The transition in South Africa: choice, fate … or recolonisation?

Abstract

Locating his argument with reference to his own long acquaintance with Harold Wolpe, one dating from their first encounter as graduate students in Ralph Miliband's London School of Economics (LSE) seminar shortly after Wolpe's escape from prison and from South Africa itself, Saul emphasises in the remainder of his essay the extent to which the victory over apartheid has been only a very partial one. Indeed, a Fanonist picture of a ‘false decolonisation’, even a ‘recolonisation’ by a new Empire of Capital, fits – as elsewhere in southern Africa – all too comfortably the facts of the South African case. Several alternative ways of thinking about this reality are noted, as well as various alternative possible national projects, each of the latter suggesting the necessity of a ‘next’ or ‘second’ liberation struggle in South Africa. A number of key questions, arising from the analysis and inviting further discussion and exchange, are quite specifically signalled in the text.