compares Northern Ireland's peace process with the transition to democracy in South Africa. The chapter details the ways in which Northern Ireland's political elites learnt from South Africa's negotiations, and argues that they have more to learn. It squarely rejects the claim of Irish republican militants that their position is analogous to that of South Africa's African National Congress.

Divided into three sections, this chapter explains how the apartheid debate changed during the late 1960s. The first section opens by looking at the murder of South African Prime Minister Hendrik Verwoerd, and explains how new Prime Minister John Vorster implemented his “outward policy” of building economic relations with moderate African leaders. The second section turns attention to the Richard Nixon administration and highlights the way his White House eliminated African expectations at the United Nations. The third section then shifts to the African National Congress and unpacks how it rehabilitated its role as the voice of nonwhite South Africa through diplomacy in the Third World and among nongovernmental organizations in Europe and the United States. These three changes reflected the new dynamics of the 1970s—an era marked by individualistic cynicism rather than postcolonial optimism—and pointed toward a fundamentally different type of anti-apartheid movement.

This chapter is about the origins of the global apartheid debate. It opens with a section about Harold Macmillan’s famous 1960 ‘Wind of Change’ speech in Cape Town—in which the British Prime Minister celebrated the arrival of African nationalism and warned that Afrikaner leaders needed to abandon apartheid—and then shifts attention to the history of apartheid and African nationalism in South Africa. The first section explains the country’s place in the British empire, the intellectual rationale of ‘separate development,’ and the political infighting between apartheid pragmatists and apartheid theorists before 1960. The second section highlights the nonwhite community’s efforts to overcome racial discrimination in South Africa, lingering on the tensions between cosmopolitan liberalism—embodied by the African National Congress (ANC)—and African nationalism of Anton Lembede and later Robert Sobukwe. These two parallel stories came together only one month after Macmillan’s visit to South Africa in the form of the Sharpeville Massacre.

Viewed from Pretoria, Kennedy looked to be apartheid’s worst enemy. Not only was the young American president strengthening US relations with black Africa both economically and morally, but he also took a stand against minority rule in southern Africa and in support of civil rights for African Americans in the United States. In reality, the specter of the New Frontier in Africa turned out not to be as bad as the South African government initially feared. Kennedy’s opposition to apartheid remained largely rhetorical as he rationalized that taking a tough line against the South African government would not convince it to change its racial policies but would only serve to militarize the conflict between the white minority and African majority. As a result, Kennedy refrained from taking stern action against Pretoria and did not send aid to the African National Congress as he had done for the Angolan nationalist movement.

This chapter explores why the South African government’s responses to terrorism are confused and ineffective. A significant contributing factor is that the African National Congress (ANC), which has governed the country since the end of apartheid in 1994, was a former liberation movement who themselves were labelled `terrorist’ by Ronald Reagan’s United States and Margaret Thatcher’s Britain. While in exile, the ANC had forged close ties with other similarly labelled groups and these strong bonds have endured. This historical legacy negatively impacts the formulation and implementation of current counter-terrorism policies. What the ANC government needs to understand is that the nature of the terrorist threat has radically morphed in the past few decades, from terrorist movements pursuing limited political goals to religious terrorist movements with global pretensions and absolutely no possibility of compromise.

Although a constellation of factors would seem to have predisposed South Africa to make major new commitments to expand access to healthcare after the fall of apartheid, embrace of National Health Insurance has taken place in name only more than 20 years later. The chapter suggests that this sad tragedy owes its fate paradoxically to dynamics of political competition that left the African National Congress unrivalled and unchallenged, with a strong mandate to rule. Torn between a desire for radical reform – that would destroy the medical schemes that serve a privileged few – and a more incremental and measured response that would leave them in place, amid a lack of political competition, the ruling party has opted for the status quo. And the entreaties of a professional movement have gone unanswered.

Chapter 2 looks at the early emergence of the discourse and reconstructs how reconciliation gained normative authority in the political sphere at all. It locates the beginning of this discourse in South Africa in the early 1990s, when the country transited from apartheid to democracy. In the course of the transitional negotiations ‘reconciliation’ was used by the antagonistic parties African National Congress (ANC) and National Party (NP) as a vague ideal which helped them to justify their various political demands and find a common reference point which made compromises possible. As chapter 3 shows, at this time reconciliation was not at all interpreted in terms of truth-telling or healing but was alternately related to political negotiations, compromise, power sharing or the release of political prisoners. It was only later, after the passing of the South African interim constitution in 1993 that the reconciliation ideal came to be firmly associated with the establishment of the South African TRC and the practices of truth-telling, healing and forgiveness. These constructions then remained relatively stable as they were reproduced throughout the workings of the TRC

This chapter explores the religion of Mathole Motshekga, the African National Congress' (ANC) chief in Parliament in 2009. As founder and director of the Kara Heritage Institute, Motshekga endorsed the return to indigenous African religion called the Hermetic mysteries of ancient Egypt. He also founded the secret brotherhood Bonabakulu Abasekhemu, also known as the Ancient Ones of Khem, to preserve the original Egyptian wisdom traditions throughout Africa. While expounding on this African theosophy through media, public events, and the Parliament, Motshekga defended the divine right of indigenous African royalty, calling for the restoration of the theocracy of traditional leadership in a democratic South Africa.

