Uncertain citizenship and public deliberation in post‐apartheid South Africa

Abstract

The post‐repressive‐regime South African government has actively convened a public sphere bristling with institutions and policies designed to facilitate public deliberation. However, certain apartheid legacies and contemporary political compromises facilitate the reach of power into the convened public sphere, leading to the corralling of public deliberation and the attempted silencing of critical voices. By the end of the Mbeki presidency, a cacophony of public dissent erupted, some of it insisting on the importance of open public critique and some of it seeking to limit and shape dissent itself. The article discusses ongoing contests over the meaning of publicness, locating the roots of these different ideas of publicness in different political and intellectual traditions, each with different understandings of the deliberative citizen. It suggests that participation in public debate is increasingly confined to the exertion of a narrowly defined notion of national democratic citizenship. Arguing that the formation of counterpublic spheres in South Africa is inhibited, the article considers the role of what it terms ‘capillaries’ of public deliberation, in which various kinds of radical critiques of cultural values, norms, identities and the fragmentation of historical consciousness take place.