Fighting for an intervention in history in the face of dreams deferred in the making: Twenty years of South African democracy

Abstract

This essay offers critical framing of the articles in the Special Issue on Twenty Years of African Democracy. It prioritizes the ideas of radical scholars and their take on how contemporary South African democracy is being experienced. It focuses on a series of important paradoxes, such as those presented by the challenge to provide truly free and accessible public education and the challenge to provide rights to the city for rural women migrants, the challenge to navigate the foreign policy role of South Africa on the African continent, the challenge posed by new laws for the protection of the reproductive rights and the prohibition of gender-based violence, and the challenge offered by popular cultural production that intervenes in African humanities. These essays explicitly think about South African democracy beyond the basic and normative terms of measuring whether or not democracy has been consolidated and can deliver steady and safe support for civil society and competing political and social interests. Instead, contributors are particularly attuned to how state projects and entrenched power attempt to incorporate and deploy or dismiss alternative indexes of democracy that may in fact be far more insightful measures: it includes research on the seemingly non-political – the genre of crime fiction, the youth poetry scene, masculinity studies, and philosophical debates over the historiography of the struggle for liberation.