This chapter focuses on events during and after the African National Congress (ANC) conference in Morogoro on 25 April 1969. These include how the Morogoro conference failed to resolve the conflicts that plagued the ANC; the struggles of the ANC in exile; and the growing international opposition to apartheid.

This chapter describes the African National Congress (ANC) leaders’s decision to expand the scope of the security and intelligence department; the spread of corruption in the ANC; the massive purge throughout the ANC called Shishita, from a word in the ci-Nyanja language spoken in Lusaka, meaning ‘to sweep’; and the protests and the mutiny of 1984, which became known in the ANC as Mkatashinga.

This chapter describes events following the Rivonia disaster. These include the proposal to declare the African National Congress (ANC) open to all South Africans; the ANC training camps in Tanzania; the South African Communist Party’s (SACP) security system in London; the Rhodesian campaign; and the memorandum drafted by Chris Hani.

Literary and political expressions of the liberal dream of freedom from the 1880s to the 1970s are analysed in the opening chapter. The liberal dream’s lineage in political discourse is analysed in Cecil John Rhodes’s dreams of unifying South Africa in the 1890s; Olive Schreiner’s political journalism from the 1880s to the 1910s; the ANC’s Bill of Rights of 1923; H. Selby Msimang’s pamphlet The Crisis (1936); R. F. A. Hoernlé’s lectures South African Native Policy and the Liberal Spirit (1939); the ANC’s African Claims in South Africa (1943); the ANC’s Freedom Charter (1955); and the Liberal Party’s Blueprint for South Africa (1958). In juxtaposition with these political texts, the following literary texts articulating the liberal dream of freedom are analysed: Olive Schreiner’s Dreams (1890); J. A. D. Smith’s The Great Southern Revolution (1893); Archibald Lamont’s South Africa in Mars (1923); George Heaton Nicholls’s Bayete! (1923); S. E. K. Mqhayi’s U-Don Jadu (1929); Arthur Keppel-Jones’s When Smuts Goes (1947); Alan Paton’s Cry, the Beloved Country (1948); Lewis Sowden’s Tomorrow’s Comet (1951); Garry Allighan’s Verwoerd—The End (1961); Anthony Delius’s The Day Natal Took Off (1963); Karel Schoeman’s The Promised Land (1972); and Jordan Ngubane’s Ushaba: The Hurtle to Blood River (1974).

This chapter examines the emergence of lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBT) organization in South Africa and Namibia. In the late 1960s, white gay and lesbian South Africans formed an organization to counter the apartheid state’s repressive tactics. As the anti-apartheid movement intensified in the 1970s and 1980s, black lesbian and gay activists challenged white activists who were unwilling to publicly oppose apartheid or to recruit non-white lesbians and gay men. LGBT activists recruited individuals of different races to form multiracial movement organizations to work for racial and sexual equality. They persuaded African National Congress (ANC) leaders to support LGBT rights in the postapartheid democratic transition in the 1990s.

This chapter describes the impact of the demonstration by students in Sowento on 16 June 1976; the African National Congress’s (ANC) strategy review; new strategies by government and security chiefs in Pretoria; and the ANC plan to isolate South Africa internationally.

This chapter examines the aftermath of the South African War, focusing on the period from the conclusion of peace, when Lord (Horatio) Kitchener shook hands with the Boer delegates and pledged, “We are good friends now,” to the establishment of the National Party with anti-British and anti-black bias. The chapter begins with a discussion of the postwar reconstruction, the reintegration of hendsoppers (surrendered Boers) and joiners, and the consolidation of Afrikaners’ national identity. It then considers the role of the Dutch Reformed Church in rebuilding community, along with the political resurgence of the adversaries of “protected burghers” in the Free State. It also looks at the 1914 rebellion that articulated a republican protest against the modernizing state. Finally, it highlights the postwar trauma suffered by blacks, their political marginalization, and the establishment of the African National Congress (ANC).

This chapter discusses how outcomes for poor young people and their families in Cape Town, South Africa, can be improved by creating and using civic capacity effectively. It analyzes the shortcomings of elected government and emphasizes the evolution of relationships between government led by a dominant political party, the African National Congress, and civil society in the country for the task of nationbuilding in the postapartheid era. Complications of urban governance and multifaceted efforts to solve and manage the critical problem of insecure housing and under-served communities are also examined. The role and efforts of the Treatment Action Campaign, a membership organization that has redirected the approach of government departments, nonprofit organizations, and individuals to the AIDS crisis, are also discussed.

This chapter provides a detailed case study of the politics of trade protection in India since 1991 and in South Africa after the country’s transition to democracy in 1994. These two cases are analyzed to understand how developing democracies with strong, centralized political parties balance their re-election goals with their desire to obtain campaign contributions from particularly owners of powerful import-competing industries. Careful analysis of historical evidence and time-series data on trade barriers from India and South Africa reveal that political parties in both these countries are susceptible to protectionist lobbying from owners of import-competing industries. Political parties in India and South Africa (after consolidation of democracy in South Africa) have also paid less attention to the interests of workers therein leading to a protectionist-bias in trade politics in the two countries.