The Politics of Difference and the Forging of a Political ‘Community’: Discourses and Practices of the Charterist Civic Movement in the Vaal Triangle, South Africa, 1980–84

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The period 1984–86 has been widely recognised as a watershed in South Africa’s history, leading to the most sustained challenge to the apartheid regime and eventually contributing to the demise of white minority rule. The Vaal Uprising of September 1984, triggered by dissatisfaction over rent increases and an illegitimate and defunct local government, heralded the beginning of the insurrectionary period. However, while the uprisings of the mid 1980s have attracted sustained scholarly interest, the processes that underwrote the rebellious momentum and the discourses and practices shaping civic politics warrant greater attention. Based on a large body of archival material and life history interviews, this article examines the roots of the emerging Charterist civic movement in the Vaal Triangle. It seeks to show that civic politics emerged along multiple fault lines, which reflected complex processes of inclusion and exclusion. Antagonism towards community councillors increased in the years before the uprising, and led to the defining of collective identities and the forging of a political ‘community’ that excluded them. These processes of inclusion and exclusion reflected not only contestations over the political order but multiple cleavages rooted in a failure on the part of councillors to honour the social contract. With the formation of underground units of the African National Congress in 1982 and the establishment of the Vaal Civic Association in 1983, localised processes of conflict and discourses of contestation began to intersect with anti-apartheid politics. The article argues that these layers of contestation finally led to a politics of difference that provided the matrix for rebellion.