ABSTRACT
One of the defining characteristics of the post-apartheid polity is the emergence of a range of organizations, outside of legislative politics, that are making direct demands on the state and capital. These movements are collectively known as the ‘new social movements’. The main grievances of the new social movements revolve around access to basic needs; that is housing, education, water and electricity and land, among others things, including lack of HIV/AIDS treatment and access to affordable medication. The origins of the new social movements can be traced to the late 1990s. They stem from dissatisfaction with the constraints of liberal democracy and the limited nature of the economic and social transition from apartheid. The retirement of Nelson Mandela in 1999 and his succession by the younger Thabo Mbeki as South Africa’s second democratic president, exposed widespread grievances among poor, black South Africans with the ‘new South Africa’. Mandela’s conciliatory politics towards whites (who retained the upper hand economically even if political power shifted with the advent of formal democracy) were now openly challenged. The idea of a ‘Rainbow Nation’, a term coined by Desmond Tutu and championed by Mandela and other ANC leaders as well as the reconciliatory tone of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission could not mask the deepening inequality, degradation and daily humiliation that most black people continued to experience well after apartheid was outlawed. Not surprisingly, in September 2009, the Johannesburg newspaper, Business Day, could report that while Brazil and South Africa for a long time vied for the title of ‘most unequal’ country in the world, Brazil was leaving South Africa behind. While Brazil has decreased its income gap through land reform and social grants, the income gap in South Africa has widened despite its government’s goal to halve poverty between 2004 and 2014. It is in the environment of national inequality and disillusionment that these new social movements link these local, specific, struggles with a critique of both national and global politics. The most active of these movements have been the Anti-Privatisation Forum (APF ) and the Soweto Electricity Crisis Committee,
both of which agitate for affordable electricity and other municipal services; the Western Cape Anti-Eviction Campaign, which defends poor people evicted from their houses; the Treatment Action Campaign (TAC) which is a national HIVAIDS pressure group, and Abahlali baseMjondolo, a movement of shack-dwellers based outside Durban on South Africa’s northeast coast (Abahlali’s name literally translates as ‘people living in shacks’). All these organizations have adroitly used mass media, including film (video, documentary film, etc.), and many of them have collaborated with filmmakers and other media activists to promote their struggles. This chapter explores how two of these movements – the Treatment Action Campaign and Abahlali – are represented on film. Do these movements have a say in or control over how they are represented? Who are the protagonists in these films? How are the movements’ politics represented? Who appear to be the intended audiences of these films? Finally, what are the impacts of new media technologies on representations of post-apartheid social movements? Why focus on these two movements? The two movements share a number of characteristics: both movements are explicitly political, linking their specific struggles (healthcare for people living with AIDS or a voice in local government development strategies, respectively) to larger political developments both in South Africa and globally. Both movements are also connected to artists and media workers in South Africa and elsewhere and as a result, on balance, have enjoyed a greater media visibility than any of the other social movements who do not have access to the same cultural capital. The TAC, however, is a national organization, while Abahlali, despite its affiliation to a national ‘Poor People’s Alliance’ with the landless and housing rights groups, mainly operates locally in informal settlements in and around Durban. While the TAC cultivates relationships with its opponents in government (and pharmaceutical corporations), Abahlali is often depicted as having a more adversarial relationship with local authorities in Durban. This is not entirely the case as Abahlali work very closely with some officials and departments in the Durban Metro Council, have set up safety committees with the police and often work within the law. This includes taking the government to court, as it did when it challenged the constitutionality of a law that would make ‘slum clearing’ possible for the local authority. Crucially, TAC is a product of the first decade of democracy (the Mandela and Mbeki years), while Abahlali is associated with ‘second generation’ social movements. Abahlali was formed in 2005, at the start of the second decade of democracy. I would like to suggest that it is particularly this generational factor that is crucial in determining their approach to film. Abahlali came about at a time when new media technologies became more readily available to social movement activists. More significantly, the TAC runs a more professionalized media strategy, while Abahlali’s media strategy is less controlled. This will become clear in an analysis of the films. This chapter connects to the overall themes of the book, namely the connections between popular media (in this case film), democracy and development. At
first glance film hardly seems a popular and accessible medium; in its traditional sense South Africa does not have a ‘film culture’: the country’s mainstream cinema houses mainly show Hollywood fare or art house films, while public television, for a brief moment the main outlet for documentary films (see p. 140), has become increasingly subject to management and financial crises. First generation post-apartheid social movements like the TAC were very successful in accessing mainstream filmmakers to tell their stories. In this case, however, the TAC’s fate was left to the filmmakers and the vagaries of the film market: at best, they could wish for the films depicting their struggles to be exhibited or screened at film festivals or public television stations outside South Africa. In contrast, Abahlali’s bottom-up, informal approach to media, its embrace of the Internet (all films made about Abahlali are posted on their website) and what film observers would describe as the ‘DIY feel’ of films about it, point to new democratic potential for social movements’ relationship to film and cinema.
