ABSTRACT
Much has been written about the slipperiness of the civil society concept. The term’s cross-cultural relevance, according to some commentators, lies more in its ability to evoke an aspired-to normative ideal than in its provision of an analytical model: originally coined in a context of European social transformation, the idea of civil society becomes reinvoked at similarly transitional moments in other parts of the world (Comaroff and Comaroff 1999). However fierce the debate about its applicability to nonWestern settings, the term has been so often strategically invoked by protagonists in some of these that its normative purchase cannot be denied. South Africa is one of these. During the late 1980s and early 1990s ‘civil society’—referring specifically to township civic organizations (Seekings 1992), the labour movement and non-governmental organizations (NGOs)—was a key ingredient of political speeches and academic papers alike. The term was often used in contexts where the boundaries between social analysis and activism were blurred (see Glaser 1997).
